Tom Smail (1928–2012)

It seems that Tom Smail, author of The Giving Gift, has died.

I met Tom a few times, as he used to attend the postgraduate seminar at Spurgeon’s College. He was always insightful in his comments and gracious when offering criticisms – not least when he read part of my own Ph.D thesis in the run-up to submission. This isn’t much of a eulogy, I’ll admit, but I can say without hesitation that The Giving Gift is the greatest shaper of my own attempts to hold a coherent doctrine of the Holy Spirit. I’ll be forever grateful to Tom for his clarity and perception in matters theological. He will be missed.

Update: I've found an obituary here.

Remythologizing Theology [9]

Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship. Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)

I am grateful to Cambridge University Press for the review copy.

Chapter 4, part 3

In this post, I cover Remythologizing Theology pages 222–240. Let me begin with a quotation:

Both God and human persons are beings-in-communicative-act who relate, largely through speech, to others. God has unique communicative powers and, unlike the human dramatis personae, play a role that he determines for himself. (p. 239).

All the elements that Vanhoozer has been discussing in the course of Chapter 4 are present in this quotation, either explicitly or implicitly. All existing things are substances-in-relation; all existing things are beings-in-act; all beings-in-act, including berries and bricks, plankton and porcupines, self-communicate; and persons have the best capacity for self-communication. God is, of course, the paradigmatic instance of self-communication, for even before the creation of all things, the Father begets the Son and spirates the Spirit. And finally, Vanhoozer suggests that ontology itself is now reframed in terms of communicative causal interactions rather than instrumental causal relations – and this new framework for causality should open up ‘rich new possibilities’ (p. 239) for understanding God, the God–world relation, and the relationship between divine sovereignty and human freedom. It should also help us understand more fully the notion of divine impassibility, and our union with Christ and communion with the triune God.

These are lofty aspirations, of course…

Remythologizing Theology [8]

Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship. Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)

I am grateful to Cambridge University Press for the review copy.

Chapter 4, part 2

In this post, I cover Remythologizing Theology pages 198–222. Among other things, Vanhoozer explains why he’s advocating a post-Barthian Thomism.

It’s clear that Vanhoozer sees God as a communicative agent: a speaker, an author, a being-in-communicative-act. And he situates himself within the Barthian tradition that defines the divine being in terms of agency. But Vanhoozer also has a misgiving:

Why must we equate God’s being-in-act exclusively with God’s revelation in Jesus Christ when the Bible depicts God as in-act at other points of the biblical narrative as well? (p. 203).

Vanhoozer is surely right. A focus on Jesus as the height of God’s revelation is meet and right, but not to the detriment of the biblical mythos and witness. In fact, Vanhoozer goes on to argue that even God’s action in Christ cannot be understood aright without first an understanding of God’s action in Israel:

The point is that the fullness of the divine life is on display in the life of Jesus as rendered by the biblical narrative and other forms of discourse. The mythos reveals the divine substance. Yet Jesus’ story neither begins nor makes sense apart from the broader canvas of God’s prior speech and activity in the history of Israel.… God’s speech in Jesus Christ may be definitive, but it presupposes prior divine communicative action. (p. 215.)

I cannot disagree with Vanhoozer here. And this leads to his comments about adopting a post-Barthian Thomism. With Barth, Vanhoozer argues that an ontology of God must be a posteriori, after the fact or event of Jesus Christ; it is Jesus who shows us who God is. But with Aquinas, we must accept that being is not static substance but dynamic act. And so, like Barth and Aquinas, Vanhoozer seeks to co-opt metaphysical categories to support a theo-ontology defined primarily by God’s communicative action in the world and in Scripture:

Hence the biblical mythos remythologizes metaphysics itself, resisting, overcoming, and recasting our conceptions of what God must be like as supreme being. (p. 221).

As far as I’m concerned, Vanhoozer doesn’t say anything too controversial or contestable in these pages. But I’m a little frustrated that he takes so long to say what he says. It seems he makes the same point two or three times. That said, the wider discussion is not without merit. He makes some good points, for example, about divine presence (although I’m not entirely sure why he mentions divine presence when he does):

God’s presence is thus in the first instance personal, agential, and communicative rather than merely spatial, substantive, or metaphysical. (p. 206).

And, discussing the question about whether or not God literally speaks, he also notes that the act of speaking does not necessarily assume the existence of vocal chords to be real, for

The core concept in action [speech is an action] is not bodily movement but bringing about a change in the world – directly or indirectly – by an act of will, decision, or intention. (p. 210).

So even though God does not speak as we do, God still literally speaks, for God performs communicative acts. I’m not fully convinced that action does not entail some kind of bodily movement – how can one will, decide or intend change in the world without their being some kind of physical or bodily movement somewhere? – but it’s an interesting idea with which Vanhoozer’s playing. His main point here is fine, though: that if God does not speak, God does not covenant.

Remythologizing Theology [7]

Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship. Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)

I am grateful to Cambridge University Press for the review copy.

Chapter 4, part 1

With Chapter 4, Vanhoozer begins to offer his own constructive proposals. The chapter itself is reasonably long, so I’ve decided to break my review of it into smaller chunks. What follows is my outline of Remythologizing Theology pages 181–198.

The remythologizing process attends to God’s self-revelation in Scripture. But this itself pushes us towards claims about the being of God. We must reflect on ‘what happens, who does it, and what these persons are like.’ (p. 183). So what sorts of persons are Father, Son and Holy Spirit? The answer, Vanhoozer surmises, lies in the possibility of moving from God’s acts to God’s being – and this is why we must attend to God’s self-revelation in Scripture if we are to know anything about God at all.

Thus Vanhoozer asks the question: ‘Can we by reasoning biblically find out God?’ (p. 187). The answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, is a firm ‘yes’, but under certain provisos: that we recognise that our theology is informed by Scripture; that God is seen to accommodate divine revelation to human intellectual capacities; that the biblical mythos governs our interpretation of Scripture; that the incarnation is regarded as the prime instance of God’s self-revelation.

However, there are some things implied in the course of Vanhoozer’s reasoning that I’d like further explained. For example, God accommodates divine self-revelation to human intellectual capacities – and in Scripture, God is revealed both to be transcendent and immanent. God is the eternal sovereign over all things, but enters into created space–time to enjoy dialogical relations with God’s creatures. Given this, what do we do about those passages where God is presented as, say, repenting? Let me quote from Vanhoozer:

No one metaphor, or literary genre, is sufficient to govern our theological thinking about God. Does God really repent and change his mind or not? That depends on the extent to which God is “like” a human, and to determine this the reader requires analogical thinking – conceptual elaboration (metaphysics) – that is both generated and governed by the diverse forms of biblical discourse (mythos). This is precisely where attending to literary genre helps. The narrative that recounts God’s repentance is part of the same narrative that recounts God’s creation of the world. (p. 194).

(I’m assuming that Vanhoozer has Genesis 1–11 in mind.)

If I’m understanding Vanhoozer correctly, all he’s saying is that determining genre and context aids our interpretation of Scripture; but if that is all he’s saying here, I don’t see why this is anything different from what any good exegete would do with a text. Moreover, it doesn’t help me take the anthropopathism of divine repentance less ‘literally’ than another anthropopathism such as divine loving. Is Vanhoozer saying that because God is first presented in Genesis 1–11 as transcendent, that God’s repentance in Genesis 6 must be ‘more’ an anthropopathism than others? Or is he saying that because God’s act of creation and God’s act of repentance inhabit the same wider text, each should be regarded with equal status? It’s hard to tell precisely what Vanhoozer’s point is here.

In this section, Vanhoozer also looks at analogy. He observes that God’s being is revealed in and through Jesus’s own speech and action; this he labels the analogia dramatis. It’s clear to me that Vanhoozer sets the analogia dramatis over and against the more traditional analogia entis. (‘The celebrated analogy of being [analogia entis] posits a certain likeness between God and other beings despite the difference entailed by the Creator/creature distinction.’ – p. 196). Those theologians who adopt the analogia entis are effectively bottom-up reasoners: if creatures are regarded ‘good’, then it may be supposed that the One who created them is all-good. The danger here – and I suppose this was Karl Barth’s point – is that the danger of projectionism is ever-present. But Vanhoozer sees the analogia dramatis as affirming the opposite movement, that God, in effect, chooses the analogies by which God is self-revealed. So far, so good. This allows for the incarnation, which, as the analogia dramatis, is definitely a divinely chosen means of self-revelation and, indeed, self-communication that does not depend on human projectionism. But I’m not convinced that (a) the analogia dramatis and the analogia entis are of the same ‘analogical’ level (Vanhoozer himself recognises that the former is a tool that makes sense of God’s prior initiatives and acts, whereas the latter is a tool to make independent judgements about God); and that (b) the analogia dramatis sufficiently replaces the analogia entis – after all, if the analogia dramatis is shorthand for God’s acts in the incarnation of the Word, it surely doesn’t cover God’s self-revelation in human language. If anything, by employing the term analogia dramatis, it just seems that Vanhoozer is desperate to coin a term further to push his theodramatic ideas.

So how to sum up this opening section of Chapter 4? Vanhoozer’s argument was very stimulating and made me think a lot about the way we use language to describe God – or the way God uses human language to self-reveal. But I’m beginning to weary of Vanhoozer’s style. It’s a little too … well, prolix. And I’m beginning to wonder if his wordiness obscures rather than clarifies his positions. Or perhaps I’m just being unfair and need to read the rest of the chapter before making these sorts of judgements.

Remythologizing Theology [6]

Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship. Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)

I am grateful to Cambridge University Press for the review copy.

Chapter 3

In Chapter 1 of Remythologizing Theology, Vanhoozer outlined the issues raised by the notion of divine communicative action for the doctrine of God, a concept of the God–world relation, and how Scripture should be interpreted. Chapter 2 was a sustained exploration of the God–world relation through the eyes of classical theism and relational theism/panentheism. Now, in Chapter 3, Vanhoozer attends to the various complications he finds inherent within the relational theist/panentheist paradigm, which he labels ‘kenotic-perichoretic theism’.

One problem is that the notion of relationality is ambiguous; relations can be spatial, logical, temporal, and so on. So when kenotic-perichoretic theists prioritise the concept of relationality, in what sense are they employing it? (Interestingly, I say the same kind of thing in Providence Made Flesh about the notion of causality: it’s too ambiguous a term to be used with any conceptual precision when it comes to the doctrine of providence.) And further complicating matters is the possibility that relationality has simply replaced substance as a controlling concept, without any evidence that it frees us to think more deeply and accurately about God. Moreover, it will not do simply to focus on relations, especially when it comes to discussion of the doctrine of the Trinity. ‘Father’, ‘Son’ and ‘Spirit’ are both proper personal names and the names of relations between each of the persons of the Trinity; a concentration on relations does not do justice to the doctrine of the Trinity. Vanhoozer also notes that Scripture doesn’t focus on relations as such, but on the triune God’s communicative actions. The Father and the Son, for example, are both ‘persons-in-communicative-relation’. (p. 148). Thus we must think about God as both three persons-in-relatedness (substance ontology) and three persons-in-distinctness (relational ontology). And it is the fact that God is triune, that God’s very being is a dynamic communion, that ultimately distinguishes God from the world.

But if this is forgotten, a new danger threatens to present itself: ‘illegitimate Trinitarian transfer’ (a riff on James Barr’s ‘illegitimate totality transfer’). Basically, kenotic-perichoretic theism is fond of using the concept of perichoresis to describe the God–world relation. However, to do so suggests that the world is thought of as playing a significant part in constituting the divine identity. Against this, Scripture depicts the God–world relation in terms of covenant, not in terms of perichoresis; this latter term was employed specifically to portray the inter-relationship between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit; and it is, says Vanhoozer, illegitimate to transfer this concept from one area of theology (trinitarian relations) to another (the God–world relation). As long as perichoresis is applied illegitimately to the God–world relation, it will always be difficult for kenotic-perichoretic theism to do justice to the mythos presented in Scripture, which instead shows God entering into covenantal relations (and not perichoretic relations) with the world. Indeed, it will always be difficult for kenotic-perichoretic theists to avoid projecting ideas of human relationships onto God’s being. And the only adequate antidote to such diseased theology is to focus on Jesus, who is the self-revelation of God made flesh. The en in panentheism, says Vanhoozer, is just too general.

So much for the perichoretic element in kenotic-perichoretic theism; what about the kenotic side of things? This approach to theology implies that God must limit Godself or lose something in order to have a genuinely loving relationship with the world. But again, the christological element is forgotten in favour of generalities. In Christology, kenosis isn’t about Jesus losing or setting aside something (i.e. his divinity); it’s about the eternal Son of God taking human flesh and the stuff of creation to himself. And so kenosis is a specifically christological concept that is illegitimately transferred to the God–world relation. When this happens, God must surrender Godself to the world and be affected by it in order to be genuinely loving. There needs to be a parity of loving mutuality and reciprocity, which assumes that God and the world are of the same ontological level. (I don’t think this contradicts my basic stance that in God’s economy, God acts or operates on the creaturely level.) But classical theism’s approach to love – that for God to love means that God gives Godself for the well-being of another – is no less loving, and has the advantage that it is not susceptible to therapeutic notions of love that render God not an agent but an empath.

It is clear that Vanhoozer thinks that classical theism holds more promise than kenotic-perichoretic theisms such as panentheism. But it is also clear that he wants to sail into new theological waters:

The way forward, beyond relational theism or panentheism and back to something more like classical theism, is to think through God’s love, and being, in terms of neither impersonal causality nor person mutuality alone but rather in terms of communicative and self-communicative action. (pp. 176–177).

It is now time for Vanhoozer to offer his own constructive proposals.

Lydia Jaeger on Divine Action and the Laws of Nature

Robin Parry has posted a quotation from What the Heavens Declare: Science in the Light of Creation, Lydia Jaeger's forthcoming book on divine action and the laws of nature. The quotation itself doesn't especially inspire me, but one of the comments to Robin's post does. It provides a link to a talk given by Jaeger on divine action. If the abstract is an indication of its contents, What the Heavens Declare is potentially an important read. Now I need to find time to listen to the audio of Jaeger's talk!