[Part 2: Continuation of my comments upon reading Barth’s “The Epistle to the Romans”, Oxford University paperback, 1968]
Around page 290, we see Barth trying to turn towards hope. Unfortunately, he has left himself in the position of most modern existentialists: all that we know to be real is nothingness and we have to look for what is good in what is not concrete, what is…existential. I repeat that their big mistake was in not seeing that divine acts-of-being underly all creatures and even the empty space and time of our universe. Not seeing this, these non-Thomistic existentialists tend to see Existence, divine existence, as so radically apart from the world of things and time that ne’er the two shall meet. In such a mess, there’s no hope for men of flesh-and-blood, men who need some sort of substance to have real being. I say: There’s no need for such a mess. We may not be able to ascend to the transcendental God but He’s here, everywhere and in every thing, else they would cease to exist.
It’s far from clear that the atheistic existentialists in the line of Sartre make this sort of mistake — Gilson claims Sartre had an appreciation of the acts of coming into existence and also of substance. I’ll ignore that group of thinkers since my main concern is with Luther and Kierkegaard and Barth and others in that way of thought, men who should have been more open to seeing the Creator as, so to speak, underwriting concrete, thing-like being.
On page 297 we read:
Dissolved is the senseless multitude of possibilities and the empty vacuity of impossibility. Dissolved is the impotence of life and the power of death, the mere humanity of men and the mere [???] divinity of God. Dissolved is the duality of our life, by which at every moment we are pressed up against the narrow gate of critical negation. For it is this duality which gives us to fear, which makes us appalled by the ambiguity of our being and by the riddle of our existence. The Spirit, which we have received and by which we have passed from death to life, brings this duality to an end.
This is passingly strange in several ways, the most important of which is the remarkable implication that we’ll not just share in God’s life but we’ll be God — I hope I’m misreading but… It’s clear that having denied all possibility of inherent goodness in created things, Barth seems to grasp at the possibility of salvation in the dissolution of the distinction between Creator and creature. If he had simply seen and accepted the possibility of substance or essence being good — in a way secondary to acts of coming into existence (acts-of-being is a cleaner term), he could have seen good in creatures just because they exist as objects of God’s love. Some sort of substance is necessary for our continued existence and perfected bodies will come into existence as a matter of course as God begins to love those who belong to Jesus as sons, brothers of the Son Himself. With that in the background, we can see salvation as God’s decision to love us as sons and not just as creatures. We’ll have a share in God’s Life but our very selves will still exist as a gift from God.
I’ll return to an earlier comment that Barth made so I can emphasize the need for careful and clear philosophical thought in theologians. As Aquinas and others have noted, all that we know comes through God’s physical universe, even His direct revelations came by way of responses in the ears or at least the brains of His prophets. God spoke to us most directly through His Incarnate Son, Jesus of Nazareth. On page 289, Barth renounces any possibility of hope in any “natural philosophy”. That move walls us off from our Creator rather than opening us to Him — how very modern of this man supposedly trying to recover some sense of Christianity known only to the (mythical) Primitive Church and to the Reformers. The doctors and politicians and businessmen are free to operate without any valid criticism from Christian hecklers and the theologians are able to create dream worlds without the constraints of knowledge of God’s Creation. Under these circumstances, human societies will be shaped to the desires and needs of those who can extend our lives a few miserable months, those who will promise to send us Social Security checks, and those who can provide us with lovely movies about sophisticated cannibals.
In His freely-chosen role as Creator, God took contingent actions in creating from nothing and then shaping this universe. Those actions are what we can most readily understand about our Maker, not because of any alleged power in the human mind, but rather because those actions shaped us and the brains which are the foundations of our minds. All things point to their Maker but the human brain has the unusual ability to mimic its Maker in being able to tell a version of the story which is His world. The universe can’t tell us God exists but, if we believe He exists, the universe is both the reality and the record of certain of God’s contingent actions.
If we wall ourselves off from this universe in our theological thought, we labor under the conceit that we have a direct relationship to God in His full Transcendence, unencumbered by any thoughts of nature. Unfortunately for Barth and his predecessors, nature is nothing more or less than the decisions made by God when He created from nothing and when He shaped this universe from that more general Creation which I called the Primordial Universe in my book To See a World in a Grain of Sand.
But, of course, Barth didn’t labor under that conceit that we have a direct relationship to God in His full Transcendence. And we come to that exaggeration and misunderstanding of what seems a breach between us and God. It was a breach, an infinitely deep and wide abyss — as we can realize from trying to imagine the thoughts of a ‘pure creature’ such as a dog. I say ‘pure creature’ regarding dogs because they don’t have the sort of brain which can model environments or even encapsulate, in small sense, the entire universe. It’s those processes, some fully natural and some involving revelation, which shape our minds to be some sort of image of God in His role as Creator. It’s just as important that our minds are founded upon a human brain which developed by way of sometime nasty physical processes inside of God’s world. It’s this human brain which gave us the capacity to hear God’s word and to imagine our own version of God’s world, false and incomplete to be sure but it’s our way of imitating God. In that way — among others, we’re prepared for an unending life as companions of God.
Barth and other non-Thomistic existentialists have deeply confused ideas of what we human beings really are. They’re committed to seeing man as a creature who can somehow escape this universe, with God’s necessary help to be sure, and this is made possible by their claim that man isn’t a citizen of this universe to begin with. A Thomistic existentialist, to the contrary, is open to the idea that this universe is not only the birthplace of men who are to live with God for time without end but also their school, their camp of formation. Born with attributes with can become virtues or vices depending upon the intentions to which they are directed, born with a brain that can form a mind which can mold itself to be an image of its environments and — to some small extent — to God’s entire universe, men can fulfill their potential of becoming images of God by thinking the thoughts God has wished for them, some of which are to be found in revelation and some are to be found in nature — but even revelation has to enter nature to have an effect on our minds and souls. The goal of natural philosophy is to see the order in nature from inside of nature and that order reflects God’s acts-of-being in creating the Primordial Universe from nothing and then shaping it into this universe.
To refuse the offer God makes to shape our minds by an appropriate response to His world is to reduce nature to blackness and chaos, an insight false to reality and false to Barth’s own well-deserved reputation for appreciating the beauty of music amongst other aspects of God’s Creation. Christian existentialists who follow this sort of path, who refuse to see that matter is an object of God’s love and has the concreteness implied by that, will have the task of building a temple of hope upon the open air above an infinitely deep abyss of despair and darkness and all other sorts of bad things which describe this God-forsaken world.
It’s unwise, and untruthful, for a Christian theologian to dissolve all possibilities of seeing goodness in Creation or creatures before turning to the task of teaching hope in the salvation of those hopeless bundles of ‘mere’ flesh. Our inadequacy to save ourselves doesn’t imply we’re hardly worth saving — else why would the Son of God have suffered for us? Nor is it appropriate for us to learn humility by paths that teach us to despise God’s Creation, not even ourselves.
Barth’s statement of dissolving the duality between God and man might seemingly give us hope, but that idea comes at a terrible, terrible cost. We are deluded and we have only a delusion to pass on to others. The duality between God and man is not dissolved by salvation. That duality is changed to a closer and more personal relationship — after we become persons, that is, Christ-like. At that, man will need some sort of creaturely substance even in Heaven — we exist only as objects of God’s love. No substance, no object for God’s love, no man. We would be left with Charles Hartshorne’s proposal that eternal life consists of being remembered images in some sort of divine photo album.
Returning to page 318, we see a clear statement of that error Gilson so strongly criticized in Kierkegaard. First:
Our world is the world within which God is finally and everywhere — outside.
A few lines later, he tells us:
The health-bringing function of suffering is to open our eyes; for joined to suffering and at its extreme limit is that true and worthy philosophy whose nature and function is to interpret the sorrow of the world. Ignorant therefore of God and of His Kingdom, but familiar with the groaning of all creation, we lend our support to honest, secular, scientific and historical research; but we disassociate ourselves from every semi-theological interpretation of Nature and of History.
Our minds develop in response to Creation and it’s through Creation that we learn of God. If we have a wrongful philosophy of nature, we’ll misunderstand ourselves and also God. If we try to develop our theologies without any philosophy of nature, we’ll be no better off. In both cases, we’ll develop bad theologies.