Person v. Being

Oberman sees a crucial shift in late medieval theology from God as being to God as person, and sees Luther as both heir and critic of the late medieval theology proper. Without the earlier shift, "the Reformation breakthrough would be inconceivable," but this does not mean that there is "unbroken continuity between the discovery of God as Person-acting-in-history and Luther's discovery of the God of covenant and promise." Luther thus attacks what he views as the Pelagianism of the nominalists, but "without a larger frame of reference that, without the Franciscan paradigm, would have been inconceivable." This is not, Oberman argues, a conflict of voluntarism and intellectualism; it is a conflict of personalism over impersonalism, of which the voluntarist move is on aspect.

This tradition, he argues, was carried on by Franciscan theologians such as Bonaventure and Duns Scotus who developed the "two propositions" of Francis himself, namely, that God is a personal lord and His action is covenant. In this "cohesive new tradition centering on the Franscican vision of history," Thomas' "Supreme Being" becomes instead "the highly mobile covenantal God who acts, a God whose words are deeds and who wants to be known by these deeds. When God is discovered to be the supreme person in his aseitas and lord of history in his opera ad extra - that is, a person both in his inner council and his outer rule - the paradigm shift is in the making."

One of the effects, he argues is that the final cause takes "a new pride of place": "The earlier, often platonizing metaphysics of time and eternity is reoriented from a concern with the nature of time and timelessness to understanding the sequence of time by inquiring into the goals of history. Such questions as 'Can God undo the past?' or 'Can God 'in the future' save [accept] a reprobate?' may strike us as abstract but reflect a new existential interest in final causation: What does God want? What is history all about?"

Luther introduces specifically a theology of the cross: "the God who acts has become the God who acts in Christ, the God who is unpredictable and foils any systematic search, who contrary to reason and against expectation carries the cross from Christmas to Easter."

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, May 04, 2006 at 03:26 PM

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