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From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John
Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture
1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary
The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter
A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons
Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature
Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen
The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism
A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel
From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution
Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy
Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper
A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament
Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature
Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays
Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life
The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church
It was inevitable, I suppose, that someone would work to rehabilitate the reputation of Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, perhaps the most prominent neo-Thomist assaulted by the nouvelle theologie. Aidan Nichols does a fine job of it in his lucid Reason with Piety, Garrigou-Lagrange in the Service of Catholic Thought
The problems are neatly illustrated by Nichols’ summary of Garrigou’s Trinitarian theology.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, January 27, 2010 at 4:51 pm
At the heart of Milbank’s response to Zizek is the insistence that Christianity is fundamentally paradoxical, but not fundamentally dialectical. For Milbank, the latter partakes of the ontology of violence that he sniffs out beneath classical, modern, and postmodern systems. In Zizek’s case, it’s fairly overt, and overtly Hegelian.
Milbank argues that the logic of Trinitarian theology is different: “for the most classical Christian perspective, as developed from Gregory of Nyssa through Augustine to Aquinas, the Father in his absolute plenitude as arche nevertheless can never even be considered ‘in himself’ as the first ‘moment,’ since this origin is entirely exhausted in the filial image which it expresses. This does not, however, mean that it is abolished or negated in what it expresses, since the paradoxical logic of substantive relation also operates with absolute symmetry the other way around: the Son, as expressed image, is only that which he images or expresses. It is perhaps no accident that it was an orthodox Anglican clergyman who invented looking-glass logic: for the logic of the Trinity suggests that the Father is only his image in a mirror, and yet that this image is indeed a ‘mirror image’ – in itself entirely transparent and containing only its reflected source.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, January 20, 2010 at 4:02 pm
In his dialog with Slavoj Zizek (published as The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (Short Circuits)
In short, “a Platonism concerning justice is not denied, as with Hegel, but rather redoubled within the Trinitarian notion by a kind of ‘Platonic pragmatism.’”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, January 20, 2010 at 3:30 pm
God is identified “by” and “with” temporal events, Jenson argues. What can we make of that?
Perhaps this: Yahweh is compassionate, slow to anger, in the Hebrew idiom “long of nose.” He is kind to the weak, generous to the needy. These are all biblical descriptions of God that describe Him in relation to creation. What can we say about these?
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 6:22 pm
Bonaventure works up to a description of the Trinity by contemplating what it means for God to be good. Good is self-diffiusive, and the highest good must be supremely so. Supreme self-diffusion must involve the complete gift of one’s entire being to another, which is what the Father diffuses to the Son. Perfect goodness must produce what is “actual and substantial, and a hypostasis as noble as the producer. Following Richard of St. Victor, he says that this must have a triune character: “from an eternal principle eternally coproducing so that there would be a beloved and a cobeloeved, the one generated and the other spirated.
Then he expounds with mystical excitement on the mystery (I am using the translation of Ewert Cousins, found in Bonaventure: The Soul’s Journey into God, the Tree of Life, the Life of St. Francis (The Classics of Western Spirituality)
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, January 4, 2010 at 11:11 am
In his book on Bonaventure (Great Medieval Thinkers)
Still, Bonaventure’s intention is certainly not to separate being and good, and he combines the two approaches with a Levitical image: “Having considered the essential attributes of God, we must raise the eyes of our intelligence to the contuition of the Most Blessed Trinity, so as to place the second cherub facing the first. Now just as Being itself is the principal source of the vision of the essential attributes of God, as well as the name through which the others become known, so the Good itself is the principal foundation of the contemplation of the personal emanations” (emphasis added).
Treatises de deo uno and de deo trino are thus inseparable, complementary views of the glory that is enthroned above the cherubim.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, January 4, 2010 at 10:40 am
Song of Songs 2:16a: “My beloved is mine, and I am his”; 6:3a: “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine”; 7:10: “I am my beloved’s and his desire is for me.”
Let us pray
Almighty God, our Father: You dwell in an eternal fellowship of love with your Son and Spirit, and in Your grace You have created and redeemed us so that we might share in that communion. Before the foundation of the world, You chose us in the Beloved, and made us your own that You might also become ours. We pray that You would fill Ryan and Courtney you’re your Spirit, so that they might live together manifesting Your life, which is Your love. For the sake of Jesus Christ, Your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and with the Holy Spirit, ever one God, unto ages of ages. Amen.
“How are you feeling today?” someone might have asked you. How can you answer? Happy? Excited? Overjoyed? Nervous? None of the normal words is big enough to express the magnitude of this day. You reach for something bigger, and you’re tempted to try something faux-German like “Uber-happy” or faux-Greek like “Hyper-excited.”
The emotion of this day is best captured, I submit, by the word “ecstatic.” That’s big enough to get at the joy and delight of your wedding, and, more importantly, it highlights deeper dimensions of what’s happening today, and what you’re committing yourselves to for the unforeseeable future.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, December 18, 2009 at 5:34 pm
McIntosh quotes this passage from Barth, saying that this reflects “the very heart of Barth’s understanding of the Gospel”:
“In the beginning, before time and space as we know them, before creation, before there was any reality distinct from God which could be the object of the love of God or the setting for His acts of freedom, God anticipated and determined within Himself . . . that that the goal and meaning of all His dealings with the as yet non-existent universe should be the the fact that in His Son He would be gracious towards man, uniting Himself with him. In the beginning it was the choice of the Father Himself to establish this covenant with man by giving up His Son for him, that He Himself might become man in fulfillment of His grace. In the beginning it was the choice of the Son to be obedient to grace, and therefore to offer up Himself and to become man in order that this covenant might become a reality. In the beginning it was the resolve of the Holy Spirit that the unity of God, of Father and Son should not be disturbed or rent by this covenant with man, but that it should be made the more glorious, the deity of God, the divinity of His love and freedom, being conformed and demonstrated in this offering of the Father and this self-offering of the Son. This choice was in the beginning. As the subject and object of this choice, Jesus Christ was at the beginning.”
One would like to make some moves to head off the universalist import of this statement. Otherwise, this would be hard to surpass, and equally hard to imagine this coming from anyone but Barth.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Mark McIntosh (Divine Teaching: An Introduction to Christian Theology (Blackwell Guides to Theology)
McIntosh’s book is full of neat twists. Like this: In emphasizing the unity of God, Augustine and Aquinas are not trying “to confine trinitarian theology within some kind of philosophical preconception about divine essence,” but rather insisting on the continuity of Israel and the church: “they want to show that the God whom Christians adore as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is non other than the one God of Israel, the Creator of heaven and earth.” And this, summarizing Barth’s view of election and Trinity: “the trinitarian pattern of divine life is not simply a making space for the other, but an active and eternal choosing of the other.”
In addition to his own explorations of basic topics in theology, he includes fairly extended treatments of key historical figures and debates (”Landmarks”) and sketches out the contours of current debate (”Pathfinding”). The whole book is premised on the notions that “Christian theology is an expression of an ongoing transformation of the world in encounter with God” and that to be done rightly, theology must be more than a “respectable discipline managed by theologians” and become “a mysterious sharing in God’s way of life, God’s talk . . . , God’s knowing and loving of Godself.” And he assumes, somewhat radically orthodoxly, that “assimilating theology’s own mode of reflection to those of, say, cultural anthropology or philosophy or psychology, will only short-circuit theology’s unique aptness for getting at truth in certain ways that other disciplines do not.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 12:42 pm
Herbert McCabe writes: “If [Jesus] had wanted something less than the kingdom, if he had been a lesser man, a man not obsessed by love he might have settled for less and achieved it by his own personality, intelligence, and skill. But he wanted that all men should be as possessed by love as he was, he wanted that they should be divine, and this could only come as gift. Crucifixion and resurrection, the prayer of Christ and the response of the Father are the archetype and source of all our prayer. . . . But the crucifixion, the total self-abandonment of Jesus to the Father is not just a prayer that Jesus offered, a thing he happened to do. What the Church came to realize is that it was the revelation of who Jesus is. . . . The deepest reality of Jesus is simply to be of the Father. . . . He is not first of all an individual person who then prays to the Father, his prayer to the Father is what constitutes him as who he is. He is not just one who prays, not even one who prays best, he is sheer prayer. In other words, the crucifixion/resurrection of Jesus is simply the showing forth, the visibility in human terms, in human history, of tee relationship to the Father which constitutes the person who is Jesus. The prayer of Jesus which is his crucifixion, his absolute renunciation of himself in love to the Father, is the eternal relationship of Father and Son made available as part of our history.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 12:24 pm
A proposal, not a settled conclusion. The problem is passibility. For most Christian theologians, God is by definition impassible, not subject to passions nor passive in relation to His creation. Recently, of course, many theologians have challenged this, sometimes at the expense of God’s Godness and Lordship. But you’ve got to admit they have a point. Yahweh is a fairly passionate God, and Jesus the God-man expresses emotion and suffers. The tradition has ways of dealing with these things – anthropomorphism, distinguishing the impassible divinity from the passible flesh, and so on. To many recent theologians, though, this seems like special pleading.
Here’s my (counterintuitive) proposal: A theology that is both Trinitarian and Reformed provides a way of resolution. The “Reformed” part of that thesis is the counterintuitive part: No theology seems less likely to endorse divine passibility than Reformed theology. Maybe we could soften the oddity of the thesis by substituting “Augustinian.”
In any case, here’s the argument:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, December 15, 2009 at 9:25 am
In a 2002 Theological Studies article, Elizabeth Groppe defends the late Catherine LaCugna against the common charge that her replacement of “economic and ontological” with “oikonomia and theologia” blurs the Creator-creature distinction and compromises God’s freedom.
On the first, Groppe writes, “LaCugna’s relational ontology maintains this fundamental ontological distinction between God and creature. At the same time, this distinction takes different expression than the same distinction as articulated within a metaphysics of substance, given that the very form of any ontological distinction is contingent on the ontological system within which that distinction is made. Within a metaphysics of substance, God in se is distinguished from the creature in se. Within LaCugna’s ontology of person and relation, in contrast, God and creature are distinguished not as two qualitatively different kinds of being-in-itself but as two qualitatively different persons-in-relation. The very category of relation that is so central to LaCugna’s theology is, notably, a term of both communion and distinction. God and creature are not identical but rather related.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at 6:41 am
For John Zizioulas and others, the Cappadocians introduced an innovative ontology, an ontology of communion. In his Letter 38, Basil provides some support for this interpretation, since he acknowledges that the Trinity represents a “new” and “paradoxical” sort of reality:
“He who eternally exists in the Father can never be cut off from the Father, nor can He who works all things by the Spirit ever be disjoined from His own Spirit. Likewise moreover he who receives the Father virtually receives at the same time both the Son and the Spirit; for it is in no wise possible to entertain the idea of severance or division, in such away as that the Son should be thought of apart from the Father, or the Spirit be disjoined from the Son. . . .
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, December 7, 2009 at 3:25 pm
Rahner’s complaint against the separation of the treatise de deo uno from the treatise de deo trino is a protest against all sorts of theological dualisms: Between nature and grace, between philosophy and theology, between natural and revealed theology, between foundational universalisms and derived or second-story particularisms.
I make no claim about causation. But these all seem to reveal a common framework.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, December 7, 2009 at 2:35 pm
Catherine LaCugna says that developments in Christology provide “an analogy for the project” of her book on the Trinity. It’s a bad analogy from the getgo.
LaCugna notes that modern Christology has collapsed the distinction of Person and Work, ontology and function, or, what we might call the “ontological” and the “economic.” Christology and soteriology are inseparable, and there is no “real distinction between being and function.”
Whatever we might say about that development, it can hardly provide a model for Trinitarian theology. Christology is, by definition, about the economy; it is about soteriology because the incarnate Son is the Savior. Reasoning from the developments in Christology, LaCugna suggests that we can make no “real distinction between the being of God and God’s relationship with all creation.” Of course we cannot in Christology, for Christ is a creature (as well as Creator). But that non-distinction is not at all obvious when talking about the Trinity, unless we’ve made a prior assumption that God cannot be without His creation.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, December 7, 2009 at 2:03 pm
Athanasius quotes Dionysius regarding the perichoretic relation of word and intelligence:
“For word is an efflux of intelligence, and, to borrow language applicable to men, theintelligence that issues by the tongue is derived from the heart through the mouth, coming out different from the word in the heart. For the latter remains, after sending forth the other, as it was. But the other is sent forth and flies forth, and is borne in every direction. And so each is in the other, and each distinct from the other: and they are one and at the same time two. Likewise the Father and the Son were said to be one, and the One in the other.”
And again,
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, December 4, 2009 at 1:35 pm
How did prosopon (”face” or “mask”) become the accepted term for the “persons” of the Godhead in the East. In a 1988 article in Theological Studies, Michael Slusser examines what other scholars have called “prosopological exegesis,” exegesis done with attention to the variety of speakers in a biblical text.
He quotes this from Justin: “But when you listen to the words of the prophets spoken ‘as from a person’ (hos apo prosòpou), do not suppose that they are said by the inspired people themselves, but by the divine Logos which is moving them. For sometimes by way of prognostication it says what things will happen, sometimes it speaks as from the person of God the Ruler and Father of all things, sometimes as from the person of the Christ, sometimes as from the person of the people responding to the Lord or to his Father—just as even in your writings it is to be noticed that while there is one who writes everything, there are distinct persons speaking.”
And adds,
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, December 3, 2009 at 11:35 am
In a very stimulating presentation on “divine poetics” in Thomas, my colleague Jonathan McIntosh pointed to this very intriguing statement from Disputed Questions on Truth: “The one first form to which all things are reduced is the divine essence, considered in itself. Reflecting upon this essence, the divine intellect devises (advenit) - if I may use such an expression—different ways in which it can be imitated. The plurality of ideas comes from these different ways.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, December 2, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Mark A. McIntosh (Mystical Theology: The Integrity of Spirituality and Theology (Challenges in Contemporary Theology)
The Spirit, he affirms, elicits from people who hear the message of Jesus “the only real response that one can make to God’s self-communication in Jesus, namely a willingness to participate in Jesus’ own life and mission.” Thus, “the strain of distance between Jesus and the One he calls Father” that is expressed most dramatically on the cross “is something Christians are drawn into by the Spirit.” The Spirit is “God presenting God’s Word to the community and within the community, thus initiating the whole creation’s response to this Word spoken in the events concerning Jesus.”
The Spirit by which the Father raised Jesus, the Spirit given to the church, leads the church into deepening grasp of the truth of Jesus, which means a deepening participation in His death and resurrection:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, December 1, 2009 at 4:51 pm
Zizioulas offers a thoughtful defense of the Cappadocian notion that there is “causality” in the relations within the immanent Trinity. He notes that “the issue of causality was introduced as a response to the Platonists, who believed that the procession from one to another, particularly in Plotinus’ system of emanations, was a natural evolution outwards from the One, in a process of degeneration or disintegration.” The Cappadocians insisted that there was no leakage or degeneration of deity from the Father to Son.
Just as importantly, they wanted to deny that the begetting of the Son was a “natural” emanation, a kind of involuntary oozing of the Father’s essence. ”Cause” thus pointed to the voluntary and personal character of the begetting of the Son. It highlighted the fact that the begetting was from “a person, the Father” and also highlighted the fact that, while the Son is begotten from the generative substance and not merely from the will of the Father, He is not unwilled. ”Cause” was a way of filling out Athanasius’ claim that “the Son is wanted and loved by the Father . . . freely desire by the Father,” so that “God’s being is voluntary and willed.” God is the way He is; God wills to be the way that He is.
“Cause” conjures up the threat of mechanistic, impersonal processes in the Trinity. Zizioulas shows that the Cappadocian intention was precisely the opposite.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, December 1, 2009 at 4:59 am
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