On Natural Theology/Unity of Reality:
“In the service of the church, natural theology serves to articulate the universality of the gospel, which is to be proclaimed not only to all people, but also to all creatures (Mark 16:15). Jesus is the one and only Lord. 'There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved' (Acts 4:12).This might seem to suggest that we should think of the person of Christ as the unity of reality or, conversely, of the unity of reality as the person of Christ, based on such key texts as the New Testament Christ-hymns, for example, Colossians 1:15-20, Hebrews 1:1-4, and the prologue of the Gospel of John. It is in this sense that especially Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth have asserted that Jesus Christ is the one Word of God. But in order to demonstrate its claim to truth or its claim to general theological validity, we do not have to begin with an indeterminate, general concept, which would have to be assumed or anticipated, but rather with the particularity of the Christ event….
If we look to history for examples of a 'pure' [a priori] Christological argument, we could take Hegel’s philosophy of religion, with some modifications, but we also need to look at Karl Barth. We recall that Barth’s initial treatment of the problem of natural theology resulted in his outright rejection of it with his famous 'No!' to Emil Brunner in 1943. But then in 1961 Barth says, 'Later I retrieved natural theology via Christology.' Therefore, we must examine his natural theology, which he rehabilitated on the basis of Christology, because of its connections with Hegel’s philosophy of religion…
With Hegel, the way pioneered by Lessing and Kant reaches its completion. The cross becomes 'rational' in that the historical Good Friday is understood as an idea and so is transformed into the speculative Good Friday, while Christ’s resurrection becomes the negation of negation. The concrete attributes (concreta) of the being of Jesus Christ are tacitly transformed into abstract attributes (abstracta), into general definitions that delineate reality as a whole and as a unity.
In the new form of natural theology perfected by Hegel after Lessing and Kant, the old distinction between theology [a general experience of God] and economy [a Christian experience of salvation] is set aside and transformed into the one reality of Christ. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, speaking wholly in the sense of the Hegelian philosophy of religion, says: 'There is…only one reality, and that is the reality of God, manifest in Christ, in the reality of the world.' Karl Barth says the same thing, theologically, especially in his 'doctrine of lights' in Church Dogmatics IV/3. Responding there to the problem endemic to the tradition of natural theology, he says that he retrieves 'natural theology via Christology' on the basis of Jesus Christ as the one Word of God….
While the distinction between Schleiermacher and Barth may be ever so great, they agree with each other in their thinking about unity. While Schleiermacher, of course, thinks of unity anthropologically, as the one fundamental state [the feeling of absolute dependence], Barth approaches it Christologically, by holding that Jesus Christ is the one Word of God….
If we criticize Barth’s thinking about unity, we will have to ask ourselves whether the unity of God is something that we can only confess, as when we confess Jesus to be the one and only Lord, or whether it is something that we can also conceive with our minds. But this can happen only in the sense of 1 Corinthians 8:4-6 and of the prayer of the Isaiah Apocalypse: ‘O Lord our God, other lords besides you have ruled over us, but we acknowledge your name alone’ (Isa. 26:13; cf Micah 4:5) Yahweh's lawsuit with the other gods must not be glossed over even by systematic theology through an abstract monism. At stake is the truth of the first commandment: 'I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods besides me!' Nevertheless, the other gods have their reality in their promises and enticements, as either something fascinating or frightening, in the sense of a power that is given to them by the human fabricating heart.
The unity of God that we confess can only be believed. It cannot be conceived, if that means to possess the idea of the unity of God as a datum that we could summon at will as we do our hopes and memories…. God’s unity is not like an idea that can be remembered or construed. It will always be a matter of dispute. Even thinking cannot escape this conflict between the one God with the many gods. Therefore, this situation must be made clear also in thinking and in theology, especially in systematic theology. We cannot skip over the distinction between law and gospel, which is at stake here, for the sake of the idea of the unity of gospel and law.” (p 192-198)
“…God encounters us in ways that are irreducibly different. [These are Law (accusation and instruction), Gospel (promise), and terrifying hiddenness (which contradicts Law and Gospel).] We cannot therefore accept a monistic doctrine of the word of God, as advocated by Karl Barth. In the midst of the contradictory and complementary ways in which God encounters us, which are laden with tension and conflict, the gospel stands out in its uniqueness as God’s decisive, final word.” (p.125)
“The danger of an ethical approach to theology exists wherever the unity of law and gospel is stressed for the sake of truth. We find this, for instance, in Karl Barth.” (p. 142)
“In this sense ‘the Holy Spirit,’ who makes the old world and its old language new, ‘has his own grammar.’… The formulas of the new language are a gift of the Holy Spirit. They focus on the way we talk about the communication of attributes. We must, however, protect them against rash generalizations, the work of enthusiastic eschatology, aided and abetted by human reason. Again, Luther achieves this by thoroughly philosophical means: through the distinction between the concrete attributes (concreta) of Christ’s being and the abstract attributes (abstracta) of human nature in general, creation and the world as such. Luther stresses the importance of this distinction, which seems to anticipate the criticism that is necessary today in the face of a post-Christian natural theology, with its distinctively Hegelian stamp, which dominates, for instance, the theology of Barth and Bonhoeffer. The hallmark of these forms of post-Christian theology is the endless and lavish use they make of the proposition 'God is human' or 'the creature and the creator are one and the same.' However, in what is surely a countermove to this, Luther pleads for a 'spare use' of this kind of talk. The thesis that 'all words receive a new meaning in Christ' is not true if we expand it in a speculative way, but only 'if they have the same referent.' People who do not see this clearly and who fail to distinguish between the concrete attributes of Christ’s being and the abstract attributes of humanity and the world, 'do not know how to distinguish between equivocal words.' In their enthusiasm, they relish the fog of equivocation and refuse to let the cloud (Exod. 13:21f.) of the Holy Spirit and his grammar be their guide.” (p. 81-82, quotes from Luther)
I must admit, I don't fully understand everything that Bayer is advocating here, and I'm not sure I even agree with everything, but here's some of what I take away from it. God speaks to us in Law and Gospel and encounters us in his hiddenness. To try and subsume these very different types of relation under one broad category of God's self-revelation in Christ (as Barth does, I believe) is to eliminate the conflict that makes theology so dynamic and powerful over us. Once these disparate relations are "united," theology becomes something dead which we have control over, rather than how the living God encounters us. The Law tells us that we are damned, the Gospel tells us that we are redeemed. Most conflicting of all, the suffering around us tell us nothing of God. This is God's hiddenness. When we try and peel back the mask with which God has hidden his face (Psalm 13), we are led into terrifying depersonalized abstractions which threaten to undo us. Once we relegate God's unity to the status of a datum, we "save" ourselves from God's work. It is the old self resisting the cross, trying to "get God off our back," to quote Forde.
This concludes Bayer's disagreement with Barth. I know I need help unpacking all of this, still, so what do you think? Let me know in the comments and maybe we can work through this together.
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