Bruce McCormack’s TFT Lectures (5): Evaluation

How to evaluate McCormack’s novel account of kenosis? I want to make two comments. The first is that I think it is at least potentially defensible when judged according to the canons of classical (Reformed) orthodoxy. I do not think there is any major doctrinal decision that it offends against, although on one point I was left with the feeling that more work was needed to establish the defence. The second comment is that I was not convinced by Bruce’s account of the pressure towards a revision of doctrine in this area. Very simply, I think his account of kenosis can be held, but it need not be: it remains open, in my view, to hold to the classical formulations of Christology without the need to revise them, and, personally, this would be my preferred position. This all needs much elaboration. Let me first address my assertion of the orthodoxy of Bruce’s proposal. It seems to me that the most obvious criticisms, and certainly the ones Bruce indicated had been most prevalent, concern the doctrine of the Trinity. However, it seems to me that with a clear-headed grasp of the contours of Trinitarian dogma we can see how Bruce’s proposals are, not just orthodox within those contours, but significantly more so than many other recent accounts of Trinitarian doctrine. The essential patristic claim about the Trinity is that all properties are held in common, save only the personal properties of begetting, being-begotten, and proceeding. If we read McCormack’s account of kenosis as an account of what it is to be begotten, i.e., as the personal property of the Son, then it meets this canon with ease. Dorner’s great criticism, which destroyed nineteenth-century kenoticism, insisted that either the Son gives up divine properties and so ceases to be divine, or we are forced to confess a kenotic Father alongside a kenotic Son, but if kenosis is a—the—personal property of the Son, then neither claim obtains. Self-emptying is the personal mode of the Son’s divine omnipotence, and so on. There are some details down the road that need dealing with, but it seems to me that the basic position is securely orthodox, certainly much more so than all of the recent theology that, misled by the word ‘Person’, insists on finding three instances of many or most divine properties (will; operation; knowledge; …) within the Godhead. What about the criticism that McCormack makes trinity dependent on election, or somesuch phrase? I confess to finding it a difficult criticism to parse theologically. God’s act is unitary, and identical with His being; if what God is is trinity, and what God does is election, then it is necessary to assert a fairly strict identity between trinity and election. Bruce does this convincingly, as far as I can see. (Personally, I would want to work harder at the ‘what God does is election’ premise—I am more and more convinced that Barth is at least unhelpful on this point, although one of my doctoral students has just convinced me that probably he doesn’t fall into any of the traps he opens up himself.) Only if we assume that God’s act is somehow an accidental accretion to His being can any form of this criticism stand—but that would be to depart completely, albeit fashionably, from the traditional Christian doctrine of God. If there is a criticism which is in danger of sticking, I think it is to do with creation. We often, and misleadingly, tell our undergraduates that the distinction between the begetting of the Son and creatio ex nihilo is that one is a necessary act and the other a free act. If that were at all an adequate account of the situation, then Bruce’s proposal would have serious problems. However, as I pointed out in the previous post, the affirmation that God’s being is His act is basic to all classical theology, and so such shorthand accounts are deeply misleading. Hence we find throughout the tradition attempts to specify in a more sophisticated way the underlying distinction. The most popular form of such attempts in a Reformed tradition is to press at distinctions between different sorts of necessity, as Barth himself does. In conversation with Bruce, I became convinced that he could offer an adequate defence along these lines that was no more problematic than many others; I did not think that defence was yet in place in the lectures as delivered, though. Thus I believe that McCormack’s account of kenosis is, or at least could easily be rendered, orthodox. Is it, however, compelling? Alongside the constructive work in these lectures was a line of critique of classical Christology...

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Bruce McCormack’s TFT Lectures (4)

A note on the nature of these posts: I am not typing up notes of the lectures (I tend to take none, other than a few scribbled phrases intended to aid in the formulation of a question or comment at the end of the presentation). Instead, I am working from my memory of them, and my reflections following them. My intention has not been to give an exhaustive account of the arguments deployed, so much as to make clear what I took to be the main thread of argument running through the presentations, and my evaluation of it. In turning to Bruce’s final lecture, I am going to depart completely from the structure of the lecture as it was given, which was split into three (unequal) sections: reflections on the proper exegesis of Phil. 2:5-11; an outline of the constructive proposal towards which the lecture series had been building; and a series of responses to criticisms that had been made earlier. On reflection, particularly following some helpful comments from George Hunsinger and Paul Molnar, I suspect that I erred in the previous post in moving too rapidly from lecture 3 to lecture 4; that is, in ascribing certain theses to McCormack’s interpretation of Barth rather than to the constructive material, intended as an advance on Barth. In particular, the notion that kenosis (as opposed to obedience, say) is simply what it is to be the second person of the Trinity, is something that I think is Bruce’s own, not something he found in Barth. What, then, is Bruce’s proposal? Let me approach it like this: it is a standard thesis of classical theology that God’s being is His act; further, God’s act is single, and simple. This is, of course, already a problem, at least if one wants to continue to maintain that God’s existence is independent of the created order: St Thomas devotes considerable ingenuity to explaining how God’s act of creation can happen without any change in God (1a q.45 arts 2 &3). When Barth brings the doctrine of election into the doctrine of God (it is treated in the second part-volume of vol. II, not the first of vol. III), and links election closely to incarnation, the problem becomes acute. However, the gains of Barth’s novel doctrine of election are sufficiently obvious that almost every serious (Protestant) theological proposal of the second half of the twentieth century chose to face the problems, rather than lose the gains. In general, and in one way or another, the problems were eliminated in the later twentieth century by the simple expedient of losing the axiom of impassibility, properly understood: if God’s life is allowed to be dependent on creation, there is no problem. The single greatest merit of Bruce’s proposal, it seems to me, is that he is not prepared to play this game. Instead, he develops a novel account of kenosis. Barth learnt from Harrmann that generic metaphysical accounts of deity should not be accepted. This allowed him to conceive of an account of Trinity that reflected the gospel story: a prior and a posterior, a sender and a sent, a commanding and an obedience—and of course a unity of the Spirit holding the two ‘poles’ together. Bruce’s proposal is at heart as simple as a radicalisation of this one point: kenosis, self-surrender, is simply and precisely what it is to be the Son. ‘Kenosis’ here implies incarnation, so incarnation, or a directedness toward incarnation, is precisely what it is to be the Son. God’s life as Father, Son and Spirit is directed towards the gospel history. The Son gives up no part of His deity in obedience, incarnation, kenosis, death, because these things are simply what it is to be the second Person of the Trinity. Further, what it is to be the third Person of the Trinity is to eternally hold together the sending and commanding Father and the sent and obedient Son in the unity of the Godhead. In a paragraph, this is what I take Bruce to be...

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Bruce McCormack’s TFT lectures (3)

The third lecture, ‘Immutable in Passibility: The Contribution of Karl Barth,’ traced the origins of Barth’s Christology in Dorner and Herrmann. Jason has suggested in a comment on the second of this series that this was the best of the lectures; I would not disagree. It happens it was also the one I chaired. There is a danger with any great theologian that s/he becomes detached from historical context. St Thomas is studied as if Peter Lombard had never written, and Albert the Great had never responded; works on Calvin represent him as springing from nowhere, ignoring half a generation of Reformation debate that is crucial to understanding what he was about; all of us who teach, I fear, have painted the caricature of Barth that has him repudiating all he learnt in the German schools when he came to write on Romans. Bruce, by contrast, took us from the speculative idealism of Dorner to Church Dogmatics IV, via Herrmann’s critique of metaphysics, showing the connections along the way. The result was an impressively fresh vision of what Barth was about. Wilhelm Herrmann was the key here, at least to the thread I am trying to develop in these comments (there were other narratives going on in the lecture series; I judged this to be the main and controlling one, but I am open to correction on that). Herrmann’s rejection of metaphysics remains in Barth as a rejection of abstraction. The truth is not found in such conceptions as ‘humanity’ and ‘deity’, which are then applied to particular things; rather it is found in concrete actual events. We should not first consider what it is to be divine and then think about incarnation; we should consider the particular history of Jesus Christ, and discover any ideas about ‘divinity’ we may want to hold from there. This is some distance from Herrmann’s own, almost existential, take on the nature of Christianity, of course. Dorner’s influence is what is important in explaining the shift. Despite his heavy commitment to idealism, Dorner succeeds, at least in part, is shifting from substance to actuality in his consideration of Christology. That is, he narrates the incarnation on the basis of the particular event that happened, not abstracted accounts of what must have happened given the necessary properties of ‘divine nature’ and ‘human nature’. Barth completed what Dorner set out to do. His Christology makes use of classical metaphysical terms at times, and idealistic language at other times, but this is all merely a borrowing of language when it happens to become useful; these technical vocabularies do not indicate, still less demonstrate, a commitment to the underlying intellectual systems. (Bruce argued this point at some length, and completely convincingly to my mind. In fact, my major, perhaps only serious, criticism of the entire lecture series was that he argued this point too convincingly for one of his subsidiary theses to stand. More on than later, though.) So, for Barth we can only understand what deity means by listening closely to the gospel history. This means that (picking up the language of CD IV) humility, obedience, and the like are intrinsic to what it is to be God—specifically, to what it is to be God the Son. Dorner’s devastating critique of the nineteenth-century Lutheran kenoticists can be avoided by extending his own insights concerning incarnation: in the act of kenosis God the Son does not surrender what it is to be God; rather the act of kenosis is precisely what it is to be God the Son. However, this victory cannot be too easily won. (One of the—many—impressive features of these lectures was the repeated refusal to claim victories too early; problems were faced up to and addressed with seriousness at every turn.) If kenosis is what it is to be God the Son, then from all eternity this must always be true. Barth’s response to this is his doctrine of election: the gospel story mirrors the triune shape of God’s life; in the act of election the Son is determined for reprobation; suffering; rejection; self-abnegation; death. The Son empties himself—that, simply, is what it is to be the second mode of being of the divine...

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Bruce McCormack’s TFT lectures (2)

Bruce McCormack’s second lecture, ‘Passibility in Mutability: The Failure of the Older Kenoticism,’ focused on the nineteenth-century kenotic Christologies of Thomasius and Gess, and on Dorner’s critique. The British kenoticists (Forsyth and Mackintosh), and Baillie’s objections, were there, but the treatment was slightly more cursory, I think because Bruce thinks that Herrmann’s critique of metaphysics should have been found decisive, and so no-one should have developed a kenotic Christology after it. ‘Kenotic Christology,’ for those who don’t know, takes its cue from the Christ-hymn in Philippians 2, which affirms that Christ ’emptied himself’ (heauton ekenosen, hence ‘kenosis’ and ‘kenotic’). A kenotic Christology understands what happened at the incarnation in terms of this self-emptying: God became human by giving something up or laying something down. As Bruce showed, the idea is very consistent with certain traditional themes of Lutheran Christology, and was developed at some length by a school of nineteenth-century German Lutherans, headed by the great Thomasius. (It later made its way into Britain, being embraced by, amongst others, P.T. Forsyth and H.R. Mackintosh,until D.M. Baillie’s God was in Christ put an end to it. The thesis of this lecture was, essentially, that the positions of Thomasius, Forsyth, and indeed any other kenoticism in the nineteenth-century pattern, will inevitably collapse into the radical kenoticism of Gess. Very crudely, Gess suggested that in the incarnation the divine Son simply chooses to stop being divine. This is obviously unacceptable, but the question is how you have any kenotic Christology which does not eventually affirm the same thing. If the divine Son voluntarily chooses to give up being omniscient, say, then either omniscience is not an essential property of divinity, in which case God is not omniscient at all (because there are no accidental properties in God; all that He is, He must be), or it is, and so the Son becomes something less than God in the act of self-emptying. Any account of kenotic Christology falls to such logic. First comment on this lecture: the historical narrative was simply stunning. It’s not really my period, but I have taught modern Christology at postgrad level, supervised on Forsyth, & recently examined a doctoral thesis on Dorner, and I do think I know my way around this stuff. Bruce’s knowledge of the detail of the texts, and insight into the grand sweep of the arguments, was nothing less than inspiring. Second comment: as Bruce indicated, the problem repeatedly in the nineteenth century was the assumption that the patristic hypostasis and prosopon could be translated into the English ‘person’ (or German ‘Person’), with all the connotations of those words in a post-Romantic age. Strauss, for instance (a quotation Bruce used): ‘to speak of two natures in one person is to speak of a single self-consciousness, for what else could a single person mean?’ However, it is clear that in the patristic construction of Trinity and Christology such ‘personal’ characteristics as ‘self-consciousness’, if considered at all, were attached to natures not persons—this was, for instance, the whole point of the orthodox solutions to the monoenergist and monothelite controversies. (This is why Barth preferred ‘mode of being’ to ‘person’ for the three hypostases of the Trinity; in post-Romantic terms, all that is ‘personal’ in God is one.) Bruce’s whole lecture was constructed on the suggestion that nineteenth-century German Christology, at least, was endlessly struggling with how to hold together the confession that the human nature is anhypostatic (it does not exist apart from in union with the divine Son) and that there is a genuinely human will alongside the divine will in the incarnate One (‘dithelitism’). I think this is an extraordinarily perceptive reading of the history, but I also think that, with a clearer understanding that the word ‘hypostasis’ does not mean ‘person’ in a Romantic sense, we can cut through the problem very easily. Footnote: anyone know how to enter Greek on a wordpress...

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Bruce McCormack’s TFT lectures (1)

Bruce McCormack’s TF Torrance lectures went under the title ‘The Humility of the Eternal Son: A Reformed Version of Kenotic Christology’. They represent the maturity of a project Bruce announced in an IJST article (‘Karl Barth’s Christology as a Resource for a Reformed Version of Kenoticism’ IJST 8 (2006), pp. 243-51), and has developed in my hearing in papers given in a conference on Hebrews in St Andrews (to be published next year in McDonald, Driver, Bauckham, & Hart (eds), The Epistle to the Hebrews and Christian Theology (Eerdmans)), and at the 2007 Rutherford House Dogmatics Conference. No doubt the theme has also been worked on in public elsewhere. I published the IJST article, and questioned Bruce after the two earlier presentations. It was clear from the start that he was doing something interesting, but there were serious questions raised. Let me say at the start that in his TFT lectures Bruce has developed his proposal into something weighty and serious—more so than any similar reconstruction that I am aware of in recent English-language theology. The first lecture, ‘Immutable in Impassibility: The Role Played by Classical Theism in Creating the Unresolved Problems in Chalcedonian Orthodoxy,’ covered the development of Christology in the patristic period down to the Lutheran-Reformed controversies of the sixteenth century, with a particular focus on Cyril of Alexandria, the Chalcedonian settlement, and John of Damascus. Bruce argued, essentially, that all Christology in the patristic and Reformation periods was hamstrung by the fact that it was constructed on the assumption of a substance metaphysics. ‘God’ and ‘humanity’ were different sorts of things, that could not be mixed. Something was either one or the other. All patristic Christology was a series of increasingly sophisticated attempts to escape this basic logic, which however proved inescapable. Cyril’s attempt was the most interesting, but relied on an unacceptable Origenist subordinationism (this interpretation of Cyril comes from McGuckin’s St Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy). If I say that this was the weakest of the four lectures, understand that this is rather like talking about the weakest member of Arsenal’s midfield—in four performances, each stunningly good, one is inevitably going to be slightly less good than the others. Bruce was trying to deal with an immense amount of material (the whole development of patristic Christology, and the Reformed-Lutheran debates as well), and he would admit himself that patristics in particular is not his period. It seems to me that Bruce was using this background to demonstrate the necessity of his constructive proposal. That is, as far as I could work out listening to the four lectures, Bruce’s own account of Christology does not depend on anything in his account of this history for its validity; however, the pressure he feels for developing a new account of Christology does. One theme of these lectures is the problem of substance metaphysics. On McCormack’s account, all Christology prior to Hegel has been infected by this: the theologians assumed such metaphysics, and it prevented them from saying the things they wanted/needed to say, or at least from saying them consistently. As a result, classical Christology needs to be re-written for a post-metaphysical...

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