Faith, Freedom Spirit and the The Economic Trinity in Barth, Torrance and Contemporary Theology PAU L D. MOL NA R InterVarsity Press P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426 ivpress.com [email protected] ©2015 by Paul D. Molnar All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from InterVarsity Press. InterVarsity Press® is the book-publishing division of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA®, a movement of students and faculty active on campus at hundreds of universities, colleges and schools of nursing in the United States of America, and a member movement of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. For information about local and regional activities, visit intervarsity.org. Previously published material by Paul D. Molnar used with permission: “The Role of the Holy Spirit in Knowing the Triune God.” In Trinitarian Theology After Barth, edited by Myk Habets and Phillip Tolliday, foreword by John B. Webster, pp. 3-47. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2011. Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers (www.wipfandstock.com). “The Perils of Embracing a ‘Historicized Christology.’” Modern Theology 30, no. 4 (2014): 454-80. Used by permission of John Wiley & Sons Ltd., Blackwell. “The obedience of the Son in the theology of Karl Barth and of Thomas F. Torrance.” Scottish Journal of Theology 67, no. 1 (2014): 50-69. Used by permission of Cambridge University Press. “Can Jesus’ Divinity be Recognized as ‘Definitive, Authentic and Essential’ if it is Grounded in Election? Just how far did the Later Barth Historicize Christology?” Neue Zeitschrift Für Systematische Theologie Und Religionsphilosophie Band 41 Heft 1 (2010): 40–81. Used by permission of Walter de Gruyter. Cover design: Cindy Kiple Interior design: Beth McGill ISBN 978-0-8308-8018-8 (digital) ISBN 978-0-8308-3905-6 (print) Contents Preface 7 Acknowledgments 13 Abbreviations 17 1 Thinking About God Within Faith: The Role of the Holy Spirit 21 2 The Role of the Holy Spirit in Knowing the Triune God 82 3 Considering God’s Freedom Once Again 129 4 Origenism, Election, and Time and Eternity 187 5 The Perils of Embracing a “Historicized Christology” 225 6 Can Jesus’ Divinity Be Recognized as “Definitive, Authentic and Essential” If It Is Grounded in Election? Just How Far Did the Later Barth Historicize Christology? 260 7 The Obedience of the Son in the Theology of Karl Barth and of Thomas F. Torrance 313 8 A Theology of Grace: Living In and From the Holy Spirit 355 Conclusion 419 Select Bibliography 431 Name Index 442 Subject Index 444 Praise for Faith, Freedom and the Spirit 449 About the Author 451 More Titles from InterVarsity Press 452 Academic Textbook Selector 453 Preface M y first book on the Trinity1 was rightly perceived as a ground- clearing exercise that was meant to illustrate why a doctrine of the immanent Trinity was important and needed to function in theological re- flection by directing theologians to the need to recognize and to maintain the freedom of God’s grace. This book is intended as a discussion of just how a properly conceived pneumatology would assist theologians speaking of the economic Trinity to think more accurately about divine and human interaction in the sphere of faith and knowledge within history. Toward that end I begin with an extensive discussion of the role of faith in knowing God and in relating with God in and through his incarnate Word and thus through the Holy Spirit. I then move to a discussion of how and why a properly functioning pneumatology will lead to an appropriately theological understanding of God’s actions within the economy, and of why natural theology can never be seen as the ground for a theology of revelation. Rather, natural theology is seen as an approach to God that bypasses God’s reve- lation and thus diverts attention away from the action of the Holy Spirit enabling knowledge of God acting for us within history. In this context, one of the key themes of this book will be to explore and explain exactly why it is imperative always to begin and end theology from within faith. That means of course that any attempted apologetic approach to Christology, to knowledge of God and thus to the doctrine of the Trinity that 1Paul D. Molnar, Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity: In Dialogue with Karl Barth and Contemporary Theology (New York: T & T Clark, 2005). 8 Faith, Freedom and the Spirit begins by focusing on our experience of faith instead of focusing on the God experienced in faith will always tend to confuse or separate not only nature and grace but reason and revelation. Any such confusion, I will contend, will weaken a strictly theological understanding of divine and human freedom and thus undermine the need for the Holy Spirit in order to see and to under- stand how exactly Christology relates with the doctrine of the Trinity and with pneumatology to point us to the constant need to rely on God himself both to know God and to love God within the sphere of history. In this book I will rely on the thinking of Karl Barth and of Thomas F. Torrance to explicate such thinking in contrast to those theologians (Catholic and Protestant) who do not begin and end their reflections in faith. I will also argue against attempts to historicize Christology in inappropriate ways by discussing the kinds of resources that are available in the theology of Barth and Torrance from which one could develop a properly historical view of Christology, and thus of God acting within history in his Word and Spirit without falling into the Hegelian trap of making God in some sense de- pendent on history. Any assumption therefore that suggests that Jesus’ human history is constitutive of his divine being, I will argue, is an as- sumption that effectively is based on a kind of theology that operates, perhaps unwittingly, with a type of false apologetic approach that attempts to ground theology in history, experience and reason instead of in God’s actions for us within history that enable our knowledge of the truth. After discussing what I would consider to be an appropriate understanding of faith and how theological knowledge operates within pneumatology, I will proceed to consider in detail divine freedom once again as the basis for true human freedom. This time, however, I will consider criticisms and misun- derstandings that arose in connection with various misreadings of my first book on the Trinity. Since the publication of that first volume on the Trinity, the doctrine of election has become something of a flashpoint for contem- porary discussions of divine and human freedom. After considering various proposals with regard to how election and the Trinity relate to our under- standing of the immanent and economic Trinity, I will argue that those who emphasize Barth’s actualism in such a way as to undercut his view that God’s being and act are one tend to confuse time and eternity because they unwit- tingly embrace a type of thinking that was rejected when Origenism was Preface 9 rejected. Relying on the thought of Thomas F. Torrance, I will propose an alternative way of understanding the connection between time and eternity that is christologically focused and pneumatologically informed. Since there is a critical connection between Christology and the doctrine of the Trinity, I will spend some time considering some of the perils of embracing a historicized Christology, that is, a Christology that is supposed to offer a view of Jesus’ divinity without having to acknowledge the continued relevance of the Logos asarkos for reflection on the God who acts as our reconciler within the economy. What does it mean to recognize that Jesus’ divinity must, as Barth once put it, be understood to be “definitive, authentic and essential”? Can Jesus’ divinity be recognized as the decisive factor that gives meaning to revelation and reconciliation within the economy if for a moment his divine Person is thought to be a reality that results in any sense from Jesus’ human relation to his Father in history? I will explain why that question must be answered nega- tively in order to perceive the true meaning of God’s actions as the basis of and enabling condition of our human actions within history. Closely related to this issue, a consideration of Karl Barth’s early and later Christology will follow, with a view toward explaining why I think the evi- dence suggests that he never did and never would have abandoned his early position that the Word would still be the eternal Word without the incar- nation, just as God would be none the less the eternal Father, Son and Holy Spirit if he had never decided to create, reconcile and redeem the world. This discussion will focus on debates among Barth scholars as to whether Barth so historicized his Christology that he could no longer espouse his earlier view, but that he changed his thinking in light of his doctrine of election and that this new view was expressed in what he had to say in the fourth volume of the Church Dogmatics, titled The Doctrine of Reconciliation. I will argue that Barth always held that revelation and reconciliation do not create the deity of Jesus Christ. Instead, Christ’s deity creates revelation and reconcili- ation. Thus he never would have accepted the idea that Jesus’ antecedent existence as the eternal Word was in any sense constituted by his human history. I explain how and why I think that those who claim that Barth’s later Christology changed and required that he therefore should reject his earlier views or be considered inconsistent in his thinking are mistakenly engaging in “untheological metaphysical speculation” just because their historicist 10 Faith, Freedom and the Spirit presuppositions lead them to discredit Christ’s antecedent existence as “au- thentic, definitive and essential.” After considering this crucial issue, we will focus more particularly on Christology once again to see where some of the problems bequeathed to contemporary theology come from. To do this I will engage in a close comparison of the views of Thomas F. Torrance and Karl Barth, comparing their understanding of the obedience of the Son as that act on the basis of which reconciliation and redemption become events within the sphere of history. The main issue to be discussed in this regard will be whether and to what extent obedience and subordi- nation can be read back into the immanent Trinity. When such a reading occurs, it will be my contention that the order of the trinitarian persons actually is confused with their being because an extraneous concept of cau- sality is, perhaps inadvertently, imported into the relations of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, thus weakening the positive point that the Son of God did not hold himself aloof from us but in his incarnation, death and resurrection he really was God acting as man for us both from the divine and the human side, reconciling the world to the Father. And as the ascended and advent Lord, he remains the one Mediator between us and the Father in the time between his first and second appearance within history. It is the Holy Spirit who enables us to experience and to live that reconciliation that is our jus- tification and sanctification by grace and by faith; this is what empowers Christian hope here and now as well. In connection with this issue I will explain why I think that Torrance had a more consistently theological view of this matter than Barth because he made important distinctions between the missions and the processions in order to assert God’s freedom in se and ad extra in ways that closed the door to reading back elements of the economy into the immanent Trinity. It is that problematic aspect of Barth’s theology that opens the door to those who think the processions within the Trinity should be resolved into the missions. But I will argue that any such thinking historicizes the person of the Mediator in just the wrong way. Finally, in order to develop a positive view of how human beings may live within the economy by grace and thus through the Holy Spirit uniting us to Christ and therefore through faith, I discuss at length how the doctrine of justification by faith relates to the living of the Christian life in the power of the Holy Spirit. In order to accomplish this I rely once again on the thinking Preface 11 of Barth and Torrance, as I do throughout this book, which itself is once again also a dialogue with other contemporary theologians about divine and human freedom. This time the emphasis is on our experience of God within the economy without forgetting what was learned from a properly func- tioning doctrine of the immanent Trinity. It is hoped that when the full picture that is presented here is considered in detail, thoughtful readers will see just why God’s freedom as the one who loves must be upheld at all costs, even and especially when speaking about our Christian life as the life of those who are justified and sanctified in and through the one Mediator pre- cisely as the Holy Spirit actualizes that reconciliation in our lives here and now. Whenever the Holy Spirit is confused with the human spirit, as it cer- tainly is when it is thought that trinitiarian life is our life or that simply by loving others we love God, there and then the all-important union and dis- tinction between us and God is lost, and theology becomes once again little more than our conversation with ourselves using theological categories.