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The theological function of the doctrine of the divine attributes and the divine glory, with special reference to Karl Barth and his reading of the Protestant Orthodox

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 2008

Christopher R. J. Holmes
Christopher R. J. Holmes*
Affiliation:
Providence Theological Seminary, 10 College Crescent, Otterburne, Manitoba, Canadachristopher.holmes@prov.ca
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Abstract

Theological discourse on the doctrine of the attributes of God has lacked a clear sense of its purpose within the doctrine of God. It has far too often led one into an abstract realm in which an incipient naturalism is present concerning who God is and what God is like: the attributes resemble those of a supreme being rather than the triune God of the gospel. If the doctrine is to perform the salutary theological work for which it is capable, it would be to its advantage to describe, as does Barth, God's attributes in terms of a series of short-hand descriptions which agree with God's enacted identity in the history of Israel as fulfilled in Jesus Christ. In doing so, Barth offers a tremendously creative re-inhabitation of the doctrine. It is creative precisely because Barth avoids many of the shortcomings of the historical shape of the doctrine, as exemplified for him in Protestant Orthodoxy's tendency toward semi-nominalism, by attending anew to the declarative and communicative character of the glory of the Lord, a glory which is inclusive of a multiplicity of perfections. The result is a rearticulation of the doctrine of the divine attributes that is truly concrete, inasmuch as it eschews not only a false apophaticism, which would deflect attention away from the resplendent contours of God's saving self-display in the economy of salvation, but also attests the extent of God's propensity to ever give of himself as he is and to evoke a form of creaturely life commensurate with his self-giving.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 61 , Issue 2 , May 2008, pp. 206 - 223
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2008

Introduction

In contemporary treatments of the doctrine of God, the doctrine of the divine attributes is a rather neglected focus. Where it is not neglected, talk about God's attributes has all too often led into an abstract realm in which discourse on God metaphysically conceived, and not so much God's saving activity in the history of Israel and Jesus, is normative. This talk reaches into Christian instruction in the churches. In answer to the question, ‘What is God like?’ inquirers are pointed to a set of descriptive attributes, including omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence. While these terms may be warranted, they often neglect the biblical account of how God exercises, for example, God's power, namely, in weakness, ignominy and lowliness. When a presentation of God's attributes bears more resemblance to a God in general or a supreme being, an incipient naturalism very easily finds its way into the church's teaching on who God is and what God is like. God is said to be divine precisely because God is the one who is free from all earthly limitations and encumbrances; God's divinity lies in the fact that God is the very opposite of what the human is, free from all finitude and all that is, in short, human.

Such a God, moreover, is far removed from the manifold actualities in which people find themselves. What comfort is there in praying to a God whose divinity is thought in terms of power, knowledge or presence writ large? And what direction or movement for life do such descriptions of God elicit or provide? If God is the very instantiation of what the human being considers to be appropriate to the divine, then talk of God's attributes is very easily domesticated such that the attributes function as glosses upon human ways of knowing or of conceiving the divine. That is to say, the human person knows intuitively and in advance, for example, what love or power is; and she finds that love modelled or exemplified in Jesus. If such is the case the Son of God simply becomes the expression or representation of a human ideal. Why the doctrine of the divine attributes is important is that it disrupts such easy and general images of God passed on via the classical philosophical tradition or experiential understanding. Accordingly, the task of the doctrine of the divine attributes is to investigate whether descriptions which the church puts forward agree with God's self-disclosure as attested in scripture, and occasion description of a form of life concomitant with divine self-revelation. Put again, talk about God's attributes concerns itself with giving an account of the essential character of a very particular God and describing a very particular form of life that ought to take shape in correspondence to what this God reveals the divine self to be.

Note two important steps taken thus far: first, an account of God's attributes is descriptive in character: descriptive because the function of the doctrine is not to gloss human perceptions of the divine, but to provide proclamation with short-hand descriptions of the God whose immanent essence is set forth in the story of Israel and Jesus.Footnote 1 There is a false humility – or better, a false apophaticism – present when the preacher or the theologian plays the ‘mystery card’, when she says that one cannot truly know what God is like: God is ‘that than which nothing greater can be thought’.Footnote 2 Accordingly, one can only speak of God as a limit concept, an utterly absolute and ineffable mystery best worshipped in silence. In disputing this, Karl Barth argues that Christian talk about God can be confident that it speaks truthfully of its subject not because it has ascended a heavenly epistemological ladder but because the God whose splendours it describes has freely disclosed the divine self in the history of Israel and Jesus – this is God's glory. In other words, an account of the divine attributes is descriptive in character because describing what God is like is a matter of attending to the place where God gives the divine self to be found, namely, in the covenant of grace attested in scripture. It is in the concretions peculiar to this covenant history that God's attributes are revealed and thus knowable and speakable.

Second, description of what God is like must also include description of the space in which human action takes place in accordance with the divine self-description. To confess that God is glorious, for example, means that there is a form of creaturely life and, more specifically, ecclesial life appropriate to that glory. If the doctrine offers an account of the essential splendours in which God's immanent essence is set forth, then it must speak too of the shape human life in the church and in the world is to take. If not, an incipient naturalism, again, invades the account. It will be thought that the church realises what God is like in relation to the world; God has left it up to the church to represent what God has declared Godself to be. Thus, God is no longer the agent of God's own presence in the world, for example, of God's own love and justice. Against this, it is to be said that God in his glory is not silent but eloquent: the risen Jesus speaks prophetically in the Spirit to his people through the Word. Yet the divine glory includes the human person, drawing her into a movement of obedience and witness, so as to testify to God as the Lord of glory, the glory in which God reveals Godself as God is.

Karl Barth's treatment in CD II/1 offers the most creative re-inhabitation of the doctrine since I. A. Dorner's own magisterial treatment. No other theologian in the twentieth century, Protestant or Catholic, took the doctrine as seriously as Barth. Further, as far as Barth scholarship is concerned, the doctrine has received very little scholarly attention.Footnote 3 Two crucial features of Barth's re-inhabitation of the doctrine of the divine attributes need to be understood, if his account of how it functions in the doctrine of God is to be grasped; namely, (1) Barth's perception of the shape of the problem and (2) its resolution. Ascertaining the shape of the problem, however, is only possible in light of Barth's reading of the inherited shape of the doctrine. And so, I begin by examining Barth's engagement with the Protestant Orthodox in CD II/1.Footnote 4 Far from simply functioning as a ‘negative foil’, Barth has many positive things to say about their treatment, especially in the case of Amandus Polanus (Reformed) and Petrus van Mastricht (Reformed), who grasp very well that God does not hold anything back in coming to us – that God is, rather, himself in all that God does.Footnote 5 However, the shape of the problem is nonetheless very present in them, too, in that semi-nominalist reservations accompany their proposals throughout. Barth's resolution of the problem is most perspicuous in his treatment of the divine glory, the ultimate horizon of attribution in the doctrine of the divine attributes, wherein God is described as glorious precisely because God freely wills to set forth God's immanent essence in God's covenantal working among us. God is glorious in that God is free to disclose the divine self effectively and without reserve in the history of the covenant.

Towards an understanding of the historic shape of the problem

From the beginning Barth distances himself from any sense that the horizon of the doctrine of the divine attributes is a supreme being in general. To that end, Barth rejects using attributes (Eigenschaften) in favour of perfections (Vollkommenheiten) to describe what God is like. Perfection better indicates what is clearly ‘distinctive’ about God's being, namely, that God's being is identical with a multitude of perfections.Footnote 6 Attributes, on the other hand, is too formal: a supreme being in general can be said to have attributes but only God can be said to have perfections; for God cannot be God without them. From the outset, then, Barth is at pains to indicate that the perfections are inherent in the divine life itself; that the divine perfections are indeed perfections proper to God's immanent essence. In taking such a step, and in emphasising that the perfections are proper to God's immanent essence, Barth negates the idea that God's perfections are occasioned by something God does: that the perfection of love is attributed to God because God sent God's Son to die for us; for, even apart from the sending of the Son God is, indeed, love. It is the love of God that overflows in the sending of the Son, whose mission (being sent) is reiterative of his procession (being begotten). And so, the perfections, as perfections, are a matter ‘of what he [God] reveals himself to be’; they are proper to or ingredient in the life of the triune God and therefore his revelation in the covenant of grace.Footnote 7 God ‘exists in these perfections, and these perfections again exist in Him and only in Him as One who, both in His revelation and in eternity, is the same’.Footnote 8 There is, in other words, no ontological gap between God's immanent essence set forth and the perfections themselves.

Yet this affirmation raises the following question: In what manner can the one God be said to be this wealth of perfections? Barth's programmatic answer sets the stage for all that will follow. In brief, the doctrine of the divine perfections is to ‘attest and expound this biblical unity of the Lord with His glory’.Footnote 9 Barth's view is that the doctrine attests the truth that God is his revelation (glory) and his revelation (glory) is his being. No gap, then, exists between who God is and what God does. In this sense, the doctrine begins, for Barth, where it concludes some four hundred pages later in CD II/1 – with divine glory. Glory performs such important theological work in Barth's account of the perfections because glory, as the chief perfection, attests that God ‘is not only the Lord (Herr), but the Lord of glory (Herrlichkeit): and conversely, that all glory is the glory of God the Lord (die Herrlichkeit Gottes des Herrn)’.Footnote 10 The account of the divine perfections is one extended commentary, then, on the biblical truth that the Lord of glory is united with or agrees with the very manifestation of his glory. Or, again, the doctrine of perfections describes the extent to which God's glory has a Lord; for God's glory is made concrete in him who is the Lord of glory. Thus God's glory is not distinct from the divine self nor the divine perfections in general: indeed, the glory of God is the point of departure for Barth's treatment of the perfections, for the reason that this concept best accounts for the actual unity of the Lord of glory with his glory – the unity of revelation and eternity.

But why does Barth place such an emphasis on the unity of revelation and eternity, attribute and essence, in God? Why must an account of God's glory assume this unity as its starting and end point? Why is Barth so insistent that there be no gap between God's revelation and eternity? To appreciate why Barth thinks it important to take these steps one must look to the inherited shape of the doctrine. To be sure, Barth has much to say about other paradigmatic figures such as Schleiermacher; and yet, it is the Protestant Orthodox who are his chief interlocutors in CD II/1. The post-Reformation Protestant Orthodox are of such importance to Barth because of the seriousness of their attention to revelation, and the rigour that marks their sense of God's glory. However, in them Barth detects a notion of being which owes more to the classical Greek philosophical tradition than to Holy Scripture. And it is this assessment which bespeaks, for Barth, the classical shape of the problem, namely, semi-nominalism. This diagnosis forms the backdrop for Barth's resolution of the problem, namely, an account of the divine glory which posits the unity of revelation and eternity, simplicity and multiplicity in God.

Barth's reservation, for example, with the theology of Amandus Polanus, arises with respect to Polanus' notion that

the essential properties of God are not distinguished really, that is, they are not distinguished from the nature of the thing, yet rationally they are determined by our conception and comprehension, by our manner of understanding . . . . Properly speaking, there are not many properties in God, but only one, which is nothing other than the divine being itself . . . But in respect of us, the properties are said to be, as it were, many, because in us they are many.Footnote 11

If this is so, then, one finds in Polanus that a robust affirmation of the unity of attribute and essence or revelation and eternity in God is immediately undermined by the qualification that the many arises from the human, that is, her vision or her reason. Such is the case in Johann Andreas Quenstedt (Lutheran) as well:

For if we wish to speak properly and carefully, God has no properties, there is but a pure and simple essence/being, which admits no real difference, nor any composition of either things or modes . . . But because we cannot adequately conceive of the very simple essence of God by a single concept, therefore we apprehend him by inadequate and distinct concepts inadequately representing the divine essence. And thus our intellect distinguishes those things which from the point of view of reality are not distinct.Footnote 12

The attributes, then, are not united in God's essence, for either Polanus or Quenstedt, in a way that includes differentiation amongst the attributes; for the difference bespeaks the creature's conception, her way of understanding. Thus it is the human creature who distinguishes, rationally, the attributes of a God whose simplicity knows no distinction or difference.

In response to Polanus' assertion that difference amongst the attributes concerns our vision, Barth writes, ‘We must reject out of hand the semi-nominalistic reservation that in the last resort we can speak of the proprietates Dei only improprie, that the most characteristic inner being of God is a simplicitas which is to be understood undialectically’.Footnote 13 Barth's criticism of Polanus is that his conception of simplicity is far too static and monadic. In Barth's mind, the doctrine of the divine attributes must account for the fact that revelation itself authorises dialectical descriptions of God's many properties and attributes that themselves correspond to God. On the basis of God's fellowship-creating act, God and the many attributes that recount God can indeed be expressed, dialectically, because God's simplicity is a relationally defined simplicity – simplicity ought to be understood in trinitarian terms – which includes properties whose unity with God's essence assume a differentiated character. Which is precisely what the Protestant Orthodox (and the mainstream tradition), in Barth's mind, have failed to recognise, for they assume ‘statements concerning a multiplicity of perfections in God are statements expressing our vision of God’.Footnote 14 Barth's understanding of the shape of the problem, then, concerns the tradition's unwillingness to ascribe to the one the many. For Barth, God's oneness cannot be construed so as to exclude the many.

It is precisely in this sense that the Protestant Orthodox reiterate the nominalist tendencies of the classical tradition, that is, that the many attributes are extrinsic to God's essence and existence. An important passage from Polanus runs thus:

Properly speaking [there is only one] property of God [namely his] essence – but with regard to us his properties are spoken of as many, because in ourselves they are many: in God, however, they are in reality one; only in reason (ratione) do they differ, and in reason (ratione) they are many, and in fact not in the reason (ratione) of God, but of ourselves, obviously more as they are accommodated to our understanding than as they really are (for what creature could understand them as they are?), they are distinguished among themselves, since we cannot explain or understand such a superessential and supernatural nature except by our words and in proportion to the nature of our capacity or conception. Our understanding cannot so know God, as all other things, in one simple act, but needs many distinct acts.Footnote 15

Notice the extent to which, in Polanus' account, the many is deemed to be an accommodation to the cognitive processes of the knower herself; the attributes differ only in her reason. Furthermore, note that human capacity (or incapacity) remains just that – human capacity (or incapacity). Hence, human reason needs many distinct acts, that is, attributes, by which it can apprehend God's reality. Since God is not like anything else – absolutely simple – God cannot be known like anything else. What is also striking about Polanus' account is his description of the character of God's super-essential nature: that it is, in fact, one property. In accordance with Polanus' assertion that one cannot understand God's super-essential nature, ought he to be so confident that God's oneness does not include properties differentiated in itself? Moreover, is such an understanding appropriate to the biblical witness? Barth answers:

The fiction which is concealed behind this consideration [of Polanus] consists in the fact that, owing to the dazzling effect of the platonic-aristotelian idea of being, in which men thought they had attained knowledge of God, it was felt necessary to ascribe a much higher dignity to the idea of the one as against that of the many – so much higher, in fact, that in the application of this idea of the one it was thought possible to speak of God proprie, as though even in this case God is not spoken of respectu nostri, pro nostri captus ratione [with respect to us, in proportion to the nature of our capacity]; as though in view of God's (own) hiddenness in His revelation it does not have to be totally conceded that our ideas – including that of the one also – are in themselves unsuitable and inadequate for comprehension of God; and as though on the fundamental assumption that God in His hiddenness has revealed Himself to us and has authorized us to apply our conceptual systems to Him, while realizing their limitations, the multiplicity of His being is not to be taken just as seriously as its unity.Footnote 16

Barth's point, and it is one which he belabours in paragraph 29, is that creaturely conceptions of both oneness and simplicity (as with multiplicity) are themselves subject to judgement in relation to revelation. Polanus' weakness, then, as Barth sees it, is that he is far too optimistic in his assertions with regard to the character of God's essential oneness. Polanus, if for no other reason than consistency, ought to apply the same suspicion which he brings to the many to his account of God's oneness, in order that the latter, too, be spoken of in proportion to human capacity. But questions of proportion are not Barth's concern per se. Rather, his point is that all our concepts in themselves are utterly inadequate to speak truthfully of the one and the many. Only on the basis of revelation are descriptions of God's essential oneness authorised, descriptions which include within themselves multiplicity. Revelation thus capacitates in such a way that creaturely limitations do not function as reservations but rather are taken up by the One who utterly exceeds those limitations, and the human, in her limitations, is enabled to bear true witness to the divine life through what seems to be altogether unsuitable and inadequate concepts.

What Barth's reading of the post-Reformation Protestant Orthodox demonstrates is the shape of the problem, namely, that a doctrine of God's attributes cannot concede the concept of the many simply to human reason. For we have to do, first and foremost, with the acting subject or agent itself, namely, God. God capacitates or makes possible knowledge of God – God is the agent of his own self-knowledge – in such a way that the human cannot be said to be the one whose cognitive processes, in effect, determine what can truthfully be said about God. Again, the doctrine, if it is to perform its salutary theological work of providing church proclamation with a language for God, must recognise that God himself is the acting agent in that process. God as it were lisps to us; yet in so doing God cannot be said to lisp in a way which betrays who God is; for God in God's revelation instructs the human being to speak with confidence of God's oneness and therewith the multiplicity of attributes. This is indeed the glory of God, for Barth. ‘God's glory is God Himself in the truth and capacity and act in which He makes Himself known as God’.Footnote 17 The many perfections that the one God is are made known to us by God – because they are inherent in God, whose act is identical to his being.

Therefore, gospel proclamation assumes the character of a movement too, in that it is a following after, a witness and an act of obedience undertaken in the power of the Spirit, to what the one God has declared to be the glorious truth about the divine self in the story of Israel and Jesus. The doctrine of the divine attributes, then, offers short-hand descriptions of the identity of the God whose immanent essence is set forth in God's covenantal work. Note: it is God who is and always remains the agent of God's own setting forth. This is why Barth, despite his often very fulsome praise for the Protestant Orthodox, remains critical. There is a sense in which God is not the Lord of his own self-presence; in which the one God cannot reveal the divine self and thus the many that God is in revelation. Human understanding usurps God's Lordship such that it is the human who becomes the active agent in the derivation and distribution of the attributes; it is her reason which is the active agent in the articulation of the many. Whereas, in Barth's thought, the resolution of the problem requires a notion of a being which is not alien to the many and which can be itself and thus the many it is in its own act.

Towards a resolution of the problem

Barth's account of the divine glory, the sum of the perfections, offers the best place to inspect the shape of his resolution of the problem. For it is in the treatment of the divine glory that the extent to which God is truly actually present – revelation as self-manifestation – is pressed to the fore. The divine glory attests that God is present as God in the concretions peculiar to God's saving history amongst us. It should come as no surprise that Barth appeals to the biblical witness as the starting point for a resolution of the problem. Barth does not speak about God's glory – namely his ‘dignity’ to make himself ‘conspicuous’ as the one he is – without appealing directly to the biblical witness.Footnote 18 In accordance with the New Testament, Barth describes glory as:

the objective conception of the honour which a man has in himself and which is therefore his due, the dignity which is his and is therefore accepted by others, the magnificence which he displays because he has a right to it, the splendour which emanates from him because he is resplendent. It is in this sense that the New Testament speaks of God's glory or of the glory of Jesus Christ or even of the glory that belongs to us. It refers to the legitimate, effective, and actual self-demonstration, self-expression and self-declaration of a being whose self-revelation is subject to no doubt, criticism or reservation.Footnote 19

God is glorious, biblically speaking, because God maintains God's identity as the glorious One in God's self-declaration. This is Barth's resolution of the classical shape of the problem. The theological function of an account of the divine glory is to attest that God is what God does. Crucial to the resolution, more specifically, is the work undertaken by the term resplendent. Unlike the most sophisticated doctrine of the divine attributes to have emerged in some years from German-speaking theological circles, Wolf Krötke's Gottes Klarheiten, in which Krötke describes the attributes as clarities and equates the glory of God with God's clarity, Barth emphasises glory's resplendent or luminous character.Footnote 20 Clarity, itself, as Krötke convincingly demonstrates, is a very helpful and serviceable theological term because it points to the unambiguous character of the divine self-disclosure and the form of individual and societal life it effects. And yet Barth's account is stronger in that he emphasises more robustly the resplendent character of God's glory. Inherent within the divine glory there is movement – movement to the other in God and, therefore, movement to the creature – which wills to go forth to share the divine self. Describing God's glory as resplendent provides, then, a necessary supplement to clarity, namely, that God's clarity, precisely because it is God's, is also luminous; it radiates and goes forth, establishing, maintaining and perfecting covenant fellowship with the creature.

To repeat: God's glory is God's self-declaration. Barth repeatedly emphasises the extent to which God's perfections are not lacking from his self-declaration as the perfections are proper to the kind of perfect being or reality God is. This, again, is Barth's resolution of the problems attendant upon the semi-nominalist approach. As George Hunsinger explains, ‘The One God who posits himself as three is also the same God who posits himself as many. The three are his hypostases or concrete modes of existence; the many are his perfections’.Footnote 21 This is important: the account of the one God who posits himself as three – description of this reality is the theological work which the doctrine of the Trinity undertakes – is analogous to an account of the one who is also many – the doctrine of the divine attributes. Put again, just as God's oneness includes his threeness, the one God includes within himself a multitude of perfections. From this point of view, the perfections cannot, according to I. A. Dorner, be perfections in relation ‘to other [creaturely] existence, objectifying themselves in relation to [this] other existence, affecting that existence and affected thereby . . . modalities, which the divine essence assumes in relation to other existence, the self-determined modificability of God in relation to another’.Footnote 22 If such is the case, God would not be glorious; for God's glory and the perfection proper to God's glory would be predicated not of God's being, but of a relation or a way of God's working. Whereas Barth insists that God is revealed to us as God is; that God's perfections are not anterior to God's being, but that God has them in Godself prior to the historical outworking of the covenant.

And so, this revealedness is not the basis for the description: the one God is three and many. The role and function of the doctrine of the immanent Trinity has the task of setting forth the basis.Footnote 23 If glory is the ultimate short-hand description of God and bespeaks the extent to which God's immanent essence is set forth, then, there must be an irreversible relationship of the immanent life of God and the economy of God. The function of the doctrine of the immanent Trinity is to safeguard this irreversible relation: irreversible because God is not exhausted in relation to the economy of grace, nor does God become God in it. Barth's resolution of the problem, then, is to stress the extent to which God's being is not realised in relationship to history; that attributes are not something God has because God relates the divine self to another. God is glorious in his self-communication precisely because God is self-communicating life, a self-communication which overflows, but does so precisely because God is complete in Godself. Thus one recognises that the doctrine of the divine glory and the immanent Trinity are intertwined for both are concerned with safeguarding God's freedom to love.

More needs to be said, however, about the extent to which the demonstration of God's glory includes its own effectiveness, if one is to further appreciate how Barth resolves the problem. ‘This opening of the eyes, is itself the work of His glory, for it is His glory that makes it necessary. It is in itself the truth and power and act by which blind eyes comes to see’.Footnote 24 God effects knowledge of his own glory, knowledge that the one God is identical to God's many perfections. This is, so to speak, the subjective dimension of Barth's account of God's glory. Included within God's objective self-presentation – objective in so far as the reality itself is present – is also its efficaciousness. Indeed, God's glory and therefore his being concerns one to such an extent that God has not left the possibility of response up to the creature, but rather has included the capacity to respond to God's self-disclosure within God's own self-disclosure. Stated differently, the human covenant partner responds to God's glory by virtue of God, more specifically, God's Holy Spirit. God, too, is the agent who effects response in the covenant partner to the divine self. Barth's credits Polanus' insight – gloria hominis est Deus – as that which gives rise to this notion of God himself as the one who answers for the creature's lack of ability.Footnote 25 And so one recognises the extent to which Barth's treatment of the doctrine of the attributes clears a space for the creature, not by virtue of the creature's own capacity, but by virtue of the fact that ‘the supplying of our lack of ability to know God carries with it a supplying of every lack in our life’.Footnote 26 The human exists as one who cannot know God and the wealth of perfections in which God is. And yet God capacitates her: the Spirit, as the mediator of communion creates the ability to respond and, in turn, sustains the community of faith in God's reality in such a way that the creature and therewith the community has a share in God's glory.

But Barth suspects it is not enough to simply identify God's glory with God's self-bestowal. Something more incisive needs to be said. Hence, Barth asks the following question: ‘To what extent is His glory this outshining, this self-declaration?’Footnote 27 Barth's answer, whose fourfold form owes its inspiration to Petrus van Mastricht, begins with an affirmation that (1) God's ‘glory consists in the fact that his being is his fullness and self-sufficiency’.Footnote 28 That is, God is glorious with reference to Godself; for in Godself, in God's self-positing, God is all that God demonstrates Godself to be. Similarly (2), God's glory is not a matter of an unbridgeable distance. God ‘changes such distance into proximity’ in seeking and finding those to whom he declares himself.Footnote 29 God's being in God's majesty and splendour, then, is a being which ‘seeks and at once finds those to whom He declares Himself’.Footnote 30 God's glory does not lead one on a flight away from the particulars of contingent human existence but shines in its lowliness and even death. God, then, is not a prisoner of God's distance or otherness. God is uncatchably other in nearness and closeness. In taking such a step Barth is again criticising a false apophaticism which equates God's glory with God's distance. An important passage from Dogmatics in Outline runs:

God changes Himself, God Himself comes most near, God thinks it not robbery to be divine, that is, He does not hold onto the booty like a robber, but God parts with Himself. Such is the glory of the Godhead, that He can be ‘selfless’, that He can actually forgive Himself something. He remains genuinely true to Himself, but just through not having to limit Himself to His Godhead.Footnote 31

God is free in God's Godhead to both reach and find this other and, thus, to ‘part with Himself’. But God's parting with himself is consistent with God's unity with Godself. God is not held hostage by his unity; rather, God eternally enacts God's singular existence in differentiatedness as revealed in the very One who comes near. The solution to the problem, then, requires a very different ontology, an ontology which is appropriate to God's propensity for self-disclosure. In fact, God's glory declares itself in this seeking and finding; and his seeking and finding is his self-declaration, which is the very glory of God's Godhead.

Third, what reaches the human is not an effect. In Jesus one does not encounter a kind of angel or an instantiation of a principle or an ideal anterior to himself, but rather, ‘God himself in person’.Footnote 32 God is not as it were satisfied to keep his glory to himself but rather establishes it ‘in the fact that He does this, that He reaches us in this way, that He himself comes to be known by us’.Footnote 33 And because God establishes it, his glory is effective, for the possibility of the human receiving it is included within the self-demonstration, such that the human is taken up into God's own movement of self-glorification. Another ingredient in the resolution of the problem, then, is a rich account of how God's glory encounters the creature, awakening response in her to obey and witness to God's self-glorification in Christ.

The response to God is the creature's joy. God's declaration effects joy in the creature: God is not satisfied with keeping God's joy to himself but shares it and in so doing capacitates joy in the human, an affective response in conformity to his bestowal. Here, again, one recognises the weakness inherent in classical absolute or metaphysical descriptions of God: describing God as omnipresent and omniscient leaves one with very few resources for the shape of human life appropriate to such a description. In describing God as one who is in essence free from what constitutes finite existence betrays an incipient hostility to the human realm as that which cannot possibly be a theatre for God's glory. Accordingly, God's concern for the creature is characteristic of the overall shape of Barth's doctrine of divine being, and therewith the doctrine of divine perfections. In Joseph Mangina's word, Barth presses ontic claims ‘with an eye to the practical and affective consequences for Christian life’.Footnote 34 The account of divine being that Barth offers includes, therefore, the exaltation of the creature and, more concretely, an account of the creaturely affections appropriate to God's exaltation of the human into God's joy. There is, then, ‘reciprocal agency’ between God and the creature at work within the context of God's covenantal working.Footnote 35 God's reality as self-diffusing joy attests this; for human reality is intended to participate in God's joy and thus God's self-glorification.

Fourth, God's glorification elicits praise: to be human is to let one's tongue be loosed by the radiance of the divine being and to be a person is to be gathered up into the movement of God's own self-glorification.Footnote 36 The doctrine of the divine attributes, as a series of identity descriptions, can be said to be a series of activity descriptions of the creature too. God wills that we participate in God's joy and be drawn up into his self-movement, which is the covenant partner's joy and the basis of her worship, the activity enjoined upon her. In fact, ‘it is their [the creature's] destiny to offer a true if inadequate response in the temporal sphere to the jubilation with which the Godhead is filled from eternity to eternity’.Footnote 37 The jubilation of the Godhead is precisely the shared glorification of the three persons, a glorification which surrounds the creature and in which the creature is invited to participate as the very fulfilment of her destiny. Indeed, the Godhead is present in the judgement and pardon of Jesus Christ, him whose very work is the express concretion of the divine glory and thereby the human's joy and worship.

Conclusions

What work, then, does the doctrine of the divine attributes and the divine glory perform for gospel proclamation and the task of Christian dogmatics? In short, the doctrine provides the Christian and the church with a language for God that is proper to God, which agrees with God and evokes a way of being in correspondence to God. On the basis of revelation God instructs the human person as to how God ought to be spoken of and described; God's self-disclosure evokes a movement of the creature concomitant with itself. The church and therewith the Christian, too, in this respect are rendered passive; but their passivity is active, too, in that they are called to declare, in word and deed, what the God who has come amongst us in Jesus Christ is like, to repeat what they have heard and must hear ever anew in relation to themselves. The church, more specifically, does not proceed with respect to God's glory as if the risen Jesus were not prophetically present amongst us in the Spirit, as if Jesus had signed off and left the task of describing God to human beings and their own cognitive resources. The doctrine, as with all doctrines, is rooted in a hearing, and as the church hears the gospel it formulates a doctrine of the divine attributes as a series of identity descriptions which tell of the ways of God with the world. A great deal of churchly work, and doctrinal work as well, proceeds on the assumption that the One of whom it gives an account is essentially dead with respect to the giving of the account. What Barth proposes is that to identify God and speak of that which is essentially God's requires hearing, witness and ultimately obedience in conformity to God's self-declaration. It is the following of a movement of God in the covenant of grace, a movement which includes knowing his perfections, perfections which catechise one in just what the God whom one follows is like.

The doctrine of the divine attributes provides a significant resource for determining the content of Christian discourse about God. God is neither the hypostatisation of what the human perceives to be worthy of deity, nor is God the superhuman who freely absolves the divine self from all the limits and vicissitudes of creaturely existence. In fact, it is in them that God is clearly bestowed as the one God is. The doctrine, then, reminds preachers and theologians that the doctrine of God is not grounded upon the faculties of the human person; that a genuinely apophatic theology which honours God's uncatchable otherness is rooted in God's nearness; that the doctrine of the attributes and the Trinity are indissolubly bound to one another and discourse on God is irreducibly material in character, too, for the material realm is the theatre of the divine disclosure and the place where the covenant partner seeks to obey and to give witness to what has been spoken and declared concerning herself.

Last, the emphasis upon the clarity or perspicuity of the divine glory does not occlude an account of divine hiddenness, although it does particularise its function. That is, an account of God's hiddenness simply serves to remind one that God is hidden apart from God's own self-bestowal.Footnote 38 To argue, further, that God's glory has hidden itself in Jesus Christ sub contrario supposes, as the ‘early’ Barth does, that the flesh or humanity of the Son conceals God's glory. The latter Barth affirms the opposite: the humanity of Jesus is sanctified in the Spirit such that it bears witness, clearly and without ambiguity, to the Son of God who became flesh and reveals his glory in and through it. Thus, God the Son is not hidden by his own assumption of humanity but declares himself effectively in the man Jesus of Nazareth in the power of the Spirit. Or, to put it in a more Jüngelian form, what hides God from us is God's own light and glory – this is what Jüngel refers to as a ‘precise hiddenness’.Footnote 39 Revelation, then, is not a veiling; rather, creaturely media are elected and sanctified in the economy of grace to definitely declare the glory of the Lord who unites himself with them and to them. God's glory is what hides God from us; yet God's glory, light and clarity is effusive, for glory is the divine self-disclosure. God's glory seeks and finds the creature, welcoming her to share in itself and, in so doing, sets her on the path of witness, obedience and praise.

To conclude: Barth's understanding of the historical shape of the problem, namely, semi-nominalism, with its hesitancy to speak with confidence of God's oneness as inclusive of the many, is resolved by his rigorous depiction of the identity of the one as inclusive of many perfections, a unity which is attested in the covenant. The resolution, in other words, involves pressing home the significance of the declarative character of the glory of the Lord. God in God's immanent essence is self-giving, not only in relationship to the other in Godself but in relation to the creature. This is God's glory: that God confronts the creature with care; that God is present to her in the concretions peculiar to this history. God in the person of the Son is, indeed, united with Jesus of Nazareth; he is the very revelation of God's glory, and thus the starting and end point of the doctrine of the divine attributes as it seeks to provide short-hand identity descriptions of the God whose immanent essence is set forth in his history in fulfilment of the promises made to Israel.

Footnotes

Ibid.
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ibid.

References

1 Webster, John writes: ‘theological talk of the divine attributes is thus not primarily a matter of categorization but of confession; the attributes of God are conceptual glosses on God's name, indicators of God's identity’: Holiness (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003)Google Scholar.

2 ‘The broad concept of the divine essence, namely “that than which nothing greater can be thought”, remains uncontested wherever that essence so defined is asserted to be unthinkable, whether for positive reasons (Fichte) or for negative reasons (Nietzsche). The result is that that beyond than which nothing greater can be thought is itself not capable of being thought’. Jüngel, Eberhard, God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute between Theism and Atheism, trans. Guder, Darrell L. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983), p. 204Google Scholar.

3 C. D. Osthövenor's work is the only available published scholarly treatment of the doctrine. See Die Lehre von Gottes Eigenschaften bei F. Schleiermacher und Karl Barth (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1996).

4 My intention, secondarily, in recounting Barth's reading of the Protestant Orthodox, is to demonstrate the extent to which Barth functions as a historical theologian. In fact, what differentiates Barth from his most sophisticated German Lutheran reader, Eberhard Jüngel, is that Barth does not participate in the habitual repudiation of aspects of the classical Christian doctrine of God endemic among much modern Lutheran theology in Germany. Barth, as a historical theologian, is at once more knowledgeable, more curious and more modest. See e.g. Jüngel's discussion of Aquinas. Jüngel concludes that Aquinas' doctrine of God remains trapped by a rather crude form of apophaticism: ‘God is understood “according to the receiving person (secundom hominem recipientem)”. [That is] Talk about God is defined by man's condition of knowledge. Since language must follow knowledge, and knowledge is defined through the mode of being of the knower, the language which speaks of God always remains behind God to the extent that it is the language of speaking man, the language of the world’. Jüngel, God as Mystery, p. 245 (emphasis added).

5 Richard Muller writes (incorrectly) that Barth's interaction with the seventeeth-century Reformed orthodox suffers ‘however, like most of Barth's dogmatic excurses, from a willingness to use the older materials as a foil for his own argument: for all its detail, it cannot be viewed as an attempt to enter the mind of the traditional doctrine on its own terms . . . His presentations must be studied carefully but also warily’. See Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725, vol. 3, The Divine Essence and Attributes (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003), pp. 24–5.

6 Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics (hereafter CD), trans. Bromiley, G. W. and Torrance, T. F. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957–75), II/1, p. 322Google Scholar.

7 Gunton, Colin, Act and Being: Toward a Theology of the Divine Attributes (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), p. 9Google Scholar.

8 CD II/1, p. 324.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid., p. 324.

11 Polanus, Synt. Theol. chr., quoted in CD II/1, p. 328 (my emphasis).

12 Van Mastricht, Theor. pract. Theol., quoted in CD II/1, p. 329 (my emphasis).

13 CD II/1, p. 333 (my emphasis).

14 Ibid., p. 328.

15 Polanus, Synt. Theol. chr., quoted in CD II/1, p. 334 (my emphasis).

16 CD II/1, pp. 334–5.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid., p. 641.

19 Ibid., p. 642 (my emphasis).

20 Krötke, Wolf, Gottes Klarheiten: Eine Neuinterpretation der Lehre von Gottes ‘Eigenschaften’ (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 2001)Google Scholar.

21 Hunsinger, George, ‘Mysterium Trinitatis’, in Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), p. 194Google Scholar.

22 This is not only Thomasius' mistake but the customary procedure of traditional treatments. See I. Dorner, A., System of Christian Doctrine, vol. 1, trans. Cave, Alfred and Banks, J. S. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1883), pp. 191, 189Google Scholar.

23 See, further, Molnar, Paul, Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity: In Dialogue with Karl Barth and Contemporary Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2002)Google Scholar.

24 CD II/1, p. 644.

25 Ibid., pp. 644, 645.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid., p. 646.

28 Ibid. Barth's positive appropriation of van Mastricht's fourfold schema demonstrates that Barth does not use the Protestant Orthodox simply as a negative foil. Although critical of their ‘semi-nominalism’, van Mastricht offers what Barth's regards as a fulsome account of the gloria Dei.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid.

31 Barth, Karl, Dogmatics in Outline, trans. Thomson, G. T. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959), p. 116Google Scholar.

32 CD II/1, p. 647.

33 Ibid.

34 Mangina, Joseph L., Karl Barth on the Christian Life: The Practical Knowledge of God in Issues in Systematic Theology (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), p. 158Google Scholar.

35 Webster, John, ‘Barth on Original Sin’, in Barth's Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth's Thought (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), p. 67Google Scholar.

36 Joseph Mangina offers a most helpful account of the logic of joy and gratitude ‘as the affective responses that most clearly correspond to Barth's actualism’. Mangina, Christian Life, pp. 132–39.

37 CD II/1, p. 648.

38 See further, ibid., pp. 179–204.

39 Jüngel, Eberhard, ‘Quae supra nos, nihil ad nos: Eine Kurzformer der Lehre vom verborgenen Gott – im Anschluß an Luther interpretiert’. in Entsprechnungen: Gott – Wahrheit – Mensch. Theologische Erörterungen II (Munich: Kaiser Verlag, 1980), esp. pp. 239, 248Google Scholar.