When Karl Barth is mentioned the first thing to come to mind would not be his similarity to Roman Catholicism and particularly his resemblance to the putative natural theologian par excellence, St Thomas Aquinas. Calling the analogia entis the invention of the Antichrist must go down in the history of theological rhetoric as a gauntlet dropped to divide intentionally and deeply evangelical theology from Catholic theology – not to mention Barth's scathing critique of Aquinas who is often credited with ‘inventing’ the analogia entis.Footnote ¹ Hans Urs von Balthasar picked up the gauntlet and engaged Barth in his important work, The Theology of Karl Barth. This work, though not without critique, is an important move towards dialogue between Catholics and Protestants sympathetic with Barth.Footnote ² However, years after Barth and von Balthasar, recent theological work has come a long way in clarifying Barth's relationship to Catholicism.

Eugene Rogers's work is probably the best available in English today.Footnote ³ Rogers's work is first a study of Aquinas and second a comparison to Barth. Rogers argues that Thomas's treatment of nature does not fall under Barth's trenchant critique. Barth, according to Rogers, was critiquing the natural sciences of his day and their immanentist presumptions. The contemporary sciences are as removed from Aquinas historically as they are theologically. Contemporary natural science is quick to acknowledge its methodological atheism, while scientia for Thomas must come under sacra doctrina. Scientia is a part of sacra doctrina, because nature is already graced for Thomas; there is no such thing as a ‘pure nature’ in his theology.Footnote ⁴ Furthermore, Thomas and Barth share a concern for faithfulness to scripture which often goes unnoticed. Rogers persuasively argues that question one of prima pars is a theological – more specifically christological – rendering of Paul which comes from Aquinas's commentary on Romans.Footnote ⁵ As it turns out, on Rogers's account both Barth and St Thomas are astute readers of the apostle.Footnote ⁶

I mention and all too tersely summarise Rogers's wonderful book in order to state that I take it as a working hypothesis. My work here will, I hope, be a further elucidation of what Rogers has achieved. I will attempt to show that Barth's analogia fidei and Thomas's analogia entis are not antithetical. In fact, they are analogous in at least two ways which I will call their analogia Christi. The first similarity is that both root analogy in christology, while the second is a shared understanding that analogy is not a reified doctrine or metaphysical mechanism but a theological practice. I perform this argument by briefly summarising each theologian's understanding of analogy and focusing on a particular part of their work. For Aquinas, I analyse his brief treatment of analogical language using David Burrell, and then I discuss Thomas's christology. For Barth, I focus on Barth's latest christological work in the Doctrine of Reconciliation and his ethics in ‘The Christian Life’, an unfinished section of volume 4 of the Church Dogmatics.

St Thomas Aquinas and the analogia entis

Thomas Aquinas is often understood as the inventor of the analogia entis which Barth eventually repudiates. However, I want to challenge this interpretation of Aquinas. When discussing how the name ‘God’ is applied to the God Christians worship, Thomas describes his understanding of ‘analogy’.Footnote ⁷ Aquinas uses ‘being’ as one example, along with health, of how analogical speech functions. For the sake of clarity, I will quote Aquinas at length.

Thomas's concern is the application or use of language regarding God.Footnote ⁹ He is not attempting to offer a theory or explicate a metaphysical doctrine if this means turning analogy into a ‘thing’.Footnote ¹⁰ Using the work of Gilson, who distinguishes Scotus's version of analogy from Thomas's (Scotus's position is often referred to as the univocity of being), David Burrell notes that ‘Aquinas offers no theory of analogy. He does not provide a method whereby one can be sure to speak responsibly of God. He offers strategies . . . [and] issues invitations to a quality of self awareness achieved only in the practice of it.’Footnote ¹¹ Burrell and Gilson are noting that reading this passage with Thomas's previous discussion about the inability of the human powers of sense and intellect to see or know God's essence requires that Aquinas hold a form of analogy that is not proportional.Footnote ¹²

A proportional understanding of analogy affirms that all analogues, despite their particularity, contain a basic structure or core that are similar to or the same as all others. Take 2:4::3:6 as an example. Here, all the analogues are different but are reducible to a shared relationship of 1:2. Also, this analogy is constituted as an analogy by the shared structure of a base ten system. Thus, in two ways this analogy of similarity in difference is reducible to a common core or genus.Footnote ¹³ The problem with affirming that Aquinas is advocating a proportional analogy is Aquinas's repeated refusal to place God under any genus. God, for Aquinas, is pure act and simple, unlike all created things which are composite and possess potentiality.Footnote ¹⁴ Therefore, unless Aquinas has contradicted himself in the short span of several articulos, Aquinas does not have a proportional analogy at work when speaking of God.

In good Thomist fashion I have said what Thomas is not doing, but I have yet to describe positively what he means by analogy, because Thomas certainly makes affirmative statements regarding God that are not univocal or equivocal. Following Burrell and Gilson, I take Thomas to understand analogy as a form of judgement or appraisal. In other words, if Socrates and God share nothing substantial in common (i.e. no proportional analogy is at work) humans are still able to apply the word ‘just’ or ‘good’ to describe them. However, a competent judge is needed to know the appropriateness of each description. The move from proportionality to judgement is important, but brings both good and bad news. The bad news is that judgement does not readily resolve the issue, since humans must be trained to be adequate judges when it comes to speaking about God. The good news is that Aquinas does offer a training regimen to help form us into good theological speakers.

The training regimen is following the only true magister, Jesus Christ. Discussing Thomas's commentary on the Gospel of John, Michael Sherwin observes that ‘Christ alone is the true teacher because in his divinity he is the first cause of all our learning, teaching us interiorly as the cause of our inner principles of learning.’Footnote ¹⁵ In order for Christians to become adequate judges and users of theological language we must follow the divine Jesus Christ. Christ's divinity is an indispensable part of Jesus’ teaching because that is what gives him the authority to be the true teacher. Moreover, the ability to see that Christ is divine is a marker in one's journey of faith. Those who do not recognise Jesus as divine like Nicodemus, Mary Magdalene, and even the disciples in John 14, possess an imperfect faith. However, Thomas notes that Jesus does not fault these people for their inability to recognise his unity with the Father, because it is difficult to grasp.Footnote ¹⁶ In spite of this difficulty, Thomas explains that these disciples have an honest desire to learn and be involved in ongoing dialogue with the master, even when the dialogue becomes confrontational; most importantly the confrontation comes from the disciples’ sincere and loving desire to learn.Footnote ¹⁷

St Thomas himself is a great example of this loving desire to learn and teach others about the divinity of Jesus Christ. In fact, the entire Summa can be understood as guidance for fellow disciples in growing in faith fitting perfectly with Thomas's membership of the Dominican Order.Footnote ¹⁸ As Robert Barron notes, ‘As a magister of theology, his [Thomas's] purpose is never simply to satisfy the curiosity of the mind; rather, it is to change the lives of his readers, to transform their hearts, in a word, to move them to salvation.’Footnote ¹⁹ Thus, Thomas intended his work, which is an extension of his own vital and Dominican spiritual life, to form his own readers’ theological practice and speech. When speaking of Christ, Aquinas is engaged in a twofold activity. First, Aquinas always remembers God's transcendence, and second he simultaneously recognises that God became human in Jesus Christ to instruct us unto salvation. Hence, humans must say something about God, since God speaks to us in Jesus, but we must always recall our finitude and that our mode of signification is inadequate to express the mysteries of God, including the incarnation.Footnote ²⁰

The first aspect of Thomas's christology relates internally to his understanding of the Triune God and analogous language. God's essence cannot be seen by the created intellect apart from God's grace given in faith.Footnote ²¹ For Thomas, ‘Faith is a kind of knowledge inasmuch as the intellect is determined by faith to some knowable object. But this determination to the object does not proceed from the vision of the believer, but from the vision of him who is believed.’Footnote ²² In other words, for one to be able to see the divine essence God must give this person God's own vision. Thus, God is knowable in himself and to us insofar as we participate in God's knowledge of himself. Within God's knowledge of himself as the Second Person of the Trinity, the Word, God knows humanity as creatures as well. The name ‘Word implies relation to creatures. For God by knowing Himself knows every creature.’Footnote ²³ It is important to note that ‘Word’ is being used analogically here by Thomas, since God's Word is definitely not the same as human words. Hence, Gilles Emery observes that Thomas's discussion ‘of the Word is not limited to manifesting the property of the Son in the divine eternity, but it equally clarifies the action of the Son in the world (creation and salvation)’.Footnote ²⁴ Emery further observes that for Aquinas one ascertains God not by his relations to the world but ‘in the contemplation of the transcendent being of God the Trinity that one discovers the source of the divine economy: creation, man [sic], grace, the mysteries of the incarnation, eschatology’.Footnote ²⁵ Therefore, though the economy of salvation is always in Thomas's purview, since humans are the ones speaking and speculating about God, it is God in se analogically understood that guides Thomas's christology. Thomas Weinandy provides a good summary on Aquinas's incarnational affirmation that ‘God is man’. ‘While we can say to some extent what the incarnational “is” is and is not, it remains a unique and ineffable mystery. The best we can do is state in faith that the Son of God is united to his humanity “in such a way” that he actually did come to exist as man even though we do not fully grasp what “in such a way” means.’Footnote ²⁶

However, to allow the account to end here ignores Thomas's lengthy treatment of the mysteries of Christ's life, which instruct us unto eternal life. As Thomas says, ‘Forasmuch as our Saviour the Lord Jesus Christ in order to save his people from their sins . . . showed us in his own person the way of truth, whereby we may attain to the bliss of eternal life by rising again’.Footnote ²⁷ And later, ‘Christ's action is our instruction’.Footnote ²⁸ For the sake of brevity, I will focus discussion on Christ's own instruction as a model for Christian education and preaching. Aquinas poses the question whether Christ's preaching should have been without offence. He answers that ‘the salvation of the multitude is to be preferred to the peace of any individuals whatsoever’.Footnote ²⁹ Hence, when perverse individuals hinder the gospel it is acceptable to offend them in order that the truth may be heard by many. Jesus’ preaching to the crowds often offended the Scribes and Pharisees, because they failed to understand Christ's true teaching while their own teachings lead the crowds into perversity. According to Thomas, ‘if scandal arises from truth, the scandal should be born rather than the truth set aside’.Footnote ³⁰ Moreover, by reproaching the Scribes and Pharisees, Jesus furthered his own ministry, because he revealed their vices, making Christ's teaching even more persuasive.Footnote ³¹ The lesson Christian educators and pastors learn from Christ's example is easily distilled: Christians should not set aside the truth to avoid offence. In fact, when done properly, i.e. as Christ does it, admonition can advance the gospel of Christ by opening sinners’ own eyes and by revealing the vices of those who oppose Christ and his teaching.

In summary, Thomas has two relevant features of analogy at work. First, analogy is a performative, linguistic judgement which is exercised by those who learn from the great magister, Jesus Christ. This, in fact, is what Thomas is cultivating in himself and attempting to cultivate in his readers throughout his life as a Dominican. The second feature is more complex. Analogy does not merely have to do with how humans use words; it has to do with humans participating in God's own self knowledge, which is the Second Person of the Trinity, the Word. Said differently, human ability to speak about God, even analogically, comes from God's prior knowledge of creatures whom he knows in the eternal Word, and our ability to speak correctly about God is a participation in God's own knowledge of us. Thus, humans can have true knowledge and speak truthfully as creatures because of God's knowledge of himself and us in the Word.

Karl Barth's analogia fidei

Barth nowhere actually explains his particular understanding of the analogia fidei. However, Stanley Hauerwas correctly notes that, though Barth seldom mentions the analogia fidei, Barth is always practising it.Footnote ³² This is because Barth understands that a theory of analogy will always fail to capture the many ways humans must speak about God; ‘If Barth had a theory of analogy, then that theory is nothing other than the full sweep of the Church Dogmatics itself.’Footnote ³³ Unfortunately, this makes my task difficult, since Barth's writing is so voluminous. In order to focus my study I will look at how Barth relates ethics and christology, with special attention to his doctrine of reconciliation.

The first book of volume 4, The Doctrine of Reconciliation, is Barth's attempt to address the divinity of Christ. For Barth, ‘The way of the Son of God into the far country is the way of obedience.’Footnote ³⁴ And,

Hence, in God's revelation in Jesus there is a divine analogy, or in George Hunsinger's terms, ‘God's self-analogization’.Footnote ³⁶ High and low, little and great, abroad and at home, and far and near take on new meanings in the person of Jesus Christ. No longer are these to be understood as polar or dialectical opposites, as ‘natural reason’ would have it, but as the actuality of God in Jesus Christ. Jesus now comes to define what these words mean, and what Christ communicates to us is the divine nature of God – God himself.

Bruce McCormack observes that the revelation of God in Jesus is not primarily an epistemic concern for Barth but an ontological one.Footnote ³⁷ For Barth, Jesus Christ and his work cannot be accidental to the being and activity of God. If it were, then this puts Jesus Christ's full divinity in question. There is no ‘rift or gulf in God himself, between his being and essence in himself and his activity and work as the Reconciler of the world created by him . . . [God] does not give up being God in becoming a creature, in becoming man. He does not cease to be God.’Footnote ³⁸ Since Christ communicates to humanity the divine nature, God reveals that he is to be known as reconciler: the one who goes into the far country, humbling himself, in order to elevate humanity to our proper place which is union with God. In Barth's own words, ‘to be man [sic] is to be with God’.Footnote ³⁹

Carrying forth his ontological concern of the relationship between God and humanity in Jesus Christ, Barth opens his theological anthropology in the doctrine of creation, which he calls ‘Real Man’ by stating, ‘The ontological determination of humanity is grounded in the fact that the one man among all others is the man Jesus. So long as we select any other starting point for our study, we shall reach only the phenomena of the human.’Footnote ⁴⁰ Unsurprisingly, christology impinges upon anthropology, or better, there can be no anthropology without christology. This is why Barth can affirm in his doctrine of reconciliation that no human person can be ‘ontologically godless’Footnote ⁴¹ and that humanity is God's partner in Jesus Christ.Footnote ⁴² Barth's working out of humanity's divine ontological grounding can be seen in his doctrine of election where all humanity is elected in the man Jesus Christ, whereby humanity is reconciled to God. Barth, always beginning in media res, discusses God's revelation to humanity in the person of Jesus, while he concomitantly affirms, albeit within the important distinction between time and eternity, that humanity has never been alone and will never be so. In turn, humanity only makes sense with reference to God, specifically Jesus Christ. In sum, Barth's christology ‘proper’, if it can be called that, leads into his theological anthropology, which folds back into christology once again. This ‘circularity’ or ‘folding back’ of Barth's analogia fidei is not composed of discrete instances of correspondence, but a dialogue between Father, Son and Spirit in eternity and between humanity and the Triune God in time; both of these dialogues are rooted in the person of Jesus Christ. The question remains, however: how does this ontological and christological grounding of the analogia fidei impinge on Barth's ethics?Footnote ⁴³

Barth names sanctification as ‘nothing other than the basic presupposition of all Christian ethics. Sanctification is the claiming of all human life and being and activity by the will of God for the active fulfillment of that will.’Footnote ⁴⁴ And later, ‘sanctification might just as well be described by the less common biblical term regeneration or renewal, or by that of conversion, or by that of penitence . . . or comprehensively by that of discipleship’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Lest Barth be misunderstood, he does not think that in Christ we are fully sanctified apart from our own agency. In his own words, ‘Saints! We are not yet this by a long way.’Footnote ⁴⁶ Barth gives shape to this process of discipleship and renewal in his discussion of the Lord's Prayer.Footnote ⁴⁷ The beginning address to ‘Father’ in the vocative is important for Barth. Christians pray ‘Father!’ because they are called to do so; we speak to God not about him.Footnote ⁴⁸ Praying ‘Father’ means Christians address ‘the source . . . of all other reality. It means, therefore, being with it. It means its coinherence with itself on the basis of its common origin in him.’Footnote ⁴⁹ Where does this knowledge of God as Father that Christians enact come from? As one might expect, this knowledge comes from Jesus Christ. Christians learn to pray to God as Father because ‘Jesus Christ enables, invites, and summons them [Christians] to invoke him as such’.Footnote ⁵⁰ The practice of baptism that Christ founded in his own baptism is the binding practice by which the community and the believer are taken up into Christ's own prayer to the Father.Footnote ⁵¹ Hence, Christians are sanctified in prayer through participation in the prayer of the Son to the Father. In relation to prayer and the analogia fidei, Joseph Mangina notes that Barth ‘highlights the character of prayer as a human action in which the analogia fidei is realised. Prayer is faith at work.’Footnote ⁵² Barth's analogia fidei in relation to Christian life requires a christological and trinitarian framework whereby Christians participate through an act of faith, and for Barth the founding act of faith in the Christian life is baptism.

In the end, what Barth has accomplished is an analogy rooted in Jesus Christ. This analogy has two theological components. First, it is grounded in the person and work of Jesus. Christians are able to speak to God as Father because of the revelation encountered in Christ – the true human. Only in this revelation and in the Son's redemptive work (which includes both justification and sanctification) can humans learn to pray and live rightly within the very prayer life of God. Thus, Barth's analogia fidei is primarily a theological claim about God's own work in Jesus Christ which enables humans to speak to God by bringing humans, via baptism and prayer, into participation in the prayer uttered to the Father by Jesus Christ.Footnote ⁵³ Without this prior work of God, humans are not able to speak about the true God, let alone to him.

Second and simultaneously, Barth's analogia fidei is a human act of speech insofar as it is an act of faithful speech. To be sure, humans may never be certain that God will make our speech his own, but that does not mean we should be silent. After all, the Church Dogmatics is fourteen volumes long, and Hauerwas rightly notes that the Dogmatics is ‘Barth's attempt to display the language of faith in such a way that the form of theology does not belie the subject of theology’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Thus, the Dogmatics is an exercise that Barth undertakes in order to speak faithfully about the God of Jesus Christ. However, the Dogmatics are not just about Barth's own training; ‘Barth understood the Church Dogmatics to be a training manual for Christians, a manual that would instruct us that the habits of our speech must be disciplined by the God found in Jesus Christ.’Footnote ⁵⁵ Moreover, ‘Barth was trying to help his readers acquire the skills necessary to see that all that is, is so by God's grace. Our knowledge of God is, thus, but a correlative to our willingness to obediently accept our lives as gifts.’Footnote ⁵⁶ Thus, the analogia fidei is a practice performed by Barth for the training of the church, in order that the church might become more faithful speakers not only about God but to God.

Conclusion: Barth and Thomas's analogia Christi

Thus far I have not tried to boil down, ‘round on’ or reduce Thomas's and Barth's unique understandings of analogy; they were after all centuries apart and were responding to different circumstances. Moreover, attempting such a reduction would utilise a proportional analogy on their own theological speech that they intended to be about God. Hence, my summary section here is only an attempt to bring into sharper relief the similarities between Barth and Thomas to which I have already alluded. My own analogical analysis I call the ‘analogia Christi’. This analogia has two salient aspects.

First, both are in agreement that christology is necessary for faithful Christian speech. For Thomas, within the immanent Trinity, the Word who becomes flesh is God's own knowledge in which God knows his creatures prior to creation. Jesus Christ, the true magister, reveals the Father and his knowledge to humanity instructing us unto salvation. Thus, both within eternity and time, the Word knows humanity, and as we imitate and come to know him through faith we come to a fuller knowledge of ourselves. Humans speak of God and ourselves through this knowledge found in faith, and our speech is truthful insofar as it participates in God's knowledge of himself and us. Analogously, Barth contends that humans can only know God and ourselves when we acknowledge our Creator in Jesus Christ. This acknowledgement takes place in the act of faith. Furthering this parallel with Aquinas, Barth's doctrine of election affirms that humanity was present in the divine life ‘before’ creation insofar as God eternally elected to be pro nobis in Jesus Christ. Thus, knowledge of God and humanity comes from an encounter within God that precedes humanity's creation. Humans can know and speak because we were first known and spoken.Footnote ⁵⁷ Within created time, Christ reveals the Father to humanity, inviting us into their own communal life of prayer.

Second, both Thomas and Barth see analogy as something performative as opposed to a ‘theory’ or abstract doctrine. Barth's Dogmatics is a form of training in Christian speech, while Thomas's Summa is likewise a lengthy exercise in theological formation for readers. Furthermore, both of these performances look to Christ as the one who teaches us, models to us and enables us to speak truthfully about the Triune God. To be sure, Barth's and Thomas's practices of analogy are not the same, which is to say they are not saying or advocating the same things. However, as I have tried to show, their differences do not have to divide. In fact, the differences can elucidate each other insofar as both found it necessary to train themselves and other Christians in truthful speech. My hope is that this brief article, building on Eugene Rogers, will precipitate more truthful theological speech between Catholics and Protestants. After all, I doubt that Thomas or Barth thought they had the last words to say about God, even though they found it necessary to say so much about such a great God.Footnote ⁵⁸