Once, there was no secular

Say what you like about Milbank, that's a killer opening line (and possibly an allusion to John 1, so make of that what you will). Chapter 1 of Theology and Social Theory argues that the idea of a 'secular' political space, where everyone lays aside their religious affiliations to meet on some sort of neutral territory is a recent invention, the sad consequence of bad theology (by which Milbank means either any theology that came after Aquinas and/or Protestant theology. One of the enduring puzzles of Milbank's work, for me, is that he keeps saying how awesome Catholicism is and how much Protestantism sucks BUT HE ISN'T A EVEN A CATHOLIC HE'S A PROTESTANT). Theology made 'the secular' possible by going wrong in three ways: in the way it thought about God, in its reading of the Bible, and in its understanding of time.

Bad God
First, then, theology screwed up by forgetting to think about God in trinitarian terms. If you remember that God is a trinity, you think of God in terms of relationships, mutuality, giving and receiving, of action as essentially love ordered to the good of others. And that translates into a particular way of thinking about people and about property: people are complicated, trying to get a handle on the different aspects of their personhood so that they can direct their whole selves towards God; and people own property, but the whole point of owning property is so that they can use it for the good of others: if you don't look after your stuff in a way that acknowledges it's really meant as a way of helping you and others towards God, you don't have the right to keep owning it any more. But if you start to forget about God as three and only think about God as one, then personhood becomes about being completely self-contained, about having complete control over one's own self and also over one's property. Not only does this mean that there's no ethical obligation on me to direct myself and my possessions towards God and the good of the community I belong to, there's also no way of thinking what it means to think and act as a community: society is just a collection of disconnected individuals, who relate to each other only insofar as they can exercise power over one another, and can only agree to act together if they are forced to by contracts they have signed with one another. What's gone wrong, says Milbank, is that we've lost sight of God as Trinity in favour of God as self-contained One. Instead of the world as a complicated networks of interconnected, mutual relationships of give and take, the secular is a world of isolated points, all fighting with each other for power and control.

Bad Bible
All of this required a new way of reading the Bible. Again, before It All Went Wrong, the Bible was seen in the context of a complicated set of relationships: to read the Bible, you needed to belong in the community of the Church, to draw on the traditions of reading that had been passed down, to assume it was still related to the world in all sorts of ways, and to listen to the monks: a special category of people whose whole lives were dedicated to living in a community which got its authority not from money or power, but from being the place where people spent time reading. What could possibly do away with such a delightful arrangement of things? Hello, Protestantism. Luther's sola scriptura (only the Bible is authoritative, so you don't need to read theology or even talk to other Christians to understand what it's saying) meant that the Bible lost its place in community and became a thing read by individuals on their own. Revelation came to be understood as something which was private; and getting rid of allegorical readings of the Bible meant that all that Old Testament stuff, which had traditionally been read as spiritually significant (God wants us to fight spiritual enemies rather than killing actual people) became straightforwardly political: God is on the side of the nation state – go national sovereignty!

Bad Times
In a trinitarian account of the world, time itself is complexly related to God. God is at work in and through time, for all that sin means that bad things happen. Time is ordered towards God and so towards good. Theology loses this sense of time in two ways: first, when it reverts to the pagan idea that reality is basically a chaos out of which we briefly emerge, struggle, and then return to in death: this is Machiavellianism, which values heroes, Real Men, and war (Victorian Christianity?) Second, theological time goes off the rails when when it descends into a fatalistic or stoical hopelessness about the possibility of really transforming the world: we can't make things better, so we just need to cling on tight and wait for the Rapture/Second Coming etc. God isn't present in time, except in moments of dramatic and slightly random intervention (hello, Calvinism). This, for reasons I don't quite understand, is the 'natural rights legacy of liberalism'. Both are bad, because both envision time as existing pretty much independently of God, and as involving not gradual transformation towards goodness, but power, conflict, and violence.

All of this means that Christianity should not acknowledge the existence of any sort of 'secular' space. Secularism has little or nothing to teach Christianity because it's either a reversion to pre-Christian paganism or a degeneration into Christian heresy.

At this point, there are two things that seem particularly obviously problematic. First is this idea that society has degenerated, that secularisation is terrible from a Christian perspective, that it all went wrong with Aquinas. You don't need to believe in uncomplicated historical progress or a cheerleader for capitalism to see lots of reasons to be glad about modernity, the Enlightenment, etc., especially as compared to what went before. And second, surely (surely!) if Milbank's right, and God interpenetrates the whole of human history, and the kingdom of God is growing, then how does it make sense to adopt a narrative of progressive degeneration from Aquinas onwards? Shouldn't things be getting, well, better? Shouldn't God be at work even (the horror!) in Protestantism?

Heresies: Modalism

The doctrine of the Trinity is a tricky one - God is three and one, wait, what? How does that work? As a result, it's one of the doctrines with the greatest potential for heresy. One of the heretical ways of speaking about the Trinity is modalism, which is basically the idea that God is one God but has three different ways of being God. Meredith Brooks' song 'Bitch' is a good example of modalism:

"I'm a little bit of everything all rolled into one

I'm a bitch, I'm a lover I'm a child, I'm a mother
I'm a sinner, I'm a saint I do not feel ashamed
I'm your health, I'm your dream I'm nothing in between
You know you wouldn't want it any other way"

This is, I think, a modalistic account of selfhood: I can be lots of different things, apparently all at the same time. One minute I'm nice, the next I'm nasty, and all of those different ways of being are equally part of who I am.' She's talking about herself, so it's not exactly heretical, but this is actually precisely the problem with the doctrine of the Trinity: the only resources we have for understanding it come from our own experience, and there isn't anything in our own experience which quite fits with the idea of a being who is entirely one and entirely three.

Some modalists have related the trinity to the process of human history: in the Old Testament, God related to us as Father; in the New Testament, he related to us as Jesus; in the era of the Church, he relates to us as Holy Spirit. It's the Clark Kent model of theology: God takes off his glasses and puts his underpants over his trousers and ta-da! He's no longer the Father but the Son!

Not only do most forms of modalism violate the principle of opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt, but it leaves you with a God who's basically one being with different moods. Too much oneness, not enough threeness = trinitarianism fail.

Sarah Coakley on Gender and Systematic Theology

In a recent article called ‘Is there a Future for Gender and Theology?: On Gender, Contemplation and the Systematic Task’, Sarah Coakley explores some issues around gender theory and systematic theology. She says that people are often suspicious of systematic theology, for three reasons:

1. Some people argue that systematic theology is often idolatrous, in that it acts as though it’s possible for human beings to comprehensively understand and explain God, even though in reality we can’t ever fully comprehend the divine nature.
2. Some people worry that because systematic theology is usually written by white, Western, middle class, straight men, it ignores the concerns of marginalised people, but because it claims to be systematic, it won’t acknowledge that it’s limited in this way, and so just pretends that those people don’t exist.
3. Some feminists have argued that any systematic thinking is – wait for it – phallocentric (hur hur, phallus), by which they mean that it’s a male way of thinking that’s all about control and mastery.

Coakley says that all of these objections have a point, but if you do systematic theology right, it avoids these pitfalls. She says that the really important thing about systematic theology is that it should be rooted in contemplative prayer, which she sees as being all about practising mental attitudes of un-mastery, welcoming the unconscious, making ourselves attentive to others, and making ourselves aware of the messy ways our desire for God is tied up with our sexual desires.

Contemplation allows us to do systematic theology properly. It brings in apophatic awareness, which isn’t just about acknowledging the limitations of our understanding, but about encountering God, and knowing him in the middle of the realisation that we don’t know him at all. It teaches us to pay attention to those who are marginalised and excluded, and because systematic theology is really all about exploring all the different ways that theological truths can be expressed, and trying to answer all the questions we encounter, doing it well should mean that we constantly challenge and change our assumptions, and constantly discover theological truths in unexpected places. She points out that it’s difficult to substantiate any claims about intrinsically ‘male’ and ‘female’ ways of thinking, but argues that systematic theology rooted in contemplation should be open to different ways of expressing theology, whether it’s in contemplation, intellectual discussion, or the arts.

Coakley argues that all three objections to systematic theology are about mastery: they all worry that doing systematic theology is about desiring mastery, either as complete understanding of God, social power, or as the domination of women by men. She says that these concerns about mastery are about the relationship of knowledge, power, and gender, but also, most importantly, about desire.

Coakley says that these questions can’t be answered without thinking about gender, because gender is about what it means to relate to God and to one another as individual, embodied people. She also says that this question about gender, about human twoness, relates to questions about God, about the divine three-in-oneness.

Coakley argues that prayer is where we most powerfully encounter God in his trinitarian nature, because in prayer, the Holy Spirit prays in me, responding to the call of God the Father and drawing me into the life of Christ. She argues that in Christ, we encounter the One who interrupted the brokenness of fallen gender, fallen twoness, by bridging the twoness of God and the world. Just as the world is transfigured by the activity of God in incarnation and redemption, so the twoness of gender is caught up and transformed in the threeness of God.

Opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt

That’s Latin, folks. It means ‘the works of the Trinity on the outside are indivisible’, and is one of the theological rules for talking about the Trinity. Cool, huh?

Let’s elaborate a bit more. We know that God is one and three, that he is God, and that he is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But what’s the difference between the three persons (or ‘modes of being’ for the Barthians down in the ditch there – watch out or the donkey of theology will spit on you)? Contrary to popular belief, traditional Christian theology would argue that you cannot distinguish the persons of the Trinity by the way that they act in the world – it is not true to say that the Father creates, the Son redeems and the Holy Spirit sanctifies. The only way you can distinguish between the three persons is by their relationship to each other. So, what does it mean for the Father to be the Father, the Son to be the Son, the Spirit to be the Spirit? Basically, this: that the Father is the source of the Son and the Spirit. The Son is begotten of the Father. The Spirit proceeds from the Father (and the Son, if you’re a Western rather than an Eastern Christian, but that’s a whole ’nother source of theology wars so we’ll leave it for today). They’re distinguished by their different origins, and by those alone.

That means that anything God does in the world, all three persons do. In the Orthodox church, this tends to be formulated so that the Father acts through the Son in the Holy Spirit. They say this a lot, so tend to be better than Western Protestants at remembering that Christianity is Trinitarian. You can also use a sneaky trick called attribution, where you attribute certain characteristics to one person of the Trinity more than the others, which isn’t true as such, but can be helpful – so we talk about the incarnation of Jesus, the gifts of the Holy Spirit and the Father’s love. It’s not that the gifts are actually any more to do with with Holy Spirit, but it can be a helpful way of getting some sort of slippery grip on the whole complicated trinitarian puzzle. Maybe.

You with me? Don’t worry if your head’s spinning – you wouldn’t be the first to be befuddled by it all. But take heart! Next time someone talks about the gifts of the Spirit or whatever, you can look wise and say (as I did today – sorry Lucie!), “Ah, but opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt”, and feel clever, which is really what theology’s all about.

Barth on the Trinity - Part Two

The Root of the Doctrine of the Trinity
Barth says that revelation is God speaking, which can't be distinguished from God's act of speaking, and so can't be distinguished from Godself. God's Word is God; the revelation of God is God. Scripture and proclamation are based on God's Word, and can become God's word, but they aren't in and of themselves revelation. All of this is summed up by the phrase 'God reveals himself as Lord': because God is Lord in relation to people, when people receive revelation, God becomes their Lord.

The revelation found in the Bible is the self unveiling, imparted to humankind, of the God who by nature can't be unveiled to human kind. God can be seen only when he chooses to reveal himself - we can't find him ourselves. The Bible isn't so much about universal truths as it is a record of specific encounters of particular individuals. The revelations recorded in the Bible are unique and contingent. You can see here that Barth's trying to protect God from any idea that he might be easily graspable. He wants God to be totally other, not someone who's around all the time and who we can too easily get our grubby little mitts on. He's reacting against theology which arguably makes God too accessible, too immanent without much of a sense of God's otherness and transcendence, but it seems to me that Barth just ends up back in the ditch on the other side of the path, probably with a sore bum by now.

Vestigium Trinitatis
Theologians like to use images from the created world, history and culture to talk about the trinity (e.g. the shamrock; a spring-stream-lake; the Old Testament, New Testament and Church; teachers, soldiers and producers in a society). Augustine refers to these as 'vestigium trinitatis' - traces of the Trinity. Barth doesn't like this because he worries that this means we can derive the doctrine of the Trinity from the world rather than revelation, neatly ignoring the fact that, firstly, this isn't really how the idea is usually used, and secondly, that he himself compares God as revealer, revelation and revealedness to the subject, predicate, and object of a sentence. D'oh! Anyway, it's important to him that we don't explain God by the world, but explain the world by God. The Trinity isn't imminent in created things, and created things can't reflect the trinity, but the trinity can reflect itself in created things (a subtle difference, I grant you). To say that creation illustrates revelation is to suggest that revelation is insufficient.

The Triunity of God
The God who reveals himself in Scripture is one in three distinctive modes of being: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The three persons aren't three Gods. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit means that God is one God in threefold repetition. God's 'personality' belongs to his one unique essence. There aren't three divine 'I's but three times the one divine I. Barth argues that without the doctrine of the Trinity, the concept of revelation ends up sticking a third thing between humankind and God to mediate between them, which isn't ok. The idea of number in God is a metaphor. Barth thinks that talking about 'modes' or 'ways of being' in God is better than talking about 'persons.' He has a point, as we tend to think of persons as implying completely separate physical and psychological entities, which wasn't quite what the original formulators of the doctrine of the Trinity meant. Tritheism is bad. But so, on the other hand is modalism, the heresy which says that God is one but acts in three different ways or modes, ignoring the necessary threeness. It might just be partly the problems of translating from the German, but I can't help wondering if Barth is, once again, in the ditch (Having fun down there, Karl?).

Karl Barth on the Trinity: Part One

Don't worry, we'll be back to Paul - I just got bored of him for now. I also won't be posting multiple part things forever. It's just a phase I'm going through and I'm sure I'll get bored of that too sooner or later.

One of the things Barth is reacting against is a tendency in theology at the time to suggest that basically we create God rather than vice versa, that God is in the image of man rather than man being in the image of God (variants of this idea were put forward by people trying to defend Christianity as well as people trying to attack it). Someone once described theology as being a bit like riding a donkey: you lean too far one way and you fall off, but then if get back on and lean too far the other way, you also fall off. This is a bit what Barth does: think of him as the guy in the ditch, wondering what the hell happened when all he did was try not to fall off like Schleiermacher did. He doesn't want God to be something we make, and so he reacts by making God so completely different to us that there's no way we can even imagine him unless he reveals himself first.

For similar reasons, he's also bothered by the traditional use of language for talking about the Trinity. The classic formulation is that God is three persons in one nature, but Barth worries that this makes him sound too much like three guys who are all God. This is fair: one of the classic Christian heresies is tritheism, where you overvalue God's threeness and underplay the oneness. Barth doesn't want to do the other heresy which is saying that God's one and then losing all sense of threeness, but it's arguable that that's what he does, and finds himself back in the ditch. So, what does he actually say?

The Place of the Doctrine of the Trinity in Dogmatics
Barth says that God, the Trinity, is 'Revealer, Revelation and Revealedness.' God is the one who reveals Godself, the actual revelation, and the effect of this self-revelation on the people to whom God reveals Godself. Barth says that for this reason, the doctrine of the Trinity is the starting point of all Christian theology because it answers the question, 'Who is God?' 'Who is God?' comes before questions about how we know God, whether God exists and what God is, because the question of who God is gives us the content to the word 'God' without which the other questions don't make sense.