THE DOCTRINE OF GOD (CONTINUED) 

THE ENCOUNTER WITH OTHER RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS 

What are the possible new issues confronting Christian theology at the present time?  We can say that there are various issues, and yet, in examining them, we will discover that many of them are not so new. Many of them are really a regurgitation and resurrection of issues that have been  brought up in the past.  We may think that they have been "laid to rest," just to find out that they were simply buried and "put on hold" until another time.  

One of the most, if not the most important one is the encounter with other religious traditions.  Some may say that it is not a valid theological pursuit to engage with other religions, because from our Christian theological standpoint, these other traditions are either totally false or "partially true."  As Christians we may be so arrogant as to think that we have the truth of God "sewn up in our pockets."  That would amount to, in my humble opinion as both a believer and as a theologian, to presumptuousness and also to Christian theological imperialism. 

In our present situation, religious faiths, like political and economic systems, encounter one another regularly and intimately.  Since this encounter of the religions, in the last several decades, has become an omnipresent reality, the relation of Christian theology to other, non-Christian modes of "theology" has emerged as a burning issue.  Not only have Christianity and Christians "encountered" other religions, they have also encountered this religions as bearing power and and as embodying vital, healing, redemptive forces providing unique illumination  and grace to our ailing cultural life and our somewhat impoverished existence.  No longer, therefore, is it possible for Christians to declare other faiths either devoid of truth (as did orthodoxy) or primitive or less developed steppingstones to the absoluteness of Christianity (as did the early liberals). The suggestion that within other religions the promise of salvation is present and also the truth is experienced is now admitted and affirmed by many.  But if that be so, what does it mean for the uniqueness of Christian revelation, for the finality of Christ's incarnation, and atonement, for the salvation of non-Christians-and a thousand other important theological questions (Gilkey, p. 111)?

I know that many Christians will fall back on the passages of Jesus saying that He is "the way, the truth, and the life," and Paul saying that there is only "one mediator between God and humankind," and Peter saying that "there is no other name given under Heaven whereby we must be saved."  Having said that, we can easily pose the question as to just exactly what do those passages mean? Does that mean that the millions of people who lived and died before the Christian era have no hope because they never heard the name of Jesus the Christ.  Did God condemn them to eternal damnation for lack of knowledge?  Or can we say that there are universal elements in those passages which we have not cared to explore, taking the easy and dismissive way out?  Is Jesus the "Cosmic" Christ who transcends all religious doctrine, dogma, and theology, or is He restricted to the Christian faith? Does a person have to shed their prior faith and religious tradition in order to have a relationship with God through Christ?  

Understandably, most of the new debate on these matters has centered on the crucial questions of special revelation and Christology. And many have assumed that that, were these christological doctrines to be liberalized or toned down, the issues vis-a-vis other religions would dissipate. Important divergences (say, with Hinduism and Buddhism) appear in connection with every significant theological or philosophical question, from the that of the nature of reality and our knowledge of it, through the nature of human being and its "problem," to the understanding of history and final salvation (Ibid., p. 112)

In conclusion, it is safe to say that the encounter of religions with one another and their subsequent dialogues with one another will effect radical changes in the discussion of God carried out by every present form of Christian theology.  To predict what new directions these changes will represent is really only to state what our preferences are, where we think the understanding of God "ought to go," granted this encounter.  As for the direction it will in fact go, we have no insight except to suggest that, even more than an encounter between Catholicism and Protestantism, a close encounter with the other religions will effect noteworthy changes in every recognizable form of contemporary discussion about God (Ibid.).

We might choose to remained entrenched in our theological cages, believing that there is no "truth" outside of them, or we might open our cage to engage with people in other cages, who together with us are in search of truth.  We might "close down" on dialogue with non-Christians, or we may opt to engage in a "give and take" dialogical exchange.

This theologian/writer opts for the latter, believing that no religious tradition has a monopoly on God, and that God-in-Christ, comes to us in ways that God alone determines, regardless of how obstinate, reticent, and stubborn we may be.  Let God be God.

In the Name of the Creator, and of the Liberator, and of the Sustainer. Amen.

Dr. Juan A. Carmona

Past Visiting Professor of Theology 

Tainan Theological College/Seminary  

 THE DOCTRINE OF GOD (CONTINUED)

In spite of the difficulties relative to defining the doctrine and idea of God, the quest continues to obtain  an understanding  of what and who God is.  Because we cannot understand God in God's full essence and nature,  is no reason to give up on trying to articulate an idea of God that makes it possible for us to acknowledge and affirm the existence of God, in spite of the reality that we are "living with the questions."

All the answers that can be offered to the myriad of questions concerning the nature of God, each answer has its power and persuasive adherents.  Those who emphasize the knowability of God by reason have offered one version or another of the classical "proofs" of God: the cosmological, from the existence of the finite world, the teleological, from the order of the finite world, the ontological, from the implications of the concept of God itself as a concept of a perfect and so necessary being ; and the moral argument, from the implications of moral existence.  These widely variant forms of philosophical approach have been united in in arguing that any theology intellectually respectable enough to speak to modern, intelligent people must represent its religious heritage in the intellectual form of such a rationally grounded philosophical theology.  Without such a philosophical base for our knowledge of God, our certainty of the divine reality and our comprehension of the relation of this concept to our other concepts will be seriously lacking.  As a consequence, the idea of God will increasingly be regarded as merely subjective and idiosyncratic, a private matter of "feeling," and therefore unreal, a private image unrelated to to the width of all experience, vacant of content, and in the end meaningless (Gilkey, op. cit. p. 101).

There are those who have shared a jaundiced view of culture's reasoning  and of its philosophical "proofs"; on religious grounds they have emphasized the transcendence and mystery of God.  They are not at all unaware that most contemporary philosophy has come to regard metaphysical speculation and all proofs of a divine reality as representing a dubious and uncritical use of reason, and therefore itself devoid of certainty, objectivity, or meaning.  They also have sensed the ideological and invalid character of such "modern" thinking.  For them modern thought, far from providing an objective and valid ground for our ultimate faith, itself represents a significant aspect of the modern problem, needing itself new principles of illumination if it is to help our religious existence (Ibid.).

More important, the main problem of the knowledge of God, they insist, is not that we cannot know God with our finite minds, but that in fact secretly we do not all wish to know God.  Thus natural theology represents the persistent and systematic attempt of self-sufficient people to create a "God" of their own and so to avoid relationship with or knowledge of the real God.  A philosophical God, the product of our own metaphysical thinking and the construct of our own wayward modern wisdom, may be infinitely more comfortable for us to live with.  Nevertheless, such a "God: is a far cry from the real God who confronts us in judgment and may confront us therefore also in grace.  Furthermore, the very center of Christian promise resides in the re-creation of what we are, and of how and what we think, not in their mere extension and solidification.  Thus God-not "our own words to ourselves"-must speak to us in revelation. Such an event of revelation provides the sole basis and the sole norm for the religious existence of the Christian community from which and for wish valid and legitimate theology speaks.  To be sure, theology does not speak to the world as well as to the church, but in its speech it must seek to represent not the wisdom of the world, but the message of the Gospel, not the word of humanity, but the Word of God. Theology may use philosophy in explicating this message in coherent and adequate form.  Its primal obligation, however, is to be faithful to revelation and not to pressures of public rationality as the world defines rationality.  Faith therefore precedes and controls the use of reason in theology, i.e. "I believe in order to understand," rather than I understand in order to believe" (Ibid., pp. 101-102)

Therefore, we understand that the doctrine of God has its rational component and foundation.  Having said that, we deal with the issue of whether theology constructs God in a human image, or whether the human, as the Scriptures state, are created in the image and likeness of God.  Theology also has its revelational component, i.e. bases itself on the divine self-disclosure, which comes at God's initiative.  Theology sees to it that the language it uses about the divine is a a language of concepts and terms that are understandable to whose who are engaged in the theological task, whether they be lay, ordained, or professional in their engagement.

In the Name of the Creator, and of the Liberator, and of the Sustainer. Amen.

Dr. Juan A. Carmona 

Past Visiting Professor of Theology

Tainan Theological College/Seminary 

 

MODERN REFORMULATIONS OF THE DOCTRINE OF GOD

The doctrine of God in Christian theology has been formulated and reformulated time and again.  The formulations tend to be a response to the Church's self-understanding and to its understanding of God in different times and in different social contexts.  

The question about how God is to be known-by rational inquiry of some sort, through religious experience, or through a revelation responded by faith-has been a traditional and recurrent question throughout Christian history.  In that history, there have been those who, while denying neither the efficacy, nor the significance of mystical experience or of revelation, have insisted that the existence of God can be established by philosophical argument and so the nature of God known and defined, at least in part, by reason alone, that is, by "natural theology." On the other side have been those who distrusted philosophical reason as "pagan" or at least as misguided; correspondingly they have argued that the true and living God, the God of Abraham, Jesus, and the Church, can only be known in revelation.  As a consequence for them a valid understanding of the nature and intentions of God must proceed from revelation and not also from philosophical reasoning. While the developments in modern culture have not effaced this traditional issue and its contesting parties, still these developments have to some extent effected changes in the way each side argues its case (Langdon Gilkey, p. 99). 

So,  the question remains "How do we know God?"  Is God known through self-disclosure?  Is God known through experience, both collective and individual?  Is God known through philosophical speculation?  Is God known through rational deduction?  Each of these perspectives have been submitted as the dominant or exclusive way of knowing and understanding the divine.

There are three points of difference submitted by Langdon Gilkey.  They are:

1.  The question of the possibility of a concept of God, the most radical question about God's reality has come to the fore.  Thus each side, the natural theologians and the revelationists, find themselves more concerned than their predecessors with the source or point of origin (in a "godless" natural and historical world) of this idea in philosophy or in the experience of revelation respectively, that is, with the question "How do we come to know God?' as well as with the question "What do we know about God in the way we do know it?" (Gilkey, op. cit., p.99).  

2.  Though the sharpness and difficulty of the question of the reality of God and of the intelligibility of that concept has made a natural theology eminently desirable if not necessary for modern believers, still the drift-not to say the flow tide-of modern rationality away from metaphysical speculation has raised increased difficulties for that enterprise in modern culture.  Whereas in many epochs only the use of philosophy in theology and especially at the idea of a natural theology, now is the philosophical community more than the theological community that raises questions about the possibility of metaphysics and of natural theology of any sort.  In modernity (as possibly the end of the Hellenic era) natural theologians have had to contend with philosophical resistance to their speculative, metaphysical labors as well as with religious-theological resistance, and they face the bizarre and arduous task, not forced upon their predecessors, of presenting a reasoned defense of metaphysical reason even before they begin their quest via such reason for God (Ibid., pp. 99-100).

3.  The modern critique of authority, the emphatic denial of absolute authority to any document or institution, has transformed the interpretation of revelation and its cognitive meaning.  Prior to this the "revealed faith" could refer to sets of prepositions in the scriptural corpus or the dogmatic tradition, and how one "knew God" via either one could be plainly and intelligibly stated.  With the modern critique of scriptural and dogmatic authority and of a "propositional view of revelation," at best revelation comes through the words of scripture and tradition and is received not in terms of objective propositions but on the "religious" level as an experience or "feeling," as an "encounter" resulting in a personal acknowledgment or a decision of faith, that is, as an existential reality and activity, so to speak, below the conceptual and ordinary cognitive level.  The obvious problem of a cognitive event taking place in a prelinguistic, preconceptual, and preexperiential "experience" thus plagues contemporary revelationists as it did their predecessors.  We should note that neither one of the traditional avenues to the knowledge of God, metaphysics or revelation, is in the least straight and smooth in our own day (Ibid. p. 100).

So, as in ancient times, and especially in as in the days of emerging Christianity, we are faced with the challenge and the task of postulating,  editing, redacting, and revisiting our formulations for understanding the divine.  We ask ourselves if our notion of God is culture-based, faith-based, or a combination of several approaches and foundations.  Is our approach to the "knowledge" of God a one-track approach or is it multi-pronged?  Our attempts to know and understand God constitute the journey of "theology in transit."

In the Name of the Creator, and of the Liberator, and of the Sustainer. Amen.

Dr. Juan A. Carmona 

Past Professor of Theology

Tainan Theological College/Seminary 

 MODERN CONSCIOUSNESS ON GOD 

At the start of the post-Reformation period there were two dominant conceptions of God, one Catholic and the other Protestant.  They differed markedly in the categories with which God was described,  yet to our modern eyes they exhibited the same paradoxical character: the Catholic conception of an absolute, purely actual, changeless being "illegitimately" related and the Protestant conception of an eternal sovereign, divine will ordaining and effecting all temporal events from eternity, thus again "illegitimately" related and even responsive to historical crises and human needs.  Understandably, subsequent modern on the issue of God has, at least since the seventeenth century, been largely constituted by philosophical and theological criticism of these two inherited conceptions, and thence characterized either by humanist and naturalist rejection of the concept entirely or by a more or less radical reformulation of it.  Perhaps the best way to examine this extensive process is to remind ourselves first of the grounds in modern (Enlightenment and and post-Enlightenment) sensibility for this criticism,  and second to describe some of the characteristic forms of these reformulations as those forms appear in the present theological discussion (Langdon Gilkey in "God," p. 96).  

So in essence, what we find is a "clash" or competing conceptions of God during this period.  One conception (Catholic) was rooted in a synthesis of tradition, experience, Scripture, and philosophy, while the other (Protestant) was rooted in the primacy of Scripture, tradition, and experience, in that order, with a subsequent embracing of philosophy and other branches of human knowledge as ancillary.  Both sides attempted to be faithful to what they believed was the faith delivered once and for all by Jesus and HIs Apostles.   Both sides believed that indeed, their position was "Apostolic" in nature.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT CRITIQUE 

The grounds for the modern critique of the idea of God have been essentially three:

1.  The new emphasis on experience as the sole relevant and dependable source for valued and meaningful concepts and the sole ground for the testing of those concepts. (Gilkey, op. cit. pp. 96-97).

2.  Corresponding shift to the subject as the sole seat of legitimate authority in all matters pertaining to truth and as the sole originating source of significant moral and/or personal action (Ibid., p. 97).  

Finally, since the principle of authority in matters of truth and morals has moved radically inward to the subject, all external forms of authority are radically questioned, especially those coming from Church traditions or Scripture (Ibid.).

In modern-day Protestantism, there is a question as to what really is the sole or primary authority.  Some Protestants believe in the "Sola Scriptura (the Scripture alone)" principle, while others believe in the "Prima Scriptura (the primacy of Scripture and secondary status of experience and tradition)" principle.  In Pentecostal theology, we have a what I would call a "theological conundrum."  While Pentecostals as a whole subscribe to the notion of the Scripture being "the only rule of faith and practice," there is a strong emphasis on the experience of the Holy Spirit being an authority in and of itself.  So far example, if someone calls out an aspect of Pentecostal theology to be at "variance" with scriptural revelation, the answer just might be "Well the Holy Spirit has revealed to me (or to us) otherwise."  It appears on the surface, at least, that in Pentecostal theology, there is room for a private experience with the Holy Spirit superseding the words of Scripture, though the claim is still made that the Bible is our only source of faith and practice.  

Thus, the question of the reality of God, even of the possibility of the concept in any of its forms, has been sharply raised in modern culture.  On the one hand, a powerful "naturalistic " viewpoint, which finds belief in God anachronistic and incredible and thus a relation to God either offensive or irrelevant, has arisen and spread pervasively throughout the Western and Communist worlds into almost every class.  From this viewpoint "nature," as understood by science, is the seat and source of all that is real; men and women are the source of values, and their needs and wishes are the sole criterion of values.  Thus this world and its history represent the sole locus of hope.  Whether in socialistic or capitalistic form, or as theorized by Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre or Albert Camus-or by most if not all the leaders of the scientific and and philosophical communities-this naturalistic humanism has dominated the cultural scene.  As a consequence its powerful presence has posed the central intellectual issues for theologians concerned with the defense and reformulation of the concept  of God (Gilkey, op. cit., p. 97).  

So here we are faced with the question of whether our theology is a revealed theology or a humanly constructed theology.  Personally, I find it difficult to submit to that dichotomy.  The reason for that is that even if we state that our theology is a "revealed" one, we cannot bypass the element of human filtering and mediation.  In other words, we cannot treat theology is if were written in Heaven and thrown down to Earth.  Whether we subscribe to the Catholic (and here I am including Eastern Orthodoxy) notion of God, or the Protestant notion of God, the agency of human mediation cannot be either bypassed or ignored.  While we might believe that divine revelation contains "absolutes," we cannot claim or pretend that our appropriation of divine revelation is either absolute, inerrant, or infallible.  In the final analysis, theology is a human construct, and subsequently is, as my theology mentor and professor at New Brunswick Theological Seminary said many times, "tentative."  

Whether or not "naturalistic humanism," a non-religious understanding of reality generally and of human existence, is a lasting possibility has also become problematic in the modern period.  This possibility of a totally "secular" world view was assumed in the French Enlightenment and taken for granted by most of the nineteenth-century critics of religion (e.g., Aguste Comte, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, et. al).  However, recent history has seemed to show that as traditional religion wanes as the symbolic center of a community's life, "ideology' tends to take its place, and ideology with important religious aspects or dimensions.  Thus even if God has receded from the center of Western (or even Eastern) consciousness, "the religious" has apparently not-for the political and social worlds of Western culture are structured ideologically, and thus its major conflicts are still inspired by competing forms of religiosity (Gilkey, op. cit. pp 97-98).  

En fin, regardless of the root or source of our conception of God,  our conceptions result in enclosed and even entrenched ideologies.  Very few of us, if any, are open to the idea that there is truth in other conceptions of God, especially if those conceptions prevail and are rampant in faith communities other than the Christian Church.  We treat our conceptions of God as if we Christians have it "all sown up" in our pockets, and that any opposing concepts are demonic and heretical.

Dr. Juan A. Carmona 

Past Professor of Theology

Tainan Theological College/Seminary 

 THE SYMBOL OF THE TRINITY 

In the early patristic period, with Justyn Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, the absolute aspect of God was unequivocally affirmed and regarded as designated by the traditional biblical symbol of the "Father," the utterly primordial, unoriginate, changeless, eternal , and unrelated source of all else.  The related aspect of God, equally central to the life and piety of Christian faith, was consequently expressed through the symbol of the "Son" or the Logos, the principle of divine outreach and self-manifestation (almost a "second God," or as Justin and Origen put it) through which the transcendent Father. changeless, and inactive, created the world, was revealed in it, and acted to redeem it.  The Holy Spirit completed the relationship by assuring the presence of the divine will in the community and in persons.  Thus at the outset of the philosophical career of the Christian God, the symbol of the Trinity served to provide conceptual expression for the dialectical polarity of the Christian God as at once the self-sufficient creator of all, transcendent to all t                                         finitude (Father), and as the active, revealing, loving redeemer (Son), present in grace and power to God's people (Holy Spirit)  Landon Gilkey "God."  Christian Theology: An Introduction To Its Traditions and Tasks.  Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994, p. pp. 93-94.

By the inexcusable and possibly ironic logic of events and ideas, however, the important mediatorial role of the symbol of the Trinity soon disintegrated.  As the doctrine of the Arians quickly made evident, a Son or Logos that genuinely mediates between the absolute  and the relative and that is related to the creaturely, the temporal, and the changing in time can be itself unregenerate, eternal, changeless, nor fully "God" if God is defined solely by the truths of a transcendent absolute. An original, related, mediating principle is by that token hardly God, but in monotheism such a subordinate, semiabsolute, and partly divine being, however, "good," is inadmissible and partly divine being as representing incipient polytheism.  Besides, if Jesus Christ is not fully God, how can He save? These unanswerable arguments of Athanasius pushed the conception of the entire divine Trinity in an absolutist direction; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were at Nicea and again later at Constantinople all defined as fully divine, that is, as essentially negating every creaturely attribute: temporality, potentiality, changeableness, relatedness, and dependence.  As a consequence, the Trinity  ceased to be the central symbolic expression of the polarity of divine relatedness.  To put this point more precisely, a distinction now appears in post-Nicean theology between the essential Trinity, (the "three-in-oneness" characteristic of the eternal God's inner life) and the economic Trinity (the "three-in-oneness" characteristic manifested and expressed externally in God's creative, revealing, and redemptive activity in relation to the world).  Clearly this distinction, in contrast to the pre-Nicean concept of the Trinity, where a "halfway absolute" Son mediated between the absolute Father and the world, covered over rather than resolved the fundamental problem or dialectic of the Christian concept;t of God, namely, how the absolute God can be related to the relative world.  Now in the new form the same old question arises: How can the essentially trinitarian God in whom Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are alike eternal, changeless, and impassive participate in all the actions and reactions in relation to changing temporality entailed in the economic Trinity (Ibid., pp. 94-95)?  

As pointed out previously, the Church was not advocating for a polytheistic doctrine, i.e. a doctrine of multiple gods.  Neither was the  Church advocating for a doctrine of semi-humans or semi-deities.  While the doctrine of the Trinity was not stated explicitly in the New Testament, the seeds of the doctrine was there in a latent way.  The doctrine of the Trinity was that God was  revealed in the relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, whether one wants to take these to mean that the three were distinct as to person while being fully divine, or distinct as to historical roles.  

As the appearance of the distinction makes plain, at no point did Christian theology allow itself to deny God's continual relatedness to and activity in the world of change.  How could it, since the entire corpus of Christian belief from creation to redemption, very aspect of its ritual of Word and Sacrament, its entire sacred law and its sanctions, and every facet of its piety of prayer, miracles, and special angelic and saintly powers depended on the reality in past, present, and future of that divine presence and divine activity?  Nevertheless, that a deep theological problem remained for the classical theological conception of God is also evident.  Once God was defined in theology as "pure actuality,"  "eternal being," "changeless," and thus quite void of potentiality, alterability, passivity, or temporality, it became virtually impossible, if not contradictory, to express intelligibly the obvious relatedness and mutuality of God to the changing world necessitated by the Scriptural witness and by the structures of the Christian religion itself (Gilkey, op. cit., p. 95). 

One of the major problems in theology relative to the person and work of God, is the inevitable use of anthropomorphic language, i.e. attributing human-like qualities to God.  In addition, the matter is complicated because of the fact that in the early stages of the construction of Christian theology, just like we previously encounter in Hebrew/Jewish theology, and subsequently in Islamic theology, God is spoken of in masculine terms, an issue which is challenged and questioned by feminist theology.  Moreover, the doctrine of God in Christian theology is complicated by the doctrine of the Trinity which on the surface, at least, appears to be an advocacy for polytheism, or at the very least, tritheism, i.e. the notion of three deities.  When we take into consideration the integration between Christian theology and Western philosophy (namely Greek philosophy), the problem is further compounded by the fact that God is depicted as detached from the world and totally unaffected by what goes on in the world.

Although with the Reformation the philosophical or metaphysical definition of God as absolute, changeless, eternal being or actuality radically receded in prominence in theology, the same problems remained.  In the "biblical" theology of the major reformers, God is conceived centrally through personal rather than metaphysical categories: as almighty or sovereign power, as righteous or holy will, as gracious and reconciling love.  The "ontological" concepts of self-sufficiency remain, but what now determines the shape of the doctrine of God in each reformer is the center of Reformation piety or religion, namely the new emphasis on the priority and sole sovereignty of divine grace in redemption;tion, on the utter unworthiness and inactivity of the recipient of grace, and finally on the absolute priority and decisiveness of divine election (Gilkey, op. cit. p. 95). 

What is here eternal and changeless is the divine decree destining, yes predestining, each creature to grace or to its opposite.  The first cause of being, that led Thomas to the concept of pure actuality has become the first "cause" of grace, leading to the concept of the eternal, and changeless divine decrees.  Thus for primarily religious rather than metaphysical reasons, the same paradox tending toward contradiction appears: an eternal, hidden, and yet all-sovereign divine electing will on the one hand, and the affirmation of the presence and activity of God in relation to a real and not sham sequence of historical events and of human decisions on the other hand.  Although it was Calvin especially who drew out most clearly the implications of this new paradox based on Reformation piety rather than on traditional philosophy, still the same paradox in this new form is evident and fundamental for the theologies of Luther and Zwingli as well (Ibid., pp. 95-96).

Like all other aspects of Christian theology, the doctrine of the Deity has its challenges, and difficulties.  Theology is an ongoing task, and the component of the doctrine of the divine, is a part and parcel of that task.

Dr. Juan A. Carmona 

Past Professor of Theology

Tainan Theological College/Seminary