Continuing in my reading of Ezekiel with Robert Jenson, I come to his commentary on Ezekiel 30:20-26. This pericope is unremarkable, in that it is part of series of judgments against Gentile nations found in this part of the overall text. Here, God pronounces judgment against Egypt: “Then they will know that I am the Lord, when I put my sword into the hand of the king of Babylon and he brandishes it against Egypt.” (Ezekiel 30:25). Jenson’s interest in his theological commentary is about how God acts through agents within the created order, like the King of Babylon. I’m going to set out Jenson’s commentary at length because I think he states the problem correctly, with one qualification I mention at the end of this post. I don’t think his proposed approach, rooted in a Lutheran sense of God’s hiddenness, however, is really all that fruitful. Here is how Jenson describes the problem. (Quotes below are from Jenson, 237-239.)
[T]he theologically most striking feature of this prophecy is its drastic identification of the Lord himself as the one who determines and indeed fights the battles waged by created armies. An actual pharaoh is or will be made militarily incapable; it is the Lord who breaks his arms. Nebuchadnezzar has been or will be victorious; the sword that wins victory is the Lord’s own, put into Nebuchadnezzar’s hand. Leaving aside at this point the question of God’s involvement in violence (7 7:10- 27), how are we to understand the relation between God’s act and creatures’ act, when the event itself is but one?
The question has been posed and debated throughout theological history. Traditional scholastic theology, Catholic and Protestant, has said that God is the “primary cause” of created events, which within creation have also created “secondary causes.” Thus God is here the primary cause of Egypt’s disaster, and Nebuchadnezzar the secondary cause. The doctrine is descriptively correct, but it is doubtful that it does much more than restate the problem. Through the latter part of the previous century, several movements attempted to place the scheme within a more substantive theory-in my judgment, without great success.
Jenson then describes contemporary efforts to solve the problem (and I love here his reference to the fact that Christian philosophers really are doing theology — the presumptions of Christian analytic philosophy of religion irritate me to no end):
Thus some Christian members of philosophy departments have taken to doing what is in fact theology. They are especially occupied with the question: How is an eternal God’s agency within time possible? In my view they pose the question in a way that makes a faithful answer impossible, for they tend to use words like “eternal” or “agency” or “time” so uncritically within an Aristotelian frame that the notion of an eternal reality’s agency in time becomes a simple oxymoron. If to be “eternal” is simply to be “not temporal;” than an eternal entity cannot do a temporal act, and there is little more to be said.
Some other recent movements have taken an opposite, drastically revisionary path. Process theology among liberal theologians and open theism among evangelicals have produced metaphysically more or less coherent accounts of primary divine agency and secondary temporal agency. But they have done so only by revising Christian language about God past all biblical recognition. A God who is one pole of a universal process is not the God of Ezekiel or any other prophet.
So far, I think Jenson has rightly diagnosed the problem, and that he has rightly suggested that process theology and open theism are not viable alternatives. He then makes another move I think is vital, which is to note that in the classical theological tradition God is not an entity within the universe, so any talk of God’s causality, whether “primary” or otherwise, can only be analogical:
I have a diagnosis and suggestion. At least since the advent of modernity, Western thought has tended to see the universe as a system, a self-contained process determined by immanent regularities; much modern theology has-sometimes subliminally-accepted this vision. When the world is envisioned in this fashion, God is willy-nilly envisioned as a second something external to the world. Then the question necessarily becomes: How does the eternal God intervene in the temporal system, without wrecking it? And the obvious answer is that he cannot: either it is simply closed to him, or his entry will compromise its constitutive laws.
But scripture does not envision the creation as a system at all, but rather-as Ezekiel and this commentary have all along construed the matter-as a history.
This vision poses quite a different question: How does God present himself as an actor in the drama of history?
After this useful diagnosis and suggestion, however, I think Jenson’s proposal relies too heavily on a Lutheran theology of God’s hiddenness:
In ancient drama, the actors brought the gods and heroes into the theater by and as masks behind which the actors hid and through which they spoke; within the ceremony the masks were the dramatis personae. Martin Luther adduced this phenomenon, but reversed the relation of actors and masks. God brings the created heroes and villains of the temporal drama onto history’s stage as masks that hide him-for were he to appear barefaced creation would perish. Thus Nebuchadnezzar and his like are larva dei, God’s masks-as indeed are all creatures in one way or another. And we masks truly are the personae of the drama; we are not puppets manipulated by someone distant from us. Yet behind us hides the Creator.
Calling the created carriers of history masks of God may at first sight seem to be a figure, not to be taken with ontological seriousness. But we should remember that the great metaphysical categories are always created by drafting ordinary language for heavy ontological duty. To instance Scholasticism’s language for our present matter, God is of course not a “cause” within any such cluster of cause and effect as quotidian language presumes; thus when the tradition calls him the primary cause of created events it drafts “cause” to serve in an alien discourse. And when Luther and I propose instead to draft “mask” for metaphysical duty, we perform the same move-but, just possibly, more appropriately.
Although I do think there are some important insights in this perspective, I’m not sure how it advances the ball over the Thomistic-Aristotelian categories of primary and secondary causality. In particular, I think Jenson’s view of causality here tends to eliminate the genuine agency and freedom of creatures that the Thomistic-Aristotelian categories seek to preserve within the domain of secondary causation.
And here is my qualification about how Jenson states the problem: I think the Thomistic-Aristotelian framework does much more than merely “restate the problem” and that contemporary philosophers of religion have mostly abandoned the “Aristotelian frame” in favor of a materialist-naturalist frame. Much of the work in philosophical theology on these problems of causality, along with much of the modern philosophy of science, rejects formal and final causality and focuses on on what an Aristotelian frame would consider material and efficient causes. This makes sense if the material universe is all there is, because the rules of energy and matter tell us that physical causation is a closed system. But Christian theology insists that the material universe is not all there is, and that in fact the material universe was created by God, who is by definition transcendent of creation and not material. The question, then, is how to speak of God’s transcendent causality while retaining the contingent freedom and reality of causality within the universe.
Of course, as Jenson notes, anything we say here is bound to involve “drafting ordinary language for heavy ontological duty” — that is, to require analogical reasoning. But the Thomistic-Aristotelian framework is a way of expressing God’s transcendent causality as the source and goal of the acts of creatures within their appropriate sphere of creaturely freedom. This brings a bit more clarity and sharpness to our thinking, which is of course not an “explanation,” but is more than a mere restatement.
In addition, concerning creaturely freedom, the Thomistic-Aristotelian synthesis emphasizes that no creature has the absolute freedom God enjoys, but rather creatures have certain limited range of powers, dispositions, and capacities of action given to them by God. Nebuchadnezzar, then, was created with the power and capacity to act as God’s agent of judgment, and he was capable of various dispositions to act or not act. That God gave Nebuchadnezzar these created powers and capacities, and that God may have influenced (though not determined) Nebuchadnezzar’s disposition to exercise them on a particular occasion, involves both God’s “action” and Nebuchadnezzar’s free agency, and seems consistent with the Biblical text. I’m not sure why the rubric of Lutheran “hiddenness” is better on these fronts — or even if it is really much different.
Martin Luther fascinates me, not least because he is such a bundle of contradictions. This is true as much in his economic thinking as anywhere else. In his sermon “