Hauerwas and Willimon – Through a Glass Darkly

During this time of lockdown and social distancing, I’m grateful for the moments of enrichment and connection people are making available through technology. One of them is a study of Karl Barth’s Dogmatics in Outline led online by Will Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas. I love Willimon and Hauerwas, and I really love Barth. “Love” them, though, doesn’t mean agree without nuance or qualification. The subject of this week’s discussion was chapters 5-9 of the Dogmatics in Outline, which treats the doctrines of God and creation. It happens that this discussion coincides with the section of 1 Corinthians I’m covering in a local Bible study tonight regarding Paul’s epistemology of the cross.

In 1 Corinthians 1:17-25, Paul says God, paradoxically, is known in the weakness and foolishness of the cross of Christ. Paul says the cross exposes the pretense of claims to superior wisdom: “Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” (1:20). In the context of 1 Corinthians, Paul is addressing the “Apollos” faction in the Corinthian church (see my Introduction). But he’s also saying some rich and important things about human knowledge generally.

In my notes on 1 Cor. 1:1 to 2:5 I mentioned how Luther’s “theology of the cross” emphasized this Pauline theme. Barth’s theology meditates extensively on this theme as well. Indeed, in many ways, Barth’s theology is an extension of Luther’s theology of the cross, as both Luther and Barth learned it from Paul.

Barth famously said “no” to any kind of “natural theology” through which we could gain knowledge of God outside God’s revelation of Himself in Christ. In Chapter 5 of Dogmatics in Outline, for example, Barth says

And it is part of this, that God is not only unprovable and unserachable, but also inconceivable. No attempt is made in the Bible to define God — that is, to grasp God in our concepts. In the Bible God’s name is named, not as philosophers do it, as the name of a timeless Being, surpassing the world, alien and supreme, but as the name of the living, active, working Subject who makes Himself known. The Bible tells the story of God; it narrates His deeds and the history of this God in the highest, as it takes place on earth in the human sphere. . . . And so the Bible is not a philosophical book, but a history book, the book of God’s mighty acts, in which God becomes knowable by us.
Dogmatics in Outline, 38.

This kind of emphasis is a balm for many people, like me, who find analytic “apologetic” arguments that try to prove God’s existence from neutral first principles, or that try to rationalize big questions like the problem of evil or the outlines of the eschatological future, exhausting, counterproductive, and really soul-sucking. Who cares about proofs for “theism?” I’m not a “theist,” I’m a Christian.

But . . . this kind of emphasis also opens Barth (and Hauerwas) up to the charge of fideism. It can’t be the case that the “ordinary” operation of human reason is completely incapable of knowledge, or else Barth couldn’t make the arguments he’s making, using human words and human appeals to argument. This points to a well-known and much-discussed debate regarding Barth’s use of the concept of “analogy.”

Barth’s claim that God is inconceivable is not at all novel in Christian (or Jewish, or Islamic) theology. It’s at the heart of the scriptures that God infinitely exceeds human creaturely capacities — see, for example, the locus classicus of the scriptural basis in Isaiah 55:8-9:

For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
    nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
    so are my ways higher than your ways
    and my thoughts than your thoughts.
Is. 55:8-9 (NRSV)

Every great Christian thinker in the tradition works from this premise — even Anselm and Aquinas, the most famous Medieval expositors of “proofs” of God’s existence, though they are often misread otherwise.

So how then can we say anything about God? Several related concepts developed from the Patristic through the Medieval eras: participation, mediation, and analogy.

“Participation” is a concept drawn from Platonic thought. It says that, although no particular thing in this world is the perfect form of the thing, still the particular relates to the universal form by participating in the universal form, which inheres in the particular. If I draw a triangle, because of the inherent limits in the medium of my drawing, the drawing will never be perfect. But the drawing does call to mind the perfect form, the absolutely perfect triangle, and therefore the particular imperfect drawing does give me some knowledge about the abstract perfect form.

“Mediation” is a related concept also drawn from Platonism. Plato used the term metaxis to refer to the way in which human beings are “suspended between” the world of the particular and the ideal — the physical world and the immaterial world of thought. Although we as humans do not exist in the perfect world of the forms, our reasoning intellect is capable of abstract thought, which mediates the perfect realm to us, even if we cannot access it perfectly and directly.

Finally, “analogy” is another related concept, also drawn from Plato as well as Aristotle. Analogy means that, although my human thoughts are not themselves the perfect, ideal form of things, because the human intellect does mediate the ideal, and human concepts participate in the ideal, human beings can talk meaningfully about what the ideal is like. This like-ness is a way of reasoning by analogy. The Triangle, then, is like the triangle I draw, only infinitely better.

Barth vigorously rejected a theological concept in Roman Catholic theology called the analogia entis, or the “analogy of being.” This was a way of reasoning from what we can know directly, the “being” of the physical universe, to knowledge about the being of God. In other words, the creation gives us meaningful analogical knowledge of what God is like — and this includes the created human capacity to reason. Instead of the analogia entis, Barth proposed an analogia fidei — an analogy of faith — we know what God is like not from abstract reflection on being, but from the specific story of faith narrated in scripture and disclosed in Christ.

This can be positioned as a kind of Protestant vs. Catholic polemic, and in some ways that’s correct, but the reality is more subtle. In Reformed theology, Barth engaged in a vigorous debate with Emil Brunner about the possibility of natural theology, and the Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Bathalsar, a friend of Barth’s, thought in the end Barth’s ideas were actually consistent with Catholic thought. There’s been some good ecumenical work on these questions in recent years. One excellent guide to the conversation is Steve Long’s book Saving Karl Barth: Hans urs Von Balthasar’s Preoccupation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press 2014).

In my view, there’s no reason to “choose” between the analogia entis and the analogia fidei. It’s more important to remember first that both agree on the notion of “analogy.” Neither the analogia entis nor, of course, the analogia fidei propose that humans can know God directly at all, or that we can know anything about God by our own powers of human reasoning. What we can know about God is always known by analogy, and God always infinitely exceeds our analogical knowledge. And we we can know about God by analogy is only possible because of the mediation of grace — God’s gracious acts of creation and redemption, which allow us to participate in God’s own being.

In our Intro to the Christian Tradition course at Biblical Seminary, we’re reading Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon’s lovely little book Lord Teach Us: the Lord’s Prayer and the Christian Life. Following are some portions of the journal I’m required to keep for the course as we read this book.

It’s somehow embedded in my spiritual consciousness that the “Christian life” is primarily an exercise in avoiding dangers. My posture, unconsciously, often has been one of defensiveness and fear. “We” need to be on constant vigil against moral laxity, heresy, “liberalism,” “secular humanism,” and other threats. If there were something like the “Homeland Security Threat Meter” for spiritual things, in many of the settings in which I’ve lived, it would constantly have been on “Red.”

Hauerwas and Willimon present instead a faith that recognizes its own weaknesses. As they note at the start of the Introduction, “[b]ecause of the nature of the Christian faith, all of us, no matter how long we have been around Jesus, are always learning anew how to ask the right questions. No one of us ever becomes so faithful, so bold in our discipleship, that we become experts in being Christian.” They are able to make such a statement because they conceive of the faith “not primarily as a set of doctrines, a volunteer organization, or a list of appropriate behaviors.” It is rather “a journey of a people.” To be Christian, they say, “is to have been drafted to be part of an adventure, a journey called God’s kingdom. Being part of this adventure frees us from the terrors that would enslave our lives if were not part of the journey.”

Why is it that we often unconsciously or consciously think of the Christian faith as something that brings slavery to terror? My Christian commitment was in some important ways born of fear – the fear of Hell. As a young teenager, fire and brimstone preaching motivated me to think, do and say the right things. We lived under the cloud of the Great Tribulation, the scourge of Antichrist followed by eternal flames, from which only proper faith in Christ could rescue us. The vast majority of the human race was on a fast train to Hell, and only a small remnant of us who got things just right would escape.

Thankfully, there were other influences on my faith besides those fire and brimstone prophecy preachers. There were youth leaders, college professors, family members and friends who really did catch the “adventure” of Christian faith. And there was a kernel of truth in the pulpit thumping – Jesus himself, after all, was the source of the imagery of sheep and goats, good soil and rocky soil, Abraham’s bosom and Gehenna.

Yet, even now, it’s hard for me to fully assimilate the truth that the Christian faith is fundamentally “a prayer that [we] must learn to pray” rather than “a set of beliefs.” I’m baffled sometimes when I meet former Roman Catholics who have gotten “saved” and joined evangelical churches. Their testimonies uniformly concern freedom and security: they traded what they perceived as a rigid system of doctrines, good works, guilt and penances, for the blessed assurance of simple faith in God’s grace. I suppose they just haven’t realized that in many of our evangelical churches, particularly for those of us who have grown up in the church, the system of doctrines, works, guilt and penances is just as rigid as it is in any version of cultural Catholicism – and perhaps it’s more insidious because it’s under the surface. Scratch the skin of many life-long evangelicals and you’ll find the same iron blood as that which flows through the most traditional of Catholics.

So, when I read Haurewas and Willimon’s meditation on God as “Our Father,” it banishes some of those old demons and encourages the whisperings of better angels: “It is comforting to know that even though you don’t always feel like a Christian, though you do not always act like a Christian, much less believe like a Christian, your relationship as a friend of God is not based on what you have felt, done, or believed. Rather, you are a friend with God because of God’s choice of you in Jesus through the church.”

Indeed! Yet – “through the church” . . . . This is our fundamental weakness as “independent” evangelical churches. How do my Catholic friends who embrace and live their Catholic identities know they are accepted by God? Why don’t they suffer from the same guilt and fears as those ex-Catholics I know who left that faith for evangelicalism (or, more likely, for no faith at all)?

I think it’s because they’ve learned to receive the blessing of the Church. They’ve learned to recognize that their friendship with God is far bigger than their own personal strengths and weaknesses. Sure, they realize the need for a vibrantly personal faith, but it’s a faith that’s far more than “personal,” and that therefore is far stronger than their personal weaknesses. And here, they can more readily grasp the significance of Hauerwas and Willimon’s thoughts on the fact that “Our Father” is “in Heaven”:

“You may not be good with words. Don’t worry. George Herbert, St. Francis, and Teresa of Avila pray with you. You may not have your head straight on Christian doctrine. Go ahead and pray with confidence. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and Georgia Harkness pray with you. You may find it difficult to make time to pray. Pray as often as you can. Your prayer joins those already in progress by Dietrcih Bonhoeffer and Dorothy Day.”

We may demur for any number of reasons to the authority of Popes and Cardinals or Metropolitans. Maybe those reasons are good ones rooted in the Reformation, or maybe at this point they’re still born of the fear of change, or maybe there’s some of both at work. Regardless, it’s vital that our “personal relationship with Christ” be far more than “personal.” We thrive as we’re ingrafted onto the vine of Christ, rooted in soil that is thousands of years deep, in communion with branches spread across time, place and history.

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