{"id":2100,"date":"2011-06-15T10:30:13","date_gmt":"2011-06-15T17:30:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=2100"},"modified":"2011-06-15T10:30:13","modified_gmt":"2011-06-15T17:30:13","slug":"newman-barth-and-natural-theology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2011\/06\/15\/newman-barth-and-natural-theology\/","title":{"rendered":"Newman, Barth, and Natural Theology"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Recently I had the pleasure of participating in a Seton Hall faculty seminar<\/a> on Cardinal Newman<\/a>, sponsored by the University’s Center for Catholic Studies<\/a> and Center for Vocation and Servant Leadership<\/a>. \u00a0 Newman, a convert to Catholicism from the Anglican Church, was the leading Catholic intellectual of the 19th Century.\u00a0 The seminar was led by Notre Dame’s Cyril O’Regan<\/a>.\u00a0 It was an absolute joy.\u00a0 Participants were encouraged to submit a 1000-word reflection on Newman.\u00a0 Here’s my contribution to the seminar proceedings<\/p>\n

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Newman, Barth, and Natural Theology<\/strong><\/p>\n

Newman\u2019s religious epistemology in A Grammar of Assent<\/em> can strike the contemporary reader as unduly focused on loneliness, fear, and judgment.\u00a0 His \u201cfirst lesson\u201d of natural religion is the absence and silence of God.[1]<\/a> Indeed, \u201c[n]ot only is the Creator far off,\u201d he suggests, \u201cbut some being of malignant nature seems . . . to have got hold of us, and to be making us his sport.\u201d[2]<\/a> All religions, Newman argues, understand that humans are separated from God, and seek to find respite from God\u2019s judgment through prayer, rites of satisfaction, and the intercession of holy men.<\/p>\n

The preparation for revealed religion, in Newman\u2019s estimation, is a sense of foreboding \u2013 a sense that seems quite distant from the appeal to symmetry and aesthetics that characterized Aquinas\u2019 Five Ways.\u00a0 It is also far distant, as Newman acknowledges, from the mechanistic remonstrations of William Paley\u2019s watchmaker.\u00a0 While Paley\u2019s God \u2013 and perhaps, in Newman\u2019s estimation, Thomas\u2019 God \u2013 could turn out to be any sort of master tinkerer, merely a Platonic ideal of the Victorian gentleman naturalist, the God prefigured by Newman\u2019s natural religion must be more viscerally terrible.\u00a0 For Newman, \u201c[o]nly one religion,\u201d Christianity, supplies a God capable of dishing out, and absorbing, this sort of pain.<\/p>\n

Newman\u2019s focus on anxiety seems to prefigure the existentialist theologies that would come to define the twentieth century, particularly those of Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasaar.\u00a0 But Newman was more an Augustinian than Barth or Balthasaar, particularly in his construction of revelation and authority.\u00a0 For Newman, the bulwark of revealed religion was the institutional infallibility of the Roman Church.\u00a0 Yet even here Newman recognized a dynamic aspect to the Church\u2019s authority.\u00a0 The decisions of Popes and Councils, he recognized, were often mired in jealousies and politics.[3]<\/a> Still, the Church reached its conclusions over time spans measured in hundreds and thousands of years.\u00a0 Time, and patience, and the slow work of God\u2019s Spirit, ensured that the Church would preserve the truth against the vicissitudes of intellectual fashions.<\/p>\n

Karl Barth\u2019s theological anthropology, and his resulting appraisal of the \u201cnatural\u201d human condition, was remarkably consonant with Newman\u2019s.\u00a0 For Barth, following Luther, Humanity stood separated from a hidden God.\u00a0 And Barth repeatedly affirmed that \u201cthere is no possibility of dogmatics at all outside the Church.\u201d[4]<\/a> It might seem that Barth and Newman were following similar lights.<\/p>\n

However, Barth was notoriously less sanguine \u2013 indeed, not at all sanguine \u2013 about the possibility of any sort of natural theology.\u00a0 He refused any prior anthropological basis for theology.\u00a0 Moreover, because, in Barth\u2019s view, dogmatics always is a fresh encounter with revelation, he likewise would not assign the final say to any person within or document produced by the Church.\u00a0 The Roman Catholic approach to dogmatics, even when it understood the Church\u2019s teaching office to embody genuine progress over time, \u201cfails to recognize the divine-human character of the being of the Church.\u201d[5]<\/a> According to Barth, \u201c[t]he freely acting God Himself and alone is the truth of revelation . . . only in God and not for us is the true basis of Christian utterance identical with its true content.\u00a0 Hence dogmatics as such does not ask what the apostles and prophets said but what we must say on the basis of the apostles and prophets\u201d[6]<\/a><\/p>\n

It is curious that Barth does not cite Newman in this section of the Dogmatics<\/em>.[7]<\/a> More similarities perhaps appear between this section of the Dogmatics<\/em> and Newman\u2019s construal of Church authority than otherwise meet the eye.\u00a0 Newman\u2019s discussion of the \u201ctyrannical interference\u201d that results when the Church acts too swiftly against an apparently new opinion resonates with Barth\u2019s understanding of the \u201cdivine-human\u201d Church.[8]<\/a> If Christian belief and practice has varied since the inception of the Church, for Newman, this only reflects \u201cthe necessary attendants on any philosophy or polity which takes possession of the intellect and heart, and has had any wide or extended dominion.\u201d[9]<\/a> Great ideas can only be fully comprehended over time, particularly when communicated through human media to human recipients, even though transmitted \u201conce for all by inspired teachers.\u201d[10]<\/a><\/p>\n

Nevertheless, Newman ultimately sides with history over experience:\u00a0 \u201c[t]o be deep in history,\u201d he said, \u201cis to cease to be a Protestant.\u201d[11]<\/a> For Barth, revelation is ever and again (to use a Barthian turn of phrase) a fresh encounter with Christ, scripture, and the proclamation of the Church; for Newman, revelation is complete, and what remains is only the development of the Church\u2019s understanding and possession of what has been delivered.\u00a0 Yet Newman and Barth seem to agree that natural theology, at most, highlights God\u2019s hiddenness.\u00a0 Nature tells us nothing about God except that God is beyond us, terrible and unreachable.<\/p>\n

Is there space for natural theology between the poles of revelation-disclosed-in-history (Newman) and revelation-disclosed-in-experience (Barth)?\u00a0 Newman rejected the Anglican via media<\/em>, which, as Newman described it, sought to \u201creconcile and bring into shape the exuberant phenomena under consideration by cutting off and casting away as corruptions all usages, ways, opinions, and tenets, which have not the sanction of primitive times.\u201d[12]<\/a> This position of \u201cneither discarding the Fathers nor acknowledging the Pope,\u201d Newman thought, cannot resolve hard cases.[13]<\/a> However, splitting the difference between history and experience is not the only possible \u201cthird way.\u201d\u00a0 Perhaps Newman\u2019s \u201cnatural religion,\u201d although it pointed towards the cross and the Resurrection, did not fully account for the cross and the Resurrection in the history of creation.<\/p>\n

The suffering and separation of creation \u2013 our suffering and our separation from God \u2013 was taken up and transformed by the cross of Christ.[14]<\/a> The cross reveals that the Logos<\/em> who created the universe is the suffering servant who became incarnate, God and man, and who in the flesh of man suffered for us and with us.\u00a0 In the cross and Resurrection, God is not distant or hidden \u2013 indeed, in the cross and Resurrection, the shape and purpose of creation is disclosed.\u00a0 In the cross, history and experience join together; in the Resurrection, history and experience are fulfilled.\u00a0 Through the cross and the Resurrection, we recognize in creation the love and beauty of the God who declared the universe \u201cgood,\u201d the God who made us, and who accepts us by grace despite our sin.\u00a0 Because the cross and the Resurrection are the center of history and experience, we can delight in creation as gift and know God in creation as the giver of all good gifts.\u00a0 This is true \u201cnatural\u201d theology.<\/p>\n

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[1]<\/a> A Grammar of Assent, p. 301.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[2]<\/a> Ibid., <\/em>p. 302.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[3]<\/a> See Apologia Pro Vita Sua<\/em>, p. 232-33.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[4]<\/a> Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics (T&T Clark Study Edition2009) (hereinafter \u201cCD\u201d), I.1.3., at p. 17.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[5]<\/a> CD 1.1.2, at p. 14.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[6]<\/a> CD I.1.2, at p. 15.\u00a0 It follows for Barth, then, that \u201cthe place from which the way of dogmatic knowledge is to be seen and understood can be neither a prior anthropological possibility nor a subsequent ecclesiastical reality, but only the present moment of the speaking and hearing of Jesus Christ himself, the divine creation of light in our hearts.\u201d\u00a0 CD I.1.2, at p. 41.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[7]<\/a> He cites Diekamp, Katholic Dogmatik, 6th<\/sup> ed. (1930).\u00a0 See <\/em>CD, I.1.1, at p. 14.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[8]<\/a> Apologia, at p. 232-33.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[9]<\/a> Ibid.<\/em> at 67.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[10]<\/a> Ibid.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[11]<\/a> Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine<\/em>, in Conscience, Consensus, and the Development of Doctrine (Doubleday 1992), at p. 50.\u00a0 \u201cAnd whatever history teaches, whatever it omits, whatever it exaggerates or extenuates, whatever it says and unsays,\u201d Newman said, \u201dat least the Christianity of history is not Protestantism.\u00a0 If ever there were a safe truth, it is this.\u201d\u00a0 Id.<\/em> at 50.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[12]<\/a> Ibid.<\/em> at. 52.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[13]<\/a> Ibid.<\/em> at 53.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[14]<\/a> See <\/em>Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (Fortress Press 1972).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently I had the pleasure of participating in a Seton Hall faculty seminar on Cardinal Newman, sponsored by the University’s Center for Catholic Studies and Center for Vocation and Servant Leadership. \u00a0 Newman, a convert to Catholicism from the Anglican Church, was the leading Catholic intellectual of the 19th Century.\u00a0 The seminar was led by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-xS","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2100\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}