Can God Show Himself in the World?

A few reflections on Barth’s discussion of the Trinity in Church Dogmatics 1.1, ch 10.

1) Barth insists that Trinitarian theology developed not as a qualification of monotheism but as a way of defending monotheism: “Christian monotheism was and is also and precisely the point also and precisely in the Church doctrine of the Trinity as such.”

Barth’s emphasis on God’s self-revelation and self-impartation helps us see how this is so. God is the Revealer, the Revelation, and the One who brings revelation into effect, fulfilling the intent of revelation. God is the one who freely chooses to reveal Himself; and God reveals Himself in Christ; and God the Spirit ensures that the revelation in Christ actually reveals God to sinners.

Consider the alternatives: A high God could have sent some subordinate god to reveal Him; Jesus could be “God second class.” But that is a form of polytheism, and besides it means that the high God remains accessible to us in Himself.

Suppose a high God sent some non-divine mediator to reveal Him; Jesus is a creaturely messenger, albeit an exalted one. But this again means that we have no encounter with the high God Himself, but only with a subordinate messenger. And besides, this messenger is part of the creaturely world, and that means that he and his revelation might be taken captive by other creatures. A creaturely messenger from the Father cannot be Lord in the action of revelation. Only if God Himself comes as the revelation from God does God remain Lord.

Consider the Spirit: Suppose God were a binity- Father and Son. The Father sent His only-begotten Son, who is of the same substance, to reveal the Father. Yet, the effect of that revelation is left in the hands of men. Then God is Lord in the act of revelation, but not in the achievement of the effect of revelation. If God is going to remain Lord in achieving this effect, it must be God Himself who achieves this effect, God the Spirit.

So, we either affirm the Trinity or we a) deny the unity of God or b) deny the revelation of God.

2) Barth makes similar points about the problems of subordinationism and modalism at the end of chapter 10. “All Subordinationism,” he says,

rests on the intention of making the One who reveals Himself there the kind of subject we ourselves are, a creature whose Thouness has limits we can survey, grasp and master, which can be objectified, in the face of which the I can assert itself. Note well that according to Subordinationist teaching even the Father, who is supposedly thought of as the Creator, is in fact dragged into the creaturely sphere. According to this view His relation to the Son and Spirit is that of idea to manifestation. Standing in this comprehensible relation, he shows Himself to be an entity that can be projected and dominated by the I. Subordinationism finally means the denial of revelation, the drawing of divine subjectivity into human subjectivity, and by way of polytheism and the isolation of man with himself in his own world in which there is finally no Thou and therefore no Lord. It was against this possibility that the Church was striking when it rejected Arianism and ever form of subordinationism.

The key point here is that subordinationism ultimately denies God’s Lordship in His revelation. In subordinationism, divine subjectivity – which means divine control and lordship – is subordinated to human subjectivity. Man is left with a multiplicity of gods – the high god and the subordinate god – and ultimately left alone with himself, with other creatures, even if there is a really great creature come from God. Man is left without a Lord.

Barth makes it clear that the battle with Arianism was not a battle over philosophical details; it was a battle to affirm the lordship of the Lord.

On modalism, of which Barth is sometimes accused, he makes similar points. We are not to see a “true God beyond these three moments in a higher being in which He is not Father, Son and Spirit.” God’s economy is not foreign to His essence. Modalism is the path of nihilism:

If we hasten past the One who according to the biblical witness addresses us in threefold approach as a Thou we can only rush into the void. Modalism finally entails a denial of God. Our God and only our God, namely, the God who makes Himself ours in His revelation is God. The relativising of this God which takes place in the doctrine of a real God beyond the revealed God implies a relativising, i.e., a denial of the one true God. Here, too, there is no Thou, no Lord. Here, too, man clearly wants to get behind God, namely, behind God as He really shows and gives Himself, and therefore behind what He is, for the two are one and the same. Here, too, we have an objectifying of God Here, too, the divine subjectivity is sucked up into the human subjectivity which enquires about a God that does not exist. Here too, but this time by way of mysticism, man finally finds himself alone with himself in his own world. This possibility, which in its root and crown is the same as the first, is what the Church wanted to guard against when it rejected Sabellianism and every form of Modalism.

3) But now, a problem, at least the appearance of a problem. God is, Barth repeatedly insists, as He reveals Himself. But Barth also hesitates to read the relations expressed in the economic Trinity into the ontological Trinity. The relations as revealed are comprehensible, but these relations as revealed, precisely insofar as they are comprehensible, “do not signify the last word in the hidden essence of God, and the distinctions in God Himself cannot rest in these distinctions.”

In reality, there is only an “analogy” between the relations expressed in the economy and the “genetic relations” or “relations of origin” that exist ontologically within the divine essence. Barth admits that the relations expressed in the economy provide a hint of ontology, but it is only a hint:

There is an analogy – we recall our exposition of the doctrine of relations in this regard – between the terms Father, Son and Spirit along with the other formulations of this triad in revelation on the one side, and on the other side the three divine modes of being which consist in the different relations of origin and in which we have come to know the truly incomprehensible eternal distinctions in God. In these analogies, which are not present in the world like the alleged vestigia trinitatis but which have been set up in the world by revelation, and by which the mystery is not as it were abandoned and solved but rather denoted, and denoted precisely as a mystery, we have the truth of the triunity as it is assigned and appropriate to us. We shall not overestimate this truth. If we did, if we confused the analogy with the thing itself, if we equated the distinctions that are comprehensible to us with those that are not, in other words, if we thought we had comprehended the essence of God in comprehending His word, we should be plunged at once into the error of tritheism.

Barth appeals to the doctrine of appropriations to explain how, in the comprehensible revealed relations of the persons, they seem to act as individual personalities: ” Per appropriationem this act or this attribute must now be given prominence in relation to this or that mode of being in order that this can be described as such. But only per appropriationem may this happen, and in no case, therefore, to the forgetting or denying of God’s presence in all His modes of being, in His total being and act even over against us.”

From this, it seems clear that Barth’s concern with a simple equation of the comprehensible relations of the economy and the incomprehensible relations of the ontological Trinity arises from his desire to affirm the unity of God, his fear of tritheism, and his affirmation of the axiom opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt.

Barth’s point is challenging, since no matter how earnestly one wishes to affirm Rahner’s Rule (“the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity, and the immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity”), we create the gap of “analogy” between the two. I would want to explore how the Spirit is “dovelike,” but I concede that the dove is only an analogy to the Spirit, that the Spirit is not a dove, and that the Spirit is more un-dovelike than dovelike.

Yet this creates some tensions in Barth’s Trinitarianism. How does he know what features of the economic relations pertain to the economy and which don’t? More precisely, if the name “Father, Son and Spirit” is only “analogous” to the “different relations of origins” of the “truly incomprehensible eternal distinctions of God,” how do we know in what ways they are disanalogous?

Jesus speaks to the Father: Is that “analogous to” an eternal communication between Father and Son? In what way? Or is “communication between Father and Son” an analogy for an incomprehensible noncommunicative something that takes place between Father and Son in their eternal life?

One way to handle this is to filter the economy through attributes of classical theism: Whatever in the economy is incompatible with God’s simplicity, eternity, immutability is disanalogous with the ontological Trinity. That solves some problems: The Father begets the Son, but, as Athanasius says, not temporally; if God begets a Son, the begetting must be eternal.

But it doesn’t solve other problems. Is communication between Father and Son violate classical attributes? How can we know? Besides, it appears that we are given some non-economic pathway to knowing God. The incarnate Son talks to the Father; how can we sort through what is analogous and what disanalogous unless we have some access to the relation of Father and Son other than the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ speech to His Father?

It appears that Barth needs an understanding of the ontological Trinity by which to measure the economy, but that understanding comes by some other path than the economy.

Besides, I’m suspicious that problems in Barth’s doctrine of creation surfaces here, for he seems to be claiming that the creation is incapable of revealing God accurately, truthfully.

If all Barth means is that the economic Trinity is revealed in a way that is accessible to creatures, I’m with him.The revelation of God in creation, and the created history of redemption, don’t reveal God exhaustively, but they give true and adequate for its purposes, since the creation was designed to be a bearer of this revelation. If all he insists on is that creatures don’t know the Trinity in the way that the Trinity knows the Trinity, I stay with him and am content cheerfully to remain ignorant of God’s knowledge of Himself.

But I sense that he’s saying more: That for Barth the creation is somehow an obstacle to the revelation of God. This runs counter to much of what Barth says elsewhere (that we encounter God Himself in His revelation), but I dare to suggest that it’s not impossible that there are inconsistencies in Barth.