Abstract
How does Christian speech confess “God as God”? That is, given that we know God at all only through God’s gracious condescension toward us, how may we trace this knowledge to its source in such a way as to properly honor God’s otherness from us? These are the questions that animate Tyler Wittman’s dense and skillful investigation of the God–world relation in the theologies of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth. His concern is to chart a course for theology that safeguards two biblically warranted affirmations: (1) Knowledge of God is to be sought nowhere else but in God’s activity toward us through the works of creation, reconciliation, and redemption, and (2) the very gratuitous and merciful nature of these works necessarily evokes our confession of God’s perfection above and apart from them. Taking up each theologian in turn, W. frames his inquiry as an investigation into the “self-correspondence of God,” centering his analysis on how each theologian renders the relationship between theology’s formal and material objects.
W. argues that both Aquinas and Barth successfully prevent God from being reduced to God’s activity for us, while also refraining from overstepping the theologian’s noetic bounds by veering into unwarranted speculation. However, their accounts of God’s self-correspondence differ substantially, guided as they are by different metaphysical instincts. The upshot is that for Aquinas the object of theology is God in God’s own self, whereas for Barth theology’s object is nothing other than God’s relationship to the world. This means that Barth is less successful at correlating God’s external acts to God’s internal being than he is at correlating God’s external acts to God’s inner self-determination to be our God. W. argues on this basis that something like Aquinas’s metaphysics is needed in order to give substance to our confession of God’s non-dependence on the world.
The irenic tone of the work is a reflection of its excellence as a piece of constructive theology. At every step of his argument, W. resists drawing hasty conclusions or trading in caricatures of either theologian’s constructive moves. Moreover, he takes pains to distinguish different levels and kinds of assertions and the aims that underlie them, so as not to falsely attribute to either theologian conclusions that may suggest themselves in isolated moments of analysis. These traits are refreshing in a field better known for its polemical tone. More to the point, W.’s interpretive restraint assists him to push past facile answers toward deeper divergences between Aquinas’s and Barth’s theological thought-worlds.
One of the fruits of the book is that it reframes the intra-Barthian dispute over Trinity and election within Barth’s concern for God’s internal and external self-correspondence. W.’s claim is that among Barth’s chief concerns in Church Dogmatics II is ridding the doctrine of God of all hints of nominalism, and this ought (as he implies but does not state) to impact the way that this debate is handled. Given Barth’s safeguarding of an “ontic reserve” beyond God’s turning toward us (271), W.’s account appears to prioritize God’s eternal triune nature over election, while still attesting to election as God’s free self-determination. Given this, I was not convinced by W.’s suggestion that questions over the ontological priority of Trinity or election were only “tangentially” related to the current work (225). Although the wisdom of deferring that debate until settling the question regarding God’s self-consistency is clear, the consequences of W.’s argument bear directly upon the ongoing debates, and the reader would have been better served by W. naming those consequences more directly, not least of all for the clarity it would have brought to W.’s own constructive statements.
W.’s study would have benefited from a fuller interrogation of the nature of divine freedom, a theme he addresses more directly with regard to Barth (162–70, 239–43) than to Aquinas (69–70, 86–91). W. seems to commend Barth’s appeal to a divine freedom that is secured by speaking counterfactually of the possibility of God’s having chosen not to elect without any loss to God’s perfection. In his treatment of Aquinas, W. typically speaks not of God’s freedom not to create, but of God’s “hypothetical necessity” to create (a concept which bears further unpacking), but even there, W. does not hold back entirely: God’s freedom for Aquinas is such that “even after having created God could cease to hold all things in being and reduce them to nothingness without loss to his perfectly subsistent goodness in himself” (88–89). W. does not adequately address the question of how, on either Barth’s terms or Aquinas’s, the absolutely self-satisfied God can turn outward to will another (even if that moment is secondary only in a logical sense, 267), nor how such a movement could be anything other than voluntarist, being in no way entailed by God’s prior judgment of the good. Despite these unanswered questions, W.’s work brings a welcome fresh perspective to debates over the doctrine of God. Displaying the virtues of clarity, precision, and charity, it is bound to be of great interest to all those engaged in Thomist–Barthian dialogue, and, indeed, to anyone concerned about truthfully articulating God’s relationship to the world.