Freedom, Necessity, and the Knowledge of God: In Conversation with Karl Barth and Thomas F. Torrance

## Preface ix ix in his analysis by relying on Einstein's view of the relationship between geometry and physics. Chapter 4 is a crucial chapter because in it I illustrate the enormous difference it makes if and when theologians espouse a scientific theology which Torrance rightly claims must be controlled cognitively by our relation with God in obedience to his reality and self-giving in his Word and Spirit. That means faith is not just a virtue that we cultivate in an effort to find God and live good Christian lives. Rather, faith really means knowledge of the truth which comes to us from God in our encounter with Jesus himself here and now as the risen, ascended and coming Lord through the power of his Holy Spirit. That means certainly one cannot know who God is without a conceptual relation with his incarnate Son who alone enables our knowledge of God the Father here and now. This chapter demonstrates with some power how different Torrance's view of grace, faith, and revelation is by contrasting his understanding of these theological categories with the views of Karl Rahner. Rahner is an ideal conversation partner for Torrance on this issue because his entire theology is structured by his view that all knowledge of God, grace, and revelation can be understood best when understood from our unthematic and thus from our nonconceptual knowledge of God, grace, faith, and revelation. I argue that as long as God, revelation, grace, and faith are understood in that way, then in some sense the Holy Spirit becomes confused with the human spirit, and theology loses its objective grounding in acts of God himself who interacts with us in history in his Word and Spirit. Part of the difficulty regarding this issue is that Rahner thinks there is continuity between our transcendental experiences and God, grace, and revelation while Torrance argues that Jesus himself, as the grace and revelation of God in history, discloses to us that because of sin, which was clearly manifest in human rejection of Christ, there is no continuity between us and God that can be found in human experience, whether it be religious or not. That continuity can only be found in and through the Holy Spirit uniting us to Christ as our reconciler and redeemer and thus to the Father in faith. For Torrance, in other words, our minds really need healing so that we might have the mind of Christ and thus know both our sin and our salvation as these are disclosed in the very person and work of Christ himself. But that can only occur through conceptual union with God the Father through faith in his Son which also means through conceptual union with Christ. Therefore, Torrance would certainly reject Rahner's notion of anonymous Christianity as an attempt to present a Christianity without Christ that is akin to the way Paul Tillich attempted the very same thing by confusing knowledge of God with our experiences of depth and our ultimate concerns. This chapter illustrates that if Catholic and Protestant theologians could agree on the importance of conceptual knowledge of God, grace, faith, and revelation, then there could be widespread practical agreement among Christians who then would find their union not directly in magisterial statements of the church or in sets of universal nonconceptual experiences but in Christ himself as the Lord of the church which is his body on earth united to its heavenly head. Preface xii xii three faiths which will never be settled because the truth of Christianity and the truth of Christianity in its unique and indispensable relation to Israel will never be understood apart from the revelation of God to Moses as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In other words, since truth is grounded in the God of the covenant and not at all in anyone's religious viewpoint or religious practice, Christianity cannot be understood at all as one religion among others. When that is attempted, then it is thought that we can find an idea or religious ideal that unites us. The point of the chapter, however, is that since all three faiths appeal to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, then to that extent they all claim to worship the same God. But, as Muslims, Jews, and Christians explain their understanding of God from a religious perspective rather than from the revelation of God attested in the Old and New Testaments, then serious problems arise. To explore this predicament, I consider the views of a Muslim scholar, a Jewish scholar, and a Christian scholar and show that while it may seem reasonable to claim all three faiths are united in a common monotheism, nothing separates them so radically as their commitment to their own version of monotheism. In the end, my argument is that what unites us is the God who acted as the savior of the human race in Jesus Christ himself such that Jews and Muslims are just as dependent on the grace of God at work in Christ for the whole world as Christians are. Thus, any attempt by Christians to claim that theirs is the true religion in itself in comparison with Islam and Judaism, and even in opposition to Islam and Judaism, have missed the point that Christianity's truth is grounded exclusively in grace so that the Church is the locus of true religion only to the extent that Christians live by grace alone. That means they are in no position to think that they are better than either Jews or Muslims since, apart from Christ's forgiving grace, all stand in need of reconciliation that can only come from God the Father through his Son and in the power of his Holy Spirit. Inasmuch as all three faiths appeal to the fact that they should be in solidarity because Jesus taught that we should love God above all and our neighbors as ourselves, there is hope in that the command to love God and neighbor is a command grounded in revelation and not in religion! xiii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Anna Turton, senior editor at Bloomsbury T&T Clark, for being consistently supportive and helpful in bringing this book to publication and in many other ways as well. She is a superb editor. I would also like to thank Sinead O'Connor of Bloomsbury T&T Clark for her assistance with the many technical details related to the publication of this volume. In addition, I am grateful to Iain R. Torrance for reading and commenting on a draft of Chapter 4, for his consistent friendship over many years and his willingness to discuss key theological issues and provide invaluable insight. I am also grateful to Todd Speidell for his interaction and discussion of many important issues related to the theology of Thomas F. Torrance as well as for his support and friendship. I would like to express my gratitude to Alex Irving for his interactions and discussion of Torrance's "new" natural theology. I am grateful to the journal of the Thomas F. Torrance Theological Fellowship, Participatio, for permission to reprint a previously published article entitled "Natural Theology: An Impossible Possibility?, " supplemental volume 4: "Torrance and the Wesleyan Tradition" ( 2018): 148-83 in revised form in what is now Chapter 3. In addition, I wish to acknowledge Paul T. Nimmo and Paul Dafydd Jones for their helpful interactions with regard to a previous and shorter version of what is now Chapter 2. I am grateful to Oxford University Press for permission to reprint the following previously published material: Paul D. Molnar, chapter 42, "Barth and Roman Catholic Theology, " The Oxford Handbook of Karl Barth, ed. Paul Dafydd Jones and Paul T. Nimmo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 670-86. I must also thank the Karl Barth Society of North America for inviting me to speak on the subject of liberation theology in connection with Rubén Rosario Rodríguez's book, Dogmatics after Babel: Beyond the Theologies of Word and Culture at their meeting held in conjunction with the American Academy of Religion in San Diego, California, on November 24, 2019. That brief lecture has developed into what is now Chapter 5. Thanks are also due to the Thomas F. Torrance Theological Fellowship for inviting me to speak on the topic of T. F. Torrance's view of Universalism at its meeting held in conjunction with the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion held in San Francisco, California, on November 18, 2011. That is a previous version of what is now an expanded discussion of Torrance's view of Universalism in Chapter 7 which includes a lengthy discussion of David Bentley Hart's recent book, That All May Be Saved. A revised version of that lecture was first published with the title "Thomas F. Torrance and the problem of universalism, " in The Scottish Journal of Theology 68 (2) (2015): 154-86 and is here reprinted with permission. The original lecture given in San Francisco was recorded and later offered as a video on the website of Grace Communion International. Finally, I am grateful to the Journal Cultural Encounters for permission to reprint the following previously published material: Paul D. Molnar, "Do Christians Worship the Same God as Those from Other God, Freedom, and Necessity 3 3 without the Son. His freedom or aseity in respect of Himself consists in His freedom, not determined by anything but Himself, to be God, and that means to be the Father of the Son. A freedom to be able not to be this would be an abrogation of His freedom. 10 Nonetheless, Barth insists that God's acts of creation and incarnation are not at all demanded by his essence because God's actions are free in the sense that God does not even need his being to be who he is since as God, he already and always simply is who he is as the triune God who loves in freedom: "The freedom in which God exists means that He does not need His own being in order to be who He is: because He already has His own being and is Himself. " 11 Having said this, Barth therefore insisted that it is appropriate to consider what God "might have done" when thinking about the fact that God did not and does not need us but nonetheless freely chose to love us. Thus, Barth maintained that it is only in this antithesis that we can really understand what He has done. In this light one can also see how dubious it is to set the doctrine of the Word of God in the framework of an anthropology. In that case the freedom of the divine purpose for man can be asserted only at a later stage, while it is really denied by the starting-point. 12 These remarks by Barth rule out any idea that in electing us God could be thought to give himself his being as triune. In fact, they rule out any idea at all that God gives himself his being since, as God, he already and eternally is who he is in the freedom and perfection of his act as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and thus as the one who loves. 13 Accordingly, for Barth, in the intertrinitarian life of God the eternal generation of the Son or Logos is, of course the expression of God's love, of His will not to be alone. But it does not follow from this that God could not be God without speaking to us. We undoubtedly understand God's love for man, or in the first instance for any reality distinct from Himself, only when we understand it as free and unmerited love not resting on any need. God would be no less God if He had created no world and no man ... Only when we are clear about this can we estimate what it means that God has actually, though not necessarily, created a world and us, that His love actually, though not necessarily, applies to us. 14 10 Barth, CD I/1, 434, emphasis mine. 11 "Paul D. Molnar discusses issues related to the concepts of freedom and necessity in trinitarian doctrine. He also explores Catholic and Protestant relations by comparing the views of Elizabeth Johnson, Walter Kasper and Karl Barth, as well as relations among Christians, Jews and Muslims by considering whether it is appropriate to claim that all three religions should be understood to be united under the concept of monotheism. He examines current debates concerning Thomas F. Torrance's thinking on natural theology, and what he called a "new" natural theology. Additionally, Molnar discusses the problem of universalism in contemporary theology, focusing on Torrance's views together with some recent discussion by David Bentley Hart, as well as Torrance's view of non-conceptual knowledge of God by comparing his thinking with the views of Karl Rahner. Molnar considers a number of topics - election, natural theology, liberation theology and universalism - that stimulate discussion in the field today"-- Provided by publisher. "Paul D. Molnar discusses issues related to the concepts of freedom and necessity in trinitarian doctrine. He also explores Catholic and Protestant relations by comparing the views of Elizabeth Johnson, Walter Kasper and Karl Barth, as well as relations among Christians, Jews and Muslims by considering whether it is appropriate to claim that all three religions should be understood to be united under the concept of monotheism. He examines current debates concerning Thomas F. Torrance's thinking on natural theology, and what he called a "new" natural theology. Additionally, Molnar discusses the problem of universalism in contemporary theology, focusing on Torrance's views together with some recent discussion by David Bentley Hart, as well as Torrance's view of non-conceptual knowledge of God by comparing his thinking with the views of Karl Rahner. Molnar considers a number of topics - election, natural theology, liberation theology and universalism - that stimulate discussion in the field today"-- Site de l'éditeur Paul D. Molnar discusses issues related to the concepts of freedom and necessity in trinitarian doctrine. He considers the implications of “non-conceptual knowledge of God” by comparing the approaches of Karl Rahner and T. F. Torrance. He also reconsiders T. F. Torrance’s “new” natural theology and illustrates why Christology must be central when discussing liberation theology. Further, he explores Catholic and Protestant relations by comparing the views of Elizabeth Johnson, Walter Kasper and Karl Barth, as well as relations among Christians, Jews and Muslims by considering whether it is appropriate to claim that all three religions should be understood to be united under the concept of monotheism. Finally, he probes the controversial issues of how to name God in a way that underscores the full equality of women and men and how to understand “universalism” by placing Torrance and David Bentley Hart into conversation on that subject. Cover Half Title Title Copyright Contents Preface Acknowledgments 1 God, Freedom, and Necessity: KARL BARTH AND THE CURRENT DISCUSSION 2 Barth and Roman Catholic Theology 3 Karl Barth, Thomas F. Torrance, and the “New” Natural Theology 4 Contrasting Visions: Comparing T. F. Torrance and Karl Rahner on Non-conceptual Knowledge of God 5 Liberation and Theology: A Theological Analysis 6 Language for God: Considering the Difference between “Disclosure Models” and “Picturing Models” in Knowing the Trinity with T. F. Torrance 7 Thomas F. Torrance and David Bentley Hart in Conversation about Universalism 8 Do Christians Worship the Same God as Those from Other Abrahamic Faiths? Select Bibliography Name Index Subject index