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

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul D. Molnar
Keyword(s):  
Karl Barth ◽  
Knowledge Of God

Thomas F. Torrance and the problem of universalism

2015 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 164-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul D. Molnar
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Karl Barth ◽  
Objective Knowledge ◽  
Salvation History ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
Universal Salvation ◽  
Existential Knowledge ◽  
Free Grace ◽  
The Voice ◽  
The Trinity

AbstractWhile Karl Barth and Thomas F. Torrance both believed in the possibility of universal salvation, they also rejected the idea that we could make a final determination about this possibility prior to the second coming of Jesus Christ. Hence, both theologians rejected what may be called a doctrine of universal salvation in the interest of respecting God's freedom to determine the outcome of salvation history in accordance with the love which was revealed in and through the death and resurrection of Jesus himself. This article explores Torrance's reasons for holding that ‘the voice of the Catholic Church . . . throughout all ages has consistently judged universalism a heresy for faith and a menace to the Gospel’. Torrance expressly believed in the ‘universality of Christ's saving work’ but rejected ‘universalism’ and any idea of ‘limited atonement’. He considered both of these views to be rationalistic approaches which ignore the need for eschatological reserve when thinking about what happens at the end when Christ comes again and consequently tend to read back logical necessities into the gospel of free grace. Whenever this happens, Torrance held that the true meaning of election as the basis for Christian hope is lost and some version of limited atonement or determinism invariably follows. The ultimate problem with universalism then, from Torrance's perspective, can be traced to a form of Nestorian thinking with respect to christology and to a theoretical and practical separation of the person of Christ from his atoning work for us. What I hope to show in this article is that those who advance a ‘doctrine of universalism’ as opposed to its possibility also have an inadequate understanding of the Trinity. Interestingly, Torrance objected to the thinking of John A. T. Robinson and Rudolf Bultmann because both theologians, in their own way, separated knowledge of God for us from knowledge of who God is ‘in himself’. Any such thinking transfers our knowledge of God and of salvation from the objective knowledge of God given in revelation to a type of symbolic, mythological or existential knowledge projected from one's experience of faith and this once again opens the door to both limited atonement and to universalism. Against this Torrance insisted that we cannot speak objectively about what God is doing for us unless we can speak analogically about who God is in himself.

Barth and the divine perfections

2014 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 450-463 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Sonderegger
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Karl Barth ◽  
Church Dogmatics ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Divine Perfections ◽  
Radical Claim ◽  
Act And Being

AbstractColin Gunton advanced the radical claim that Christians have univocal knowledge of God. Just this, he said in Act and Being, was the fruit of Christ's ministry and passion. Now, was Gunton right to find this teaching in Karl Barth – or at least, as an implication of Barth's celebrated rejection of ‘hellenist metaphysics’? This article aims to answer this question by examining Gunton's own claim in Act and Being, followed by a closer inspection of Barth's analysis of the doctrine of analogy in a long excursus in Church Dogmatics II/1.Contrary to some readings of Barth, I find Barth to be remarkably well-informed about the sophisticated terms of contemporary Roman Catholic debate about analogy, including the work of G. Sohngen and E. Pryzwara. Barth's central objection to the doctrine of analogy in this section appears to be the doctrine's reckless division (in Barth's eyes) of the Being of God into a ‘bare’ God, the subject of natural knowledge, and the God of the Gospel, known in Jesus Christ. But such reckless abstraction cannot be laid at the feet of Roman theologians alone! Barth extensively examines, and finds wanting, J. A. Quenstedt's doctrine of analogy, and the knowledge of God it affords, all stripped, Barth charges, of the justifying grace of Jesus Christ. From these pieces, Barth builds his own ‘doctrine of similarity’, a complex and near-baroque account, which seeks to ground knowledge of God in the living act of his revelation and redemption of sinners. All this makes one tempted to say that Gunton must be wrong in his assessment either of univocal predication or of its roots in the theology of Karl Barth.But passages from the same volume of the Church Dogmatics make one second-guess that first conclusion. When Barth turns from his methodological sections in volume II/1 to the material depiction of the divine perfections, he appears to lay aside every hesitation and speak as directly, as plainly and, it seems, as ‘univocally’ as Gunton could ever desire. Some examples from the perfection of divine righteousness point to Barth's startling use of frank and direct human terms for God's own reality and his unembarrassed use of such terms to set out the very ‘heart of God’.Yet things are never quite what they seem in Barth. A brief comparison between Gunton's univocal predication and Barth's own use of christological predication reveals some fault-lines between the two, and an explanation, based on Barth's own doctrine of justification, is offered in its place.

‘Thy word is truth’: the role of faith in reading scripture theologically with Karl Barth

2009 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-92
Author(s):  
Paul D. Molnar
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
General Trend ◽  
Karl Barth ◽  
Paul Tillich ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Justification By Faith ◽  
Doctrine Of The Trinity ◽  
The Trinity

AbstractFollowing the thinking of Karl Barth, this article demonstrates how and why reading the Bible in faith is necessary in order to understand the truth which is and remains identical with God himself speaking to us in his Word and Spirit. After developing how faith, grace, revelation and truth are connected in Barth's theology by being determined by who God is in Jesus Christ, this article explains why Barth was essentially correct in claiming that we cannot know God truly through a study of religious experience but only through Christ himself and thus through the Spirit. I illustrate that for Barth the truth of religion simply cannot be found in the study of religion itself but only through revelation. That is why he applied the doctrine of justification by faith both to knowledge of God and to reading scripture. In light of what is then established, I conclude by briefly exploring exactly why the thinking of Paul Tillich, and three theologians who follow the general trend of Tillich's thinking (John Haught, John A. T. Robinson and S. Mark Heim), exemplify the correctness of Barth's analysis of the relation between religion and revelation, since each theologian is led to an understanding of who God is, how we reach God and how the doctrine of the Trinity should be understood that actually undermines Barth's emphasis on the fact that all knowledge of God and all doctrine should be dictated solely by who God is in Jesus Christ.

Karl Barth’s Reception of Thomas Aquinas

2021 ◽  
pp. 467-482
Author(s):  
Kenneth Oakes
Keyword(s):  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
Karl Barth ◽  
Summa Theologiae ◽  
Catholic Theology ◽  
Analogy Of Being ◽  
Doctrine Of God ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
The Relationship

Four different pictures of Thomas Aquinas can be found in the works of Karl Barth: Thomas as representative of Roman Catholic theology; Thomas as forerunner to positions later adopted by the Reformers and the Reformed scholastics; Thomas as an ally in countering aspects of Roman Catholic theology that Barth deems problematic; and Thomas as a common doctor of the Church. Additionally, Barth agrees with Thomas on many issues regarding the Trinity, the doctrine of God, the relationship between God and the world, providence, and predestination, while he disagrees on with Thomas on issues related to the natural knowledge of God, the relationship between nature and grace, and the analogy of being. Barth’s interpretation of Thomas Aquinas’ theology was influenced by Erik Peterson and Erich Przywara, and his main sources for understanding Thomas were the Summa contra gentiles and the Summa theologiae.

Karl Barth's Christological Basis for the State and Political Praxis

1980 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 223-238
Author(s):  
R. E. Hood
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
The State ◽  
Karl Barth ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
Central Factor ◽  
False Start ◽  
Political Praxis ◽  
The Demonic

It would appear that one is an apostle of the obvious when speaking of Karl Barth's ‘christological basis’ for the state. According to G. C. Berkouwer, amongst others, to say Karl Barth is to mean simultaneously ‘christocentricism’, especially when speaking of Barth after his deliberate reversal in his dogmatics published in 1932—the date Barth published his Kirchliche Dogmatik after he discontinued writing his Christliche Dogmatik begun in 1927, which he later described as ‘my well-known false start’. But even Berkouwer, who criticises Barth for underplaying the demonic effects and influences of evil through his emphasis on grace, admits that Barth's ‘christocentricism’ has epistemological emphases not found in other theologians:… Barth underscores with increasing emphasis that all knowledge of God is exclusively determined by and is dependent upon the knowledge of Jesus Christ, and that this is not simply a matter of our epistemology, but that it is directly related to the nature of God in Jesus Christ who is the dominant and all-controlling central factor in the doctrines of election, creation, and reconciliation. Only in Jesus Christ do we meet the true and decisive revelation of God.

Barth on Revelation

1960 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 366-382 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. H. L. Parker
Keyword(s):  
Natural Theology ◽  
Karl Barth ◽  
Evangelical Church ◽  
Church Dogmatics ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
The Will ◽  
The University ◽  
Evangelical Theology ◽  
The Church

In 1938 and 1939 Karl Barth delivered the Gifford Lectures in the University of Aberdeen. According to the will of the founder, these lectures were established for the ‘promoting, advancing, teaching and diffusing’ of the study of natural theology. But Barth was, as he made plain on receiving the invitation, ‘an avowed opponent of all natural theology’. Three years earlier he had fiercely attacked his former theological associate, Emil Brunner, on this same question. He had then said of natural theology: ‘It has to be rejected a limine—right at the outset. Only the theology and the church of the antichrist can profit from it. The Evangelical Church and Evangelical theology would only sicken and die of it.’ When therefore he was asked to give the Gifford Lectures he was in a quandary. The way in which he resolved the problem has usually been treated, half-humorously, as an ingenious piece of theological juggling. In fact, however, when we consider it in relation to his attitude to natural theology in his controversy with Brunner and to his treatment of it in Church Dogmatics II.I, on the knowledge of God, and indeed against the background of the whole of his life's work, we can see that in his solution of this difficulty there is simply the same attitude sharpened to a clear-cut issue. What he did was to jettison natural theology completely and give an exposition of its opposite, the theology of revelation.

Neediness: the anthropology of Karl Barth

2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. Dorman
Keyword(s):  
Theological Anthropology ◽  
Karl Barth ◽  
Church Dogmatics ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
Human Need ◽  
Christian Witness ◽  
Constitutive Element

AbstractThe article argues that Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics presents human ‘neediness’ as the constitutive element of his theological anthropology. Since this element has had little notice in Barth scholarship, the article focuses on describing the consistent reiteration of this theme in theologically substantive locations throughout the Dogmatics. It begins with Barth's observation that the emergence of humanity on the sixth day discloses humans to be ‘the neediest of all creation’. Barth elaborates the dimensions of human neediness in his discussion of ‘the readiness of humanity for God’, propounding the human need for God as the precondition of knowledge of God that is in actuality undercut by the sin that denies any such neediness. Barth thus describes a potential ‘blessed neediness’ and an actual ‘wretched neediness’ that together define the glory and the tragedy of all that is human, and which inform not only Barth's epistemology and hamartiology, but also his accounts of christology, forgiveness, redemption, worship and Christian witness.

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