As someone who works with a lot of biblical language, the status of God-talk is of obvious interest; as a student at Princeton Seminary, the natural conversation partners for matters like this are folks steeped in 20th-century German dialectical trajectory. So: I’ve been reading some Thiselton, some Bultmann, some Hector, some blogs.
All this falls woefully outside my expertise. Help me out: expand or correct some of these for me. Do the following sound somewhat right, babied down as they are – admittedly fusing and confusing Barth and Bultmann? I own that my understanding of how to avoid objectification is far shabbier than why it ought to be avoided.
“Objectification” is the description of God as an object amongst other objects, i.e., with univocal language as one would use of any other reality.
Objectification is to be rejected because it
- forecloses God’s “infinite qualitative difference”;
- makes knowledge of God attainable through some other means than by God’s own self-revelation:
- thus offending against the epistemological corollary of justification by faith alone: objectification means that humans can reach God naturally somehow
- that is, objectification denies that God’s revelation is identical to Godself: objectification thus implicitly posits a God behind the revealed God (aka Jesus Christ)
- i.e., objectification permits a general foundationalism, a natural theology
- objectification subjects the knowledge of God to possession, and consequently, to manipulation
Objectification is to be avoided by
- dialectics, i.e., tacking from thesis to antithesis such that the natural inadequacy of language for God is given full play
- analogical language: speaking of God only with language that God has authorized and/or delegated to describe God
- namely, in the unique history of Jesus Christ (???)
- apparently, by using a lot of language like “invasion” and “event” and “act” that allegedly through its punctiliar rather than extended spatiotemporal metaphors keeps God-talk sufficiently alienated from ordinary talk to safeguard God’s transcendence/freedom
Avoiding objectification necessarily means
- demythologization, i.e., recognizing that biblical representations of God are mythical; they objectify God according to their specific, historically parochial cultural idioms. Consequently, these must be recognized as such and “translated” somehow (rendered such as to address humankind in its present [presumably also local] self-understanding)
- e.g., avoiding objectification means rejecting a realistic, future eschatology, because, besides belonging to an antiquated cosmology, such a postulate makes knowledge of God’s activity accessible, stable, and possessable (rather than identical to God's paradoxical veiled unveiling in Jesus Christ) ??
There's nothing wrong with understanding God as an object, as long as we remain bound to the actual God as actual object, and we understand that the study of this object is the study of an (if not "the") uniquely autonomous subject. This is a difference, I think, between Barth's theological science and Bultmann's hermeneutic one. But it also gives demythologization a basis and a direction.
ReplyDeleteYou've said something quite pointedly correct: "... with univocal language as one would use of any other reality." The problem is that God is the only reality of which we may, can, and should use univocal language, at which point we become obliged to use equivocal language for every other reality. But until we work phenomenologically with the phenomena of existence, we really will try to use univocal language for our understanding of creaturely reality. Which sticks us with this problem when we then try to speak univocally of God. Which is that you can't add God's reality to the world without equivocating somewhere.
I initially took this post as partially a send-up, and a funny one at that, but on a second reading I'm thinking it's more or less serious. Correct?
ReplyDeleteAnyhow, for it to be funny to me, it had to get a lot basically right. Yeah, you fuse Barth and Bultmann quite a bit--I'll pass over that. A couple things:
This--"apparently, by using a lot of language like “invasion” and “event” and “act” that allegedly through its punctiliar rather than extended spatiotemporal metaphors keeps God-talk sufficiently alienated from ordinary talk to safeguard God’s transcendence/freedom"--was what made me think you were satirizing. Because, of course, the point of God-talk is maximal alienation from normal talk. And what God really wants us to do is spend our time trying to safeguard his freedom--that's not absurdly presumptuous or anything--and the best way to do that is slightly different metaphors.
The bit on analogy is stated in a way that is slightly confusing to me. Are you claiming that this approach broadly authorizes a certain view of analogy, or forecloses on it? To push this in the direction of what Mr. Frost says, God does actually present himself as an object. I'm not sure how Jesus Christ himself, in his own life and history, is in any way an analogy--but of course he was, for us, an object, hence the whole crucifixion thing. The trick is that we are always his objects as well.
But here we can become far too worried about prolegomena. I am extremely wary of the "No theology for you till you finish your Heidegger" approach, though that is often a fair description of what you mean to get at here.
Regarding eschatology, the key word there is "realistic." Given that what comes in Jesus Christ is entirely new, I haven't the foggiest what could be realistic about it. Real, certainly. And it seems to involve a dead body having life in it again. Vivid, perhaps, but unqualifiedly un-realistic, insofar as this happens outside the law.
"More or less serious" would be about right, Adam -- definitely this was tongue-in-cheek, but with some real questions in there for this approach (if Barth-Bultmann can be treated as such, which is probably too sloppy for much useful discussion). As for analogy, Jesus Christ is not one: but I gather that on this line of thinking, the analogical language we use of God is authorized somehow by the unique history of Jesus. Good thoughts on prolegomena, Adam, and on the difference between B & B, Matthew.
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