Pistis Christou

In the famous Brunner-Barth debate on natural theology, Barth issues a sharp, decisive NO! to Brunner’s attempts to make any place for a natural theology. Brunner tried to make an argument for natural theology from there being a distinction within humans being in God’s image between a remaining formal aspect of the image, while the material aspect of God’s image had been erased from humans due to the fall. If some formal aspect remained, therefore some capacity for natural theology could be retained. However, for Barth, this distinction would not do and he tore into his former friend due to the threat he perceived for making any place in natural theology. While the disagreement strayed into various matters, such as an appropriate understanding of John Calvin, at the end, the distinctive theological question that undergirding the possibility of natural theology is the image of God. However, in the end, I would say both Brunner and Barth were trying to appeal to the wrong idea to make their points about a natural theology because I don’t think the image of God was ever meant to portray any sort of ontological capacity or status, but God’s purpose humanity or, at N.T. Wright commonly refers to, vocation. If humanity being in the image of God is a matter of telos/purpose or vocation, then one would be hard-pressed to determine how a description of epistemic capacities can be derived from what is not ontological but purposive.¹

Furthermore, the apocalyptic school of interpretation of Paul has read the Apostle Paul in light of what they label as “apocalyptic” but, as Wright has argued, are using apocalyptic to describe what are ultimately Barthian readings of Paul. While not wanting to oversimplify what the various proponents such as Martyn, Campbell, etc. or overstate my familiarity with their work, it seems to me that the construe the significance of apocalyptic for Paul and the wider Second-Temple Judaism in terms of a discontinuity with the past, much as Barth wants the revelation of Jesus Christ to be distinct from all other forms of knowledge and justifications.

In short, there is a distinctive pattern within Barthan theologies and exegesis to reject any “a priori” concepts that aids in receiving God’s self-disclosure in Jesus Christ; it is epistemically mistaken to suggest there is any helpful continuity between some other form of knowledge and the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. At the end of the day, Barthian epistemology derives from specific ontologies about God’s image, ontologies of revelation, suggesting we have some clear and precise ontological knowledge about God, whether in terms of ontological affirmation or ontological negation, that shapes the nature and form of theological knowledge about God. The leads, in my opinion, to perceptions of apocalyptic in the Second Temple as some sort of literature and movement that has embedded within it specific ontologies and epistemology.

Now, indeed, there are some similarities between apocalyptic literature and Barthian theological epistemology. What God discloses, either directly or through mediating agents like angels, is often quite portraying as surprising, dramatic, and unlike anything the recipients of revelation would be familiar with. But the cause of the significant difference is the reason for false knowledge in apocalyptic: without overgeneralizing, there is false knowledge because there are hostile forces in the world that distract people’s hearts and minds from the true knowledge of God. Whereas Barthian theology would have skepticism about human knowledge due to ontological concerns about the person’s inability to receive knowledge about God, unless God Himself makes it happen, in apocalyptic discourse the prevailing reason one can not have true knowledge is that there are opposing forces that can mislead and misdirect people to think in the wrong manner. In other words, there are similar, but not the exact same, epistemic concerns but for different ontological reasons: for Barthian theology, it relates to the definition of what it means to be human and ontology of relation and revelation between God and humanity, whereas for apocalyptic it is often entails an ontological of cosmological agents/powers that are in a fight in God.

Now, the Apostle Paul clearly works from within the apocalyptic mindset and discourse at times, although the apocalyptic mindset is not a fixed, unmalleable thing. Rather, it is could use and appropriate for one’s reasonablycontext, so to suggest Paul is “apocalyptic” doesn’t tell us he is using the apocalyptic ideas and discourses in the same manner as they are in the apocalyptic literature. In fact, I would hypothesize that one of the distinctive differences between the Christian tradition in the New Testament and what is labeled as apocalyptic is that novel way the apocalyptic is used and transformed around the person of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. In other words, Jesus and the Spirit do not fit into the apocalyptic mold, but rather the apocalyptic discourses are being fit to the primary datum of the testimony and tradition of Jesus’ death and resurrection and the community’s experience of the out-poured Holy Spirit, but this isn’t a reappropriate of apocalyptic discourse due to a Barthian theology but rather due to my own linguistic theories about how language and discourse shift and function surrounding dramatic events that challenge and defy previous structures of meaning. In other words, I have a more “naturalistic” reason due to my understanding about cognitive structures, events, and language for explaining how the apocalyptic discourses were re-appropriated and that explain how the events of cross and Pentecost can change theological thinking, along with some historical speculation. However, I allow that this “naturalistic” reason is still justifiably exegetically and theological significant also, as it is God’s decisive action that impact the effects of the otherwise natural processes.

Which leads me to my point that I will then use to bring my narrative up to this point together: nature can reveal God when God acts to make nature reflect God’s will as the Truth-maker Creator and Redeemer that silences and contains all other, lesser truth-making powers. The problem with knowledge about God, and particuarly knowledge about God from nature, is that there are other truth-making powers that alter and change way nature functions, such that it makes nature unreliable and misleading to understanding the will of God.

To make my point, I will gratefully appropriate a wonderful metaphor from a friend from my past and colleague, David Hull, but for a somewhat different direction than he originally used it. Imagine a painting from a masterful artist that is on display in a museum. That painting as it is expressed something about the artist, even if it isn’t always immediately clear the full significance of the artwork. Then, imagine some thieves come in, steal it, and malign and destroy it, they pour beer upon it, rip and tear it, and make it look only vaguely like the original painting. Now, whatever knowledge people might gain about the artist is blurred, to the point of any reliable discernability of what they really painted. Because of the opposing actions, one can not readily know anything about what this painting conveying about the mind of the Artist, in and of itself. The conflict between different truth-makers, that alter the truth of what that painting is and conveys, makes reliable knowledge about the Artist impossible. At best, to momentarily shift metaphors, one would be shooting a target in the dark while having a gun that does not have the range to hit the target.

However, say this Artist had created His Masterpiece painting, that was the best, most absolute expression of His distinctive style. Now, with this image in hand, someone else could begin to compare the masterpiece with the defaced work, and begin to make sense of the mess that is the defaced work. With this understanding in tow, the defaced painted can begin to be carefully and discerningly understood in relationship to the Masterpiece, and so one could begin to use the otherwise defaced artwork to make sense of the Artist’s intentions and purposes, even if it is still somewhat obscured in some fashion and not absolutely clear. And despite the conflicting truth-makers for the defaced painting, the Truth-maker has created a Masterpiece that can be used to interpret the other painting; the Artist even protected it from other thieves who tried to destroy it but He immediately found it and restored it in three days.

This metaphor is used to make a point. God’s handiwork in nature, including us as human persons, are not on their own reliable conveyers of knowledge about God because there are other truth-making forces, whether one considers is demonic powers, political powers, people’s own free will choices, etc., that can distort what nature originally pointed to. One might manage to see some signpost here, some glimpse there, but none of these appearances that stem from God have the proper sense of context to make real sense of what they are about. While we can see God’s style, we can not see God’s meaning and purpose behind it. But, in Jesus Christ, and also the Holy Spirit, God has entirely limited other, hostile truth-making powers, so that the will of God can then become discerned and seen throughout creation. But one must have the hermeneutical key of God’s own self-caused disclosure that no other force mars of distorts in order to make sense of the rest.

Meanwhile, one might say it is possible that the nature of the Masterpiece/Jesus Christ could be identified in a vague way by comparing to the defaced works/creation. What little can be made from the style of nature can be used to identify God’s style in Jesus Christ, but we can only know the significance of the style once we see it in context of Jesus Christ.

So, this is what I think is a more fruitful metaphor, analytic framework, and theological paradigm for understanding the epistemic framework of the apocalyptic discourse used in relationship to Jesus Christ for the New Testament, particularly the Apostle Paul. If valid, there are many implications for this framework, such as the relationship between theological hermeneutics and theological epistemology, etc. But at the end of the day, this theology doesn’t entail us relying upon certain ontologies that are more veiled and hard to a get a grasp of and define, such as what it means to be human to be in a (revelatory) relationship to God, but an ontology of agents and causation that is a) more intuitive to understand when you think about it, b) more closely resembles human experience, c) can allow a more synergistic understanding of salvation as in Wesleyan theology, and d) can be circumstantially brought into coherence with other forms of knowledge like empiricism, while e) retaining a role for mystery amidst the conflict, f) assigning reliable knowledge only to God’s action who make sit possible, g) fitting within the apocalyptic-discursive context of the New Testament, h) and employing an ontology of agency which seems to be more primary throughout the Scriptures.

Put differently, given this agentic focus contained in my implicitly personal usage of the Truth-maker ontology, this is a more subject-based epistemology that I referred to in the past, that avoids the problematic distinction between nature and revelation that object-epistemologies directed towards theology have created.

1. One could reasonable infer from human purposes to a prescriptive epistemology of how people should come to know God, but the flavor of the Barth-Brunner debate was more descriptive rather than merely prescriptive.