Having now read all five responses to The Perfectly Simple Triune God (PSTG) I must first express my gratitude to each of the respondents for their careful engagement with my work. As readers will discover, each offers thoughtful analyses and critical reflections, raising different but overlapping concerns based on their specific areas of interest. It was my decision to respond first to Erin Kidd’s review because she provides a succinct overview of the book laying out so well the main argument that if readers have not had the opportunity to read it they can be assured that her summary is nearly flawless. I see what I wrote in her review. That is a remarkable achievement because many reviews often criticize the author for the book he or she should have written, one that usually lines up with the reviewer’s body of work, rather than the work that was written. (I have written a few of those reviews myself as more than one author has informed me.) Charitable, concise and accurate in its description, Kidd’s review goes to the core in what matters most and in what remains undone.

What Matters Most

Kidd begins her review noting that although I first interpret Thomas the interpretation is followed by the sources that lead to his teaching on God (chap. 2) and how the Reformers received his teaching (chap. 3). What matters most is that my argument is not to defend Thomas, but to argue that there is a coherent, stable, Christian teaching on the doctrine of God that emerges from Scripture, is found among the church fathers, is passed on through Augustine and Dionysius, concisely summarized for beginners in Thomas, and received favorably by the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Reformers. This “traditional answer” is first questioned from the eighteenth century on—with the important exception of the seventeenth-century Reformed theologian Biddle and the Socinians.

I recognize that arguing that there is a coherent, traditional teaching on the doctrine of God will not be universally applauded. There are differences between Augustine and Dionysius; Thomas, Scotus, and Ockham; Owen and Arminius. My argument is that the differences are not to be found in the answer, but in the questions to which the answer was put. I think this should be noncontroversial. One will search in vain for rejections of divine simplicity and its entailments among these authors. Likewise, none are afflicted with cognitive dissonance in correlating simplicity, Trinity and the confession that God is love as are so many modern theologians. The controversial claim, as we shall see in Jennifer Sanders’s question to me, is my claim that the “primary” purpose for simplicity in Thomas’s teaching is to answer the question how do we best speak of the Triune mystery. Its primary purpose is not to speak of God’s relationship to creation, but the truth about God in se, what Thomas refers to as “speculative theology.” Only when simplicity first functions “in divinis” as an aid to set forth the Triune processions can it then be used to describe the God-creation relation.

It is the perfectly simple Triune God who relates to creation, not the simple, omnipotent, omniscient God. That matters, as Kidd notes, for a proper understanding of creation. It hinders doctrines of predestination that would posit an absolute decree prior to creation or redemption promulgated by a deity who may be simple but need not be Triune. Thomas states at ST I 32.1 ad 3 that knowledge of God is necessary for us to think well about creation and salvation. First, we think well about the perfectly, simple Triune God and then we can do the same with respect to creation and redemption. I find this important dogmatically even if, as I suggest, Thomas himself did not always attend to its significance. Arminius becomes important for the story because he construes the relationship between the perfectly, simple Triune God and creation as a communication of goodness that avoids making God the author of damnation.

Kidd also notes the central place of theophany in my apology for the perfectly, simple Triune God. Many of the criticisms of the traditional answer are that it depends on a putative Greek “substance metaphysics” against the more dynamic Jewish and Christian Scripture, and thus it distorts the biblical teaching on God. I learned from Janet Soskice to think about theophany and transfiguration as the way God “appears” in Scripture, revealing to us that God is both apart from, and mediated through, material reality. I had much of this work completed before Katherine Sonderegger’s first volume of her Systematic Theology appeared, but her reflections on “Holy Fire” helped me formulate how “metaphysics” and Scripture work in tandem, maintaining the centrality of divine love.

What Remains to Be Done

Kidd raises an important question about my use of divine theophany and its correlation to Scripture. I defend a “speculative” theology whereby the doctrine of God serves no interest because God is an end in God’s self and not a means to something else. God is to be enjoyed not used. Bauerschmidt raises a question about my use of the term “speculative” that I will deal with later. Although it differs from Bauerschmidt’s, Kidd raises a concern about it as well. She writes, “God does not appear to Moses in order to be enjoyed, but to tell him to go back to Egypt and face the Pharaoh. Between the burning bush and the pillar of fire is a dramatic story of political liberation. How do these two things—divine transcendence and human liberation—relate? Do we see the holy fire of the transcendent God in the liberation of people as well as in the bush and the pillar?” Her question made me wonder whether I had neglected the drama in setting forth the drama’s Author? PSTG is a work in “speculative theology,” attending to who and what God is without focusing on what God has done / is doing for us. The so-called Melanchthonian epistemology that we cannot speak of God without speaking of God pro nobis is neither Melanchthon nor a dominant Protestant approach to God and I attempted to be vigilant in rejecting it. We can and must speak of God in God’s self as if God were not first and foremost Creator and Redeemer of us. This speculative theology allows us to see that the God who speaks through the angel of the Lord in the burning bush, goes before Israel in the pillar of fire, and illuminates Christ in the transfiguration is the same God without beginning or end. If we did not know who or what God is, we could not make these identifications. Only when God is this God can the dramatic narrative unfold without the narrative becoming greater than God, reducing God to one actor in the story among others. The problem, of course, a problem Thomas named so well, is that even though theology is primarily a speculative discipline attending to God without attending to human or God’s operations, human creatures are “the works of God” (see ST Ia 4). How then can the results of operations (we creatures) conceive God as if they were not? The answer is we cannot; we cannot act as if we have God’s own viewpoint, as if we conceive God apart from practical theology, from God’s operations. Speculative without practical theology is closed to us. But we can abstract from our location and ask what are the conditions that make it possible. This metaphysical and theological question has been unduly neglected and scorned in contemporary theology. It does not require a theological division of labor between reason and faith, but it welcomes all who have asked this question and tries to attend to their answers, including philosophers. Those answers, however, can only be sufficient when they also attend to the dramatic narrative Kidd calls to our attention. The speculative and practical are not an either-or. The God who liberates can liberate because what God is, is more than just a god for us.

Kidd then asks a related question, “But I wonder how we resolve the tension of God being both simple and one with whom we can argue. In what way can God be called upon to remedy a situation if God does not act upon the world as a cause? Does God intervene in the world, and if so, how? In other words, for what can we pray and hope?” This too is an important question, and one that is raised by others. Howsare, Bauerschmidt and Sanders also ask why I critique God as cause and I’ll address that more fully in future installments. Suffice it for now to say this: on the one hand, God is the “cause” of all that is if we use the term, like all terms about God, analogically. On the other, “cause” can assume God is an actual entity among others, as Whitehead put it, and thus causality renders God intelligible rather than vice versa (see PSTG, 185). “Causality” creates all kinds of problems downstream from Thomas that I don’t think can be ignored. Here I follow Victor Preller, David Burrell, Rowan Williams, Herbert McCabe, David Bentley Hart and Katherine Sonderegger in finding “causality” too weak to set forth God’s intimate relation with creation (see PSTG, 60, 217, 301). God does not intervene in creation as an external cause forcing events to be other than what they would be by their own movement. God is less “cause” of all that is and more its donating source, constantly giving being to all that is out of God’s Triune fecundity. Perhaps “cause” can convey this, but the argument for God as “First Cause” does not seem to me to be as successful in doing so, which is why I prefer Thomas’s language that God is “semper eis esse dando,” a description related to God’s eternity. As the one always giving being to creatures, God is more intimate to us than we are to ourselves. The desire to argue with, pray to, and hope in God is born out of that intimacy. Do those arguments, prayers and hopes change God, cause God to move from being less loving to more loving, less engaged to more engaged, from being indifferent to being liberator? If so, then our arguments, prayers and hopes perfect God rather than us, and I find that theologically untenable. Even these arguments, prayers and hopes, like the language and concepts used to express them, are God’s creaturely gifts to us; so perhaps the best way to conceive them is as participations in the Spirit’s promptings in our life.

As Kidd notes, I tried to give examples where I think the traditional answer and concern for liberative practice meet. I do not want this work to be read as a reactionary Thomist movement against progressive developments in theology. Unnuanced narratives of historical decline or progress overlook important details of our historical existence. Not every detail of modern theology is a progressive advance; some of it—like the overused critique of substance metaphysics—reflects a loss, a decline based on unnecessary forgetting or options taken that I find mistaken, but not every detail of modern theology expresses decline. Thomas did not get everything right, not only by our standards but even by those of his own time. He had better courses of action available to him that he did not take (see PSTG, 276–77 for an example.) The contribution I hope this work will make is to retrieve the traditional answer and show how it can incorporate the advances found in theologies that have directed our attention to neglected dimensions of theology.

Jennifer Sanders read my work with care and set forth with utter clarity where she thinks it is right and where it is wrong. We agree, as she notes, that the “traditional answer” can and should be defended and its importance for contemporary theology advanced. We agree that dividing questions 2–26 of the Summa Theologiae from 27–43 misinterprets the “traditional answer,” making its defense more difficult and losing its contemporary significance. We agree that advancing that answer requires “transposition into our contemporary context.” Within these broad agreements, however, she takes up the task I invited in the preface (see xiii) by presenting reasons for our theological disagreements, and offering necessary corrections. Theological work is not a competition, but a collaborative exercise where our mistakes, developments and possible advances must be on public display so we can be held accountable to the “object” to which we seek to be faithful. We are always in the midst of a conversation; no final word can be said.

Our disagreement is less the “what” of that “object” and more the “how.” We agree that theology should explicate the perfectly, simple Triune God, and although she does not enter into the more disputatious parts of my work that challenge modern theologians who depart from the “what” I sense we would agree that these departures have proven less than beneficial. Our disagreement is “how”; how do we best lead students to arrive at the knowledge of God? This disagreement has an important ethical and political dimension. For Sanders, Thomas’s “how” is found in his psychological analogy. It is how she transposes, via Lonergan, Thomas’s Trinitarian thought into a contemporary “‘conversational’ structure of human subjectivity, divine intersubjectivity and the divine missions.” Her transposition has potential to address those theologies that reject the traditional answer, many of whom assert that it creates an abstract deity incapable of relationship. Her contemporary transposition of Thomas via Lonergan presents a theology as capable as any of those theologies of a relational, communicative ethics and politics. Here too we find common cause. Nonetheless, I am not yet convinced I should correct my tepid dismissal of the psychological analogy.

Let me remind readers what I stated about it: “Discussion of divine operations in terms of ‘knowledge, will, and power’ is risky. These are, after all, human acts that assume potentiality, imperfection, finitude, and temporality. Had we not first been shown how to speak of God’s essence, we might even think Thomas is doing nothing more than giving a ‘psychological analogy’ from creaturely agency to divine agency” (PSTG, 34). Although Thomas uses natural, human operations of knowledge and will as analogies for the divine processions, I am less confident than Sanders (1) that Thomas moves from these natural, human operations to the Triune processions or (2) that we should make such a move. Perhaps she could convince me that I am wrong on (1). If she did, it would most likely not convince me about (2). It would mean I am not a Thomist, or at least, not a very good one. The latter would not trouble me because Thomas did not invent the “traditional answer,” but received it and passed it along and some of what he passed along should be forgotten.

I referred to Thomas’s argument for the psychological analogy (ST Ia 19.1) at PSTG 35. Thomas begins with three objections against God having a will; each objection shows how our natural will cannot be easily applied to God because of what Thomas already established, God’s perfect simplicity. Our will has an end, God has no end. Our will is a desire for what is not possessed; God is perfect, lacking nothing. Our will is a moved power; God is the unmoved mover. It is important to emphasize that Thomas does not reject the appropriateness of these three descriptions of the human will. His argument assumes that if God has a will, it cannot be like ours in these senses. He then asserts, without much nuance, that will follows upon intellect per Aristotle and if God has an intellect, then God has a will. By itself, this argument leaves more than a little to be desired. It is, I suggested, too “sparse” to be useful, but it also is not intended to be a self-standing argument (PSTG 35). It only works if we assume what Thomas has already established, God is simple so anything that we say about the analogy from Aristotle’s argument about the natural will following upon the intellect to attributing will to God must observe all the qualifications simplicity established. Otherwise, we would not have an analogy but univocal natural attributions to divinity. Only if simplicity first renders these operations intelligible will we be able to use the analogy.

Sanders most likely does not disagree with anything that I wrote in the previous paragraph; I could be restating rather than refuting her defense of the psychological analogy, but I think there is a subtle yet significant difference that speaks to her second concern—my “repeated thesis that divine simplicity is what renders the Trinity intelligible.” She agrees that “there is a relationship between divine simplicity and trinitarian theology, and that correctly understanding this relationship illuminates the unity of Thomas’s doctrine of God,” but she thinks I say too much when I say that “divine simplicity renders the Trinity intelligible.” I have misplaced what “illumines” the Triune mystery. It is not simplicity but the psychological analogy. Here too we agree in part, and disagree in another. I agree that if I led readers to the conclusion that simplicity renders Trinity intelligible, then I overstated my case. As I read back over the passages she cited, I see how what I wrote could have been read as such. I wrote: “Simplicity primarily renders Trinity intelligible” (PSTG 22).

“Simplicity allows theologians to posit real distinctions in God without losing God’s unity or dividing God into three parts” (PSTG 23).

“Only if God is perfectly simple is it intelligible to posit processions ‘in’ God without mixing error with the use of such a term” (PSTG 46).

“Only if God is perfectly simple can this Triune predication work” (PSTG 99).

If these or other statements suggest that simplicity renders the Trinity intelligible, then I welcome her correction. I would prefer to say that the Trinity renders the Trinity intelligible, and in so doing assists us in recognizing how God is simple, something philosophers also knew but without knowing its significance. My point is that Thomas’s use of simplicity primarily, not only, serves the purpose of helping us conceive Trinity. That God is one, also a revealed teaching, is intrinsic to Trinity, not its precondition. Simplicity assists us in conceiving of and naming divine processions without abandoning the basic confession Thomas cites in ST I.11.3 and ST I.39.3: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one.”

I disagree that the “psychological analogy” illumines the Trinitarian mystery. Thomas’s argument works the other way. The Trinity illumines our psychology, and only then can we speak of a psychological analogy; it is at best a derivative concept. Our disagreement is on the extent to which the human person is naturally proportioned to God so that pure reason, reason devoid of faith and revelation, can know God. Sanders appears to think this is necessary for the “how” Thomas teaches. She writes, “The conclusions of Questions 2–26 are ones that human reason can know apart from revelation—that is, they correspond to a knowledge of God that is natural to human beings on account of the natural likeness of their intellect to God. The reason we say such knowledge is natural is because it is proportionate to the human mode of knowing.” If she is correct about this, then unless I misunderstand her point it would seem to entail a doctrine of pure nature and an account of reason that entails the kinds of dualisms I sought to overcome by refusing to divide Thomas’s treatise on the doctrine of God in terms of the neoscholastic distinctions between what can be known by nature and what by revelation.

I think our difference is found in how one relates Thomas to two Aristotelian maxims that Laurence Feingold identifies as essential for understanding Thomas. The two Aristotelian axioms are these: “a natural passive potency in a genus never expends beyond the active power of that genus” and “natural desire is never in vain” (Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God according to St. Thomas Aquinas and His Interpreters, 129–30). If our naming of God must observe these axioms, then we have a serious difficulty knowing God because the knower, per Aristotle, must be proportioned to the known and a natural desire for such cannot be in vain. If we know that the beatific vision is our true end, then our natural desire for God must in some sense be proportioned to that end if we are to attain that end, but that is impossible. Once we conceive that God has no real relation with creation, this problem becomes exacerbated. If God has no real relation with creation, how can there be a natural proportion between God and creatures? The problem does not exist in process theology for God, as an actual entity among other entities, is proportioned to the creature through “causal influence,” which is so central to process metaphysics (see PSTG, 185). Thomas cannot affirm that kind of proportion.

When Thomas addresses this problem—the natural knower proportioned to the supernatural God (ST I.12.1 ad 4)—he does so through setting up the problem by referring to a traditional Christian teaching: “it seems that no created intellect can see God in his essence.” Everything Thomas has received from the tradition through Chrysostom and Dionysius and that he has argued to this point would agree. But then there are these pesky Aristotelian maxims that the knower must be proportioned to the known and no natural desire is vain. I find him less insistent on observing the Aristotelian maxims than on the traditional teaching. Because God is our beatitude, we must in some sense see God as creatures, not in this life, but in the beatific vision. Here is where he affirms a creaturely proportion between our knowledge and the Known. He identifies two senses of proportion, one that would be “a fixed relation of one quantity to another” and a second that is “any relation of one thing to another.” He rejects the first, and affirms the second. The “any relation” between two things is found in effect to cause or act to potency, and by these he merges the traditional teaching with the Aristotelian maxims. But once again the argument is sparse. What kind of cause? What kind of act? Are these natural causes and acts as is found in so much neoscholastic thought? Or are these acts of grace that enable our nature to see what could not otherwise be seen? Sanders, like Feingold and Vatican I, seems to find them natural causes and acts and thus we can know by a pure reason that God is, tracing effects back to a first cause or potentiality back to pure act. I think that reads quite a bit into Thomas’s sparse argument and distracts us from what matters most, not that God is, but who God is.

Another important difference between us is our transpositions; mine take a Barthian and Wittgensteinian shape (even though I do so to critique Luther-Hegel-Barth trajectories in Protestant theology), hers take a Lonerganian shape. Hers focuses on “method.” I am less interested in method, in fact I fear that preoccupation with method, especially one that identifies sharp divisions between nature and grace, or reason and faith, prevents us from hearing Thomas well. If Thomas has a “method,” it would be more like what Pierre Hadot has shown us in Philosophy as a Way of Life; method is “met’—odos,” following along a way. Perhaps the best place to begin understanding Thomas is to make a pilgrimage, for then, it seems to me, what he is doing becomes clearer. I attempted to capture this “way” in the structure to the first part, “Exposition,” by setting forth the Summa Theologiae as a journey. Like every journey, the first few steps become more and more significant once the end comes in sight. One starts out on the way looking into the distance observing “sketches of landscapes” that gain contour through “long and involved journeyings” (to cite Wittgenstein). Thomas should be read as a guide who takes what came before him, the perfectly, simple Triune God, and passes it on to us. In so doing, the teaching develops and sometimes wrong turns are taken. Given these different transpositions, I would not differentiate “grammar” and truth.

Rodney Howsare raises three important questions about The Perfectly Simple Triune God (PSTG). Does it capture the right tone between theology and philosophy in general and in Thomas in specifics? Does the abandonment of arguments for causality concede too much, giving away less an argument for the existence of God and more a proper understanding of the relation between God and creation? Does the affirmation and use of Sara Coakley’s théologie totale overlook the much-needed critique of Enlightenment trends by the “traditionalists” and radical orthodox against which she positions her theology? All three are important questions, but I will focus on the first and make brief mentions of the second and third because the first question sets the conditions for the others. We agree on his third question so brevity will suffice in handling it.

Capturing the Right Tone between Philosophy and Theology

Let me parse the first question Howsare puts to me into two distinct but related parts. First is the specific interpretation of Thomas. Howsare does not so much question my interpretation as ask if I hit the right note in placing philosophy in Thomas’s theology. I take it this question comes from a friendly critic who agrees with my overall concern not to divide Thomas’s treatises between (1) what metaphysical reason alone could do in the de deo uno and (2) what faith contributes in the de deo trino. I find sympathies with what I am doing here and his Hans Urs von Balthasar and Protestantism; in it he notes that Thomas was “more optimistic than Luther” with respect to what philosophical theology could accomplish, yet “he would have been quite perplexed by the later Scholastic notions of ‘pure reason’ and ‘pure nature’” (77). This makes his question to me all the more significant; it arises from a sympathetic reader. He reminds us that the tone Thomas struck toward Aristotle was prudent. He rejected the radical Augustinians, who in his day (and in ours), had little place for philosophy, and he rejected the strict Aristotelians, who in his day (and in ours) gave insufficient place to sacred doctrine.

The Relation between Philosophy and Theology in General

This leads to the second part of his question, the relationship between philosophy and theology in general, asking if I have argued, explicitly or implicitly, that philosophy “needs to be hobbled in order to make room for theology, or even that reason was so frail that it couldn’t judge philosophical claims on philosophical grounds.” I addressed his general question at length in a previous work, Speaking of God: Theology, Language and Truth (SOG). There is no reason he should have knowledge of that book; few people, if any, have read it, and for good reason. Its thesis is complicated, and often confusing. The culpability for this confusion, however, is not all mine. I started the research for it by taking courses in philosophical theories of truth at Northwestern University and what I discovered is that philosophers are confused about what truth is. Trying to defend a philosophical account of truth in cooperation with theology is, well, complicated.

SOG began with two quotations from Barth and Balthasar that guided me throughout: Barth’s, “the great temptation and danger consists in this, that the theologian will actually become what he seems to be—a philosopher,” and Balthasar’s, “without philosophy there can be no theology.” I suggested both could be true given the circumstances, and attempted to delineate when each would be. I tell readers this not to defend myself as if I were saying, “Well, I answered that question in another book, read it,” but because trying to get the right tone in the relationship between philosophy and theology has preoccupied me for some time, and I think it is an exceedingly difficult task. Sometimes we reduce theology to philosophy and need to hear a word from Barth. Sometimes we disregard philosophy to theology’s detriment and need a word from Balthasar. Howsare is an astute reader to identify striking the right tone as a central question and then ask if I got it right. What would the right tone be?

I think that Howsare and I agree on the tone that we desire to strike in setting forth the relationship between theology and philosophy. I agree that philosophy is not just really smart people sitting around thinking, but that it, or at least metaphysics, begins as Aristotle stated in his Metaphysics from wonder. I agree philosophy has a necessary role to play in theology, and that as he puts it so well, “Thomas’s first question is not intended so much to call philosophy into question or even to make it a subspecies of theology, as it is to say that philosophy is not sufficient.” If I might indulge my readers’ forbearance, let me quote from SOG as to the tone I attempted to adopt:

The inevitable failure of philosophy to render truth fully comprehensible is not in the end its failure, but its promise. It is an opening for something unmanageable, the reception of truth as a gift more so than an accomplishment. This gift does not diminish philosophy; it strengthens it. It does not reduce philosophy to theology, nor divide them into equivocal disciplines that must then be correlated or placed in a dialectical relation. The “excess” found in theology’s exorbitant claims completes philosophy and makes it necessary. The paradigm for their relationship is the incarnation.

My sense is that Howsare would agree with this, but could still ask, “Yes, but did you lose sight of this in PSTG?” And if I did, perhaps the reason is the first part of PSTG might be too reactive, too worried about the resurgence of neoscholasticism and a doctrine of pure nature that diminishes the place of the divine economy by forcing it into the strictures of a zealous Aristotelianism.

If we differ, I think it is that I blur the lines between theology and philosophy more than he finds warranted. To judge if this is the case, we could ask, “What does philosophy do?” First, I think we agree, it cannot do everything. We both learn from Thomas that when it comes to speaking of God we need a discipline “beyond philosophy” (ST I.1). Second, philosophy assists theology by “manifesting sacred doctrine’s truths about God” (PSTG, 34). It also removes obstacles to thought so that faith can flourish. What it does not do, and cannot do, is lead one to the perfectly, simple Triune God without the help of God’s self-communication. Philosophy points in a direction, but it cannot arrive at the destination. Philosophy will always be limited in seeking knowledge of God, and I notice how many times I speak of philosophy’s “limitation” in the first chapter (PSTG, 12, 18, 20, 42). Philosophy and theology are both part of a journey to our true end; the former sees from a distance what the latter sees from illumination; the illumination can be more blinding than the blurred vision from distance, so both are necessary, overlapping and not easily distinguished.

If I overemphasized philosophy’s insufficiency, it is because I tend to think some counter Reformation and modern Thomists, Catholic and otherwise, overemphasize its sufficiency. For example, I don’t know how to square these two statements, the first from Thomas and the second from the dogmatic constitution at Vatican I, Dei Filius.

• In addition, it was necessary for man to be instructed by divine revelation even with respect to those things about God that can be discovered by human reason. For the truth about God that is discovered by reason would come to man only from a few, and after a long time, and mixed in with many errors. (ST1)
• The same Holy Mother Church holds and teaches that God, the beginning and end of all things, can be known with certitude by the natural light of human reason from created things; “for the invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made” [Rom1:20] . . . (Dei Filius)

If the “can be” of the second said “should be,” then I would find it a better interpretation of Romans 1:20 and less contradictory with the first quote, but the certitude of the “can be” compared with the more modest claims from Thomas has always struck me as if not contradictory at least so radically different that inasmuch as it seeks to be in harmony with Thomas, it strikes a discordant note. I wonder if it arises from an unnecessary anti-Protestant posture—we Catholics have reason, those Protestants are fideists. If so, it overlooks too much evidence and no longer serves truth.

Final Brief Thoughts on the Other Critiques

Let me quickly and inadequately address the next two questions. Perhaps the critique of causality is a symptom of the different tones in relating theology to philosophy? I don’t have a stake in thinking that I must come up with an argument for God’s existence from causality so criticisms like Preller’s and Hart’s are not off-putting to me. Finally, I agree with Howsare that Coakley’s théologie totale does not need to bypass the two critiques she dismisses early in her work. Both the “conservative” and the “liberal” Enlightenment trajectories lose the notion of the body, treating it as a mere datum or fact upon which we can impose “values,” underwriting a technological view of human nature that is deeply troubling and ecologically disastrous. I think Coakley would agree so I don’t see the need to distance her work from other theologies that could be an ally.

Fritz Bauerschmidt has been my mentor in all things Thomistic since graduate school. What I learned from Fritz is how not to read Thomas. He is not an analytic philosopher who gives us a series of propositions that can be pulled out of their theological context and ordered into distinct theses, setting some propositions on the side of philosophy and others on the side of theology. I also learned from him how to read Thomas. For Thomas, the “intellectual” (faith and reason) and the “evangelical” (following Christ) “intertwine” (see Bauerschmidt, Thomas Aquinas: Faith, Reason and Following Christ, 22). Fritz taught me to pay attention to question one of the prima pars with great care before moving on, and not to isolate one article from the others. Inasmuch as I misunderstand Thomas, and he thinks I have at several crucial points, I could credit him with my mistakes.

Fritz raises three criticisms of my reading of Thomas. The first concerns the way I distinguish speculative and practical theology; the second is my unease with causality; and the third is how I relate divine simplicity, creaturely multiplicity and reprobation. As I noted in the previous response to Erin Kidd, I see PSTG as an exercise in speculative theology, an exercise that attends to the truth of who God is in God’s self without focusing on the modern dominance of practical theology in which all we can know is who God is for us. It is why I concluded the book the way I did, “Only a God can save us, but it must be a God who is more than the god who is nothing but the god who saves us.” Fritz questions if I have interpreted the distinction between speculative and practical theology correctly. I rely on Thomas’s definition of “practical” based on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. A practical science, he suggests, has as its end “an operation.” An operation is an activity in which something is made. It could be techne that does not affect the agent making it, or phronesis which does, producing virtue. Speculative science is not primarily about an operation; it is not about an action but about being, about what something is. Fritz thinks this is not quite correct. He states,

At least as I read Thomas, however, he does not really make the distinction Steve is making here. In particular, Thomas does not identify the “speculative” dimension of theology or, as he calls it, sacra doctrina with God’s knowledge of himself in se nor does he identify the “practical” dimension of theology with God’s works. Rather, for Thomas theology is “speculative” when it is concerned with God who, as true, is the object of human knowing, and is “practical” when it is concerned with God who, as good, is the object of human action.

I don’t think our interpretations are as opposed as he suggests. Let me explain by first setting forth how and why I arrived at the distinction I did, and second showing how his distinction between the true and the good restates my reading.

The How and Why of Speculative Theology

It would be worth tracing when the term “speculative” became a pejorative term designating abstract, irrelevant, or useless knowledge, but it holds little appeal to much modern theology; practical theology has dominated our imagination for some time. Perhaps the demise of speculative theology and ascendancy of the practical originates with Kant’s critiques of speculative arguments for God in the first critique and his defense of the moral proof for God in the second? Perhaps, in a historical irony, the dominance of the practical emerges from Hegel’s speculative system? It seems to me, however, that this emphasis on the practical at the expense of the speculative has been mistaken; it is a major reason why modern theologians abandoned the perfectly, simple Triune God and focused on identifying who God is by attending to who God is for us rather than who or what God is in God’s self. I thought I was pushing against these trends, Fritz fears I may have cordoned knowledge of God off into an unrepresentable sublime à la Kant and thus conceded too much to the critics of the traditional answer. It was a surprise to me, but I see why he offered this critique.

As I read Thomas, he presents us with a difficulty in our knowledge of God that does, in the beginning, resonate with Kant. Because knowledge of God “exceeds the comprehension of reason,” Thomas argues, if we are to have such knowledge we need a science beyond philosophy (ST I.1.1). Philosophy alone does not suffice to provide knowledge of an object that exceeds human reason. To this point, he and Kant would agree. They have a similar starting point. But Thomas is no fideist. He does not rest content with critiquing reason to make room for faith. He proceeds to argue that there is another science, “sacred doctrine,” that can provide what philosophy alone cannot. But what makes it a science? His answer to that question overlaps philosophy and theology. Science arises either from “first principles that are known per se” from the “natural light of the intellect,” or from “first principles known by the light of a higher science.” Thomas is explicit that sacred doctrine cannot be a science from the first, but only from the second option. If it were from the first, philosophy would suffice. We could know who and what God is from nature with certainty. We need something else, a “higher science.” The “higher science” that provides the necessary “first principles” is God’s self-knowledge and the vision of the beatified. The necessary first principles “are only known by God and the blessed in heaven” (ST I.1.2). If I neglected something in my interpretation, it would be the roles of the beatified in the knowledge of God, but I think Fritz and I would agree that sacred doctrine is a science because its first principles are present in God’s self-knowledge—if there is a God, God knows who God is and that God is—and the beatified who look upon God would know it as well. Although we do not have access to these principles through nature itself, these first principles are communicated to us and it is from the communication of these higher principles, aided by philosophy, that we can know and speak about God. Sacred doctrine is “beyond” not “against” philosophy.

Thomas then poses the question if sacred doctrine is a single science. He must pose this question because the communications of the higher principles will be creatures; yet a single science only has one object. Sacred doctrine has two—God and creatures. This poses no problem, he argues, because it does not deal with them “on an equal basis.” He states, “It deals with God principally and with creatures insofar as they are related to God as their origin or their end. Hence, the unity of the science is not obstructed” (ST I.1.3). Now we are ready for the all-important fourth article in which he distinguishes speculative and practical theology.

Thomas asks if sacred doctrine is a practical science, and begins by suggesting it is because as Aristotle stated in the Metaphysics, “the end of a practical science is an operation.” God is the end for which human creatures exist, so sacred doctrine would seem to be a practical discipline. As noted above, a practical discipline is an activity that could be a techne or phronesis. Thomas explicitly refers to this distinction in his sed contra to article 4: “Every practical science is about things that can be done by man. For instance, moral science is about the acts of men, and the science of building is about buildings. But sacred doctrine is principally about God, and it is men who are rather the works of God.” The “rather” in that sentence is intriguing. God is not an object human creatures make for themselves, they are the works God makes. Sacred doctrine is concerned with both God and creatures, but it does so under a single “formal characteristic”—“their being knowable by the divine light.” Thomas then correlates speculative and practical philosophical sciences with sacred doctrine by stating, “Hence, even though some of the philosophical sciences are speculative and others are practical, sacred doctrine includes both types within itself—just as it is by the same knowledge that God knows both Himself and the things that He does.” Has he not correlated speculative science with what God knows of himself and practical with God’s operations? Such a correlation fits well Aristotle’s distinction between speculative and practical sciences. Moreover, when Thomas comes to the end of his discussion of who God is in question eleven and begins assessing how we know God (human operations) in question twelve, he makes this startling claim: “Since in what has gone before we have investigated how it stands with God in Himself, we must now investigate how it stands with Him in our cognition, i.e., how God is known by creatures.” Thomas tells us that the first eleven questions investigated “how it stands with God in Himself.” It is this speculative task that I think much of modern theology abandons, and it does so by focusing on the practical. We cannot know who God is but we can know how God functions for us.

God as the True and Good Object of Human Knowledge and Action

Fritz suggests that the speculative is our knowledge of God as true, and the practical is our knowledge of God as good. I think this restates my position. For what differentiates the former from the latter other than who God is (being) from how God is our source and end? These will be related, but speculative theology focuses on the first and practical theology on the latter, differentiating them is not easy but nonetheless important. The difficulty that Thomas points us to is this: (1) Philosophy alone does not suffice for knowledge of God. (2) Sacred doctrine is a science beyond philosophy that has no principles sufficient in themselves in the natural comprehension of human reason. (3) Sacred doctrine depends on “higher principles” known only to God and the blessed. But (4) because of (1) and (2) we have no access to (3) apart from divine communication of those principles to creatures. Therefore (5) those divine communications will be creatures, human and divine operations, that push in the direction of making sacred doctrine primarily if not exclusively practical. For it is true that we who are the result of God’s operations cannot know God apart from those operations; without them we would not be. How, then, can sacred doctrine be, as Thomas states, “more speculative than practical” because its primary concern is “with divine things” rather than “human acts” (ST I.4 resp). Our knowledge of God can only be a human act based on a divine act, the acts of creation and redemption. Both are operations, and the definition of a practical science is that it has as its end an operation. How then can it be primarily speculative? Thomas resolves this aporia not by relinquishing God as the true object of sacred doctrine and adopting God and creation as its only object, but by arguing that it is from the practical that we can know the speculative. Our speculative knowledge of God would be to know divine things, to know God as God is in himself. Our practical knowledge of God would be to know God as our source and end. God as the “highest cause” is a “determination” that both philosophy and sacred doctrine make, but if we are to go beyond philosophy then it requires what “God alone knows about Himself and which has been communicated to others by revelation” (ST I.1.6).

Causality, Causality

If the above is an adequate interpretation of the aporia Thomas sets forth and addresses, then it would not differ from Fritz’s use of speculative and practical, but it would relativize the role of causality. Yes, the philosophers knew in part God was the highest cause, but they could not know the significance of it apart from God’s self-communication (see ST I.1.6). For this reason, if philosophers find the causal arguments unpersuasive, we should not be alarmed or judge them to be irrational. Of course, as many philosophers have suggested, the argument from God as first cause is a strange argument.

(1) Everything has a cause.

(2) But we cannot trace everything back to a cause without assuming an infinite regression, which seems unreasonable.

(3) Thus everything has a cause except one thing and that one thing that does not have a cause is what we call God.

But if (3) is correct then (1) is incorrect, and (2) remains subject to philosophical and scientific critique. A strict Thomist might respond, but this is not what we mean by “causality.” To which the answer for those of us less enamored with it, or concerned with the trouble it caused in the tradition, is: Precisely.

Damning the Reprobates

Finally, Fritz thinks I misinterpreted Thomas on reprobation. I hope so. One of the surprising results of my research was to discover that it was their Thomistic training that led some Reformed theologians to posit strict teachings on predestination and reprobation. The troubling passage is ST I.23.5 rep. obj. 3. Creaturely multiplicity results from God’s “goodness, which is one and simple in itself.” Simple, divine goodness requires multiple forms of instantiation, some higher, others lower, including some that are predestined for glory and others reprobate. The former represents God’s goodness in “the mode of mercy” and the latter in the “mode of judgment.” It is something God “permits,” but it is also something God “wills,” which is the only “explanation” for it. One positive reason for modern revisions to the perfectly, simple Triune God is that it can be construed to make God the author of evil, especially by damning the majority of God’s creatures by divine will. Here I agree with the revisionists. If the traditional answer required that teaching, then it should be rethought. Just as Thomas was wrong that heretics should be executed, an error all churches now recognize, so he, or those who received his teaching on predestination and reprobation, are wrong to argue that somehow the “completion” of creation requires reprobation. Scripture itself, as Fritz reminds us by referring to Balthasar’s more nuanced teaching, does not require such a teaching.

I no longer know what to think about the use of analytic philosophy in theology. In a previous work, Speaking of God, I suggested that a theologian’s response to it depends on what she or he thinks about the linguistic turn. Following Charles Taylor’s distinctions, I then suggested that the “designative-instrumental” version of that turn render theological claims arational in advance while the “expressive-constitutive” could serve to manifest theological claims well. I still stand by that conviction. However, in doing the research for this work I read more analytic philosophers on the doctrine of God than I had for that earlier work in which I primarily read them on the philosophy of truth. I was astonished how some of the leading analytic philosophers used their method for revisions to the traditional doctrine of God that were as radical as process or open theism. It was unclear what they were describing was the same object that the tradition described before the use of this method.

Let me be clear that I qualify the above statement, as I also tried to do in chapter 6, with “some” analytic philosophers. Not every analytic philosopher/theologian seems as committed to revision as those I noted in chapter 6, but the ones discussed are by no means marginal figures, and they are the ones who have taken on the task of using this method to address and revise the doctrine of God. Thomas McCall is an exception to this rule as his important work Forsaken: The Trinity and the Cross, and Why It Matters shows. It is a compelling defense of the “traditional answer.” Given his own work, An Invitation to Analytic Christian Theology, he is surely correct to challenge my claim that analytic philosophy is too often a secular discipline that seeks to resolve dilemmas by rendering them non-mysterious through stipulative definitions. I think that does describe much of analytic philosophy and it is one reason why the revised doctrine of God looks so much like a really big creature in some of those revisions. Perhaps I made it easier on myself by focusing on those revisions, but as he noted I also looked at a new generation of analytic philosophers/theologians who are not as dismissive of the traditional teaching on God. For this reason, I would accept much of his criticism as a summons for me to gain more precision in what I think about analytic philosophy. Should I follow David Bentley Hart and deny its “consanguinity” with theology or Fergus Kerr and use it to be more precise and logically rigorous in setting forth arguments?

I doubt that I will develop a style of logical rigor to the satisfaction of analytic philosophers, who will find theologians like me similar to continental philosophers, humorously defined by Stanley Rosen as indulging in “speculative metaphysics or cultural hermeneutics, or, alternatively, depending on one’s sympathies, in wool-gathering and bathos.” However, if some analytic philosophers/theologians continue to make the large claims for their method that I noted in that chapter, then it seems that the onus is on them to show us the fruits of their labor. To this point I find it uncontroversial to say that they have little agreement among themselves as to which attributes should be singled out for revision, what the doctrine of God should be post-analytic philosophy, and how it relates to the tradition prior to the analytic method. Until the analytic method achieves the success some of its more ardent defenders suggest it can, it will be one more discipline in which its proponents speak primarily with each other.

I am grateful for McCall’s work because he calls into question the “triumphalism” found in some quarters of analytic Christian theology, reminds its practitioners of the importance of mystery, and orders it toward the “glory of God” rather than merely the solving of dilemmas. Using his more modest and minimal analytic method he puts the following questions to me. First, he asks if I have read too much continuity with respect to the interpretation of simplicity in the Christian tradition. I attempted to answer this question in my first response to Erin Kidd. It is not so much the doctrine of God that differs among theologians prior to the eighteenth century, but the questions to which it is put. That is a large claim that exceeds the evidence put forward for it; for I have not read every theologian prior to the eighteenth century. I’m sure there are exceptions so I should qualify it to say that there is coherent and dominant tradition that puts together these four claims: (1) God is simple, which means at least the following: God is “to be”; God’s essence is God’s existence; God is not composed of parts; and creaturely distinctions such as act/potency, form/matter, genus/difference, substance/accidents cannot be attributed to God. (2) It follows logically from simplicity that God is perfect, eternal, impassible, infinite and one; for to deny any of these will require at some level attribution of the creaturely distinctions simplicity rules out. (3) The perfectly simple God is triune. Rather than causing difficulties in expressing trinity, simplicity assists it and in turn trinity helps us see how God is and is not simple. (4). None of this conflicts with the claim that God is love or free. All I need for my argument to work is to show that these four claims are present in Scripture and pervasive throughout the tradition prior to the eighteenth century (with the exception of teachings that were ruled as heretical, and with Biddle and the Socinians). I do not need to defend Thomas as a unique thinker or set him against Lombard, Scotus, or Calvin on these four points. If their work, or others, contradicts these four points then my argument would need to be nuanced. The “traditional answer” would still stand, but I would have overstated its pervasiveness.

Second, these four points do not require me to provide a metaphysics of freedom or weigh in on the distinction between the intellectualist versus the voluntarist conceptions of God. Nor do I feel compelled to discuss diverse accounts of analogy and/or univocity and their role in modern theology. Only insofar as those discussions bear on the four points above would they be relevant to my argument in this work. I am willing to entertain objections to the thesis that there is a “traditional answer” that becomes increasingly criticized after the eighteenth century and not before, but I did not find much evidence for those objections in the research for this work. What I would like to know from Tom is if he thinks Scotus fundamentally challenges any of the four points above?

Third, I concede that I may very well misunderstand contemporary analytic philosophy. I should have limited my statements and criticisms in chapter 6 to the philosophers under consideration and not tarred the entire method with their conclusions. I did attempt to show the diversity among analytic philosophers/theologians on whether, or how, the traditional teaching should be revised. However, I am not convinced I need to present theology in terms of the predications Tom presents toward the conclusion of his analysis. I think his thirteen propositions show a difference in theological style between us and I would need to adopt his style, with its assumptions about how theological language works in order to address them to his satisfaction. Let me explain why I want to avoid that.

He begins with (1) the Father is not identical with the Son and from there proceeds to draw the conclusion that without attending more careful to the “is” of predication or identity my position might conclude with the contradictory (4) “The Father is identical with the Son” since both are identical with the essence [his (2) and (3)]. It seems to me that this shows some of the limitations in presenting the Trinity through analytical propositions rather than narrative construal for of course (1) and (4) both must be said if we are to present the doctrine of Trinity in speech. The Son says that he is “one” with the Father and in his actions and words conveys difference from the Father so we are bound to express both the unity and difference within our theological language. That he is one in essence and distinct in person appears to be contradictory only if these propositions must be definitions in which the terms, especially the verbs, are designative. If they are expressive then it seems to me noncontradictory to say the following:

1. The Father is the essence. The Son is the essence. The Spirit is the essence.
2. The Father, Son and Spirit is the essence.
3. The Father is not the Son is not the Spirit.
4. God has one essence and three persons.

I am not designating quantities that can be indicated but expressing a mystery as best as it can be expressed in language. In so doing, these four points do not constitute a dilemma to be solved but rules of grammar that express a truth, and if we seek to be consistent in the truth of God received from Scripture and tradition the rules will need to be obeyed. We do not bend the rules to satisfy our logic. We obey the rules and reconceive logic when applied to Trinity.

Fourth, I do not understand why I would have to accept Tom’s fifth point: “(5) If God is simple, then there is no liberty of alternatives for God.” The question for me would not be if God has liberty of alternative but which alternatives God might have liberty for? Here we must remember that simplicity must be coupled with perfection. Is God at liberty to choose between good and evil? The perfectly, simple Triune God cannot choose evil. Would this mean God is unfree? Only if we have a libertarian version of freedom that always requires choice between opposing options. Is God at liberty to be other than Triune? Or is God at liberty to be or not to be? I am confident Tom would agree that God does not choose among these alternatives. Within God’s perfectly, simple Triunity God can set before us multiple ways in which we can participate in God’s goodness, and this is how I would read the passage from Thomas that he cites: “we must simply say that God can do other things than he has done.” Yes, but I don’t see how that provides warrant for “liberty of choice between genuine alternatives” unless more detail is first given for what is meant by “genuine.” Once that detail is given, then I think we might agree, but I would disagree with libertarians like William Hasker who argues that the beatified are unfree if they lose the power to choose sin. Freedom is not always the power to choose between alternatives; it is also the power to be turned toward what is good such that evil no longer holds us. To have to choose between good and evil at every moment because both are equal possibilities is to lack freedom.

Finally, Tom and I agree with his concluding comment: “So while his work is helpful, there is yet more to be done.” Always . . . And I am grateful for his contributions working from a very different philosophical and theological style than my own. We are, after all, seeking to do the same work—setting forth what we have come to know of God in speech for the purpose of acknowledging God in theory and practice as our beginning and end. It is a joyful activity in which even our differences and errors can contribute to sacred wisdom.