I
The cross has been a scandal in every
age. It subverts our dreams and overturns our
idealisms. Human nobility and spirituality die upon this cross.[1] It
stands in opposition to the values of the world, the values summed up in the expression
“theology of glory.” Because, as Luther says, “Crux sola est
nostra theologia” (“the cross alone is our theology”), it follows that the
cross is opposed to all theologies of glory.[2] But what
is a theology of glory, and how must it be understood over and against a
theology of the cross?
As soon as we reflect upon this, other questions
naturally arise. What is the best in man? What
is it that makes human beings noble? What gives men and women
dignity? In answering this, we might
start with the following catalog of human virtues, those characteristics seemingly
separating us from the other primates. Human
beings:
·
have
an eternal soul.
·
are
bearers of reason.
·
possess
free will and inhabit a moral order.
·
can
actualize their potentiality.
·
have
a taste for the Infinite.
·
can
know the truth, do the good, and appreciate beauty.
·
understand
justice and law as their highest good.
·
know
God to be the foundation of truth, goodness and beauty.
Theologies of glory understand that human and
divine being stand on a continuum with human being either participating in
divine being, or instantiating properties normally associated
with the divine. Theologies of glory can be stronger or weaker to
the degree to which they instantiate divine being or divine
attributes. My favorite expression of a theology of glory comes from
Ralph Waldo Emerson whose poem “Worship” has these memorable lines:
This is [He], who, deaf
to prayers,
Floods with blessings
unawares.
Draw, if thou canst, the
mystic line,
Severing rightly his
from thine,
Which is human, which
divine.
The line between the two
is difficult to draw because human beings are the embodiment of the highest aim
of God, and God is the projection of the highest sentiments of
humanity. Thus, it is a challenge to know where the one leaves off
and the other begins.
Human beings are
created in imago dei and, although this divine image is now
tarnished by the waywardness of sin, it still shines forth weakly within human
hearts. Accordingly, human beings,
through greater or lesser degrees of effort and divine succor, must work to
polish up that which is now tarnished.
An historically
important theology of glory was bequeathed to us by a famous philosopher living
over 400 years before Christ. The Greek philosopher Plato claimed that while
the human soul bears the marks of the divine world from which it fell,
e.g., indestructibility, simplicity and eternity, and while its essence is
to be without a body, it has unfortunately been joined to matter in the veil of
tears of this life. At death, however, the sickness of the soul’s
involvement with the body is healed as it sheds the corporeal forever and lives
in eternity beyond the temporal. Throughout the ancient world,
the Greek idea of the immortal soul formed the intellectual backdrop on which
Christ’s death and resurrection were understood.
While time does not permit me to sketch out
representative theologies of glory in the western tradition, one must at least point
to a dominant early one: Neo-Platonism. This philosophy held that
all things are ultimately ONE and that this ONE in the course of history flows
out of itself into Nous, then into
the World-Soul, and finally into the alienated world of matter. Salvation
demands that material men and women become more spiritual as
they are freed from the corruption of the flesh and returned to the ONE from
which they have been separated but to which they essentially belong. Christian
variations emphasized that God sends grace which is infused in
believers so that they might become more spiritual and return to God.
By the sixteenth century, Neo-Platonism had
waned, but the impulse of the theologian of glory remained. The idea was
that God gives human beings particular laws and that humans must act in
accordance with those laws in order to be close to God. To act in
accordance is to be just; to not act in accordance is to be unjust. In
Luther’s time it was widely thought that as a person is just when
he acts in accordance with divine law, so is God just when he
rewards likes for likes. God’s justice demands He punish sin and
save the sinless.
However, because humanity is not sinless, God
had to give grace that either makes the believer sinless enough for God not to
punish, or which “covers” sinners such that if somebody makes some small effort
towards God, an effort within the power of the person (‘fac quod in se
ipsum’), God does not deny His grace (‘facienti quod in se est Deus non
denegat gratiam’). God justly acts to reward the sinner
who has worked merit congruent with his or her ability (meritum de congruo) as
if he or she had actually worked a merit worthy of salvation itself (meritum
de condigno). Because
of Christ, the wretched faltering steps towards God the believer makes in this
life are regarded by God to be as if they were worthy of salvation.
It is not important that we follow all the
specifics here. The theological tradition is rich in reflection on the
nature of justification. Suffice it to say that, for Lutherans, a
person’s justification and salvation are coninstantiated. Conceptually,
it is impossible for one to be justified and not saved, or for one to be saved
and not justified. Accordingly, it is a necessary truth that ‘x is
justified just in case x is saved’. A
theology of glory understands that proximity to God is a function of the
worldly instantiation of properties that perfectly and properly apply to
God.
II
What then is a theology of the cross? While
a theology of glory understands the presence of God as a worldly manifestation
of properties like those of God, a theology of the cross finds the divine
presented sub specie contrario, that is, underneath its contrary. Thus,
a theology of the cross finds God where one least expects to find God: in
weakness, in suffering, in death, in finitude. Whereas the
theologian of glory locates God in the divine apathei of
detachment, peace and impassibility, the theologian of the cross finds God in
despair, suffering, and emotional turmoil.
In 1518, 35 year-old Martin Luther gave a
presentation at the Augustinian monastery in Heidelberg in which he provided a
classic distinction between a theologian of glory and a theologian of the
cross.
(19) Non ille
digne theologus dicitur, qui invisibilia Dei per ea, quae facta sunt,
intellecta conspicit. (20) Sed qui visibilia et posteriori Dei per
passiones et crucem conspecta intelligit. [(19) That
person is not worthy to be called a theologian who perceives the invisible
things of God as understood through things that have occurred. (20)
But who understands the visible and “back side” of God through the perception
of his passion and cross.]3
The theologian of glory in thesis 19 is one who
looks at how the world is in order to get a clue about how God is. Since
God is like the world in that both are measured by goodness,
the better the world is, the better or closer the divine source and goal of
existence itself is. This theologian expects to find God where there is
maximum goodness. Luther says that this theologian of glory is not worthy
to be called a theologian.
Rather, the one worthy to be called a theologian
is he or she who understands that what can be known of God is available only by
looking at the cross. The theologian of the cross finds God precisely
where one would not expect Him to be found: in His ignoble suffering and death
on the cross.
The ancient notion of the anologia entis claims
that there is an analogy between the being of God and the being of the
world. When the world is a particular way, then God must be a
particular way. But the one who searches for God in this way always
misses Him, says Luther. Instead of moving from how the world is to
how God is, the theologian of the cross
finds God in how the world is not. She finds God in how Christ is! God
is not discerned by looking lovingly at the world, but by looking at the One
who, by his crucifixion and death, looked lovingly at us. God is
found in Jesus Christ and only there, and this is precisely not where we would
expect to find him. Luther says it clearly in thesis 21:
(21) Theologus
gloriae dicit malum bonum et bonum malum, Theologus crucis dicit id quod res
est. [The theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil; the
theologian of the cross calls a thing what it is.]4
While the theologian of glory sees through
creation and finds God at the ground or source of it, the theologian of the cross
finds God revealed in the desolation of the cross. While the theologian
of glory uses analogy in order to reason to what God is like, the theologian of
the cross admits that God remains hidden in his worldly
actions, and that He reveals Himself only when and where he wills it: on the cross
and in the proclamation of that cross. The theologian of the cross
proclaims God’s presence in the midst of His apparent absence.
Instead of the soul being liberated by divine
grace to fly closer to God, the theologian of the cross declares the death of
the soul and the dissolution of the self. While the theologian of
glory assumes some continuity between the divine and human,
the theologian of the cross exploits their discontinuity. The
old being dies and the new rises and takes its place. It is not that
the eternal essence of a man needs readjustment, it is rather that
the old Adam in us is put to death and the New man in Christ is constituted in
his stead. There is no perdurance of individual substance across the
domains of the old and new.
III
So we have now sketched the salient difference
between the theology of the cross and the theology of glory. What is
the problem? Clearly, the cross is unpopular and does not fit
well into the intellectual and cultural horizon of our time. Could we not say,
in fact, that there is a “crisis of the cross” in our time? Few any
longer understand this distinction.
Theologians who should know better tacitly yet assume a profound
relation between moral goodness and the divine.
It is as if one climbs up one’s own ladder high enough one can jump over
to heaven itself! Why is it that we find
theologies of glory plausible? Is it
that we no longer understand the distinction between the theology of the cross
and that of glory?
I don’t believe that the crisis is found in our
not seeming to understand this crucial distinction. Lutherans
from many different theological trajectories seem to grasp it. The
problem, I shall argue, is that certain moves within Lutheran theology have
made it difficult to state meaningfully the truth-conditions
upon which the distinction between the theology of the cross and the
theology of glory must ultimately be grounded. How is it that this is
possible?
Theology is a discourse, and like other kinds of
discourses, it is concerned with meaning and truth, the realm of
semantics. Classically, the semantics of theological propositions
was assumed to be more or less realist. Terms like ‘God’ were
thought to refer to a determinate being, while relational terms like ‘creates’ referred
to a relational property of that divine determinate being by which that being
brought that complex state of affairs referred to by ‘world’ into being. Prima
facie, to say that a person does not deserve to be called a theologian
who “looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were perceptible in
those things that have actually happened," is to deny the statement
claiming that there is some divine being such that humans perceive something of
the existence and properties of that being by perceiving some set of events
within the universe.
At this point it is necessary to make things
very precise. The theologian of the glory palpably holds that there
is a divine being, and there is a universe that is not divine but created by
that divine being, and there are sentient human beings such that these beings
can perceive some set of events in the universe, and their perception of this
class of events within the universe rationally justifies these human beings to hold
that a particular set of properties is instantiated by that divine being. I shall term this the epistemic
formulation of the theology of glory because it refers both to events
and the perception or the knowing of those
events. Let us make this even more perspicuous:
(1) There is
some x such that x is divine, and some y such
that y is the universe, and x is not y, and
there are some z such that z perceive events E
in y, and z are rationally justified to hold that x has
property set S on the basis of z’s perception of E in y.
Those holding to (1) are theologians of glory,
while those denying (1) are not. This
much is clear. Luther would hold that theologians
of glory and theologians of the Cross constitute an exclusive disjunction. Accordingly, not to be theologian of glory is
to be a theologian of the cross, and vice versa. This epistemological formulation concerns
states of knowing and is a weaker formulation of the theology of
glory than the following:
(1’) There is a divine
being and a universe distinct from that being, such that a particular class of
events within the universe is manifest if and only if a particular cluster of
properties is present within the divine being.
This ontological formulation of
the theology of glory can be clarified as follows:
(2) There is
an x such that x is divine and a y such
that y is the universe, and x is not y,
such that property set P obtains in y if and only if property
set S obtains in x.
It is this stronger ontological formulation of
which I am most interested. It is crucial now to notice that the
theologian of the cross can deny (2) in either of two ways I will call (3) and
(3’).
(3) It is not the case that
there is an x such that x is divine and
a y such that y is the universe, and x is
not y, such that property set P obtains in y if
and only if property set S obtains in x.
(3') There is an x such that x is divine and a y such that y is the universe and x is not y, such that it is not the case that property set P obtains in y if and only if property set S obtains in x.
Clearly, (3’) does not simply deny the entire
ontological formulation, but rather a part of it. Accordingly, one
affirming (3’) would claim:
(4) There is a divine
being and a universe distinct from that being, such that it is false
that a particular class of events within the universe is manifest if
and only if a particular cluster of properties is instantiated by that divine
being.
The theologian of the cross affirms the existence
of God and a universe distinct from God, but nonetheless denies the analogy of
being, that is, that the presence of a set of events in the universe is tied to
the instantiation of divine properties.
Any covariance in property distributions across the temporal and eternal
is denied. A world of perfect moral
order does not a better God make, nor does a perfect God make a better
world. The cross forever undercuts the
natural human proclivity to identify God as the mathematical limit of the
maximization of the Good, the True and the Beautiful.
At this point a dizzying variety of senses of
the epistemological and ontological formulations might be investigated as to
their meaning in order to make possible precise senses undergirding Luther’s
thesis 19. However, this is not the issue about which I am
concerned. What I am concerned with is that my semantic formulation
here presupposes a particular ontological contour, a contour that
much of Lutheran theology no longer assumes.
IV
Since the time of Kant academic theology on
Lutheran soil has denied both the epistemological formulations and ontological
formulations of theology of the cross.
Why is this? I believe it is because
it has assumed that God is not a substance that in principle can possess
properties or be engaged in important kinds of relations – particularly the relation of causality. But if God is not a being having properties,
then what is God?
Schleiermacher famously claimed that God is the
whence of the feeling of absolute dependence. Fichte talked of God
as the infinite striving of the ego in positing the non-ego, and ultimately the
world as the backdrop of moral striving. Hegel understood God to be
the Absolute Spirit coming to consciousness of Godself in time through human
consciousness: God is God in Spirit coming to consciousness of itself through
relating to what is seemingly other to it. Ritschl and his school
downplayed metaphysical assertions about God and spoke only of the effect
of that which is other than the world. Barth was strongly
opposed to the liberal theology of Ritschl, Harnack and company, and spoke of
God as the totaliter aliter, the “wholly other” of human
experience. God is thus “wholly other” than being, just as He
is “wholly other” than non-being. Other theologians have spoken of
God in such ways as the infinite fore-grasp of the illimitability of Being in
every act of thinking particular being (Rahner), or as a type of being of God
such that God is not being God (Scharleman), or as a primal matrix
(Reuther).
The problem here is that even if one could
clarify what it is that one is meaning by “God being God only when God is not
being God” or God as Henry Nelson Wieman’s “primal event,” it is not clear
why such diverse referents should be called by the same name,
nor is it clear what exactly could be meant by Luther’s thesis 19 when the
referent of ‘God’ changes so radically under different interpretations.
The problem here is that theologians have not
paid sufficient attention to the “depth grammar” of their
statements. ‘Jack fishes from a bank’ means quite different
things when ‘bank’ means ‘an institution allowing the deposit of money’ on the
one hand, and ‘that which abuts a creek’ on the other
hand. While the surface grammar of ‘God is in Christ
reconciling the world to Himself’ can be held constant in various languages in
which the locution is used, the depth grammar, the propositions actually
expressed or the states of affairs actually named vary
greatly across theological schools.
What I am talking about is the need to specify
clearly semantic models for
theological statements. Such models
would include the domain of those entities about which we are speaking, and
predicates which clearly delineate to which entities they properly apply. What
theological model is specifiable either for the ontological interpretation of
the theology of glory or its theology of the cross denial if God is not a
substance – that is, a being that perdures through time – and God cannot be
causally related to any entities within the universe?
V
Imagine a Bultmannian view of things where there
is no being having divine properties or attributes and no being that is the
second person of the Trinity that actually has the properties of divinity and
humanity. Further imagine a Bultmannian view of things in which the
proclamation of certain locutions is itself a performative use
of language in which existential empowerment can occur in the
listener. On this view of things, the semantics of the statement ‘Christ
is raised from the dead’ does not refer to a state of affairs in which there is
a particular being such that this being had the property of death then
afterward life. The semantics instead has meaning on the basis of
transformed existential horizons in its hearing.
While Bultmann could speak of a theology of the
Cross, and could even accept Luther’s thesis 19, he would not be meaning by
that either the epistemic or ontological formulations given
above. He would be meaning by it something quite complicated
pertaining to horizons of expectation and empowerment in a succession of
historical beings having particular existential constitutions. Perhaps
we might rework (3’) into (3’’) as follows:
(3'’) Although there is
no x such that x is divine and a y such
that y is the universe and x is not y,
one can use locutions like ‘God’s power is found in weakness’ in order to effect
a particular existential empowerment, or ground a use of proclamation language
to effect existential empowerment, in some sentient hearer S, such that S is
empowered in the face of fundamental anxieties to still discern some future
open for S, that is that S’s facticity is not wholly determinative of S’s
being.
The attempt to specify the distinction between
the theologian of glory and the theologian of the cross is not easy at all for
the Bultmannian who has abandoned traditional semantic theological models.
We have no time here to work any of this out,
but the point should be clear enough. In the absence of a
traditional, realist semantics of theological language, it is
very difficult to state clearly the distinction between the theologian of the
cross and the theologian of glory. However, the last 200 years of
academic theology has tended not to work with a realist semantics
for theological language. It has indeed tacitly rejected semantic
realism, the assertion that theological statements have truth values even
when we are in no position evidentially to ascertain their truth. On the
rejection of a semantics that talks about states of affairs and property instantiation,
then how might one characterize what a theology of the cross is? Is it merely an expression of existential orientations or psychological
attitudes? Does it not then merely
reduce to human expressions of engineering our futures or allowing our future
to bestow itself graciously upon us?
Much more needs to be said to establish this
clearly, but maybe this can get the ball rolling. My contention is
that the distinction between the theology of the cross and the theology of
glory cannot be sustained if a realist semantics is not
presupposed. However, for almost 200 years a realist semantics has
not been presupposed. Therefore, the distinction is no longer clear
to us. This is the scandal of the theology of the
cross. It is a formal, not a
material scandal. The necessary condition for the latter scandal
is for the former scandal to be assuaged. Since I believe in the theological
importance of the material scandal, my hope is ultimately to undercut the
ground on which the formal scandal appears to rest.
[1] ‘Cross’ here means the entire
narrative of the crucified and risen Jesus. See Gerhard
Forde, On Being a Theologian of the Cross (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans Publishing, 1997), 1.
[3] WA 1,
350:17-20.
[4] WA 1,
350: 21-22.
