Considering Clayton’s Conundrum

Dear Philip (if I may), Thanks so much for your response; I'm replying after having gone away and buried myself in 'Adventures in the Spirit', which I have now just finished. For anyone out there who is into this whole science-faith-culture conversation, it's a wonderfully stimulating read, and I can't really understand why the internet isn't awash with discussions about what has to be the most ambitious attempt so far at outlining a program for an 'emergent systematic theology'. The book raises so many important questions that it's difficult to know where to start, but please let me offer just a few 'bullet-point' reactions: - Our positions are actually extremely close, and I find myself agreeing with about 98% of the book. So whatever reservations I may express should be read with this in mind. - The differences are small, but substantive as they concern the way in which the whole inquiry is conducted. I guess they boil down to the question of the extent to which theology should proceed 'from below' or 'from above' (which of course brings us back to the central issue faced by Pannenberg) - what is the role of 'revealed theology' in all of this? Is there such a thing as 'theological knowledge' of a sort that (even allowing for its inevitable mediation through human language) the Judeo-Christian tradition has generally acknowledged as being communicated either verbally by Jesus or in mystical/prophetic experience? Does such revealed theology have to be 'bracketed' at the outset in order for the dialogue with science to get off the ground, and if so, at what point can it be reintegrated into the whole picture? Can the exclusion from theology of elements clearly outside the purview of science be anything more than a pragmatic/methodological move from which it would be illogical to draw ontological conclusions? - I confess that I struggle to see how an adoptionist Christology follows naturally from the emergent framework outlined in 'Adventures'; this puzzles me as I persist in thinking that a dipolar Christology can be developed within an essentially orthodox position, and indeed that this might actually make for a better, not a worse 'explanatory fit' both with the New Testament (particular the Johannine writings) and the overall concept of God both as the 'Ground' and goal of creation (as in Colossians). What I mean is a Christology in which Christ's eternal Sonship (which of course should not be viewed simplistically in terms of a scheme in which the pre-existent Logos is a 'man' in any straightforward sense) in relationship to the Father is part of the 'primordial' nature of God, with the life of the earthly Jesus as a temporal expression of self-emptying obedience to the Father's will and the subsequent development of the 'totus Christus', head AND body (i.e. Church and ultimately world/cosmos) corresponding to God's 'consequent' nature. I'm not sure that I understand why 'Adventures' is prepared to look at the third person of the Trinity in dipolar terms, but does not attempt a similar thematic treatment with respect to the Son. For example, in the section 'Pneumatology', we find 'the Spirit that emerges corresponds to the Spirit who was present from the beginning, and this Spirit's actions - both its initial creation and its continual lure - help bring about the world and its inhabitants as we know them. Insofar as this emergent theology remains panentheistic, it holds that the physical world was already permeated by and contained within the Spirit of God long before cosmic evolution gave rise to life and mind.' (111) I absolutely agree, but would simply like to add that for me the same would apply if we replace 'Spirit' by 'Son/Logos'. This, it seems to me, would lead to a position which is wholly consistent with the Scriptural witness without the loss of any of the dynamism that is such a salient feature of 'Adventures'. - I do wonder whether the general approach of the book is not inevitably coloured by the felt necessity of responding to Western science at a certain point in its socio-historical evolution, with the latter functioning according to a largely materialist paradigm which is on the point of being broken down from WITHIN science (here I'm following the thought of our mutual friend Jean Staune, but also the work of Keith Ward in his recent books such as 'More than Matter'). My sense is that a position of 'non-reductive physicalism' is not the only option available to a theology that wants to take correlation with science seriously, and that a (heavily chastened) form of philosophical dualism is making something of a surprising comeback. Here I sense that the key area of inquiry is consciousness research; while obviously controversial, the work of figures such as Mario Beauregard (U of Montreal) and Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel is posing really fundamental questions regarding the mind-body relationship which are potentially game-changing for this whole discussion. If, as many think, Sam Parnia's AWARE Study of near-death experience at the University of Southampton corroborates van Lommel's findings in his famous 2001 article in The Lancet (concerning the possibility of conscious experience in the absence of a functioning brain during cardiac arrest), then the theology-science conversation is set to enter a whole new phase in terms of how to think of the mind-body relationship. To a certain extent this shift already appears to be occurring (you already hint at this in the tantalizing section 'Spirituality as Spirit'), but I am prepared to wager a reasonably large amount of your favourite beverage that if we hold this conversation again in five or ten years' time, the ground rules of faith-science engagement will have changed considerably. A sign of this is the way in which former scientific outlaw Rupert Sheldrake (who comes in for some fairly negative comment in 'Adventures') seems to have come in from the cold lately - I see that he was a guest at Claremont recently - with his 'Science Delusion' receiving a much more respectful critical reception than much of his previous work. Perhaps people have finally had their fill of Dawkins and co.!! Grace, Peter B.

Dear Peter, Thank you for your positive comments, and just as emphatically for your critical probing. *These* are the discussions we must be having. We have an interesting difference about audience: you and Ryan are worried primarily about not cutting more orthodox Christians out of the conversation (which Steve and I also care about), while we have worked to reopen the conversation especially with younger Christians who find themselves cut off from the traditional language. Probably this difference is about the different voices we each carry in our own heads. Perhaps you are concerned that your own conclusions will not be orthodox enough. And Steve and I are clearly concerned about the reasons to doubt many of the core Christian claims -- reasons so serious that they are separating many people from Christian language altogether. We believe that result is tragic and unnecessary, and we wanted to demonstrate at least one way that folks could reconnect with the language of the work of God in Jesus Christ. The most urgent sentence, from our perspective, is this one: "Get rid of the preexistent Logos and you also kiss farewell to the Immanent Trinity, Trinitarian theology of creation and Trinitarian theological anthropology. Hasta la vista to the Cappadocian Fathers – and Eastern Christian tradition more generally (as well as Celtic Christianity in the West), for which the threeness of God is as just as much theological bedrock as the Divine Unity." That's where we really disagree. We had *thought* that there was only one way to preserve the uniqueness of Jesus and the Trinitarian nature of God. But it turns out, surprisingly, that that's false. If you've read my last book, *Adventures int he Spirit*, you know that I strongly affirm the Immanent Trinity, a Trinitarian theology of creation, and a Trinitarian anthropology. The earlier book, "In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being*, includes an entire section by Orthodox theologians, and I incorporate their work in my concluding chapter. In short, the glory of the situation is that there is at least one other route to the core beliefs that you and I both care about. Steve and I were clear about what we cannot affirm. The amazing thing, though, is how much one *can* still affirm if, like Nan, one just can't make sense of a certain set of philosophical categories. -- Philip Clayton

This is one very thrilling conversation! Thanks to Peter!!

Hello and thanks for the comments/questions. I apologize for using some theological shorthand in my post, but it isn't easy to avoid unless you're Karl Barth writing 16 volumes of Church Dogmatics (and he didn't finish!). So let me take a stab at unpacking a couple of things, and sorry in advance if this is a little lengthy: - Nan, the basic reason why a lot of Christian theology doesn't feel comfortable 'ontologizing the God-world relationship' (i.e. arguing that the world is necessary for God to be God) is it solves one problem by generating another. Going down that route certainly appears to allow the affirmation that relationship isn't just an accident but belongs to Ultimate Reality, which is something that appeals both to process folks (who see the interconnectedness of all things as foundational) and more existential philosophical types attracted to writers like Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas or Michael Polanyi, those who feel that our own experience of relationality (we only know ourselves through others) has something to do with the very grain of the universe. So I admit that giving ultimacy to the God-world relation does 'ground' otherness philosophically; it doesn't just leave the existence of 'the One and the Many' as an incomprehensible riddle. But at the same time treating relationship with the world as CONSTITUTIVE rather than EXPRESSIVE of God effectively takes away Divine freedom by saying that God simply had to create out of necessity in order to 'actualize' Godself. I know that lots of extremely smart people have said just this (Hegel and Whitehead are both widely interpreted as having done so, but I'll leave the scholars to fight over whether that's fair to them), but to many of us it leaves God looking suspiciously 'needy' - to put it crudely, in this scheme it appears that God creates out of something like loneliness, having nobody to relate to. The objection is that this makes God seem a) less than perfect, 'lacking' something b) egotistical, creating to satisfy God's own needs and c) creation out of necessity is arguably not truly loving, since talking about a loving act is only meaningful in the context of genuine freedom Perhaps this is just personal taste, but I'm more attracted to the alternative offered by the Trinitarian view that God creates freely out of a desire to share the overflowing plenitude of love existing eternally in the Godhead (don't think of this as the 'three bears on three chairs' caricature: instead try sitting in front of Andrei Roublev's amazing Icon of the Trinity for five minutes ...).This makes creation - and therefore our own existence - a real GIFT. We have real autonomy, but human relationality is rooted in the relationality of God's own being. Make up your own mind, but if I have to choose these two theological/philosophical options I find this one a far more exciting and beautiful concept (yes, I know that sounds sentimental, but theology does have an aesthetic dimension in the same way that scientists and mathematicians will often intuit that an equation or hypothesis is correct because of its 'beauty'). - DMF: what I meant by saying that if the Son is not eternal, neither is the Father (which is a classical kind of argument) is that without the eternity of the Son we can only use the term 'Father' for God in an arbitrary sort of way, i.e. without the word being expressive of anything ontological/ultimate. OK, so I guess you might say 'so what, isn't all language about God arbitrary anyway?', in which case we can forget about trying to do metaphysics. I can understand that position and sympathize with it to a certain extent - John D. Caputo for example thinks that indulging in metaphysics is like smoking: 'just try to give up the habit'! However, I don't think that the Trinitarian language of classical theology can be written off as 'Greek non-sense' rather than 'the least inadequate way of speaking about God', which I think is a more balanced view of the doctrinal formulations of the early Christian centuries: i) I know it's fashionable to trash Hellenism, but just because Greeks may have said something doesn't automatically make it wrong! Hellenistic influences are present in Christianity from the outset, as there is a consensus that most of the early Christians knew our Old Testament in Greek translation, i.e. the Septuagint. The idea that we can get back to some kind of Jewish 'core' by stripping theology of everything Greek is historically problematic because of the Hellenistic influences already present within first-century Judaism. Paul didn't see a problem with quoting Greek philosophy in Acts 17 ... ii) (here I need to say something about the exegetical problem of getting rid of the pre-existent Logos) the roots of Trinitarian thought aren't in Greek metaphysics - here I agree with Dan Hauge -, but in the New Testament: a) Look at the baptismal formula of the first Christians as found in Matthew's Gospel (the most obviously Jewish of the four): 'go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit' (Matthew 28:19) and the equally Jewish Paul's doxology of 2 Corinthians 13:14 ('may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all') b) the specific idea of the eternity of the Son is central to the Fourth Gospel from start to finish, perhaps expressed most clearly in Jesus's prayer in John 17:5 'and now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began'. Of course you might say that Jesus's words in that Gospel are a theological back-projection of the Church, and that the pre-Easter Jesus is very unlikely to have spoken this way, but that doesn't change the fact that the Johannine writings represent the faith of the age of the apostles and weren't just invented for the purposes of theological wrangling around the time of the Council of Nicea in the 4th century. I know that there are some folks in the 'quest for the historical Jesus' camp who would like to ditch the Fourth Gospel as a theological embarrassment, but that's something of a nuclear option, and 'The Predicament of Belief' is quite happy to quote Johannine sources. What I'm claiming on historical grounds is that later theology inherited all this from the apostolic era - primarily in its tradition of worship - and then had to work out what to do with it conceptually, which they didn't find at all straightforward! They certainly translated it into Greek categories out of necessity once Christianity went into the Graeco-Roman world, but historically it would be mistake to think that this meant that they all simply swallowed Plato/Plotinus whole. If they had, they would have been monists, not Trinitarians. For a brilliant explanation of this - not an easy author but really worth the effort -, look at almost anything by John Zizioulas ('Being as Communion' is his most famous book). Being Greek, he really knows what he's talking about when he says that the Cappadocian Fathers were absolutely going AGAINST Greek tradition in talking about the threeness of the Persons in the Godhead as being as fundamental as the unity of the Divine essence, as a) 'person' wasn't an ontological category for Greeks and b) philosophical Hellenism thought of God as a 'monad, a self-sufficient unit'. I hope this makes things more rather than less clear, although I've probably raised more questions than I've answered! Peter B.

My question deals with the sentence before that: "Philosophically, if God is not eternally Triune, then grounding otherness ontologically becomes impossible unless you go the route of ontologizing the God-world relationship (which creates other problems)." Can you perhaps untangle the meaning of this sentence? What does it mean, to "ground otherness ontologically," which, as I read this, non-Trinitarians cannot do? And what are the problems created by "ontologizing the God-world relationship"? (I'm hoping that identifying the problems may suggest the meaning of the phrase.) Sorry. But you've gotta admit, it's a bit thick.

For me, the area that I most want to look into is the Third point of your conclusion--is any notion of Jesus as pre-existent-ly God really completely dependent on Greek philosophical categories of substance? Yes, that was the framework in which those doctrines were worked out in the first few hundred years of the church. But when Clayton defended his adoptionist view, at the Emerging Church Conversation, by exclaiming 'what other option do we have?' (if you don't want to embrace Greek notions of substance), it seemed to me kind of a false binary, i.e. if you no longer believe in ancient Greek metaphysics you must necessarily rid yourself of any possibility of Jesus's divinity before his human life. While many contemporary theologians may just find that view of Jesus untenable anyway, whether 'Greekish' or no, it seems to me that there may be plenty of alternative ways of looking at Jesus's divine identity beyond the two poles that Clayton presented.

I have to say that I thought many of the same things when I listened to Clayton's presentation. I just don't find as many problems with traditional concepts of the Trinity as some of my more Liberal brothers and sisters. Saying that Adoptionism is the best option cuts the participants in the conversation by more than half.

pardon the tangent but on what basis do we come to decide whether or not G-d's nature(s?) is bound to human rules of logic as in "If the Son is not eternal, then logically neither is the Father", is this more than Greek non-sense?