Tag Archives: Natural Theology

Emil Brunner’s Simple Faith (7)

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Brunner’s Natural Theology

It is clear in this section that Brunner presupposes a universal knowledge of God, natural in the sense that every person has some ‘instinct’ (53) for it, that the gift of conscience has been given to every person by God, that “the law of God is as though it had been engraved in the human heart” (46). “Even the heathen know faintly that this life is a gift of God the Creator” (56). And they know also that they have violated God’s law and ordinances.

Everyone has a bad conscience whenever he thinks about God, for we know quite well what God wants of us, and our own failure to do what He demands. We know that we are disobedient. But because we know … we flee from God, we hide from Him like Adam and Eve after the Fall. The Law of God drives us away from God, or, more correctly, our bad conscience drives us away. We do not fear God, but we are afraid before God. … A bad conscience and the law of God belong together. We have a bad conscience because we know the law of God (55).

Evident in this citation is Brunner’s emphasis of human responsibility before God, of a final accounting before the Judge. “God requires an accounting. He holds us responsible. And that is what strikes terror in us, for how can we bribe the judge in this case?” (47)

The spring of life is really poisoned, things are bad with us. This is the testimony of conscience and even more sharply and clearly, the testimony of Holy Scripture. Behind God’s command stands the fearful word—Judgment! Lost! It is written more sharply in the New Testament than in the Old Testament. What then are we to do? (51, original emphasis)

A question we might ask is whether Brunner has correctly assessed the human condition or whether, in fact, his analysis is predicated on the loss of the cultural knowledge of God in Christendom. His exposition is not uncommon but follows a long tradition of biblical interpretation, especially passages such as Romans 1-2. His doctrine echoes that of Calvin and the Reformed tradition’s distinction between general and special revelation. Nonetheless, his rhetoric seems to presuppose the conditions of European Christendom.

Further evidence of this suggestion arises from Brunner’s discussion of the divine ordinances. He speaks specifically in terms of human marriage, the relationship between parents and children, and rulers and ruled. This language was widespread in nineteenth and early twentieth-century theology but was controversial in the period between the wars precisely because it was applied to such notions as nation, blood, and race. That is, the idea that there are ‘orders of creation’ was used in support of Nazi ideology, as God-ordained structures of existence that must be supported and maintained.

Although Brunner does not here engage these ideas, the structure of his argument suggests that he is aware of the danger that lurks here and that he repudiates it. Brunner explicitly grounds his doctrine of the ordinances in the divine love; they arise from God’s love for the creature and are given that humanity’s relationships might be ordered by the kind of love that God is and gives. True humanity is not defined by nation, blood, or race but by the image of the God who is love. These other realities divide humans from one another and so by definition fail Brunner’s test of what constitutes authentic human existence.

Finally, Brunner clearly notes that the Decalogue begins with God’s Word of grace but does not draw out the implication that the Decalogue is not so much a ‘republication’ of natural law but commandments for the covenant community. In particular, it is difficult to see how the first table of the law could arise as part of a natural law ethic; these commands are specific for the people of Israel.

There is, therefore, a tension in Brunner’s discussion. The traditional interpretation of Romans 1-2 especially, establishes human culpability before God: we are all sinners and therefore liable to divine wrath and judgement. Brunner maintains this interpretation and strengthens it with his assertion that “in his law God tells us nothing but the natural laws of true human life…” (46). But this diminishes the particularity of the revelation given to Israel and over-estimates the natural knowledge of the divine law that humanity supposedly possesses.

Emil Brunner’s Simple Faith (6)

Theology, , , ,

God’s Will for Humankind

In his reflection on the nature of human being, Emil Brunner suggests that the ‘image of God’ is a dynamic becoming:

He created man as a personal being, that is as a being that does not simply develop of itself into that for which God created it, but rather as a being who achieves his destiny only by saying his ‘yes’ to it (51).

Persons achieve or realise their ‘true’ humanity as they hear and receive the Word of God addressed to them. In chapters 10-13 of his little book Our Faith he explores the nature and contours of this Word, beginning with the Law.

Brunner begins with human experience of ‘law’ in general: our experience of cultural and social laws, of the laws of physics, of the human freedom and sense of autonomy that tempts us to think that we might be a ‘law unto oneself.’ Perhaps we can be even our own god! Yet, says Brunner, we find our autonomy limited and ultimately doomed. We find ourselves in environments we are unable to change or to bend to our will. We are confronted, finally, by the inevitability of death and with it all our God-pretensions. Brunner thus argues from a learned sense of law to establish an understanding of that which stands over against us and for which we are responsible: the Law of God.

The divine law is God’s will for humankind. “Every man, Jew or Christian, believer or atheist, cultured or uncultured, has some knowledge of this law. Every man has the consciousness of ‘responsibility’” via the faculty of conscience (46). This law is a reflection of the Creator’s good will for human life and it is just as inviolable as the laws of nature (47). Further, God has supplemented conscience by giving his people a written Law which is really a reiteration of “the natural laws of true human life” (46).

God’s law reveals that God wants something of us and that we are accountable for it. What is it that God desires? Brunner’s answer is threefold: something new every moment (!), only a few things—the Ten Commandments, and indeed, only one thing—the first commandment, for “he who keeps the first commandment keeps all the rest” (49). To have God alone as our God is to have a Master and thereby to forsake all alternatives, including especially the desire to be our own master. “God wants only that we should be that for which He created us. He created us ‘in His image’” (49). In binding us to himself God binds us also to others for the command to love God includes within itself the command to love our neighbour.

The Commandment of God is what God wants of us. But if we understand the words concerning the image of God, we also know what God wants for us. That God first loved us, before He demanded anything of us, and that He demands nothing more than that we should accept His love, that is, react to love with love, is simply what we call faith. … God’s incomprehensible, undeserved Love; and whosoever does that fulfils the will of God (49-50, original emphasis).

Of course, humanity has failed to keep God’s commandments and his law. We have supplanted God’s rule in the attempt to be our own master, seeking to live without and apart from God. We misuse our freedom of choice to do that which God does not will.

But God in His creative goodness, having given man freedom to choose for himself, gave him something more in that when he sinned he might not wholly corrupt his life and the life of others, might not wholly deviate from God’s way. This gift is the Ordinances of God (52).

The ordinances of God are those regularities of the natural ‘order’ in which human life is set. More particularly, they are limits and realities implanted in our very nature by God, which we can know intuitively, and which we can but ought not to transgress.

The most important of these ordinances is the fact that God has so organized human life that no man can live for himself. He cannot live without the other. Man needs woman, woman needs man. … Human life is so ordered by God because God has created man for love (53).

The ordinances of God can be endangered by human wilfulness, and, says Brunner, this has never been more apparent in world history than ‘today’ (53). The individual’s will for mastery, for autonomy, for independence tears at the very fabric of relationship and society.

The man who recognizes nothing higher than reason becomes ‘independent’—he no longer needs others, he is his own master—even his own God. And then human fellowship is dissipated like a string of pearls when the cord is cut. What binds us together is the Ordinances of God, behind which stands God’s love. He alone who is bound to God, and through God to his neighbour, can really become a man (54).

God’s address to humanity takes not only the form of law but also promise. Indeed, “God is not primarily the lawgiver, but the lifegiver” (55). The law functions to make us aware of our failure to do what God wills. But in itself it is a gift of divine love given to us for our good. Brunner acknowledges that the commandments do not begin with Thou shalt Not but with I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage. All humanity have some inkling of the divine demand but the knowledge of the promise is strictly the message of the Bible.

That is the biblical message, not what God wants of us, but what He desires for us; no what we should do, but what God does and gives. The Law of God is everywhere, the Promise of God is only in the Bible—the promise, namely, that God comes to His sick, rebellious people, to heal them, the message of the ‘Saviour,’ the healing, saving, forgiving, and redeeming God. This promise is really the Word of God. … God desires nothing of us save that we allow Him to bestow life upon us (57, original emphasis).

Emil Brunner’s Simple Faith (3)

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Creational Purpose

God is the Creator—and Lord—of all things. He is the Lord prior to, in, and over his creation. To know God as Creator is to know him as the Lord who claims us in the totality of our existence. The world is God’s world and it testifies to him who made it.

The world is the house of the Great King and the Great Artist. He does not permit Himself to be seen; for man cannot see God, only the world. But this world is His creation, and whether conscious of it or not, it speaks of Him who made it. Yet in spite of this testimony man does not know Him, or at least not rightly. … We behave ourselves in this God-created world (if one may use the clumsy simile) like dogs in a great art gallery. We see the pictures and yet fail to see them. … Our madness, haughtiness, irreverence—in short, our sin, is the reason for our failure to see the Creator in His creation (24-25).

Humanity in all ages has had ‘presentiments’ of God though not true or full knowledge. This natural awareness of God’s existence is the basis of human religion: “the gods of the heathen are partly constructions of human fantasy, partly surmise of the true God, a wild combination of both” (26). This is true also of the philosophers.

Brunner distinguishes between belief that a divine being created the world (which is merely a theory of origins) and faith in the creator. The latter is, as already mentioned, to know God as Lord and to obey him as such.

The world is not an arbitrary occurrence, rather God’s creation is purposeful. What appears to us as perhaps random chance or fate finds its place in God’s overarching plan.

There is One who knows the destiny of the world, He who first made the sketch, He who created and rules the world according to this plan. What is confusion for us is order for Him, what we call chance is designed by Him, thought out from eternity and executed with omnipotence (28).

This purpose, however, is not immediately evident to those who live in the world and its historical unfolding but is a matter of revelation, a matter of Jesus Christ. Here Brunner announces the divine purpose: “reconciliation, salvation, forgiveness of sins, promise of eternal life, fulfilment of all things in God’s own life. That is God’s plan for the world” (29). The world that originated in God is to find its fulfilment and destiny in God: to this we are called and invited, and to this we must respond. “To hear this call, and in this call to hear where God will lead us, to have insight into God’s plan for the world—that is faith” (30).

Emil Brunner’s Simple Faith (2)

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The Knowledge of God

Brunner’s first three meditations concern the knowledge of God: Is there a God? Is the Bible the Word of God? and the Mystery of God. Brunner wants to turn the first question on its head. To even ask the question is to signify a fundamental disconnect between ‘ourselves’ and our heart, conscience, and awareness of the world, all of which testify to the reality of God. “Your heart knows something of God already; and it is that very knowledge which gives your question existence and power” (Brunner, Our Faith, 14). Further, “not only the heart within, but the world without also testifies of God” (14-15).

To ask the question, then, “Is there a God?” is to fail to be morally serious. For when one is morally serious one knows that good is not evil, that right and wrong are two different things, that one should seek the right and eschew the wrong. There is a divine order to which one must bow whether one likes to do so or not. Moral seriousness is respect for the voice of conscience. If there is no God, conscience is but a complex of residual habits and means nothing. If there is no God then it is absurd to trouble oneself about right—or wrong (15-16).

Like Calvin, Brunner presupposes an innate knowledge of God, supported by an external knowledge of God grounded in the created order. “That God exists is testified by reason, conscience, and nature with its wonders. But who God is—God Himself must tell us in His Revelation” (16, original emphasis). This ‘natural’ knowledge of God (shared by all humanity) is really an awareness of something more rather than personal knowing. One does not know God in a personal or relational sense but ‘knows’ of God or has an intuition of his reality. The reason for this is that God is not ‘a thing’ in this world, one more thing amongst other things, an object of knowledge which might be discovered and categorised and thereby mastered by the knower (13). God, rather, intends that we might know him and be mastered by him.

It is for this reason that God has given us the Bible: “God has made known the secret of His will through the Prophets and Apostles in the Holy Scriptures. He permitted them to say who He is” (18). Brunner holds an instrumental view of the Scripture. God speaks to humanity through the Bible. It is the Word of God because and as it points to Jesus Christ, and because in it we hear the voice of God. The Bible speaks in many ways of its one central theme—of the Good Shepherd God who comes to us. “The voices of the Prophets are the single voice of God, calling. Jesus Christ is God Himself coming. In Him, ‘the word became flesh.’ … He is the Word of God” (19, original emphasis). Brunner uses the analogy of a gramophone record and the record label “His Master’s Voice” to illustrate how the Scripture functions as the Word of God. (I remember as a child my father’s record collection included albums from this label!)

If you buy a gramophone record you are told that you will hear the Master Caruso. Is that true? Of course! But really his voice? Certainly! And yet—there are some noises made by the machine which are not the master’s voice, but the scratching of the steel needle upon the hard disk. But do not become impatient with the hard disk! For only by means of the record can you hear ‘the master’s voice.’ So, too, is it with the Bible. It makes the real Master’s voice audible—really His voice, His words, what He wants to say. But there are incidental noises accompanying, just because God speaks His word through the voice of man. … But through them God speaks His word. … The importance of the Bible is that God speaks to us through it (19-20).

What the Bible reveals is Jesus Christ—the mystery of who God is. All that humans can know in their own capacity is the world. God, however, is not the world but rather the mystery within which the world has its being (21). The mystery of God is threefold: his transcendent majesty over the world, his searing holiness which wills our obedience, and his unspeakable love and condescension. In his transcendent majesty, God is Lord. He is the Almighty whose holy will confronts us as an absolute to which we must either submit ourselves or against which we will shatter ourselves.

But the mastery of God is even greater. The will of this holy God—what He absolutely desires, is love. His feeling towards us is of infinite love. He wants to give Himself to us, to draw and bind us to Him. Fellowship is the one thing He wants absolutely. God created the world in order to share Himself. … God desires one thing absolutely: that we should know the greatness and seriousness of His will-to-love, and permit ourselves to be led by it. Our heart is like a fortress which God wants to capture (22-23).

Brunner’s portrayal of the divine mystery posits the sheer givenness of God’s transcendence: God simply is and is the almighty and holy God. This is the overarching reality within which our being and the being of the world has its being. The central category Brunner uses to discuss God’s relation to the world is the divine will. Brunner speaks first of the holiness and demand of God and only then of the tender lovingkindness of God. In each case it is a matter of the divine willing, and in each case the divine will is absolute. Yet although Brunner speaks of the divine holiness first, it seems that the divine loving has a deeper and perhaps more fundamental bearing: God created the world in order to share himself with it, and wills above all things that we should know his ‘will-to-love.’

Our heart is like a fortress which God wants to capture. He wants to capture it with His love. If, overcome by His love, we open the gate, it is well with our souls. If, however, we obstinately close our hearts to His love, His absolute will—then woe to us! If we refuse to surrender to the love of God, we must feel the absoluteness of His will as wrath (23-24).

A Psalm for Sunday – Psalm 8

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Psalm 8Read Psalm 8

Derek Kidner suggests that “this psalm is an unsurpassed example of what a hymn should be, celebrating as it does the glory and grace of God, rehearsing who he is and what he has done, and relating us and our world to him; all with a masterly economy of words and in a spirit of mingled joy and awe” (65-66). From the highest heaven to the lowest earth God’s majestic glory is declared, made known and acknowledged.

The theme of the psalm concerns the greatness and goodness of God and the small but significant human. In light of the vastness, glory and intricacy of creation the psalmist is compelled to ask, “What is man that you take thought of him?” The focus of the psalm on the great and special privilege given to humanity occurs within the overarching focus on the sovereignty and majesty of God which frames the psalm in verses one and nine.

It is perhaps significant here, that this psalm does not teach a kind of natural theology or revelation (see Craigie). That is, humanity cannot ascertain its own true nature, nor its creational task, by looking at the world of nature. We may be awed by the splendor of nature, but it does not communicate a divine word to us; for that, we need the revelation of God’s name which is proclaimed in all the earth, and the revelation given to us in Scripture, for the psalm itself includes a meditation on the word of Scripture given in Genesis 1.

The comparison between God and humanity may be extended. God’s glory and majesty is inherent, revealed in the vast and mighty work of creation. The creation, which is so great that we are dwarfed in comparison, is but the work of God’s fingers. The greatness of God far surpasses the greatness of creation! Nevertheless, the glory of the heavens evokes praise, so that even children are aware of God’s awesome greatness – to the shame of those who would repudiate God’s existence, rule and justice.

Humanity’s glory, in contrast, is derivative, bestowed by God in the act of creation as the crown of all God’s creatures, and in the constant remembrance by which God calls the human creature to mind. This is a dignity given by grace, a dignity given to every person, and constantly renewed as each person is the object of God’s particular care and concern. Amongst all the creatures, only humanity is crowned with glory and majesty.

Verses six through eight indicate the creational task given to humanity: to “rule” over the works of God’s hands. This task echoes the creational ordinance of Genesis 1:26, 28. Created in the divine image, humanity is to rule over the other living beings. It is crucial that this text be understood within the cultural milieu in which it was written. Biblical scholars suggest that the creation stories picture the world and all its creatures as a temple for the praise of God’s glory. Humanity in God’s image are a priesthood within this temple charged with the task serving and caring for this temple, representing God to the creatures, and offering acceptable worship to the creator.

This vision of priestly stewardship has, of course, been drastically altered by the reality of the Fall, so that even creation has been implicated and altered in humanity’s turning away from God. Indeed, as the author of the letter to the Hebrews plainly notes, “But now we do not yet see all things subjected to him. But we see Jesus…” (Hebrews 2:8-9).

The New Testament clearly and unambiguously applies this psalm to Jesus Christ, both here in Hebrews and elsewhere. Humanity in general has failed in its creational task and forfeited its distinguished role. But Jesus Christ has come as the truly human person, and in his incarnation, suffering and death, was made for a time “lower than the angels,” but now is crowned with glory and honour. The One who tasted death for all has now been so exalted that all things are under his feet (Ephesians 1:22; 1 Corinthians 15:25-27). Jesus himself cited this psalm on the day of his triumphant entry into Jerusalem when the children cried out, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” (Matthew 21:15-17).

Jesus Christ is the “real humanity,” the true “Son of Man” in both the earthly and eschatological sense. In our place and on our behalf he has taken and borne human weakness and fallenness in order to redeem us and restore us to a position in which we share his glory, honour and dominion. Authentic humanity is fully and truly realised in Christ, and we find our identity and destiny in him. By the Spirit believers are being renewed and transformed into his image, restored to truly human life and existence (see 1 Corinthians 15:49; 2 Corinthians 3:17-18; Ephesians 4:20-24; Colossians 3:8-11).

True human being and identity is a christological and eschatological reality.

A Latin Poem & Natural Theology

Literature, Theology, , ,

the-name-of-the-roseI came across this in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (15):

“My good Adso,” my master said, “during our whole journey I have been teaching you to recognize the evidence through which the world speaks to us like a great book. Alanus de Insulis said that
      omnis mundi creatura
      quasi liber et pictura
      nobis est in speculum
and he was thinking of the endless array of symbols with which God, through His creatures speaks to us of the eternal life. But the universe is even more talkative than Alanus thought, and it speaks not only of the ultimate things (which it does always in an obscure fashion) but also of closer things, and then it speaks quite clearly.”

This little Latin poem is half of the first stanza of a longer medieval work. The whole stanza is:
      Omnis mundi creatura
      quasi liber et pictura
      nobis est in speculum:
      nostrae vitae, nostrae mortis,
      nostri status, nostrae sortis
      fidele signaculum,

which translates roughly as:

     All the world’s creatures
     As a book and a picture
     Are to us as a mirror;
     in it our life, our death,
     our present condition and our passing
     are faithfully signified.

The poem derives from twelfth century Christian theologian and neo-Platonist philosopher Alain de Lille, and makes the simple point that observation of the natural world can inform understanding of our own life. But it does so only up to a point. This poem is like the book of Ecclesiastes: it can see the reality and inevitability of death, but cannot see resurrection. This is the limitation of all forms of natural theology: it requires the revelation given in Jesus and attested in Scripture if it is to speak the truth of our existence. Umberto Eco rightly suggests that God indeed speaks to us through created things of the eternal life, but only obscurely.

See Psalm 19.