Meeting A Stranger: A Covenantal Epistemology

By Michael S. Horton

[Michael Horton is Professor of Apologetics and Theology at Westminster Seminary California, Escondido, Calif. This article was originally presented as his inaugural address at the seminary on 9 March 2004. A revised version will also appear in the author’s book Lord and Servant: A Covenant Christology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, forthcoming).]

In his essay “The Two Types of Philosophy of Religion,” Paul Tillich contrasts the “ontological” and “cosmological” approaches, which he characterizes as “overcoming estrangement” versus “meeting a stranger.”[1] Drawing on Tillich’s typology and adding a third alternative, “a stranger we never meet,” I will defend “meeting a stranger” with the covenant as its site.[2]

I. Two Ways of Avoiding a Stranger

A. Overcoming Estrangement (Hyper-Immanence)

Of course, Tillich does not regard his own (ontological) view as a method of avoiding a stranger. As far as he is concerned, God is not a stranger in the first place. According to Tillich, “In the first way [‘overcoming estrangement’ or the ‘ontological’ view] man discovers himself when he discovers God; he discovers something that is identical with himself although it transcends him infinitely, something from which he is estranged, but from which he never has been and never can be separated.”[3] Tillich cites an example from Meister Eckhart: “There is between God and the soul neither strangeness nor remoteness, therefore the soul is not only equal with God but it is. .. the same that He is.”[4] If we think of God as “‘the innermost center of man which is in kinship with the Deepest Reality in the Universe’;. .. if the concept of vision is used again and again, for our knowledge of God, we are in an ontological atmosphere.. . .”[5] In fact, Tillich’s own defense of the “ontological” view repeats familiar oppositions in Platonism and Neoplatonism.[6] In this approach, unity, univocity, and sameness win out over plurality, analogy, and difference. This ontological way or “overcoming estrangement” persists in the various pantheistic and panentheistic visions of modern theology according to which we come to ourselves when we come to God.[7] This approach represents an ontology of emanation and an epistemology of vision. Thus, encountering God is nothing like meeting a stranger—a genuine other—but is more like a new awareness of a presence that is always immanent (visio dei) and, at least in its liberal Protestant form, always benevolent, even benign. In Scheiermacher’s words, “Turn from everything usually reckoned religion, and fix your regard on the inward emotions and dispositions, as all utterances and acts of inspired men direct.”[8] Moreover, “God never reveals himself from outside, by intrusion,” wrote Teilhard de Chardin, “but from within, by stimulation and enrichment of the human psychic currents.. . .”[9] (Avery Dulles observes, “Karl Barth, for his part, dismissed Teilhard as ‘a giant Gnostic snake.’”)[10] In more banal forms, this approach is also dominant in the various New Age spiritualities and can be regarded as generally characteristic of popular American religion across the denominational and religious landscape.[11] It is no wonder that Feuerbach could conclude that “the religious object of adoration is nothing but the objectified nature of him who adores,” so that “God is the manifested inward nature, the expressed self of man.”[12] It was in reaction to this trajectory that Barth invoked Kierkegaard’s “infinite-qualitative distinction” between God and humanity.[13] We are therefore authorized to speak of God only because of the Deus dixit—God has spoken, and has done so ultimately for his glory, not ours.[14] “The very names Kierkegaard, Luther, Calvin, Paul, and Jeremiah suggest what Schleiermacher never possessed, a clear and direct apprehension of the truth that man is made to serve God and not God to serve man.. . .The only answer that possesses genuine transcendence, and so can solve the riddle of immanence, is God’s word—note, God’s word.”[15] Yet even this word does not render God “haveable,” as Dietrich Bonhoeffer observed in criticism of Barth.[16] Recoiling from hyper-immanence, Barth resists identifying God with any creaturely reality.[17]

But all of these debates are rather intramural in the light of the postmodern critique of theology of any kind. The suspicion of divine immediacy, “have-ability,” and presence is far more emphatically worked out in the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida, among others.

B. A Stranger We Never Meet (Hyper-Transcendence)

To Tillich’s two types, overcoming estrangement versus meeting a stranger, I would like to add a third: a stranger we never meet. If hyper-immanence avoids meeting a stranger by denying that he is a stranger—a genuine other, different from oneself—hyper-transcendence avoids meeting a stranger by denying access to the other. If the ontological view is given to hyper-immanence, the critical approach embraces a hyper-transcendence in which the reality of God can be neither affirmed nor denied, but can serve only as a place-holder for things like the “universal religion of morality” in contrast to an “ecclesiastical faith” (Kant) or Derrida’s equivalent contrast of a “universal messianic structure” over against the actual arrival of any particular messiah.[18] If we cannot find a passable road to God, there must not be one.[19] If univocity fits with “overcoming estrangement” and analogy with “meeting a stranger,” then equivocity is the epistemology of choice for postmodern skepticism.

That which Tillich defined and defended as the ontological way is now pejoratively labeled onto-theology. The term “onto-theology” dates to Martin Heidegger in his 1936 lectures on Schelling.[20] There, despite the widespread use that is made of his term, Heidegger is interested not in “debunking” religion, but rather in liberating theology from philosophy, specifically a speculative metaphysics and ontology. The kind of god one gets after Descartes—the metaphysics of being, causa sui, and the Infinite—is finally not even a god to whom one can pray or sing.[21] According to Heidegger, at least, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Pascal, and Kierkegaard represented resources for overcoming the onto-theological project that seemed to hold theology captive especially in German idealism and its philosophy of the absolute.

For Heidegger, therefore, “‘God’ as thought in metaphysics is not the God of faith, but a consequence of the way metaphysics thinks transcendence.”[22] But “to think God in terms of being is to impose limit and finitude on God.”[23] In Zurich in 1951, replying to the question, “Need being and God be posited as identical?” Heidegger answered, appealing to Aquinas, “.. . being and God are not identical, and I would never attempt to think the essence of God through being.” In fact, Heidegger added, “If I were yet to write a theology—to which I sometimes feel inclined—then the word ‘being’ would not occur in it.”[24]

Derrida, for his part, recognizes that the onto-theology that he particularly has in mind is that of Enlightenment rationalism, where “the determination of absolute presence is constituted as self-presence, as subjectivity.”[25] Despite the ambiguity of some of his now taken-for-granted phrases, Derrida asserts, rightly, I believe, that all dualisms and monisms ultimately spring from “a metaphysics whose entire history was compelled to strive toward the reduction of the trace” in favor of “full presence.” In fact, this is why this history of Western thought—including Derrida’s—is trapped in a circle of hyper-transcendence and hyper-immanence, we would argue. It is not presence per se that is Derrida’s bogeyman, but violence, “an onto-theology determining the archeological and eschatological meaning of being as presence, as parousia, as life without difference.”[26] However, like Kant’s categories (including God), Derrida’s universal messianic structure must be presupposed while proscribing any particular presence of a given messiah in time.[27] Whatever his intentions, therefore, Derrida does not overcome the dualistic habits of Western thought, nor does he return the particular to pride of place.[28]

Nevertheless, Merold Westphal sees Derrida as providing at least a useful therapy against “a Neoplatonism that denies the reality of divine alterity,” which can only lead to what he calls “ontological xenophobia, the fear of meeting a stranger, even if the stranger should be God.”[29] In the light of this long-running critique that began, one could say, with Kant himself and culminates in Derrida, Westphal sees Christian faith as “the overcoming of ontological xenophobia.” Derrida cites two sermons in which “Eckhart stresses that it is the task of the intellect to apprehend God naked: ‘The intellect pulls off the coat from God and perceives him bare, as he is stripped of goodness and of being and of all names.’” (It is no wonder that Luther characterized the theology of glory as an attempt to climb up to heaven to get a glimpse of the “naked God.”) Such immediacy is, of course, direct. “But if I am to perceive God without a medium,” says Eckhart, “then I must just become him, and he must become me.”[30]

Westphal elaborates on Eckhart’s comments in the light of Derrida’s critique:

Derrida finds this kind of talk as troubling as did the church authorities. It denies the finitude we experience in what he calls “the structure of the trace”: “Language has started without us, in us and before us. This is what theology calls God.” There is a necessity in language that beckons “toward the event of an order or of a promise that does not belong to what one currently calls history.. .. Order or promise, this injunction commits (me), in a rigorously asymmetrical manner, even before I have been able to say I, to sign such a provocation in order to reappropriate it for myself and restore the symmetry.”[31]

Neoplatonic pantheism allows for no real “otherness,” but Westphal is convinced that the Christian doctrine of creation does generate precisely that transcendent space that opens up to genuine otherness: “The finite self is real” even if it is not an emanation of God’s being. “Eden is heteronomy from the outset,” with the possibility of estrangement (sin).[32]

Ontological xenophobia is not just the attempt to use linkages of being to defend myself from the anxiety of meeting a stranger; it is the attempt to avoid meeting the kind of stranger whose moral presence is sufficient to undermine the ultimacy of ontological categories as such, the kind of stranger who might lead me to ask, “Is Ontology Fundamental?” and to answer my own question by exploring the possibility of “Ethics as First Philosophy.”[33]

Levinas and Derrida recognize the violence against the other that hyper-immanence represents. The problem with accounts such as Levinas’s and Derrida’s, however, is that they render the other absolutely and wholly other. Suspicious of all presences as the reduction of the other to oneself (Levinas), the actual arrival of any specific God is indefinitely postponed—à venir (Derrida). It is the aneschatology of always-deferred presence (Bataille and Mark C. Taylor), a “coming” that never arrives, the ontology of the stranger we never meet.[34]

II. Meeting a Stranger

What if Kant and his postmodern successors are right, as I think they are, in telling us that there is no safe path to God? But what if instead there is a path from God to us, such as the famous Emmaus road, and instead of our finding God he has caught up with us, even when we did not recognize him? In the wake of Kant’s critique, those who have not taken Hegel’s triumphalistic route have in fact been much like those despondent disciples: “They stood still, looking sad,” as the stranger inserted himself into their conversation about the arrival that never came. “Then one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answered him, ‘Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?’” For them, the empty tomb was not a sign of presence but of sheer absence, without a trace.

Then [Jesus] said to them, “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures. (Luke 24:17, 25–27)

And finally, when he celebrated the Supper with them, they and the rest of the disciples recognized Jesus as their risen Lord (vv. 28–35).[35] In word and sacrament they had met a Stranger.

If hyper-transcendence introduces an unbiblical dualism (i.e., antitheses) between the creator and creature, eternity and time, heaven and earth, hyper-immanence collapses all dualities (i.e., difference) in a monistic scheme. If the paradigm of “overcoming estrangement” represents an ontology of emanation and an epistemology of vision, “meeting a stranger” articulates an ontology of genuine difference and an epistemology of the external Word, both grounded in a theology of the covenant.

A. A Covenantal Ontology

Our rejection of the “ontological way” does not mean that we lack an ontology. But it is to say that recognizing a stranger, especially if that stranger should be God, is an ethical enterprise. We do not usually think this way, at least in the West, because we have been taught to separate epistemology from ethics, theoria from praxis, giving the former its own autonomous foundation. The ethical stewardship of knowledge—the accountability for what we hear—is directly stated by Jesus in the Emmaus passage: “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared!” (v. 25). If we begin not with the metaphysics of being but with YHWH of the covenant, we ineluctably find ourselves in the world thus described as meeting a stranger.

Reflecting this suspicion of the ontological way as defined by Tillich, then, Reformation theology has always been wary of even discussing the “being” of God. It is not a “what” that we worship, but a “who”—an agent, not an essence. That is not to deny God’s essence, but to recognize that this is hidden to us. Speculation yields a “what,” but the biblical drama renders a “who.”[36]

So, for example, concerning Calvin, B. B. Warfield notes, “He is refusing all a priori methods of determining the nature of God and requiring of us to form our knowledge of him a posteriori from the revelation He gives us of Himself in His activities.”[37] In the Institutes, after a mere paragraph on the exegetical support for God’s spirituality and immensity, Calvin moves hurriedly on to the Trinity.[38] “The essence of God is rather to be adored than inquired into.”[39] In fact, Calvin goes so far as to assert, “They are mad who seek to discover what God is.”[40] At least this far Calvin would sympathize with Heidegger’s remark above, “If I were to write a theology. .. then the word ‘being’ would not occur in it.” Early Reformed writers such as Musculus repeated this approach, explicitly launching their discussion of God with the question of who God is rather than what God is.[41]

The notion of God as “supreme being” (summum ens) is suspended upon an ontology common in most essentials to Platonism according to which, as Gerald Bray notes, “only God has being (ousia),” and “everything else is a corrupt or illusory emanation from the ‘one which is.’”[42] The scale-of-being ontology not only confuses the creature with the creator (any distinction being merely quantitative); it simultaneously downgrades creation as a falling away from being in its very essence. In scripture, however, God is not revealed as the “supreme being,” but as the creator who freely wills that which is not-God nevertheless to be related to God in all of its difference. As Kathryn Tanner reminds us, aside from the incarnation, God communicates his goods, not his being, to creatures.[43]

The covenant is the place where a stranger meets us. It is an ethical clearing that opens before us, not a preoccupation with “being” or “existence” as if we knew what it was like for God to “be.”[44] Therefore, Reformed theology recognizes some of its own polemics in the postmodern criticism of modernity, yet without falling into the opposite reductionisms of an equivocal metaphysics of absence, sheer difference, and endless deferral.

1. Covenantal Rather Than Ontological Union

Basic to our account is the sharpest possible contrast between ex nihilo creation and emanation.[45] Gerhard von Rad concluded that, far from relying on the ancient Near Eastern mythologies, “Israel’s world-view performed a major function in drawing a sharp line of division between God and the world, and by purging the material world of both elements of the divine and the demonic. There were no avenues of direct access to the mystery of the creator emanating from the world, certainly not by means of the image, but Yahweh was present in his living word in acts of history.”[46] Pagan myth allowed only two ontological options, the divine and the demonic, while biblical faith introduced the notion of a creation that is neither divine nor demonic but is affirmed in all of its difference, finitude, and materiality. The secular was good without being God. Thus whfile Buddhism, Platonism, and much of modern theology down to our own time locate good and evil in ontic structures, scripture relocates mat discussion to an ethical-historical site of a broken covenant.[47] There is no “sacred cosmos,” but that does not make the cosmos evil. Finitude does not imply fault. Again Westphal is helpful in making this point:

Henceforth, to Tillich’s chagrin, religion can only have the form of meeting a stranger.. .. No doubt that is why Kierkegaard’s Anti-Climacus describes “as pantheistic any definition of sin that [makes] it out to be something merely negative—weakness, sensuousness, finitude, ignorance, etc.” As long as theology has only the categories of cause and effect of infinite and finite to work with, it is vulnerable to the loss of divine alterity that pantheism represents. On the other hand, when the creation and fall motifs are united, the mild otherness of the former is preserved in the wild otherness of the latter.[48]

The basis for creation is not conflict (as in ancient Mesopotamian and Canaanite creation myths, as well as in Manicheanism, Hobbes, Hegel, and Marx), but “covenant love,” as Colin Gunton notes, and this also generates a different ethic.[49] This paradigm affirms genuine difference without succumbing either to antitheses or monism.

If the fall acutely reminds us of God’s relation to us as a stranger, the covenant is the site where strangers meet. Whether in secular treaties or those associated with the biblical traditions, a covenant is “a union based on an oath” (McCarthy) or “a relationship under sanctions” (Kline).[50] Under this broad definition existed a variety of treaty forms, some of them promissory while others were strictly law covenants. One implication of a covenantal approach is that divine “presence” and “absence” are ethical and relational rather than ontological categories. “Presence” (or nearness) is synonymous with salvation and divine favor—righteousness (saddiqa), sabbath peace (shalom)—while “absence” names the judicial curse for covenant-breaking (lo-ammi, “not my people”).[51] We know this form of presence and absence in our own covenantal experience with marriage. Sometimes even when the spouse is physically present, he or she may be said to “not really be there” in the relationship. Desertion happens in the heart. It is this ethical or covenantal form of presence and absence that scripture employs. Although, ontologically speaking, God is omnipresent, the real question is, Where is God there for us? It is a question of security, given our knowledge of ourselves as rebels against the God who calls out, “Adam, where are you?” It is no wonder that the marital analogy figures so prominently in the biblical drama. The two become “one flesh” not in any kind of ontological synthesis, reducing the other to oneself (or vice versa), but in covenant. The sort of union that a covenantal approach entails corresponds to the analogies of marriage and adoption, in which the two becoming “one flesh” or the child being made an heir is constituted by both legal and organic solidarity, while retaining their otherness.

2. Divine Descent Over Human Ascent

This is a retrieval especially of the doctrine of analogy as the form of the creator-creature relationship, which is ontologically realized in the incarnation. As J. K. A. Smith argues, “The incarnational paradigm operates on the basis of an affirmation of finitude, materiality, and embodiment. In this sense, I take it to be the very antithesis of the versions of ‘Platonism’ which have dominated philosophy of language from the Phaedrus to the Logical Investigations.”[52] But if the ontological approach, especially at its radical quasi-gnostic fringes, announces an escape from finitude, materiality, and embodiment through absorption into the “whole” (however defined), antithetical accounts are too suspicious even of any likeness or analogy between creator and creature. What we are calling here a covenantal account or, in Smith’s coinage, “the incarnational paradigm,” is essentially analogical rather than embracing either the univocity or the equivocity of being. Indeed, humankind was created to be, in its parts and as a whole, the paradigmatic analogy of God. The prime example of this in scripture is the familiar pattern of divine summons, “Where art thou?” and the servant’s reply, “Here I am.”

“To think,” says Levinas in agreement with Heidegger, “is no longer to contemplate but to commit oneself, to be engulfed by that which one thinks, to be involved. This is the dramatic event of being-in-the-world.”[53] Thus far Heidegger’s phenomenology shows great promise, according to Levinas. But in counseling us to go beyond the particular being (i.e., the other who calls) to the “horizon of being,” Heidegger “rejoins the tradition of Western philosophy” rooted in Plato.[54] Instead of aiming at an object, says Levinas, prayer—the proper mode of discourse par excellence—is “the tie with a person” expressed in the vocative.[55]

Instead of comprehending, possessing, dominating the other through vision, we invoke the other and are summoned by the other by voice. Rather than a universal horizon, there is a particular depth in the face/voice of the other.[56] To be a self is to be responsible.[57] Thus Levinas seeks to transcend ontology by shifting thought to the ethical plane. At the same time, Levinas lacks an incarnational perspective that would allow him to identify the revelation of the Other with someone or something to which he had access. In this respect, Levinas only deepens Kant’s strictures against the knowability of noumena—reflecting what I have designated the paradigm of “the stranger we never meet.”

By contrast, Smith rightly argues that our finitude, materiality, and embodiment, far from being obstacles to revelation, are in fact the very conditions of its possibility. In Levinas, the radical alterity of the other does not permit access. In Jean-Luc Marion, the “saturated phenomenon. .. displaces and overwhelms those conditions,” notes Smith.[58] But in that case, how could there ever be a possibility of anyone receiving revelation?

In other words, if the Wholly Other were wholly “Wholly Other,” how would we know it even “exists”? How could any discourse concerning the Wholly Other—even about its being “beyond being”—ever be generated? And more importantly, how could any relation with the Wholly Other be possible, apart from its appearing in some manner?[59]

Levinas and Marion both insist on the importance of such a relation (ethical responsibility, etc.), but there can be no relation. “This is where I would locate my critique of Levinas and Marion: any ‘revelation’ can only be received, and must be received, insofar as the recipient possesses the condition for its reception—otherwise, it will remain unknown.”[60] The great questions that occupy theology can only be settled finally in the sphere of history and ethical action rather than metaphysics and ontological participation.

In a deeply incarnational approach, as Smith notes, “new truth comes from the outside to us as a gift.”[61] “As Kierkegaard argues, such an ‘equality’ could only be made possible by a descent by God, and more particularly, by an incarnational appearance in which God will ‘show up’ in terms that the finite knower can understand.”[62] Thus, says Smith, “.. . analogy is an incarnational account of knowledge.. .. Thus we are not surprised to see Derrida emphasize that ‘language never escapes analogy,. .. it is indeed analogy through and through.’ On my accounting, that is to conclude that language is incarnational through and through, that it never escapes incarnation as its paradigm and condition of possibility.”[63] Even Aquinas spoke of our contact with God as “a matter of ‘raising up’ the human intellect to the level of the divine, rather than a movement of descent from the divine.”[64] Aquinas himself must be transcended, says Smith, arguing along similar lines to the Reformation traditions. God accommodates his revelation to our capacity, without surrendering his transcendence in the process.[65] While “correlational” theologies (Tillich, Rahner, McFague) threaten to reduce revelation to “cultural manifestation,” theologians such as Barth and von Balthasar “ignore the historical conditions of finitude which are the condition of possibility for the reception of a revelation. An incarnational account does justice to both of these poles.”[66]

Having emphasized the downward descent, we should also insert a brief mention of eschatology. A theology of the cross (divine condescension) is inert unless dialectically related to a theology of the resurrection and ascension. This is also to reintegrate christology and pneumatology. For instance, in Paul’s teaching, not only has God become flesh; in so doing, and by living, dying, rising, and ascending, he, by his Spirit, has “raised us up together with Christ and seated us with him in heavenly places” (Eph 2:6). Paul is not inviting the Ephesians in such expressions to climb by sure-footed contemplation from weak physical and historical appearances to the beatific vision of “the One.” He is not encouraging the overcoming of ontological estrangement, a new awareness of what has always been the case. Rather, says the apostle to the Gentiles, his readers were in times past “aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.” But the solution is as ethically and historically embedded as the problem: “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.” In his broken body is created “one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace. .. through the cross” (vv. 13–16).

B. A Covenantal Epistemology

Neither modern accounts (by turns Kantian or Hegelian—or both at once) nor postmodern extensions of Kantian criticism can serve as reliable alternatives to a covenantal epistemology. Like Derrida, Reformed theology is suspicious of idols, but unlike Derrida, recognizes its summoning Shepherd and welcomes his arrival. We share postmodernism’s critique of the Promethean pretensions of the modern self to absolute (archetypal) knowledge, but find in the fact of revelation the basis for ectypal, finite, creaturely knowledge.

1. Archetypal-Ectypal Theology

If anything, the reformers went beyond Aquinas in their criticisms of the god of the philosophers. The attributes of God are set forth in scripture, writes Calvin. “Thereupon his powers are mentioned, by which he is shown to us not as he is in himself, but as he is toward us: so that this recognition of him consists more in living experience than in vain and high-flown speculation.”[67] Revealed knowledge is not mere “opinion,” as in Plato’s shadowy and imperfect realm of appearances, since phenomena are creations rather than emanations of God. God cannot be directly known by our climbing the scale of being, but can only be known in and through the Mediator. Calvin explained, in terms reminiscent of Heidegger’s above:

When faith is discussed in the schools, they call God simply the object of faith, and by fleeting speculations, as we have elsewhere stated, lead miserable souls astray rather than direct them to a definite goal. For since “God dwells in inaccessible light” (1 Tim. 6:16), Christ must become our intermediary.. .. Indeed, it is true that faith looks to one God. But this must also be added, “to know Jesus Christ whom he has sent” (Jn. 17:3).[68]

And in a very important passage, Reformed scholastic Francis Turretin expands on this counsel, even taking Aquinas and the medieval scholastics to task:

But when God is set forth as the object of theology, he is not to be regarded simply as God in himself (for thus he is incomprehensible [akataleptos] to us), but as revealed and as he has been pleased to manifest himself to us in his word, so that divine revelation is the formal relation which comes to be considered in this object. Nor is he to be considered exclusively under the relation of deity (according to the opinion of Thomas Aquinas and many Scholastics after him, for in this manner the knowledge of him could not be saving but deadly to sinners), but as he is our God (i.e., covenanted in Christ as he has revealed himself to us in his word not only as the object of knowledge, but also of worship).. .. Thus although theology treats of the same things with metaphysics, physics and ethics, yet the mode of considering is far different. It treats of God not like metaphysics as a being or as he can be known from the light of nature, but as the Creator and Redeemer made known by revelation. It treats of creatures not as things of nature, but of God (i.e., as holding a relation and order to God as their Creator, preserver and Redeemer) and that too according to the revelation made by him. This mode of considering, the other sciences either do not know or do not assume.[69]

This distinction between archetypal and ectypal knowledge is the epistemological corollary of the creator—creature distinction. Hearing the following comments this side of Descartes’s “clear and distinct ideas,” I find the following statement from Wolfgang Musculus (1497—1563) particularly interesting: Even the advanced believer, he says, does not attain a “plain and perfect” knowledge of “those things which concern the Majesty of God, which is so clothed and covered with inaccessible brightness, that the finest part of our mind or understanding can by no means comprehend it.. .. So we stand in a profound predicament—with the most mighty and unsearchable Majesty of God on the one side, and the necessity of our salvation on the other.”[70] (Derrida has correctly perceived that a discourse on religion cannot be dissociated from a discourse on salvation.)[71] The predicament that Musculus refers to is irreducibly ethical and soteriological, not ontological or epistemological. It is all about meeting or avoiding a stranger. These theologians spoke of a distinction not only between “our theology” (theologia nostra) and God’s, but even distinguished eschatologically between our theology as pilgrims in the state of grace from our knowledge of God in the state of glory.

The parallels between these classical epistemological distinctions of pre-modern Protestant systems and, for instance, the following claim of Michel de Certeau, should become obvious: “Seeing is devouring”—a “white eschatology” that is blinding vision. “There are no more words if no absence founds the waiting that they articulate.”[72] It is not in the intellectual logos of the self that rises to beatific vision but in the incarnate Logos who descends that the divine and human meet, and this even itself is founded on a covenant in which speech (command and promise) both marks absence and mediates presence. Even as incarnate, he remains the Word, not the Vision. He is received through the ear rather than the eye. God is a stranger indeed, but one who has met us in covenantal history. This covenant history is not simply a phenomenon of the past, but is the present location of all who have “called on the name of the Lord,” which leads us to our second implication of a covenantal epistemology: invocation.

2. Invocation: Calling on the Name

God has given us his name as a pledge of his covenant faithfulness throughout all generations. “But how can they call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard?” (Rom 10:14) Faith, the habitus calibrated to our state of pilgrimage, comes by hearing, while idolatry, the result of demanding immediate presence and full vision before its time, comes by seeing (Heb 11:1; Rom 8:18–25). Faith rests in its object, while vision is given to restless devouring of its object until all transcendence is lost.

Still, even if faith or invocation does not devour its object, there must be content to it. As Derrida notices, even prayer assumes that there must be something that one knows about the one invoked.[73] Thus, revelation cannot simply be an encounter; it must tell us something about the one encountered. It cannot be reduced to propositional content, but it also cannot be devoid of it. Theology serves the function of articulating the identity of this God so that he may be properly invoked.

We alluded earlier to Levinas’s appeal to the category of invocation. This is especially interesting in the light of the familiar topic in classic prolegomena that answers the question as to what kind of knowledge theology claims to be among Aristotle’s list of various types. One habitus that Aristotle did not list, however, is the one that we regard as most appropriate, though by no means exhaustive for theology: invocatio. Theology exists for this very purpose: so that believers may faithfully appeal to the God who has revealed himself and his redemptive purposes, so that he may be invoked in trouble and praised in gratitude. This is not the “objective” knowledge possessed by detached spectators, but the personal knowledge in which we ourselves are involved in an unfolding plot, cast either as “strangers and aliens” or as “children of promise.” The importance of theology lies in getting God’s name right not in order simply to have the right conception of God, much less to harness God (or rather, our projection of God) for our purposes, but in order to call on the actual God who is there and has made himself there for us. Invocation, as Levinas has reminded us, is the most appropriate epistemological corollary to an ontology of otherness; however, with the incarnation as the ground of the covenant in which invocation takes place, God is “have-able” in a way mat Levinas does not recognize.

In the context of the ancient Near Eastern covenant or treaty pattern, “calling on the name” of the great king (suzerain) had to do with invocation for liberation from an invading army.[74] The covenant people are summoned to their God’s command and promise. At the heart of the theological way of knowing, then, is the hearing of an announcement so that hearers may call upon the name of the Lord. So when God reveals his name to Moses we read, “YHWH descended. .. and proclaimed the name” (Exod 34:5). The content of that revelation is that YHWH is “a God merciful and gracious” (v. 6). This was essential because “presence” by itself communicates very little in this situation. For one thing, God’s presence in a given situation could be regarded as fairly trivial, since God is said to be omnipresent. Further, God’s presence is not infrequently treated in scripture as a danger as much as a blessing (Gen 3:8; Exod 19:18–25; 32:9–14; Lev 10:1–3; Isa 6:1–5; Amos 5:18–19; Luke 8:25; Rev 20:11). Given our ethical situation before God and the ethical connotation of God’s presence in scripture, immanence is not by itself a piece of good news. So the real question, given our ethical stance before this God, is, Where can one find God’s gracious presence? The covenant of grace is the place and the Son is the mediator of this saving encounter.

III. Thinking Immanence Without Losing Transcendence

The critique of onto-theology, inasmuch as it targets the god of metaphysics, together with the metaphysics of presence, is no more of a threat to Christian theology than the theologies of glory that have dominated the horizon of so many modern theologies across the entire spectrum. But Levinas’s search for “a thinking which does not bring transcendence back to immanence,” which even he calls “an impossible demand!”[75] is fulfilled, as J. K. A. Smith has argued so cogently, in an incarnational phenomenology.

Modernity has assured us that we are in the consummation, knowing good and evil without any ethical obligation except to be true to oneself. It is the autonomous voice or vision within, not the verbum externum, that we are told to heed. It is not surprising, then, that a theologian of glory like Hegel would find the faith of Israel so mundane. In fact, “Hegel recalls the disappointment of Pompey, who ‘had approached the heart of the temple, the center of adoration, and had hoped to discover in it the root of the national spirit. .. the life-giving soul of this remarkable people. .. [only] to find himself in an empty room.’”[76] After generations have thought we were in the promised land of pure presence, postmodern thought has reminded us quite truly that “under the sun,” we are in the desert—in Derrida’s development of the concept, the chorah, desert of deserts.[77] Even more dogmatically, in Mark Taylor’s postmodern a/theology the metaphor of pilgrimage is still too full of presence. In truth, says Taylor, our existence is “endless straying,” “erring,” and “wandering.”[78] Biblical faith does not hesitate to affirm this as the form of life in this present evil age that refuses to meet a Stranger, but it treats this as an ethical rather than metaphysical problem. The pointless existence that Taylor celebrates is precisely this “empty way of life” passed down to us by our fathers from which Peter tells us we have been liberated. We may be in the desert, “exiles and sojourners” in this age (1 Pet 1:18), but Egypt is behind us even more fully man it was for the Israelites in the wilderness. The tomb is empty. We are not in an empty room, but seated with Christ in the Holy of Holies. It is not a time for either the beatific vision or the funeral dirge, but for the songs of Zion as we make our way to the city of God, for the Stranger of the Emmaus road and of the upper room still meets us, to bring us into his Sabbath joy by his Spirit through word and sacrament. Even if we are still in the desert rather than the promised land, it is not a desert of deserts. A theology of pilgrims will have to suffice—and does suffice—for meeting a Stranger.

Notes

1. Paul Tillich, “The Two Types of Philosophy of Religion,” in Theology of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 10. Merold Westphal’s treatment of Tillich’s essay in Overcoming Onto-Theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), 238–55, first brought the essay to my attention, and I will be interacting with Westphal’s insights below.
2. I concede from the outset that typologies are notoriously reductive, and this paper is necessarily limited to a number of generalizations. All but the most radical proponents of the so-called ontological approach (Plotinus, Eckhart, Spinoza, Hegel, Whitehead, Tillich, et al.) would affirm ex nihilo creation, the incarnation, and reconciliation as redemption from sin and death through union with Christ. However, it is worth asking to what extent these Christian beliefs actually transform philosophical habits of thought. This is where I think the typology is illuminating. In addition, the term “ontological” can be understood in its most mundane sense as the study of being or reality, but particularly since Heidegger it has acquired a narrower meaning, and today it is largely associated with Platonism—specifically, with presence as manifestation, sameness over difference, etc. It would seem that Tillich is using it in this narrower sense—at least Heidegger’s—but is more approving of its theological usefulness.
3. Tillich, “Two Types,” 10.
4. Cited ibid., 15.
5. Ibid., 21. What then is the ontological principle? It is this: “Man is immediately aware of something unconditional which is the prius of the separation and interaction of subject and object, theoretically as well as practically” (emphasis in original). Tillich adds, “The ontological approach transcends the discussion between nominalism and realism, if it rejects the concept of the ens realissimum, as it must do. Being itself, as present in the ontological awareness, is power of Being but not the most powerful being; it is neither ens realissimum nor ens singularissimum. It is the power in everything that has power, be it a universal or an individual, a thing or an experience” (pp. 25-26).
6. Ibid., 27-28. We do not have the space here to defend a particular reading of the Platonic and Neoplatonic traditions or their role in Christian theology. Rather, I will simply have to reveal my working presuppositions. I understand this trajectory as privileging unity over plurality, the intellect over sense, the invisible (i.e., always-present forms) over the visible (i.e., always changing appearances), intellectual vision over sensual hearing, presence over promise, and emanation (monism) over ex nihilo creation (duality without dualism). These tendencies hold despite significant differences between Platonism and Neoplatonism.
7. Hegel has been rehabilitated in various theological programs, particularly in the tendencies toward dialectical historicism that we perceive in the work of Jürgen Moltmann and Robert W. Jenson. However, a more direct appeal to Plato, Eckhart, and the Platonist tradition comes from certain members of the group known by the label “radical orthodoxy,” especially John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward. For a programmatic statement of this revival of a Christian Platonism, see the introduction to Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (ed. John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward; London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 3. That what we are calling the “ontological way” has many mansions is all too evident in this grouping of representatives. For instance, while radical orthodoxy wants to revive Christian Platonism, Moltmann, Pannenberg, and Jenson wish to see its demise. At the same time, these theologians often take their own Platonist turns despite their best intentions. Moltmann, for example, also draws on Jewish and Christian “theosophical” traditions and thinks that traditional theology needs a good dose of emanationist thinking that takes the best from both pantheism and monotheism. Further, one need not endorse the Platonist version in order to adopt the “ontological way.”
8. Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (trans. John Oman; New York: Harper and Row, 1958), 18.
9. Cited in Avery Dulles, Models of Revelation (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1985), 99. He also refers to William James’s description: “The mystical feeling of enlargement, union and emancipation has no specific content whatever of its own” (p. 80).
10. Ibid., 113.
11. See Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993). A self-proclaimed Jewish gnostic, Bloom persuasively argues that the American religion is essentially gnostic.
12. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (ed. and abr. E. Graham Waring and F. W. Strothmann; New York: Ungar, 1957), 10–11; cf. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (ed. and trans. James Strachey; New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1961), 21.
13. In the following comments I recognize that Barth’s theology matures in the direction of the “humanity of God” (as in The Humanity of God [1956]), but the dialectical tension (indeed, dualism) between time and eternity is never completely overcome in the Church Dogmatics.
14. Karl Barth, Göttingen Dogmatics (ed. Hannelotte Reiffen; trans. G. W. Bromiley; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 1:10: “Far from adopting this view [of Schleiermacher], I oppose to it the view that I find expressed in Luther’s saying that God’s Word—and no one else, not even an angel—must establish articles of faith; and if not an angel, then certainly not I, a man with my pious experience. I also find it expressed in the statement of Ursinus that dogmas are things we must believe or obey because God commands them, so that the principle behind every theological dogma is: Deus dixit. .. God is the final author, the final end is his glory, and the secondary end is our salvation.”
15. Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man (trans. Douglas Horton; New York: Harper and Bros., 1957), 196, 199.
16. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Act and Being (trans. Bernard Noble; New York: Harper and Bros., 1961), 90–91.
17. Not even the historical Jesus is as such the revelation of God. Barth, Church Dogmatics 1/1 (ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley; trans. Thomas F. Torrence; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), 323, 406. For Barth, nature does not seem to have the inherent integrity to receive revelation: All divine—human contact must be the result of an overcoming of natural capacities. CD 2/1, 142–78. As we will encounter in our treatment of sin, the Reformed tradition typically distinguished between natural and moral ability. Barth, on the other hand, seems to have equated any affirmation of natural ability/receptivity with moral ability and thus with synergism. In other words, Barth pushed the non capax (i.e., the Calvinistic emphasis on divine transcendence) too far. In fact, revelation is a complete and utter novum with no previous analogies. “It comes to us as a datum with no point of connection with any previous datum” (CD 1/2, 172–73). Although he never took it as far as “the stranger we never meet,” the thrust of Barth’s doctrine of revelation renders God “wholly other” in a sense that threatens the covenantal bond—and creaturely integrity. While one certainly meets a Stranger in Barth’s theology, the divine subject is so wholly other that finitude is easily identified, ironically once again (as in the ontological way), with fault and revelation with a grace that overwhelms nature. In fact, Barth does seem to come full circle at times to an “ontological” paradigm, not only negatively (identifying sin with finitude), but in relation to redemption: In Christ’s incarnation, he says, the whole cosmos is “called and enabled to participate in the being of God” (CD 2/1, 670).
18. The same oppositions of “messianic structure” (universal) to “an actual messiah” (particular) remain as undeconstructed in Derrida as in Kant. See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (trans. Peggy Kamuf; New York: Routledge, 1994), 167–70.
19. And this is where the two approaches converge, at least with some of the representatives of either paradigm. For example, Kant and Schleiermacher or, say, Derrida and Bultmann, share a common anthropocentric presupposition: Theological statements reveal something about us, rather than something to us. But where this leads Kant and Derrida to skepticism with respect to constitutive knowledge of God, Schleiermacher and Bultmann see theological statements as bearing experiential or existential truth. So ironically, the Kantian tradition could be taken either in the direction of the ontological way (overcoming estrangement) or skepticism (the stranger we never meet), but could never conceive of meeting a stranger on that stranger’s own terms. In the history-of-religions school of the nineteenth century, theology is reduced to anthropology, psychology, or, more recently, sociology—just as Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud had announced. The irony is that it was the theologians who had given flesh to their caricature, as Nietzsche was fond of reminding us. Thus, religious language is equivocal, grounded in the attempts of specific peoples and groups (ecclesiastical faith) to express the truth of a universal morality (Kant), feeling (Schleiermacher), or sense of Justice (Derrida) which is univocal. With Schleiermacher, such language is expressive of religious experience and thus, as Feuerbach and his successors properly concluded, a psychological projection.
20. Laurence Paul Hemming, “Nihilism: Heidegger and the Grounds of Redemption,” in Radical Orthodoxy, 95.
21. Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference (trans. Joan Stambaugh; New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 72.
22. Hemming, “Nihilism,” in Radical Orthodoxy, 96.
23. Ibid.
24. Cited ibid.
25. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (ed. Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 16. For a fascinating conversation between Jean-Luc Marion and Derrida on the so-called “metaphysics of presence” in the Christian Neoplatonic tradition, see the first two chapters of God, the Gift and Postmodernism (ed. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 20–78.
26. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 71. This presence as parousia is “another name for death, historical metonymy where God’s name holds death in check. That is why, if this movement begins its era in the form of Platonism, it ends in infinitist metaphysics. Only infinite being can reduce the difference in presence. In that sense, the name of God, at least as it is pronounced within classical rationalism, is the name of indifference itself.” Ibid., emphasis added.
27. The transcendent “One” beyond being is as essential for Derrida as it was for Plotinus in grounding all positive being. This transcendent “One,” inherently indeconstructible, is Derrida’s difference. See Conor Cunningham on this point in his Genealogy of Nihilism (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 155–265.
28. For further treatment, see ch. 1 in Michael Horton, Covenant and Eschatology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 20–45.
29. Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology, 238.
30. Ibid., 239-40, emphasis added.
31. Ibid., 241, emphasis added.
32. Ibid. So Augustine is not a Neoplatonist on this point at least: He was “converted” to God, addressed as “you.” Such thought “knows that union with God can only have the form of reconciliation, and that reconciliation means the courage to meet one who has become a stranger. If we want to give a name to this faith we could hardly do better than to call it Augustinian” (Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology, 249).
33. Ibid., 252, emphasis added.
34. Mark C. Taylor, Erring: An A/Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
35. Marion appeals to this second part of the Luke 24 narrative as evidence that the Eucharist is the site of revelation. God Without Being (trans. Thomas A. Carlson; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 150–52. However, the Emmaus road encounter is hardly a mere prologue to revelation. It was in Christ’s opening of the scriptures and explaining them as referring to himself that the dejected disciples could respond, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32).
36. Louis Berkhof observes, “The Bible never operates with an abstract concept of God, but always describes Him as the Living God, who enters into various relations with His creatures, relations which are indicative of several different attributes.” Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1941), 41.
37. B. B. Warfield, Calvin and Augustine (ed. Samuel Craig; Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1956), 153. See further his excellent summary of this reticence in Calvin and the tradition generally to explore the “whatness,” pp. 139-40.
38. J. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (ed. J. T. McNeill; trans. F. L. Battles; 2 vols.; LCC; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 1.13.1.
39. Calvin, Institutes, 1.2.2.
40. Calvin on Rom 1:19, cited by Warfield, Calvin and Augustine, 154 n. 45.
41. Richard Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: Vol. 3, The Divine Essence and Attributes (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 228.
42. Gerald Bray, The Doctrine of God (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1993), 55. Of course, simply appealing to such terms does not require prior commitment to a univocity of being, but such univocity is the native soil of the concept.
43. Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), 44.
44. In contemporary theology there are, of course, rather vague and sweeping denunciations of rival positions as “metaphysical,” and we do not have the space here to treat these. In terms of defining what is meant by the so-called metaphysics of substance, William P. Alston has provided an excellent summary in “Substance and the Trinity,” in The Trinity (ed. Gerald O’Collins et al.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 179–201. Alston cites Ted Peters’s claim that the Nicene-Constantinopolitan fathers were saddled with a substance metaphysics that “runs into an obstacle in modern thought, viz., ‘the denial that we could know God in the Godself’” (cited on p. 184). But Alston replies, “This, of course, is not a specific objection to a substance metaphysics but a much more general objection to any supposition that we can know ‘the being of God’ in any terms at all. But the idea that the ancients and other pre-moderns (or is it pre-Kantians?) felt confident in human ability to gain an adequate cognitive grasp of the divine being and nature does not fit the facts.” Deepening the patristic and Thomistic defense of God’s incomprehensibility, the Lutheran and Reformed traditions repeatedly emphasized that we cannot know God in se est (as he is in himself) but only by his works. Peters further challenges “substance metaphysics” for its “distinction between absolute essence and relational attributes” (cited by Alston, p. 184). Substance metaphysics, Peters argues, denies that God can be related to the world and thus entails immutability and impassibility (cited by Alston, p. 184). Yet Alston, although sharing Peters’s rejection of immutability, impassibility, and simplicity, replies, “But there is absolutely no justification for saddling substance metaphysics as such with these commitments to timelessness, immutability, pure actuality with no potentiality, and being unaffected by other beings.” After all, Aristotle developed his substance metaphysics in application to finite substances that “retain their identity through change.” From the Latin compound, sub-sistare, the word itself means “standing under.” Aristotle’s “substance” was simply that about which things could be predicated—any entity that could in some sense be described due to the exhibition of certain qualities and characteristics. It did not intrinsically entail any particular determination of what those predicates were in any given case. What remains then is for us to evaluate specific claims about God, any of which will be claims about God’s “substance.” Alston adds, it was not substance metaphysics that gave rise to the doctrine of simplicity. “On the contrary, Thomas was led by his doctrine of divine simplicity—which is the root of his denial of divine potentiality, change, and dependence on creatures for anything—to deny that God is in any genus, including the summum genus of substance” (p. 196). God is beyond substance—hyper-essential, according to Thomas, so the particular predicates he attributed to God were in no way the result of “substance metaphysics” (pp. 195-96).
45. More popular in our day is panentheism, an attempt to incorporate elements of both pantheism and theism. While denying that all of reality is divine, panentheism maintains the interdependence of God and world.
46. Cited in Brevard S. Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection on the Christian Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 386. In his landmark work A History of Israel, John Bright observed, “We must once again make it clear that Israel’s faith did not center in an idea of God. Nevertheless, her conception of God was from the beginning so remarkable, and so without parallel in the ancient world.. . .” John Bright, A History of Israel (3d ed.; Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1981), 157.
47. Bright, History, 161. The paganism of Israel’s ancient neighbors exhibits a mythological cosmology which, as John Bright explains, “reflected the rhythmic yet unchanging pattern of nature upon which the life of earthly society depended.” Thus, the cosmos is enchanted, with divinity shot through it in every part. While pagan myths were ritually re-enacted in order to renew the cosmic forces, “In Israel’s faith nature, though not thought of as lifeless, was robbed of personality and ‘demythed.’ Yahweh’s power was not, in fact, primarily associated with the repeatable events of nature, but with unrepeatable historical events.”
48. Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology, 246.
49. Colin Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 26. It is worth adding that both Hegel and Marx demonstrate how easily “otherness” is affirmed only on the way to sublation—i.e., the higher synthesis.
50. Reaffirming Geerhardus Vos’s analysis (Biblical Theology [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1948]), M. G. Kline defines a covenant as “a relationship under sanctions” (By Oath Consigned: A Reinterpretation of the Covenant Signs of Circumcision and Baptism [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1968]). See also Dennis J. McCarthy, Treaty and Covenant (Rome: Biblical Institute, 1963), 96.
51. Somewhere in between is the promise, which is neither the full presence of that which is promised nor its absence, but a semi-realized eschatology of hope: the trace of the consummation in the “today” of profane time. Circumcision and sabbath, as well as temple, land, and torah, become sites at which this future irrupts into the present, in a transitory, typological, and conditional manner. In the new covenant, however, the new creation actually dawns, with Jesus Christ as the one in whom, by the Spirit, the true circumcision, sabbath rest, temple, land, and torah find their fulfillment.
52. James K. A. Smith, Speech and Theology: Language and the Logic of Incarnation (New York: Rout-ledge, 2002), 156.
53. Levinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental?” in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings (ed. Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 4.
54. Ibid. See also pp. 6-7: “We respond: in our relation with the other (autrui) is it a matter of letting be? Is not the independence of the other (autrui) accomplished in the role of being summoned? Is the one to whom one speaks understood from the first in his being? Not at all. The other (autrui) is not an object of comprehension first and an interlocutor second. The two relations are intertwined. In other words, the comprehension of the other (autrui) is inseparable from his invocation.. .. I do not only think that he is, I speak to him. He is my partner in the heart of a relation which ought only have made him present to me. I have spoken to him, that is to say, I have neglected the universal being that he incarnates in order to remain with the particular being that he is.”
55. Ibid., 8.
56. Ibid., 10.
57. Levinas, “Transcendence and Height,” in Philosophical Writings, 17.
58. Smith, Speech and Theology, 157–58.
59. Ibid, 158.
60. Ibid., 159.
61. Ibid, 161.
62. Ibid., 162, emphasis added.
63. Ibid, 164.
64. Ibid, 165.
65. Ibid., 166. “Thus the God whom no one had seen, nor could see, at any time (John 1:18) was ‘beheld’ (etheasametha) in that moment that ‘the word became flesh and pitched his tent among us’ (John 1:14). Thus the analogical principle whereby the difference is known by means of the same is also a fundamental incarnational principle, where the Infinite is known by means of a finite appearance, without losing its infinitude—’neither slipping away nor betraying itself.’. .. It will not be, as Marion suggests, a matter of displacing or overcoming these conditions, but rather understanding the possibility of the Transcendent condescending to such conditions without thereby undoing its transcendence” (p. 166).
66. Ibid. See also pp. 168, 176. The debate between Barth and Brunner over general revelation reflects these very tensions. Barth’s analogy with the virgin birth reveals no capacity. It creates a capacity ex nihilo. Yet, counters Smith, “Does it not begin with a created womb? In other words, is not Mary’s (albeit virgin) womb nevertheless a condition for the birth of the Savior? In emphasizing that Mary was utterly unable to conceive this child apart from the creative agency of God, Barth seems to confuse ‘capacity’ with a ‘tendency’ or ‘predisposition.’. .. The logic of incarnation, in contrast to the mere logic of participation, moves by condescension rather than ascension, and is rooted in a more fundamental affirmation of embodiment as an original and eternal good, rather than a remedial ‘instrument’ of salvation whose telos is disembodiment. Thus the logic of incarnation is a logic of donation, a logic of giving.. .. In short, it is because of the Incarnation that we avoid not speaking,” Ibid., 176.
67. Institutes, 1.10.2, emphasis added.
68. Institutes, 3.2.1.
69. Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology (ed. James T. Dennison, Jr.; trans. George M. Giger; 3 vols.; Phillipsburg, NJ.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1994), 1:16–17, emphasis added. Turretin continues: “While other sciences proceed according to sources that are instrumental to the knowledge of their scope of inquiry, theology proceeds according to a source that is authoritative rather than simply instrumental. The knowledge that is possible is proportionate to revelation, not to everything that can be known” (p. 17). This is precisely the language that Tillich lamented as the abandonment of the ontological project. And as blameworthy as Aquinas appears by Tillich’s reckoning to be in the dissolution of the ontological way, Turretin and his colleagues regarded Aquinas as still too caught up in the metaphysical search for an abstract deity apart from Christ and the covenant. The Reformed scholastics have been victims of the rumor that they transformed the reformers’ project by returning to the very “scholasticism” that the Reformation attacked. Not only does this fail to appreciate that similar methods and forms of presentation do not necessarily imply an identity of content, it is also anachronistic. For example, Robert Greer writes, “Roughly coinciding with the advent of early Enlightenment thought, an emerging Protestant scholasticism made use of the Cartesian Cogito in this systematization of Reformation thought. With a sense of irony, this introduction of Enlightenment thought to the Protestant tradition reintroduced back into the church a method (the via moderna) that Luther had strenuously argued against. Protestant scholasticism affected the church in a number of ways, the most basic being the division of theological liberalism from conservatism.” Robert C. Greer, Mapping Postmodernism (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 34. Each sentence has its own problems, but my principal focus is the claim that Protestant scholasticism “made use of the Cartesian Cogito” and created the liberal-conservative division. Protestant scholasticism actually began with the likes of Melanchthon and Calvin, and was already in decline well before Descartes’s Meditations had begun to make a wide impact. In fact, interest in Descartes among some late Reformed scholastics met with widespread disapproval. Representing Reformed scholastics as rationalists and forerunners of the Enlightenment is a powerful genealogical narrative, but without any foundation in the primary sources.
70. Cited in Richard Midler, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: Vol. 1, Prolegomena to Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1987), 179, emphasis added.
71. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” in Religion (ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo; trans. David Webb et al.; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 2.
72. Michel de Certeau, “White Ecstasy,” in The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader (ed. Graham Ward; Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 157.
73. See Smith’s development of this point in Derrida and Levinas in Speech and Theology, 132–33.
74. Early in the biblical story, the lines of Cain and Seth are contrasted, the latter distinguished by the announcement, “At that time people began to invoke the name of the LORD” (Gen 4:26). This is not an act of generic piety, but a recognition early on that YHWH had revealed himself sufficiently even at this stage in redemptive history to be called upon as the suzerain in time of threat. Those who deny YHWH are foolish: “Have they no knowledge, those evildoers, who eat up my people as they eat bread, and do not call upon God?” (Ps 53:4). The people of God’s inheritance are distinguished by the fact that they call upon the name of YHWH and thereby own him as their only sovereign because of his antecedent liberation of them (Pss 80:18; 105:1; 145:18). In fact, a recurring sign of Israel’s own apostasy is that “There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you” (Isa 64:6). The liberation in the last days will therefore involve a renewed invocation: “Then everyone who calls on the name of the LORD shall be saved” (Joel 2:32). Paul appeals to Joel 2:32, in fact, in Rom 10: “For, ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the LORD shall be saved.’ But how are they to call on the one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard?” (vv. 13–14). This knowledge of God clearly comes from God, mediated through creaturely agency. Thus, it is not good advice, techniques, experiences, or propositions, but good news.
75. Levinas, “Transcendence and Intelligibility,” 155.
76. Vincenzo Vitiello, “Towards a Topology of the Religious,” in Religion, 141.
77. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” in Religion, 19–22.
78. Taylor, Erring, 157. This sentiment is hardly new, however, but is a constant refrain in romanticism, as in Flaubert’s statement, “No great genius has come to final conclusion,. .. because humanity itself is forever on the march and can arrive at no goal” (cited by Roger Lundin, The Culture of Interpretation [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993], 39).