The Domestication of Transcendence

...Indeed, he acknowledges that he is able to tease out only one thread of the tangled skein, that having to do with language about God and God's relation to the world...

...Mystery, Gabriel Marcel has instructed us, demands an attentive sort of reflection, for it involves a larger and more powerful reality from which we cannot distance ourselves without distortion...

...In contrast to process theology, however, which accepts a domesticated transcendence and fits God into a univocal universe, and in contrast to Mark Taylor's postmodern "a/theology," which by reappropiating the via negativa absolutely ends with absolutely nothing to say, Placher seeks a return to a richer sort of discourse, one in which analogy does not serve simply as another name for uni-vocity, and one in which the biblical narrative frames and informs human speech about God...

...It is a complex tale, involving social realities as much as ideological affiliations...

...How did we get to this point...

...The functional equivalent of Thomas's insistence on the modest capacities of analogical language to speak truly about God was matched by the reformers' refusal to attempt solutions to the conundra posed by the sacred text...

...Part 3 refines and extends the previous analysis...

...In effect, they each maintained a sense of God's transcendence that involved both a sense of distance (God is utterly different from creation) and of intimacy (God is everywhere present to creation as its creating and sustaining cause...

...He almost makes the provocative suggestion that the biblical narratives themselves, in the way they challenge credibility at the empirical level, allow a kind of entrance into a richer world in which not only analogy but also allegory can serve, not to describe the universe, but to enable a rich existence within God's world...

...The two convictions are not, for them, opposed, but mutually defining...

...In contrast, Placher argues in part 2, the thinkers who came after Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin insisted on system and clarity...

...Once more, he finds that they understood transcendence as the condition of immanence rather than its opposite, and that they saw the divine causality as the enabler of rather than the competitor to human freedom...

...And much of what calls itself theology appears to the uninitiated to be less about God than about the politics of identity or linguistic halls of mirrors...

...But once the cosmos becomes a closed system and miracle is defined as that which disrupts that system by direct divine causality, it is only a matter of time before the miraculous disappears under assault from a rational analysis that can supply alternative empirical "causes" for every claimed "divine intervention...

...A problem, in contrast, is that which, however puzzling, is ultimately capable of being solved by human ingenuity...

...What might it mean to speak about God if we ever were to speak about God and if there were a God...

...Those embracing the modern turn propose that wisdom as applied to humans is simply in need of an upward adjustment when applied to God...

...Placher uses the "Domestication of Grace" to demonstrate the implications of this reduction, showing how Pietists, Jansenists, and Puritans-three groups with strong positions on grace-actually limited the role of grace in contrast to their predecessors, precisely because they operated within a framework in which God tended to be one player among others: rather than God's freedom mysteriously being the ground and presupposition for human freedom, the "problem" now becomes how to relate human and divine freedom, and considerable energy is expended in "worrying about the state of their souls and the criteria by which they could measure it...

...In effect, Placher shows that by reducing God to a conceptually manageable size, theology also trivialized its own task and thereby also assured its eventual irrelevance...

...What one misses here is what one misses in so much of what calls itself theology today, the robust and even passionate willingness to speak in direct and first-person discourse (whether singular or plural), the absurd ability to embrace, if even for a moment, the language of faith as something more than another hypothesis...

...Ever more refined definitions of analogy ended up becoming a form of univocity...

...The title of the book effectively states its argument...

...Placher addresses the complaint made by some process and postmodernist theology against "classical theology"namely, that its emphasis on God's transcendence removed God from involvement with the world-by showing how that charge should be laid not against such theologians as Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin, but against the theologians of the seventeenth century whose turn toward "modernity" was also a turn from analogy to univocity, which truly did domesticate transcendence and disastrously distort theological discourse...

...Likewise, the confession that God is the cause of all other causes, not as the first in a horizontal series, but as the sustainer of the series itself, gets reduced to the conviction that God's activity must be fitted within the same system as human activity...

...The debate over miracles is the classic example...

...For Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin, the subject "God" was-despite whatever devices of philosophy or rhetoric they might employ-the God revealed in the biblical narratives, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and above all the Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, whose self-revelation in history was indeed a "self-revelation," and whose gift of grace caught humans up into a community of divine life...

...Coming from a scholar inevitably marked himself by the "modern turn," these are appropriately tentative and suggestive...

...In the academy, what once sat enthroned as the queen of the sciences now has to argue for a place at the table spread for the study of religion among the human sciences...

...In part 4, Placher essays some "critical retrievals" from the premodern tradition with examinations of "The Image of the Invisible God" and "Evil and Divine Transcendence...

...His is an old-fashioned history of ideas: we learn how writers read earlier writers and in their turn influenced later writers...

...Now God truly has become the filler of the gaps, progressively less necessary a hypothesis as science continuously reduces the number of empirically unexplainable events...

...In part 1, Placher contrasts the theological approach of Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin to that of theologians-and philosophers-after them who took what Placher calls "the modern turn" in their language about God: Cajetan, Suar-ez, Martini, Quenstedt, Descartes, and Leibnitz...

...Still, Placher's very willingness to go back to the tradition, not as a nostalgic gesture, but as a way of finding footing for a new start, is heartening...

...Thomas would say, "we do not know what such wisdom means" even as we declare "God is wise...

...tart, is heartening...

...Such convictions were possible because these theologians did not demand the perfect clarity given by univocal speech...

...In effect the move to the modern meant the reduction of mystery to the problematic...

...It is God's otherness that makes possible God's closeness...

...Placher shows the same process happening in the changed understanding of grace and works and in the progressive "Marginalization of the Trinity...

...Luke Timothy Johnson Few would want to argue that Christian theology is enjoying its best days...

...Only a small portion of the annual output of denominational presses deserves the designation...

...In these last two cases in particular, he demonstrates not only how language had become more univocal but also how it had become increasingly distant from the world of the Bible...

...Earlier theology could see everything that happened as equally and wondrously the work of God, even when it also involved secondary causes...

...how'God does these things, what the relation actually is between these two orders of causation, remains unknown to us and indeed unimaginable" (underscoring in original...

...In this view, the "miraculous" was a matter of perception rather than a difference in causality...

...They all respected the limitations of human language when it referred to God, and they all insisted that the language of philosophy be controlled by the language of revelation...

...Even those who seek to retrieve the theological enterprise find themselves in the infinite regress apparently demanded by academic rigor, talking about other authors who talked about God...

...William Placher does not tell the tale entire...

...In the end, however, his excellent analysis also reveals the most glaring deficiencies in contemporary theology in contrast to Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin...

...Placher then shows how this tension between confession and cognition is broken with succeeding theologians who increasingly have difficulty "finding a place for God" in a world defined as a geometric space in which every location had the same status as every other, and in a discourse which demanded uni-vocity as the only legitimate describer of reality...

...Placher's substantial historical analysis makes a significant and badly needed contribution to theology today...

...Now, language about God is not considered as radically discontinuous with language about human realities...

...By the eighteenth century, the Trinity was something of an embarrassment, effectively replaced by the Deist God whose work was largely that of First Cause and Sanctioner of the Moral Order...

...Placher is an infinitely careful dissector of texts, past and present, which means that his theological task is still fundamentally turned to his fellow academics, still in effect an effort to find a place at the table of academic discourse...

...Thomas and the two great reformers shared certain characteristics...

...Placher revisits Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin in their approach to thinking about God's relation to the world and to human freedom...