Transcript
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Ordinarily it is my privilege to be the first introducer of our Warfield lecturers each year, but this morning the seminary was in the process of receiving its 10-year report card from the accrediting associations and there were some who felt that I needed to be there to hear that, so I apologized
to our guest for not being here to introduce him. I'm sure that Dr. West did that in splendid fashion and, therefore, I'm in danger of possibly repeating some of the many nice things that could be said about Dr. Alexander McKelway. He is certainly no stranger to this community, being not only an alumnus himself, but having been a guest professor just a year ago and we had the joy
of having him here on his sabbatical for a year and a half, wasn't it [really, Xandy?]? So we are familiar with him, but not faithlessly familiar, and delighted that he and his wife could be here to give the Warfield lectures on this particular occasion as the seminary celebrates its 175th anniversary. Dr. McKelway's topic is The Freedom of God in Human Liberation, and what could be more timely or pertinent than that? And the subject of his second lecture is The Structure of Divine Freedom. Dr. McKelway, welcome back to Princeton Seminary.
MCKELWAY: If there are those who do not have a little synopsis of these lectures as a guide along the way -- people have enjoyed them; I think that they are preferred above the lectures themselves perhaps. They're certainly briefer; I expect they are clearer, but if you need one why, there are some there. If the evening
news is any guide, we have, in more ways than one, divested ourselves of interest in South Africa. It is no longer so interesting for us that white brutality continues, perhaps because we can see no way around the deadly logic of the conflict. There the cause
of injustice -- or cause of justice and peace -- seems almost contradictory and self-defeating. But in Mamelodi, the great black township on the outskirts of Pretoria, something else is going on. There Ellen and Nico Smith serve a God who is confused neither with white
self-interest or revolutionary rhetoric, but whose ways are past understanding. In taking the highly improbable and not unrisky step of moving into Mamelodi to serve a parish; of being, I think, perhaps the only white residents in a city of several million or more blacks in the grip of
revolutionary fervor. Ellen and Nico Smith bear witness to the possibilities of God when all human possibilities are exhausted. It is on behalf of these possibilities for human liberation that we are trying to recover a sense of the unlimited inner freedom of God, in whom the struggle of liberation may be delivered from mere self-projection
and reduplication of oppression. In our first probing of this inner nature of God, we learned that God is one who acts, lives, and loves in freedom. When we say that God lives and loves in Himself prior to His action in love toward the whole creation, then we have really said the
essential thing that must be said concerning the content or character of the way God is as God. All other so-called attributes are finally subsumable under the notation that God acts in love, but because we are here particularly interested in the meaning of the radical freedom of God as the basis and hope of human liberation,
we must now look more closely at the way God is free in Himself and the way this freedom determines God's actions in love. From this perspective, the freedom of God appears to disclose itself in four ways. First, that God is free in Himself. Second, that God is free from any other power, thing, or person.
Three, that God is free for the other things and persons he has made. And finally, and not insignificantly, fourthly that God is free even from His freedom for us. Again, we will be interpreting and, in some ways, reinterpreting Barth's discussion of divine freedom in volume 2-1 of The Church Dogmatics
and applying it to the question of liberation. First, God is free in Himself. God's freedom in Himself means that God's action and love do not require any other being outside of Himself for actualization and realization. In Himself, God is free. Now this radical and unimaginable freedom
of God is captured best by the term "aseity." I've already mentioned this word without precise definition. One never knows anymore what words need defining in Princeton. I understand that a local mother recently was overheard at breakfast complaining of seeing a condom on an eating club patio,
which prompted her five year old to ask, "Mommy, what's a patio?" In any case, aseity comes from the compound "a se," which means "from the self," or "self-derived." Such a way of being is obviously not a possibility for created being, which can be
an act only in a causal nexus and thus ab alio, from another. The description of God's being action as a se, "from itself," is found, according to Barth, first in Anselm and is then taken up as the general presupposition of Aquinas' five demonstrations of the existence of God, especially the third which speaks of God as necessary being. If God
is free in Himself, not only is God not dependent upon any other being, nor even being itself, but positively, as Barth has noted, He is the One Who already has and is in Himself everything that would have to be the purpose of His creation and causation if He were not God. Care must be taken at this point because the statement does not intend
to equate God with everything that is, as if God's work of creation did not bring to pass something new and other than Himself. It is not that God already has and is in Himself everything that He creates, but rather that God already has in Himself any and every possible attribute and characteristic that could be assigned as a reason or purpose of His creation.
Just as God's love did not need an object apart from and outside of Himself for its actualization and realization, so too the divine power, wisdom, majesty, even creativity of God, did not require anything apart from itself. God is not creative because He brought the universe into being, but the universe came into being
because God was already creative. God possesses the attribute of power, not because He rules the creation; rather, God governs it because He is already and antecedently powerful. Now this point is rather important because if God's justice and power were not antecedently His own, then we would have no reason to hope for a way out of the conflicting
demands of our justice; respecting, for instance, individual and community rights, freedom of the press, AIDS testing, and a host of other issues. If God does not, in the absolute aseity of His own freedom, possess power in a way quite different from the operation of power in the world, we would have no basis for the hope that we must have that the power of God may
yet liberate us from the final threat of our power -- global annihilation. God's freedom from other being; it is only on the basis of this prior freedom that God has in Himself that we can now go on to say that God is also free from other being. We have anticipated this form of God's freedom
for, as Barth notes, "If He does not need His own being or any basis or limitation in Himself; if He has and is in Himself being ground and limit in the actuality of His existence and in the freedom proper to Him, how can He possibly need any other being or need to be ground or limited by it?" This means that the God who is absolutely free in
Himself cannot be confused with Whitehead's God, whose primordial nature is balanced by a consequent nature, fully dependent upon the actual entities of the world in the process of His becoming. Even less can such a God be confused with what has always seemed to me Hartshorne's crude formulation of God as one power among others, not to speak of Kaufman's God, whose sovereignty is forfeit
to human domination. If God is free in Himself so He does not need other being, then the existence of other being cannot stand over against God as a possibility or problem. To the contrary, the existence of the cosmos must, if God is free in Himself, be a product of, and thus subordinate to, God's will. The freedom of God from other
being is expressed primarily in the old doctrine of the [creatio ex nihilo?] -- the creation out of nothing. "In the beginning, God" -- with these words the Bible sets the proper course for theological reflection. We have to begin with God, before Whom and beside Whom there is, in the beginning, no other. Now the claim that this God creates out of nothing
is not embarrassed by the fact that, for the [eloist?] poet, there are also waters over which God broods in the conception of His work of creation, or by any -- a number of contradictory poetic images. Neither is the doctrine disturbed by the fact that the idea of ex nihilo, as such, is not stated in Genesis one or two. In this poem, God creates -- in Genesis one -- God creates
out of nothing because in His work of creation, there is nothing beside God, which would have to be understood as it is in other religious mythology as an eternal substance which intrudes into the creation as a non-divine or negative principle, setting itself over against God and constituting for God a problem or a limit. Moreover, we have to say that God creates ex nihilo
because, in Genesis one, He creates simply by His word, "and God said -- and it was so." In that litany of God saying and doing, the poet obviously sees God as pulling things, so to speak, out of thin air. If, therefore, other being exists only as a product of God's sovereign word and will, there can be no thought
of His dependency upon it. God is free from it. This claim carries several implications. If God creates out of nothing, then God obviously creates out of Himself; that much is clear from the biblical witness. From the point of view of this witness, there can be no question of a neoplatonic overflowing of divine being into
the emptiness of non-being. If God is free from His creation, then the creation itself is granted a reality and integrity. The things created have their own being apart from God. Human being is addressed by God as to another in this story and if this human being is not able to hide or escape from its dependency upon God, it can nevertheless contradict His will and
command. It is other than God; it has its own finite reality granted to it by God and so to -- quite apart from its sin and disobedience -- it has its own world and sphere of activity. The struggle for liberation obviously takes place within this sphere and if we are left to be responsible within it, we are not thereby left to ourselves,
but now we have to also say that God's creation itself does not restrict the freedom of God. The world does not constitute, so to speak, a problem for God just by its own existence. The Christological controversies of the fourth and fifth century were, in large measure, the result of the conviction that because, from our side, the finite
is not capable of the infinite, the same disability must, to some extent, operate from God's side. The chasm, in other words, separating the human and the divine appeared to them unbridgeable from God's side as well as ours because it seemed to them -- that chasm -- to constitute an order of reality which could not be set aside by God without contradicting His own nature.
But the God who is free in Himself is also free from other being in that while he allows it its own integrity and reality, he does not bind Himself to the nexus of cause and effect that governs all reality other than Himself, "Deus non est in genere." This dictum of the scholastics needs to be taken with greater seriousness than they themselves
took it, perhaps. God did not, by His act of creation, become a part of His creatures' genus or class. What hope for true liberation could we have if this were not the case? What prospect could faith have for the attainment of real justice -- a justice delivered from the ambiguities of human justice with its competing claims of personal, corporate, property rights --
given the fact that after two centuries of revolutionary effort, social and economic inequity and political oppression appears just as great, if not greater than before? What courage can sustain Christian praxis, except that a God who is free from His creation can thereby be free for it by breaking into and through the inevitabilities that control our existence?
God's freedom for us; everything that we've said so far about the freedom of God in Himself and from other being holds theological interest only because it helps us understand the meaning of the fact that God is free for us. When we first began to talk about the freedom of God, we admitted that here is where
Christian thought really begins, with the way that God in His unimaginable freedom is free pro nobis in Jesus Christ. It is with this gospel that all Christian reflection has to begin. The freedom of God for us is first of all the freedom of God to be present with us --
to be eminent in human life. Now this may appear to be an accommodation to the theologies of Immanentism, but there's a difference. The problem with Immanentist's theologies is that they do not understand the presence of God to be a function of His radical and absolute freedom. Because God is not seen in the light of that freedom, which He has in Himself,
and from all other being, God becomes in these systems merely one factor among others in a higher reality -- a reality perhaps understood as history as with Hegel -- or a higher reality of the impulse of life, as with Bergson, or a universe of entities, as with Whitehead. When this happens, a real presence of
God in life is actually undermined, for when God becomes one power among others or one Whose power operates only as persuasion -- in other words, when the absolute freedom which belongs to God is abandoned, the question arises as to whether or not it is really God
who is here understood to be present in creation; in that sense God's eminent reality is undermined and then again in another sense, when God is so identified with other being that the attributes which belong to the divine nature are transferred to creaturely being, making it divine, then the question arises as to whether it is anymore a real human creatureliness with which God is present;
and so finally, the much desired solidarity of God in creation seems to me to be actually denied in these theologies since the presence both of God as God and human being as human being are removed by redefinition, but a God Who is free in Himself and Who is therefore also free from other being and the limiting causal relations
which belong to it, such a God and only such a God is free to be for other being by being with it in unrestricted eminence. The freedom of God to be for and with creation does not cancel God's freedom from it. God does not become part of finite being so that He becomes subject to its conditions.
Nor does created being lose by God's being present in it its own identity and proper freedom as creatures. Again, I think the creation story is instructive. The Yahwist narrative in chapters two and three understands God's freedom in eminence in the way I think we have described. God is present in the garden; there is no sense of
impediment in God's addressing the man and the man hearing His Word. How could it be otherwise since God Himself creates the man and then later the woman -- by hand you might say? Before the creation of the woman, God is present with the man providing what is needed, but the fact that God's intimate presence and support does not
violate God's own being and freedom, or that given to the man and woman is seen in the integrity of their own individual identities and responsibilities -- as far as the man and the woman go, they can decide against God and they do so. The fact that they do so, of course, is not evidence of their freedom, but rather of their decision to forfeit it, but the point is that not
only was God's eminence not a threat to their individuality before their own decision and fall, but God's presence continued afterward seeking and finding them, clothing them, providing for their future, which they themselves had placed in jeopardy; God accompanies them out of paradise. This remarkable eminence
of God was made manifest in Jesus Christ. If God's way of being eminent is not seen here, it is doubtful that it can be seen at all. This is why the doctrine of the incarnation is so essential for the cause of human liberation. Unless the liberating freedom of God is seen in His freedom to be for us by being with us in complete unity of His divinity with
the humanity of Jesus, it is difficult to see on what basis we could hope for its redemptive presence in our own political and racial and sexual existence. As Gregory of Nazianzus once said, "that which is unassumed remains unhealed," and, we might add, [unliberated?]. If God is eminent with us in radical solidarity in a way impossible for anything
or person to be with and for another, then there is available to a theology of liberation a hope, a confidence, and a power, not to be found in any other revolutionary theory or movement. The fact that it is God and not some self-projected apotheosis of human need, but God in His absolute freedom who wills
to be with us in the struggle for liberation means that the human future is not trapped in the self-perpetuating circle of injustice which has marked all previous attempts at liberation, but the eminence of God in human affairs means, in addition, that in contradistinction from all finite attempts at revolutionary change, God does not need to destroy human being
or subvert the structures of existence which delimit its finite identity and integrity to accomplish liberation. As God's way of being radically present does not threaten the being of the one with whom He unites Himself, so God requires no Eutychian disillusion or Hegelian Aufhebung
of human history and culture into some angelic state in order to save it. This means that a theology of liberation has no need or reason to accept the assumption common to revolutionary idealism of every sort that all inherited structures of human community are unredeemable and must be replaced by what is claimed to be, but cannot be, new.
Of course, within the structures of human history, there are what Tillich has called structures of destruction, forms of male oppression, of child abuse and neglect, of economic exploitation, structures of political oppression and military violence, all of these and more are negative structures with which God does not unite Himself
and from which He would liberate us. To discriminate correctly between destructive and constructive forms of human life is always risky and a matter of prayer and guidance, but it would surely be wrong to imagine that a God Who wills to be eminent in human life, in the humanity of Jesus Christ, is not able to exercise the liberating power of His grace
in and through the structures of family, church, state, commerce; nor have we cause to imagine that the presence of God which sustains individuality and personal integrity cannot work for liberation through sexual, racial, and other forms of human selfhood. If God is
eminent in His creation, His liberating power and presence may be found in all the rich variety of our ways of being human together. If God's revolution works to overthrow structures of destruction, it can also work within other structures of existence to transform and redirect our intentions and expectations for the pursuit of justice. If the freedom of God can create new structures of life
for females, it can also work through the nuclear family; if it can work through democratic structures, it can also work through other political forms, such as socialist democracy in Nicaragua; if it can work through racial self-consciousness, it can also achieve liberation through interracial and non-racial visions of community; if through communism, also through agrarian and
capital intensive forms of commerce; if through violent rejection of violence, also through pacifist forms of protest. These and scores of other possibilities for the operation of God's freedom in human affairs means that the theologies of liberation may engage in the struggle for freedom and justice without rejecting the immeasurable variety of
our ways of being human and God's ways of being with us in our humanity. We are trying to understand the meaning of the freedom of God in
its various forms and we are tempting in just an introductory way to indicate the significance of God's freedom for human liberation. We now come to the last and fourth form of
that freedom, which can only be described in a reflexive and dialectical way. We have said that God is free in Himself and free from the creation so that He can be really and radically free for it by being with us in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, now just as God's act of creation did not bind Him to creaturely being so as to curtail or limit His freedom,
so too God's freedom for us by being eminently with us does not change the fact that God is free -- free even in respect to His solidarity with us. As in all other of God's attributes, God's eminence is not determined by our ways of being present. Just as divine grace does not preclude judgment, God's yes/no, nor
His no/yes, so God's way of being present does not preclude His concealment and withdrawal. For this reason, we have to understand the final form of God's freedom as His freedom from His freedom for -- as awkward as the construction is -- or, more precisely, His freedom from any particular manifestation of His freedom for us.
This clarification is perhaps important because if, from our perspective, the ways of God must appear contradictory, from God's own point of view, they are not. God's actions are indeed necessary and determined, but only by the free exercise of His sovereign will. Again, we will follow Barth's analysis, who says that, "In this -- God's freedom -- in which he spontaneously binds Himself in a certain way to the world,
He remains unbound from the point of view of the world and its determinations." His changelessness does not correspond with any of our constancies; His faithfulness is His own and not the metaphysical equivalent of any one of the normal features of creaturely existence, so God may reveal Himself in eminence, "The heavens declare the glory of God,"
or conceal Himself in withdraw, "Truly Thou art a God who hidest Thyself." In responding to prayer, God may manifest Himself or may do so by withholding judgment, in all of this God is shown to be free, to be conditioned or unconditioned in His relation with the world. As creator of the natural order, God can obviously work within it
according to its own laws or, if we care to accept the testimony of Scripture, God is free to operate upon nature from the infinite distance of His divinity in the form of miracle. God is free to relate to His people in the most intimate way, "As one whom his mothers comforts, so I will comfort you," or to confront them in the thunder and lightning on Mount Sinai.
God is free in the mystery of the Trinity to become human in Jesus Christ and to assume again His Godhead and distance. In the same way God is free to enter the human condition as the lowest and humblest of servants without abandoning His supreme and transcendent Lordship. God, in His freedom, can be and do all of this and more, for in Scripture there is no single way of His being for us that does not have its dialectical counterpart [at?] opposite. Now this means that when we consider all the ways in which the freedom of God empowers and sustains the struggle for human liberation, not only are we confronted with a variety of possibilities, owing to God's eminence in the world and all the ways in which He is eminent, but we're also confronted
by the infinite possibilities of God's freedom to act in love toward His creation in ways undetermined by those ways that we see. If, for instance, God may -- according to His eminence -- work through a variety of political forms, He may as well work through none at all. The protest of nihilism, or simply a divine intervention through spiritual renewal, could be a vehicle of God's liberating
action. If God's presence in history gives promise and warrant for social, political struggle on behalf of the oppressed, who can say whether -- as in the Middle Ages, and as Thomas Burton in our own time has suggested -- a life of contemplation might not equally be an effective instrument of God's justice. If God is always on the side of the poor, His way of being so cannot be determined or delimited by poverty itself.
If the freedom of God promotes a liberating self-acceptance and even self-celebration among women whose self-consciousness has been victimized by centuries of oppression, it may also accomplish their emancipation through a self-denial that comes from the security of faith. Now the point of these dialectical possibilities is not to suggest that what, on the basis of Scripture and disciplined
reflection, seems to be the case in respect to the need for workable political change, for an active participation in the struggle for liberation, for an advocacy for the poor or for feminist consciousness -- not that any of these ought to be set aside in favor of some other possible, if less promising, approaches to the cause of justice. No, that's not the point. It is to say that in our attempts to discover the
place and character of God's liberating power, we can never forget that we are dealing with a God who is radically and absolutely free. If we deny God any of these possibilities, we are, as Barth reminds us, quote, "denying God Himself." Instead of recognizing and adoring God, we are setting up an idol, for we are imposing upon God
in [the?] defiance of the freedom which He has actually proved to us, a bondage which can only be that of our own self-will that would like to deny God and put itself in the place of God. Any recognition of the actualities of the infinite possibilities of God is a matter of individual hearing, of course. In obedience to
God's Word, we must be prepared to change our minds and our courses of action; otherwise, we will miss the opportunities of God's liberation. But even if no such word is heard to change our course, as we do the best we can, the freedom of God from the way He is free for us must always be kept in view if it is really God whose freedom and liberating power we wish to claim
and to serve. But now, before concluding our consideration of this four-fold form of the freedom of God, we need to raise a question, one that must certainly be on your minds and offer a further point of clarification, if possible. The question is this, is there not a danger in speaking of God's freedom from other being,
His freedom for it by being eminent within it, and especially in speaking of God's unpredictable freedom from His way of being free for us, that we have raised so many possibilities and possible contradictions in our perceptions of God's will and work in the world, that we will lose our way entirely? Is the freedom of God to be so construed that we can know nothing of God with certainty,
and thus have no assurance of what obedience to God's call for liberation means? In answer, we have to say that just as God's own inner purposes are neither capricious nor contradictory, so too we have not been left with only unprincipled unpredictability. In the first place,
when we said that God is free to enter into human life and also free to return to the sphere of His own otherness, we were simply describing how the freedom of God expresses itself in Jesus Christ. It is in Christ that we see, definitively, what it means that God limits Himself without forfeiting His unlimitedness; how He reveals Himself and conceals Himself; how He judges and saves,
but the question may remain as to whether the prior freedom of God may not, in a sense, superimpose upon this His action in Christ an uncertainty and caprice which overrides that meaning of His freedom. Well, if Arius had been right, if the Son of God in the flesh were not also the Son -- the eternal Logos -- of one being with God -- if the One we see in Christ were not also
in the beginning with God, then this danger might be real, but in light of the identity of Jesus Christ and the revelation of the inner life of God found in Him, we know the freedom of God as an activity which is love and because this inner and prior freedom of God cannot be viewed apart from its disclosure in Jesus Christ, we have no cause
or reason to interpret the meaning of God's freedom, even that hidden in the mystery of Trinitarian existence, as having any other meaning or purpose than that of grace and good for His creation. This is why the radical and absolute freedom of God can, in any of its forms, mean nothing else or other than our liberation from everything that threatens and oppresses human existence.
The freedom of God means liberation from many things, certainly liberation from sin and guilt and death, and certainly also liberation from -- for the glorious freedom which belongs to the children of God, but in our time and in our situation, it also means -- and, in many contexts, must mean -- primarily liberation from poverty and oppression.
The freedom of God to accomplish human liberation is God's cause before it is our cause. It's God's work before we take it up and will be His to finish when our best efforts come to ruin. If we wish to take that cause and participate in God's revolution, we can never forget that it is with God that we have to do -- not a God who is subject to the oppressive and hopeless conditions of
finitude, and certainly not a God we can define or delimit or control, but a God who is free in Himself and therefore free for us. To the extent that we remember this essential fact, we will in the pursuit of justice have always to ask whether our judgments concerning the will and activity of God originate in our own self-understanding or in God's self-revelation.
We will have continually to ask whether our programs and strategies for human liberation are responsive to the revealed will of God or merely projections of our own assumptions and values. Obedience to the will of God, who is mysteriously, absolutely, and radically free, will always mean that we must live and work by faith and not by sight, but however
uncertain, unpredictable, and marvelously varied the specific ways of God's freedom may be, and thus our obedience to it may be, we are not left without a guide along this way. The counsel of Calvin is still correct that we should look to Christ, the mirror, wherein we must and without self-deception may contemplate
the ways and works of God. Our responsibilities in respect to the liberating will and activity of God are the same as those announced by Jesus in Nazareth, when he claimed for Himself the prophecy of Isaiah, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord." In the next hour, we'll take up the issue of the kind of thinking about God and the problem of thought that Professor [Adams?] has already raised -- the problem and project of thought that is required if we are to think about God in his radical freedom. Thank you very much.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Thank you, Dr. McKelway, for a very thoughtful, insightful, and provocative lecture; second, congratulations on your choice of tie, which I couldn't help notice we both chose in the freedom of God, and thirdly we are looking forward to what will be a very crucial lecture in this series tomorrow morning
on the thinking of God.