I have been an oft critic of the ‘classical theistic’ god. The classical theistic God is typically known by actus purus, ‘pure being.’ I have argued that this conception of Godness as Monad comes to us from the ancient Greek philosophers, and not from God’s Self-revelation of Himself in Jesus Christ. Some would say that my argument is modern, but that would simply be the chronological snobbery fallacy. Truth has no provenance; that is, truth is truth no matter where or whence it comes. Bruce McCormack describes this sort of critique this way (here his comments are in the context of his treatment on Eberhard Jüngel’s explication of Barth’s doctrine of God):
The term “essence” in its origins is a class term, descriptive of what is common to all members of a class. As such, it is an abstraction from all exemplars belonging to that class in their lived existence. Applied to God, the qualification was traditionally added: “but, of course, God belongs to no class. God is unique.” But the qualification came too late for it did not qualify the definition of divine essence that had been devised by means of negations alone without reference to God’s existence. Jüngel shows that the classical ambivalence in holding and, at the same time not holding the claim that essence and existence are one in God gave rise in the early modern period to Descartes’ insinuation of the cogito (the “thinking human subject”) between divine “essence” and divine “existence” — thereby creating “a contradiction which disintegrates the being of God: namely, into a highest essence over me and into its existence through and with me.” Ibid., p. 126. From there, it was but a short step for modern thinkers to remove the contradiction through surrender of this highest essence. In this way, the ambivalence of classical treatments of the relation of essence and existence in God made a substantial contribution to the rise of modern atheism.1
Usually, it is the evangelical opponents of modern theology in favor of their retrieval of classical theism who decries anything modern; like Jüngel’s critique of the classical theistic god. Yet, if Jüngel is right, and McCormack’s commentary on him is to the point, then it is these evangelical retrievers of classical theism who, if anyone, should be ‘demonized’; insofar that the God they are introducing the churches to reduces to the god of modern atheism. Just because the evangelical suitors of classical theism (indeed, they have created that designation) assert that modern theology is demonic, doesn’t make it so. The greatest irony here is that in fact it is the god of classical theism who reduces, quite easily, into the “thinking human subject”; or the god of the modern atheist.
In my experience, nobody really wants to bite the bullet on these things. Most evangelical theologians today (of the Reformed provenance) simply live in a posture of denial. They feel the pressure to think God from antique roots, because they seem to think God spoke more clearly then than now, but then when a modern theologian[s] shows that the way this God was synthesized with Hellenic conceptualities results in the No-God of modern atheism, they simply deflect and claim that it is the modern theologian who is the devil. Both can’t be right. I’ve never seen an evangelical counter the sort of critique made by people like Jüngel, McCormack et al. There are guys like Craig Carter, Matthew Barrett, Scott Swain and Michael Allen, who are continuously pushing the classical theistic god for the massa of evangelicals out there. But again, this simply glosses past critiques like those made by people like EJ.
1 Bruce Lindley McCormack, The Humility of the Eternal Son: Reformed Kenoticism and the Repair of Chalcedon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 170-71 n.41.
*Repost from almost exactly two years ago. I think this is one of the better posts I’ve written with reference to drawing multiple connections together vis-a-vis a doctrine of God. This post implicates, classical theisms, of all types, along with modern atheisms and evangelical theologies of the 21st century.