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I

Thanks to the political theologies and theologies of liberation the question of faith and justice has now become a, if not the, central question of Christian theology. For all the discussion recently devoted to it, however, whether the question has as yet been adequately answered is far from certain. One reason for this is that the proper relation between faith and justice still remains highly controversial. Despite widespread agreement that faith by its very nature inevitably finds expression in moral action, whether or to what extent faith also demands to be expressed through specifically political action continues to be disputed. In fact, some theologians, faced with what they take to be the virtual identification of Christian faith with political action, have been so concerned with distinguishing faith and justice as at least to seem to argue for their separation. On the other hand, those theologians for whom a specifically political responsibility is the demand of faith itself so react against what they take to be misguided attempts to separate faith and justice as to give every appearance of simply identifying them.

But if this familiar polarization in theology continues right up to the present, it is not the only reason for doubting that the question of faith and justice has been adequately answered. Another reason is that up to now insufficient attention has been paid to the metaphysical aspect of the question and, in this sense, to what I mean by ‘the metaphysics of faith and justice." Of course, neither faith nor justice is a matter of metaphysical belief or reflection. But it is certainly arguable that both faith and justice necessarily have metaphysical implications and that it is of the utmost importance theologically for these implications to be made fully explicit.

According to the Christian witness, faith is the kind of basic human attitude or disposition that can be formally characterized as an existential self-understanding, or understanding of our own existence, in relation to others and to the encompassing whole of ultimate reality. As such, however, faith is the only self-understanding that is both explicitly authorized by Jesus who is said to be Christ and -- as Christians claim in saying this is who Jesus is -- implicitly authorized by the whole of ultimate reality itself as our authentic self-understanding. Consequently, even though faith itself is an existential, rather than a metaphysical, matter, it necessarily implies certain claims about the ultimate reality of self, others, and the whole in its structure in itself as well as in its meaning for us; and the proper name for all such claims is precisely "metaphysical." Furthermore, if this same faith has moral as well as metaphysical implications, including the specifically political implication of justice, the justice that faith demands necessarily implies the same metaphysical claims as the faith that demands it.

I conclude, therefore, that the question of faith and justice can be adequately answered theologically only insofar as attention is given to the metaphysical aspect of the question. As it happens, however, the theologies that have made this question central in the current discussion have tended, on the whole, either to neglect this aspect of the question or else to proceed more or less uncritically in explicating the metaphysics of faith and justice. Instead of thinking out the full metaphysical implications of the basic understanding to which they have come in reflecting on the meaning of faith and justice for our self-understanding and praxis, they have either settled for talking merely about the meaning of ultimate reality for us or else taken over traditional metaphysical ways of talking about the structure of ultimate reality in itself that are doubtfully consistent with their own basic understanding. At the same time, the other theologies that have contributed most to explicating and justifying the metaphysical implications of the Christian witness seem to have been typically preoccupied more with theoretical questions of belief and truth than with practical issues of action and justice, and so have contributed only indirectly to clarifying and answering our central question. One may also wonder, perhaps, whether the marked speculative tendencies of some of these theologies have not kept such contribution as they have actually made from being clearly recognized in its bearing on the question.

In any event, the point of these broad generalizations, to all of which there are obvious exceptions, is only to explain why the argument I now propose to develop seems to me to be relevant to this symposium. Without exaggerating the need for what I shall do, I want to offer some theological reflections, first, on the relation between faith and justice and then, second, on what I take to be their necessary metaphysical implications. My purpose in doing this is in no way to set forth an adequate answer to our question, either in the one part or in the other, but simply to say enough to open up our subsequent discussion, through which I hope we may together succeed in further clarifying the question, whatever our success in answering it.

As for the characterization of my reflections as "theological," I mean simply that they belong to either the process or the product of critically reflecting on the Christian witness of faith so as to be able to validate the validity claims that it expresses or implies. Specifically, any act of Christian witness advances the claims, implicitly if not explicitly, to be both appropriate to what is normatively Christian and credible in terms of common experience. Since both of these claims not only can be but in fact are problematic, the primary level of praxis that is properly called "Christian witness" creates the need for the secondary level of reflection that is properly distinguished as "Christian theology." Among the other things this entails is that the adequacy of theological reflection must itself be judged by the same two criteria of appropriateness and credibility whereby it has to judge the adequacy of Christian witness. For our purposes here, this means, not that I shall argue for my claims by showing why they satisfy these two criteria -- there simply is not enough time to show this -- but that I am bound to allow that they are the criteria by which you may judge the validity of whatever I shall say. In allowing this, however, I would remind you that the deeper difficulty with all theological discussion is that the specific requirements of such general criteria are themselves always controversial. This is why, in conducting our discussion here, we will all need to be mindful of both of the levels on which it must perforce be conducted, so that we each accept the same double responsibility: not only to satisfy the specific requirements of our general criteria of adequacy but also to specify just what it is that these criteria now require.

II

Turning first to the relation of faith and justice, I wish to argue that even when "justice" is understood not merely in a generally moral but in a specifically political sense, the demand for justice is a demand of faith itself. Thus, in my understanding, the relation between faith and justice is a special case of the relation between faith and good works. Just as, in general, good works are distinct from faith and not to be identified with it, and yet are also demanded by faith and not to be separated from it, so justice in its political meaning as right structures of society and culture is both distinct from faith and demanded by it, and hence neither identifiable with faith nor separable from it. But if this understanding is correct, both poles in the familiar polarization on the question involve equally serious, even if precisely contrary, misunderstandings of how faith and justice are really related. My task now is to explain briefly why just this seems to me to be the case and why I hold, accordingly, that both of the usual alternatives can and should be overcome.

I noted earlier that, according to the Christian witness, faith may be characterized formally as an existential self-understanding. But I immediately went on to add that it is the only self-understanding explicitly authorized by Jesus whom Christians assert to be the Christ, the point of their assertion being that it is also the very self-understanding implicitly authorized as the authentic understanding of our existence by the mysterious whole of ultimate reality that they call by the name "God." If we ask now for the material content of this self-understanding, the only adequate answer is that it is an understanding of ourselves and all others as alike objects of the unbounded love of God, which is to say, of the inclusive whole of ultimate reality of which both the self and others are parts. It is precisely the gift and demand of this unbounded love that are decisively re-presented through Jesus; and to understand ourselves as we are thereby explicitly given and called to do is to actualize the one possibility of self-understanding that is properly called "Christian faith" (Ogden, 1982).

It is of the essence of this self-understanding to have a distinctive double structure; it is both trust in God’s love alone for the ultimate meaning of our lives and loyalty to this same love as the only final cause that our lives are to serve. Although in both aspects, faith is a human response to God’s love, its first aspect of trust is relatively passive, while its second aspect of loyalty is relatively active. Moreover, the priority of the first and more passive aspect of trust to the second and more active aspect of loyalty is absolute. For it is precisely out of our acceptance of God’s love in trust that we alone become sufficiently free from ourselves and all others to be truly loyal to God’s cause. It is no less true, however, that if we truly trust in God’s love, we cannot fail to live in loyalty to it. Thus, while this second aspect of faith is and must be strictly posterior to the first, there is nevertheless but one faith with two aspects, each of which necessarily implies the other.

To be loyal to God’s love, however, is to be loyal not only to God but also to all to whom God is loyal; and this means, of course, everyone, both ourselves and all others. But to be loyal to another necessarily involves -- if, indeed, it is not simply another word for -- loving the other, in the sense of so accepting the other as to take account ofthe other’s interests and then acting toward the other on the basis of such acceptance. So it is that the faith that can originate only by our trusting in God’s prevenient love for all of us can eventuate only in our returning love for God and, in God, for all whom God loves.

This means that the returning love that faith involves is like the prevenient love to which it responds in being, in its own way, unbounded. This it is, in the first place, because the love demanded from us, like the love given to us, covers the full range of creaturely interests. Because God’s love itself is subject to no bounds and excludes nothing from its embrace, there is no creature’s interest that is not also God’s interest and, therefore, necessarily included in our returning love for God. This explains why the first commandment that we shall love God with the whole of our being can be fully explicated only by the second commandment that we shall love our neighbors as ourselves. But as the first commandment itself makes clear, our returning love for God is unbounded, in the second place, because it covers the full scope of our responsibility. Because we are to love God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind, and with all our strength, nothing of ourselves is to be withheld from our love for God and for those whom God loves. In this sense, all of our powers and all of the possible uses of our powers are governed by the one demand for love that is necessarily implied by the demand for faith itself.

To recognize this is to understand why the self-understanding of faith necessarily has properly moral implications. Clearly, if all of our powers and all of the possible uses of our powers are governed by the demand for love, the whole sphere of action through which we actualize our powers must be at least indirectly governed by this same demand. But it is precisely the sphere of action, including both how we act and what we do. that is the proper concern of morals. Thus even though faith as such lies beyond the sphere of action in the sphere of existence or self-understanding, it is nevertheless inseparable from action, and its necessary implications for action are properly moral. In general, we may say that these implications include everything that follows for human action -- both how we are to act and what we are to do -- from a love for God and for all others in God that is unbounded in the two respects just noted, and so covers both the full range of creaturely interests and the full scope of human responsibility. Of course, just what these implications do include at any given time and place is a variable, which depends not only on the actual circumstances of action but even more importantly on some understanding of the range of relevant interests and of the extent of human powers for realizing them. But if changes in Christian morals are to this extent inevitable, what never changes is that the returning love for God in which faith by its very nature eventuates always has just such properly moral implications and that they always pertain to acting in the situation in a distinctive way -- namely, so as to take account of all the interests affected by our action in order to realize these interests as fully as circumstances allow. Recalling, then, the classical definition of justice as giving everyone his or her due, we may summarize the argument up to this point by saying that the faith which works by love inevitably seeks justice and finds expression in it.

The question remains, however, whether this faith also demands justice in the specifically political sense of the word. Granted that faith does indeed imply justice in the generally moral sense of right action that gives each his or her due, what this does and does not imply depends upon some understanding of what is due to those whose interests are affected by our action and of what we are able to do to realize these interests. Clearly, the understanding of these matters that underlies the demand for justice in the specifically political sense is closely related to our distinctively modern historical consciousness, by which I mean our consciousness of ourselves as historical subjects who bear full responsibility for creating ourselves and one another in and through our creation of society and culture. In other words, we can experience the demand for political justice as we do because we have now become aware that the social and cultural structures by which human existence is always limited are neither divine appointments nor natural givens but human creations. Thus we now recognize not only that we have the power in principle to transform these structures so that they more nearly allow for the realization of all relevant interests but also that it is in the deeper interest of all creatures that there be a social and cultural order that frees each of them to realize its interests as fully as possible in solidarity with all the others.

The final conclusion of the argument, then, depends upon appealing not only to the moral implications of faith in any situation, but also to the understanding of ourselves and of our fellow human beings as the agents of history that is pervasive of our situation today. On the other hand, once this understanding can be presuppposed, we have the right to conclude that justice is a demand of faith itself even in the specifically political sense of creating and maintaining right structures of social and cultural order. As a matter of fact, with the full consciousness of our own historical agency, we become aware that the justice which love inevitably seeks and in which it finds expression is, above all, political justice. Of course, the love through which faith works must still continue to accept others and to act in their interests within society and culture as presently constituted. But with the change marked by historical consciousness, the first and most fundamental responsibility of love is for a just ordering of society and culture themselves -- for so forming or transforming their most basic structures that they allow for the fullest possible realization of all relevant interests, thereby giving to everyone his or her due.

The real relation between faith and justice, then, resists both of the usual ways of viewing their relation as alike misunderstandings. Rightly understood, faith and justice are in principle different because, while faith is a matter of human existence, of authentic self-understanding in trust and loyalty in response to God’s love, justice is a matter of human action, whether right action toward all others (its generally moral sense), or right structures of social and cultural order (its specifically political sense). But this means that faith and justice can and must be clearly distinguished and can never be simply identified without being seriously misunderstood. At the same time, faith and justice are also in principle connected, just as in general human existence is in principle connected with human action insofar as any understanding of ourselves cannot but have implications both for how we are to act and what we are to do. In fact, the deepest root of all human action is in the self-understanding that constitutes any human existence distinctively as such. This means that we can avoid the contrary but equally serious misunderstanding of faith and justice only if we recognize that they also can and must be integrally related and can never be simply separated. For this reason, but without in any way simply identifying them, we may say that the specifically political demand for justice is a demand of faith itself.

III

My task now is to pursue the question of the metaphysics of faith and justice as thus understood. Assuming that they are really related in the way I have argued, how do we make fully explicit what they necessarily imply about ultimate reality -- not only in its meaning for us but in its structure in itself?

To clarify this question, it is necessary, first of all, to ask just what is included under the term "ultimate reality" and how, accordingly, we properly understand the scope of metaphysics. According to a well-known definition of William James’s, the real is "what we in some way find ourselves obliged to take account of" (p. 101). Accepting this definition, we may infer that "ultimate reality" covers everything that we are all finally obliged to take account of insofar as we exist humanly at all, whatever other things we may or may not have to take account of in each leading our own individual human life. In other words, ultimate reality includes everything necessary in our experience or self-understanding, as distinct from all the other things that we experience or understand that are merely contingent relative to our own existence simply as such. If we already presuppose, then, that the theistic religious language employed by the Christian witness in authorizing faith in God’s love as our authentic self-understanding can be metaphysically justified, we can say -- as I, in fact, have already been saying -- that ultimate reality includes not only the self and others but also the encompassing whole of reality that theists refer to when they use the name "God." Significantly, it is this very threefold differentiation of ultimate reality into self, others, and the whole, or self, world, and God, that underlies the understanding of metaphysics that has been conventional in the Western tradition since at least the seventeenth century. In this understanding, the scope of metaphysics includes both metaphysica generalis, or ontology, understood as critical reflection on strictly ultimate reality’ as such, and metaphysica specialis as comprising the three disciplines of psychology, cosmology, and theology, understood as critical reflection respectively on the three ultimate realities of self, world, and God.

My judgment is that this conventional scheme is still useful provided one avoids certain misunderstandings that an unthinking use of it may perhaps encourage. One such misunderstanding would be to suppose that there can be an adequate distinction between general metaphysics or ontology, on the one hand, and the discipline of special metaphysics called "theology," on the other. Given the concept of God necessarily implied not only by the Christian witness but by any radical theism, God is not merely one reality among others but is in some sense reality as such. But if this kind of theism is metaphysically true, ontology itself must be theology even as theology can only be ontology. Much the same would be true of the distinction between ontology and cosmology as well if, as some forms of radical theism maintain, the concepts of God and the world are correlative concepts. In that case, the constitutive concept of ontology, namely, "reality as such" would be strictly equivalent to the distinction or correlation between the constitutive concepts of theology and cosmology, "God" and "the world."

Of course so far as theology is concerned, it is metaphysics in the broad sense including psychology that is most directly relevant. This is clear enough from the foregoing theological reflections on the relation between faith and justice; for whatever else faith and justice may be said to be, they have been shown to be possibilities of human existence, whose metaphysical implications necessarily include claims about the reality of the self such as properly belong to metaphysical psychology. With this in mind, we may begin with some brief comments on the psychology -- or, as I prefer to say, anthropology -- that must be an integral part of any adequate metaphysics of faith and justice.

The comments here can be brief because the main point of such an anthropology has already been made in explaining how faith and justice are both distinct and inseparable as I have argued they are. I refer to the distinction I introduced between human existence or self-understanding on the one hand, and human action or praxis, on the other. Clearly, if this distinction is valid, it is so only because the reality of the human self in its essential structure necessarily involves both of the moments that the distinction serves at once to distinguish and to relate in a definite way. But if the reality of the self indeed has this duplex structure, no anthropology that failed to attend to both of its essential moments in their difference as well as their connection could adequately explicate the anthropological implications of faith and justice. Thus, if an anthropology were to advert to the fact that the self is existence and, therefore, can and must understand itself, all the while ignoring the fact that the self’s possibilities are also always limited by social and cultural structures, it would so understand the self that the demand for justice in the specifically political sense could not be understood as a demand of faith itself. On the other hand, if another anthropology so focused on the social and cultural limitations of the self as either to ignore or to deny that the self nonetheless always bears responsibility for understanding itself and leading its own unique life, it would be equally unable to understand justice in either of its senses as ultimately grounded in the self-understanding of faith.

These examples should suffice to indicate the range of philosophical resources of which, in my judgment, theology is well advised to make us if it is to explicate and justify the anthropological implications of faith and justice adequately. Since in other things I have said on this question I have expressly stressed the importance of existentialist philosophy, I would like to emphasize here that I certainly do not think of it as the only important resource. As necessary as its analysis of the self as existence still seems to me to be to any anthropological reflection, the value of this analysis as well as its limitations are more likely to be justly appreciated when it is viewed together with the other post-Hegelian philosophies of human activity that Richard J. Bernstein has so ably discussed in his book, Praxis and Action. Both Marxism and pragmatism, along with more recent analytic philosophies of action, help to make sure that the other moment of action or praxis in the self’s essential structure will be brought out no less effectively than the moment of existence or self-understanding on which existentialist philosophy so sharply focuses. Also important for the same reason are not only the contributions of so-called philosophical anthropology, especially, in my opinion, Michael Landmann’s analysis of human beings as both the creators and the creatures of culture, but also the sophisticated philosophy of human praxis that provides the foundation for the "critical theory" of Jürgen Habermas and, in a somewhat different way, for the "transformation of philosophy" proposed by K.-O. Apel (Landmann, 1961; 1964; Habermas, 1968; 1973; Apel). Although theology must certainly do its own anthropological reflection and cannot rely on any of these resources without criticism, all of them are directly relevant to its task if it is both to explicate and to validate the understanding of the structure of the self that faith and justice necessarily imply.

As for the other, strictly metaphysical implications of faith and justice, I propose to explicate, first, what they necessarily imply for the essential structure of the reality of God. The comments I shall then make about the structure of the world or of reality as such can be more easily made and understood once these theological implications have become explicit.

Faith, as we have seen, is by its very nature our human response of trust and loyalty to the explicit gift and demand of God’s love both for ourselves and for all others. But if the meaning of God for us is the gift and demand of unbounded love that authorizes trust in this love and loyalty to its cause as our authentic self-understanding, the ultimate whole of reality that we call by the name "God" has to have a unique structure in itself. Just as it must be all-inclusive both of self and the world and, therefore, strictly universal in scope and function, it must also be genuinely individual in that it is a single center of interaction, both acting on and being acted on by itself and all others. Ordinarily, of course, universality and individuality are distinguishing properties, the most universal things being the least individual, and vice versa. But if the kind of trust in God’s love and loyalty to its cause that are Christian faith are, in fact, authorized by ultimate reality in its meaning for us, the encompassing whole of reality in its structure in itself must be as individual as it is universal, or as universal as it is individual, and hence an exception to the rule by which individuals and universals are otherwise distinguished.

This conclusion can also be seen to follow from the demand of God’s love as summarized in the two commandments that we shall love the Lord our God with the whole of our being and that we shall love our neighbors as ourselves. Clearly, if it is God whom we are to love with all of our powers, God must be one individual as distinct from all others whose interests we can take account of and act to realize. At the same time, if we are also to accept our neighbors as ourselves and act so as to realize all of their interests, even while all of our powers are to be exercised in our love for God, God must also be strictly universal, in that there can be no interest either of ourselves or of our neighbors that is not somehow included in the interests of God.

The God implied by love for God as well as by faith in God, then, is not simply one individual among others but is the one and only strictly universal individual. This means that the inclusive whole of reality that we experience as strictly necessary in contrast to the radical contingency both of ourselves and of all others must also be distinctively dipolar in its essential structure. It belongs to the very concept of an individual, and hence to any individual whatever, that if is a center of interaction that both acts on itself and others and is acted on by them. Therefore, even the universal individual called "God" must be conceived as having two essential aspects: a relatively more active aspect in which it acts on or makes a difference to both itself and all others and a relatively more passive aspect in which all others as well as itself act on or make a difference to it. Thus the uniqueness of God in comparison with all other individuals does not lie in God’s only acting on others and in no way being acted on by them, but rather in the strictly universal scope of God’s field of interaction with others as well as with self. Whereas any other individual interacts with itself for a finite time only, God’s acting on Godself and being acted on by Godself has never begun nor will it ever end. And so, too, with respect to interaction with others: whereas any individual other than God interacts with some others only, God interacts with all, not only acting on them but also being acted on by them.

In both aspects, God as the universal individual is strictly unsurpassable; and only by being thus unsurpassable both actively and passively can God be the God necessarily implied by the distinctive double structure of Christian faith, and thus be both the ground of unreserved trust and the object of unqualified loyalty. We may trust in God without reservation only because God is unsurpassably active, doing all that could conceivably be done by any one individual for all others as well as itself. Likewise, we may be loyal to God without qualification only because God is unsurpassably passive, being open to all that could conceivably be done or suffered by anyone as something that is also done to God.

But if God can be worthy of our loyalty only by unfailingly suffering all that anyone could possibly do or suffer, what is it exactly that God must do in order to be worthy of the trust that is also distinctive of Christian faith? The answer to this question, in my opinion, is absolutely crucial if the implications of faith and justice for the reality of God are to be adequately explicated. If faith and justice are both distinct and inseparable, as I have held they are, God must do both of two correspondingly distinct and inseparable things in order to be the ground of unreserved trust. On the one hand, God must so act to accept both the self and all others into God’s own everlasting life as thereby to endow them with abiding significance. On the other hand, God must so act in the interests of both the self and all others as thereby to establish the cosmic order of natural law that sets the optimal limits of all other action, where by "optimal limits" I mean limits such that, were they to be set otherwise than they are, the ratio between opportunities for good and risks of evil would be less rather than more favorable than it in fact is.

Elsewhere I have argued that these two things that God must do to be worthy of our trust are what are properly meant respectively by the theological terms "redemption" and "creation" (Ogden, 1979: pp. 82-95). As such they are the two essential aspects of the one work of God ad extra which is God’s unbounded love for all others. But if faith in its first aspect of trust necessarily implies both of these aspects of God’s work, the justice that is the demand of faith in its other aspect of loyalty especially implies the second. Both in its generally moral sense as right action and in its specifically political sense as right structures of society and culture, justice implies that it realizes the same divine interest in the interests of all that is expressed by God’s own work of creation. Even as God’s work as Creator is in the deeper interest of every creature in a cosmic order that frees it to realize its own interests as fully as possible in solidarity with all its fellow creatures, so right actions toward others and, even more so, right structures of social and cultural order are byway of realizing the same deeper interest, thereby carrying forward God’s own work of creation. Thus the justice that faith demands necessarily implies the unsurpassable justice of God, who not only redeems all others from insignificance by accepting them without condition into the divine life itself, but also creates the optimal conditions of creaturely action, thereby doing all that could possibly be done in the interests of all others except what they must each do for themselves and for one another if it is ever to be done at all.

The question now is whether the reality of this God that faith and justice necessarily imply is their only strictly metaphysical implication. My answer is that it is not, because there is a certain respect in which the world as well as God must be said to be strictly ultimate. This is so, at any rate, if one holds, as I do, that the unbounded love of others whose gift and demand are decisively re-presented in Jesus is nothing merely accidental and contingent in God but is God’s very essence and strictly necessary. Of course, the love of God for any particular others could only be contingent, assuming that God alone exists necessarily, all other individuals and events existing or occurring merely contingently. In this respect, God’s love for others and the creation and redemption that are its two essential aspects must themselves always be contingent and so utterly free and gratuitous. But if God is not merely accidentally love of others and essentially love only of self -- and this, I maintain, is what faith and justice necessarily imply -- then that there are some others for God to love and that God, accordingly, is Creator of these others as well as their Redeemer are precisely not contingent but necessary. In this respect, the existence of the world, unlike that of the self, is strictly ultimate; and the concept of "the world," understood as referring to the necessarily nonempty class of realities other than God, all of whose members exist or occur merely contingently, is strictly correlative with the concept of "God."

If this is correct, however, there can no more be an adequate distinction between ontology and cosmology than between ontology and theology. To reflect critically on reality as such is and must be one and the same with critically reflecting on the distinction and correlation between God and the world -- and conversely. Of course, there is the difference that, whereas "God" is not only a concept but a name, designating the one universal individual who alone exists necessarily, "the world" refers to nothing individual but only to a class, at least some of whose members cannot fail to exist or occur -- namely, the class of all individuals and events other than God, any of which exists or occurs only contingently. But as important, and even crucial, as it is to appreciate this difference, the God implied by faith and justice necessarily implies at least some world of creatures other than God, even as any such world of creatures necessarily implies this one and only God as its sole primal source and its only final end.

So far as other implications of faith and justice for ontology and cosmology are concerned, they can be summarized for our purposes by saying that they are in every sense antidualistic, being in one sense monistic, in another sense qualifiedly pluralistic (Ogden, 1983). They are monistic in the sense that any individual or event whatever, whether God or one of God’s creatures, is of one kind of reality only, not of two or more kinds. This implication follows necessarily, I believe, from the concept of God as being strictly universal as well as individual, and hence as not being merely one individual among others but the one individual whose existence is constitutive of reality as such. If God is indeed so conceived, then, to be anything real at all is either to be God or to be a creature of God whose difference from God cannot be absolute; for to be absolutely different from God would be to be absolutely different from reality as such, and so not anything real after all, but simply nothing. Thus it follows from faith and justice that there is only one kind of ultimate subjects of predication and that no difference between any one such subject and any other can amount to an absolute difference in kind, whether it be a merely finite difference between one creature and another or even the infinite difference between any creature and God.

This means, among other things, that even the difference between human creatures such as ourselves and other creatures not similarly capable of self-understanding and moral action is at most a relative, not an absolute, difference. Consequently, there can be no ontological or cosmological justification for restricting the demand for justice to action or structures pertaining to exclusively human interests. On the contrary, because all differences between creatures are relative only, the justice that faith demands requires that we so act as to take account of all interests that can be affected by our action, nonhuman as well as human.

But if the implications of faith and justice are in this way attributively monistic, they are nonetheless substantively pluralistic, even if in a qualified sense. By this I mean that they imply not one, but many, ultimate subjects of predication. Although any individual or event is and must be ultimately of the same kind as any other, there are any number of such realities, each ontologically distinct from all the others. Above all, there is the unique ontological distinction between the self and others as all mere parts of reality, on the one hand, and God as the all-inclusive whole of reality, on the other. Even as each creature is ontologically distinct from every other, so each of them severally and all of them together are ontologically distinct from God. And yet, as I have indicated, the distinction between parts and the whole, creatures and God, is unique; and for this reason the pluralism implied by faith and justice, real as it certainly is, is also qualified.

This became apparent earlier when we took note of the important difference between the two concepts of "God" and "the world." Even though these concepts are indeed correlative in that each necessarily implies the other, the symmetry they thus express between God and the world presupposes an even more fundamental asymmetry between them. For while God could not exist without the world any more than the world could exist without God, what God necessarily implies is not this world or that (since any world, unlike God, is merely contingent rather than necessary), but only some world or other -- or, as I put it before, that the class of all individuals and events other than God not be an empty class. On the other hand, what any world necessarily implies is not merely some God or other (since the idea of more than one God is self-contradictory), but rather the one and only necessarily existing God but for which no world whatever would even be possible or have any abiding meaning (Hartshorne, 1967: p. 64f.). Because of this profound asymmetry between God and the world, the ontology implied by faith and justice is indeed pluralistic but with an important qualification.

With this I must conclude my initial contribution to our discussion. I hardly have to say, I think, that in my judgment the strictly metaphysical reflections of a certain form of process philosophy provide a unique resource for Christian theology. But I trust my argument has helped to make clear why the kind of revisionary metaphysics developed, above all, by Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne seems to me all but indispensable to theology if the strictly metaphysical implications of faith and justice are to be explicated and validated both appropriately and credibly.

Having said this, however, I would emphasize that here, too, theology has to do its own metaphysical reflection and cannot afford to be uncritical in making use of this any more than of any other philosophical resource. To be sure, the situation here is not simply the same as it is with respect to the anthropology of faith and justice. In my opinion, at any rate, there is nothing inherently one-sided about this form of process metaphysics, nor is there any other revisionary metaphysics that is at all comparable in the overall adequacy of its strictly metaphysical positions. But aside from the fact that other kinds of metaphysics are concerned with the same problems and, therefore, can hardly fail to make some contribution toward further clarifying them, there are certain well-known difficulties with any speculative or categorial metaphysics that make its critical appropriation imperative. Specifically, there is the root difficulty of whether there can really be any such thing as proper metaphysical analogy, this being the kind of thinking and speaking on which any categorial or speculative metaphysics necessarily depends. Obviously, this is neither the time nor the place to discuss so radical an issue (Ogden, 1982: pp. 127-47; 1984). But unless I am mistaken, it is one of the issues that Christian theology must not only discuss but resolve if it is to carry out its task of explicating and defending the metaphysics of faith and justice.

Works Consulted

Apel, Karl-Otto

Bernstein, Richard J.

Feinberg, Joel

Frankena, William K.

Gamwell, Franklin I.

Habermas, Jürgen

Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag

Hartshorne, Charles

1967 -- A Natural Theology for Our Time. LaSalle, IL: Open Court Publishing Co.

1970 -- Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method. LaSalle, IL: Open Court Publishing Co.

James, William

Landmann, Michael

Ogden, Schubert M.

Walzer, Michael

If Charles Hartshorne is correct that "the intellect’s self-understanding . . . is the innate, a priori, or metaphysical" (CSPM 31), then, provided "intellect" is taken as it evidently is in the dictum nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu, namely, as the human intellect, I do not see how all metaphysical statements can be "inconceivably falsifiable" in the strictest possible sense. For, clearly, on this account of what ‘metaphysics is, the statement "I exist" must be a metaphysical statement, along with the other statements, "The world exists" and "God exists." And, whatever may be true of the latter two statements (and certainly for classical as well as neoclassical theism the last is factually unfalsifiable sensu strictissimo), the first is evidently falsifiable, since it is true and can be true only contingently, even though it could never be even meaningful, much less true, to say of oneself, "I do not exist." In short, if metaphysics is defined as the human intellect’s self-understanding, then metaphysics comprises contingent as well as necessary truths -- although even the contingent truths it comprises are such that in one sense they cannot be coherently denied and, therefore, must be believed, if only implicitly or nonreflectively.

What, then, is the criterion of metaphysical truth? I submit that it is the criterion of unavoidable belief or necessary application through experience. Those statements are true metaphysically which I could not avoid believing to be true, at least implicitly, if I were to believe or exist at all; or, alternatively, they are the statements which would necessarily apply though any of my experiences, even my merely conceivable experiences, provided only that such an experience was sufficiently reflected on.

Now, among such statements, there are evidently some that not even a divine believer could avoid believing, if he could be said to believe at all, or which would necessarily apply even though all of his experiences, including his merely conceivable experiences, could he be said to have such. Thus the statement "God exists" would be unavoidably believed even by God, or would necessarily apply though any of his experiences; and I should think the same would be true of "The world exists," provided it is understood as asserting the existence not of an individual but of a class, some of whose members must exist, but none of whose members can exist except contingently. By contrast, since what makes the statement "I exist" true is a wholly contingent state of affairs, it is in fact falsifiable, even though I myself could never falsify it, insofar as none of the other statements that would have to be true in order for it to be true would be an unavoidable belief for God or a statement that would necessarily apply through his experiences.

Because of this difference it is possible and necessary to distinguish between metaphysics in the broad sense, for whose truth the criterion is unavoidable belief or necessary application through human experience, and metaphysics in ‘the strict sense, for whose truth the criterion is unavoidable belief or necessary application through experience as such, even divine experience.

By "metaphysics in the strict sense," one properly means metaphysica generalis, or ontology, although from the standpoint of a neoclassical theism there can be no adequate distinction between ontology, on the one hand, and theology and cosmology, as disciplines of metaphysica specialis, on the other.¹ From this standpoint, ontology is also theology in the sense that its constitutive concept "reality as such" necessarily involves the distinction/correlation between the one necessarily existing individual and the many contingently existing individuals and events. Conversely, theology can only be ontology, in the sense that its constitutive concept "God" necessarily requires that the implied distinction/ correlation between God and the world be identical with that involved in "reality as such." Thus "reality as such" = "God and the world," which explains, of course, why from this standpoint ontology is also cosmology, even as cosmology is ontology.

"Metaphysics in the broad sense," on the other hand, should be taken to include, in addition to ontology, and hence also theology and cosmology, the third discipline of metaphysica specialis, psychology, or, as I prefer to call it, anthropology. As thus inclusive, metaphysics is integral existential truth.² Conversely, integral existential truth necessarily includes metaphysics in the strict sense, as ontology and therefore theology and cosmology, even though metaphysics in the strict sense does not include anthropology, and hence is not the full truth about human existence -- not even as such.

References

CSPM -- Charles Hartshorne. Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method. La Salle, Ill.: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1970.

Notes

1 Hartshorne is clearly right about this (CSPM 39), although, in thinking about the distinction, one must keep in mind what Hartshorne himself insists on elsewhere in replying to Paul Tillich’s unqualified denial that God is a being -- namely, that God’s uniqueness "must consist precisely in being both reality as such and an individual reality, insofar comparable to other individuals" (A Natural Theology for Our Time [LaSalle. Ill.: The Open Court Publishing Co., 1967], p. 35).

2 This is to resolve the question that Hartshorne leaves open -- although, as I have argued, some of his own statements imply the same resolution -- namely, whether "existentialism or phenomenology may have something neither metaphysical nor quite within the scope of science to contribute" (CSPM 296). Existentialist (or phenomenological) anthropology does contribute something metaphysical, although it is not strictly metaphysical.

Readers familiar with John Cobb’s many theological writings will know that he has already contributed a number of essays on the subject of Christology. Christ in a Pluralistic Age (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1975) significantly adds to this number, not by being, as he explains, a full-fledged Christology," but by expressing the results of a "series of forays into interrelated topics" (p. 23). Thus, by his own estimation, the book is "more a progress report than a finished Christology," and his description of it as consisting in "essays" is apt (pp. 14,23).

The title, also, is well chosen, given the main argument of the book. Its thesis, Cobb says, "is that faithfulness to Christ requires immersion in the secular and pluralistic consciousness and that it is precisely there that Christ now works, impeded by our failures to recognize him and by our continuing association of faith with past, particularized expressions of Christ" (p. 187). Cobb argues for this thesis by seeking to show that the very process that has produced and is at work in the secular and pluralistic consciousness is the process of "creative transformation" that is properly named "Christ." Thus, so far from allowing that Christ excludes secularity and pluralism, or is excluded by them, Cobb proposes to reestablish Christian faith by holding that Christ, in reality, is their own "basis" or "positive principle" (pp. 51, 187). Although the objective study of religion breaks "the correlation of faith and the sacred" and relativizes all absolutized particulars, the Christian not only can accept these consequences but should also affirm them. For "the remaining absolute" necessarily presupposed by objective study itself is "creative transformation as such," and the Christian should recognize that just that is the present working of Christ (p. 42).

Actually, most of the burden of this main argument is borne by the first of the book’s three parts, entitled "Christ as the Logos," in which Cobb seeks to discern the reality of Christ in the present as creative transformation, which he interprets in broadly Whiteheadian terms as "the universal presence of the transcendent Logos" (p. 24). In part two, then, he turns from the present to the past, to consider "Christ as Jesus," and attempts to ground the process of creative transformation historically in "Jesus and his influence" (p. 18). His conclusion there is that "both encounter with the words of Jesus and incorporation into the field of his influence effect creative transformation in the hearer," the reason for this being that the Logos which is universally present as creative transformation "was distinctively embodied in Jesus," who was its "full incarnation" (p. 24). Finally, in part three, "Christ as Hope," Cobb considers Christ in relation to the future and there argues that the distinctive structure of existence that was embodied in Jesus unifies four contemporary images of hope into "one immanent/transcendent, personal/communal, human/cosmic hope" (p. 256).

Even so cursory a summary is enough to indicate that Cobb explores a wide range of topics, indeed, and that he is amply justified in regarding this book as more than the mere "Jesusology" that he confesses to having hardly gone beyond while writing some of his earlier essays (p.13). Although here, too, the focus of his interest is a constructive answer to the question of how God can be affirmed to have been fully incarnate in Jesus (and this, I take it, is what he means by a "Jesusology"), the scope of his interest, and thus also of the book, takes in most, if not all, of the issues that a constructive christology today must perforce consider. This alone, I judge, should commend his book to all who are concerned with the contemporary christological problem. For no christological reflection having a narrower scope of interest can be adequate to the task that now confronts the theological community.

Of course, there are difficulties with the book, and, what with the scope it covers, they are not few. Apart from those pertaining to the focus of its interest, which I want presently to discuss in some detail, I am myself most troubled by the incidence of confusing, if not confused, formulations, which in some cases seem to reflect real inconsistencies in thought. Thus, for instance, Cobb can say toward the end of the book, "Jesus is Christ, because he is the incarnation of the Logos" (p. 281), even though, by his own account, the Logos is universally incarnate (at least in all living beings and human persons), and Jesus is the Christ because he is the "full" or "fullest" incarnation of the Logos (p. 142). (Cobb also speaks of Jesus as the "perfect" and "normative" incarnation, as well as "the paradigm" thereof.) Or, again, and more seriously, Cobb can assume in one place that "the study of the many faith stances correlated with the many forms of the sacred has permanently eroded them all" and yet propose in another that the Christian faith stance can now "reestablish itself" as "the basis for the objective study that breaks the correlation of faith and the sacred" (pp. 53, 51). Evidently, the same faith stance cannot both be "permanently eroded" by, and also "reestablish itself" as the "basis" for, the objective study of religions. And yet these are not untypical of Cobb’s formulations, which in general are confusing as to whether the theological change now called for is simply to endorse the secular struggle to become free from the sacred (pp. 19f) or, rather, to relocate the sacred, and thus effect a "transference of commitment" from "every form in which Christ has previously been known" to the process of creative transformation that is the reality of Christ itself (p. 63).

Still other such difficulties will be particularly evident to students of Whitehead’s philosophy. Thus, at one point, Cobb appears to deny that the Logos is an "abstraction" (p. 170), and yet he himself says that "the Logos is an eternal aspect of deity" (p. 77; italics added), and he expressly identifies the Logos as "God in his Primordial Nature" (p. 71), which Whitehead explicitly speaks of precisely as an abstraction (PR 521f). Or, again, Cobb asserts that "the Logos itself [is] love" (p. 85), even though he himself says elsewhere that "the Logos in its transcendence is timeless and infinite" (p. 72), and Whitehead says that "God in the abstraction of a primordial actuality" is "deflected neither by love, nor by hatred, for what in fact comes to pass" (PR 522). Or, yet again, and more seriously, Cobb asserts that "the Logos as the principle of novelty is the only ground of order" (p.77; italics added), only to assert elsewhere that "the immanence of the transcendent Logos is but a special case [and hence precisely not the only case!] of causal efficacy in general" (p. 72). From Whitehead’s standpoint, certainly, one might indeed say that the Logos is the only ultimate or universal ground of order. But, since to be actual at all is to be causally efficacious in relation to all subsequent actualization, one would have to allow that not only the Logos but any actuality whatever is insofar forth a ground of order. (There is one passage, indeed, where Whitehead says that "the process of finite history is essential for the ordering of the basic vision, otherwise mere confusion" [ESP 126].) Finally, and most seriously, there is Cobb’s astonishingly anti-Whiteheadian claim that "in fact [our own achievements] are not our own achievements at all but achievements of the Logos in which we have actively participated" (p. 85). As it stands, this claim is implicitly self-contradictory; for either we have "actively participated" in the Logos’ achievements, in which case they are our own achievements as well as the Logos’, or else they are not our own achievements "at all," in which case we have not actively participated in them. In any case, if what Cobb wishes to claim is that our achievements are only apparently ours because they are really God’s, he must surely know that the whole weight of Whitehead’s philosophy, at least, stands against him.

But, as serious as some of these difficulties no doubt are, they are more than offset, for me, at least, by Cobb’s insightful treatment of many of the issues belonging to the larger problem of a contemporary christology. His basic proposal for reestablishing Christian faith in a pluralistic age strongly commends itself to me, and, even when I cannot wholly agree with him, I find what he says about the universal, if largely anonymous, working of Christ and about the meaning of Christian hope both illumining and provocative. Particularly significant, in my opinion, is his comparative discussion of the Christian and Buddhist structures of existence and of the present possibilities of each creatively transforming the other.

The most serious difficulties I have with the book pertain, rather, to the focus of Cobb’s interest -- namely, his constructive interpretation of what I call the constitutive christological assertion, "Jesus is the Christ." The deepest source of my difficulties is that Cobb entirely omits an analysis of the question to which this assertion functions as the answer. It is true that, at the very beginning of the book, he offers a "formal" definition of "Christ" that he might well have taken as the clue to such an analysis. In the formal sense, he says, Christ’ names what is experienced as supremely important when this is bound up with Jesus" (p. 17). From a parallel passage it becomes clear that "the divine reality" is "what is supremely important" and that being "bound up with Jesus" means being "present and manifest in Jesus" (p. 54). By implication, then, Cobb here identifies the question of Christ with the question of God, itself understood as the question of what is most important for human existence. But he himself nowhere follows up this clue by explicating the existentialist analysis of the christological question to which it points, and, for all the difference it makes to the book as a whole, he might just as well never have dropped it. As a consequence, his interpretation of the christological assertion commits what one could properly call the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Forgetting the existential context that, in the New Testament, at least, is the concrete context of this assertion, Cobb assumes that it has to do with the distinctive possibility of existence that Jesus perfectly actualized, not with the distinctive possibility of existence that Jesus decisively represents. And so he interprets it as an assertion about the being of Jesus in himself in abstraction from the question of the meaning of Jesus for us.

In this, of course, he but follows the precedent of most other constructive christologies both past and present, traditional and revisionary. And so I am well aware that what I take to be the profoundest inadequacy of the book, when judged either by the witness of the New Testament or from the standpoint of Whiteheadian philosophy, is the very thing that other readers will judge to commend it. But it is extremely doubtful, I think, whether even those who share Cobb’s assumption about the function of the christological assertion will be able to approve his interpretation of it. For, even if one grants that assumption, his interpretation involves a number of difficulties -- all of them serious.

This can be shown by taking a closer look at his procedure. By his own account, he first undertakes to develop the "theoretical possibility" of a distinctive structure of existence (p. 141). On his view, the Logos "is incarnate in all things," although "the mode and function of that incarnation vary" (p. 138). This is particularly so with respect to its incarnation in human beings; for "there is little common human nature other than the uniquely human capacity to be shaped in history into a wide variety of structures of existence" (p. 136). Thus "human beings embody many structures of existence," which "are correlated with different roles of the Logos" (pp. 170f, 138). "In all but one of those structures," however, "they constitute themselves around a center that is distinct from God’s presence in them" (p. 171). Nevertheless, one structure of existence is at least possible, whether or not it has ever been embodied, in which "the presence of the Logos would share in constituting selfhood" (p. 139). "The ‘I’ in each moment [would be] constituted as much in the subjective reception of the lure to self-actualization that is the call and presence of the Logos as it [would be] in continuity with the personal past. This structure of existence would be the incarnation of the Logos in the fullest meaningful sense" (p. 140).

Having thus established its theoretical possibility, Cobb then proceeds to argue that this distinctive structure of existence was actually embodied in Jesus. This he does, not by the usual reductio from faith in Jesus’ saving efficacy to this structure of existence as the necessary condition of its possibility, but by what purports to be an argument from "the evidence of history" -- specifically, from the consensus of historians who have engaged in the quest of the historical Jesus that "at the heart of [Jesus’] message is an astonishing presumption of his own importance and authority" (pp. 24, 133). Cobb dissociates his argument at this point from that for "the liberal Jesus," because the bridge from historical knowledge to strong statements about Jesus’ "wisdom, piety, freedom, obedience, and love" is "a fragile one" (p. 165). Consequently, in its logical structure, his own argument, also, is a kind of reductive argument -- namely, from the alleged historical "datum" of "Jesus’ implicit claim to authority" to his having embodied in fact the unique structure of existence that has been shown to be at least a possibility (pp. 137f, 135). Accordingly, the major premise of Cobb’s conclusion implies that, if Jesus spoke and acted with the kind of authority that reliable historical knowledge confirms he implicitly claimed, then he must have embodied this distinctive structure of existence, which alone can explain such a claim.

But now consider the difficulties involved in this procedure. First of all, Cobb’s whole argument evidently takes for granted that we can know enough about "the real Jesus" to assert that he himself claimed a unique authority for his personal word and implicitly identified his actions as "directly expressive of God’s purposes" (pp. 132, 138). Yet how warranted is this assumption? Cobb seems assured that "we do not have to accept extreme skeptical conclusions; for by working back to older layers of tradition we can arrive at reliable information about Jesus" (p. 101). But, surely, that is just the question, considering that, no matter how far back we work through the layers of tradition, the only thing given we can ever arrive at is itself always only a layer of tradition, which shows every sign of being more concerned with bearing faithful witness to Jesus than with giving reliable information about him. That Jesus’ implicit claim to authority is a more or less probable inference from our sources I, at least, am willing to allow. But to speak of it as a "datum" seems to me to claim far more than our sources warrant -- and certainly more than Cobb himself gives any reason for claiming.

Yet, even if one grants Cobb’s assumption concerning what we can reliably know about Jesus -- and most of his readers will no doubt be prepared to grant it -- there is the further difficulty that no merely historical evidence could possibly yield the conclusion for which he argues. That Jesus actually implied an astonishing claim for his word and actions logically could be established by appealing solely to the evidence of history. But what Cobb’s conclusion requires him to establish is not merely that Jesus implied such a claim but also that it is a true or valid claim -- and that historical evidence alone logically could not be appealed to to establish. Consequently, Cobb must be confronted with the choice of either settling for a merely hypothetical conclusion logically different from the categorical conclusion for which he argues, or else abandoning the pretense that the only evidence his argument requires is the evidence of history.

Beyond these difficulties, however, just what Cobb wishes to claim with his argument is doubly confused, or, at any rate, confusing. It is confusing, in the first place, because, while he again and again asserts that Jesus was the "fullest" incarnation of the Logos, in that he embodied the unique structure of existence in which all tension between the self and the Logos is overcome, what Cobb affirms or assumes as historically true of Jesus’ life in no way entitles him to make such an assertion. "We may assume," he says, "that the distinctive structure of Jesus’ existence did not characterize his infancy or remain constant through sleeping and waking states. When it emerged and how steady it became are subjects on which we have little information" (p. 142). Moreover, even if "the stories of [Jesus’] temptation in the wilderness, his struggle in Gethsemane, and his forsakenness on the cross are not historically reliable," they nevertheless "witness to the belief on the part of his disciples that he was not continuously free from the tension between his ‘I’ and the Logos" (p. 142). Thus all that Cobb finally affirms as historically true is that ‘at least at important times in his life Jesus freely chose to constitute his own selfhood as one with [the] presence of God within him" (p.173). But, clearly, this highly qualified affirmation by no means entitles Cobb to assert that Jesus was in fact the fullest incarnation of the Logos. For, by his own definition, the possibility of such a perfect incarnation requires that "the ‘I’ in each moment" be free from all tension with the Logos, and this he not only does not affirm of Jesus’ life but, by implication, denies of it.

Among the other difficulties this entails is that the alleged distinctiveness of Jesus’ existence becomes blurred in relation to the "ordinary" Christian existence from which Cobb wishes to distinguish it (p. 137). Jesus’ "I," he says, "was co-constituted by the incarnate Logos. Thus God’s purpose for him was his purpose rather than being a threat to his purpose, as we often experience it" (p. 144). But, if what distinguishes us as ordinary Christians from Jesus is not that we always experience God’s purpose as a threat, but only that we "often" so experience it, then, clearly, Cobb can claim no more than that Jesus’ distinctiveness from us is relative, a matter of more rather than less, since he does not affirm, and by implication denies, that Jesus never experienced God’s purpose as a threat. Notwithstanding, Cobb insists that the incarnation in Jesus was not simply an intensification of the presence of the Logos in all people," and he contends that Jesus would not constitute an image of hope "if he only participated more fully in the distinctive structure that we know in ourselves as Christians" (pp. 256, 184).

But Cobb’s argument is confusing, in the second place, because, while the conclusion for which he argues entails the claim that his interpretation of Jesus’ existence is required by the evidence of history, the most he himself ever expressly claims for his interpretation is that it "fits" such evidence. At this absolutely crucial point, I must confess to being confident that Cobb’s argument is not only confusing but also confused. It is one thing to claim that an explanation fits certain facts, in that it can account for them and is not incompatible with them. But it is another and very different thing to claim that the facts in question require a certain explanation if they are really to be explained. There cannot be the least question that the conclusion for which Cobb argues logically requires him to make the second and much stronger of these two claims. For, if the fact of Jesus’ claim to speak and to act for God could be explained otherwise than by his being the fullest incarnation of the Logos, then the most that Cobb could conclude is not that Jesus was that incarnation but only that he might have been it. And yet, as I have said, the only claim that Cobb expressly makes for his interpretation, as distinct from the claim implied by his conclusion, is the first and much weaker claim that it fits the fact of Jesus’ implied presumption of his own importance and authority. Consequently, if one judges solely from Cobb’s express claim for it, his argument warrants a much weaker conclusion than the one for which he argues and evidently supposes he has established.

There is, to be sure, a very good reason for Cobb’s not making a stronger claim for his interpretation. A further and still more serious difficulty with his whole procedure is that he does not, in fact, provide the kind of argument that his conclusion logically requires. On the contrary, such argument as he provides at most establishes the appropriateness of his interpretation, or, in other words, is an argument for the converse of the major premise implied by his conclusion! Thus he typically argues, for instance, that "if Jesus existed in full unity with God’s present purposes for him, then even the rules that he acknowledged as embodying God’s past purposes could be freely set aside" (p. 141). But, true as this may be, what Cobb’s conclusion requires him to argue for -- but what he nowhere does argue for -- is the converse premise that, if Jesus could freely set aside the past rules of the law, then he existed in full unity with God’s present purposes for him. Only by establishing this kind of a major premise can the conclusion for which Cobb argues itself be established. But, since he not only does not claim to establish such a premise but also in fact fails to establish it, the most that his argument entitles him to conclude is not that, "so far as we know, Jesus is unique," but only that, so far as we know, Jesus might be unique (p. 142; italics added).

This, in my judgment, shows beyond question that Cobb’s proposed interpretation simply will not do. By his own account, any understanding of Christ must be grounded in the historical Jesus, and this is what he himself clearly claims to have done in providing his interpretation (cf. pp. 22f, 24, 177). But, as I have shown, this is just what such argument as he offers does not do at all and, significantly, does not even claim to do. For all Cobb succeeds in establishing, his christology describes a Jesus who is a mere possibility, not the actuality it purports to describe. Thus, it is at best a wholly speculative interpretation in no way grounded in the Jesus of history it professes to interpret.

In a well-known lecture on "The Prior Actuality of God," Austin Farrer argued already in 1966 for something like a mediating position between "the scholastic absolutism," on the one hand, and "process theology," on the other (RF 178-91). "Our evidence," he allowed, "is that God can concern himself with the actions of his creatures in such a way as to make his action relative to theirs." This means that "the Christian disciples of Aristotle were wrong in stating that God does not, and cannot, make his action so relative to his creatures as to render that relation constitutive of anything in his divine life." But if "the retreat from theological absolutism" is to this extent justified, how far should it go? "Must [God] so relate himself? To put it otherwise: Has God no other action than what is relative to a creation he makes, governs, or saves?" (RF 179, 190-91). Farrer’s answer to his question was emphatically negative. Applying the principle nulla impotentia ponenda est in Deo, he argued that to answer it affirmatively, as "process theology" does, is ponere impotentiam in Deo -- no less so, indeed, than to hold with "the absolutist position" that God is not capable of really relating himself to his creatures. In this sense, he insisted on "the prior actuality of God," contending that "God’s so relating his action to his creatures has no tendency to show all his activity to be thus creature-related and none of it God-related, as (for example) the traditional doctrine of the Blessed Trinity declares it to be" (RF 181-83, 191).

Arguments for much the same kind of mediating position continue to be put forward by traditionalist critics of process theology. One recent example is the argument of Thomas V. Morris in his essay, "God and the World: A Look at Process Theology" (AE 124-50). Although Morris readily grants that "process theology has issued some important correctives concerning the medieval conception of God," he nonetheless holds that "process theologians, in a spirit of innovation, often have departed unnecessarily, and dangerously, from the traditional claims of the faith they most often purport to be preserving" (AE 150). This is evident, he argues, because they not only claim correctly that "God can interact with us, his creatures," but also conclude, contrary to "a central belief of orthodox Christian thought" that "God freely created the world ex nihilo," that "God needs the world in order to be who he is" (AE 127). Thus process theologians start from "genuine insights about relatedness and divine love," to the effect that

It is not to my purpose to evaluate the case that Morris then proceeds to make for the understanding of the trinity that his mediating position requires. The relevant point is simply that, in much the same way as Farrer, he seeks to affirm that God can be really related to creatures even while denying that God must be so related.

My contention, however, is that attempts such as Farrer’s and Morris’s to take up a third position between classical theism, on the one hand, and neoclassical theism, on the other, quite fail to carry conviction. I hold, on the contrary, that unless God must be really related to creatures, God cannot be really related to them. Consider the following argument:

1. If God can be really related to creatures, creatures can make a real difference to God. (That this is so follows analytically or by definition from the meaning of "being really related." For any values of x and y, if x can be really related to y, y can make a real difference to x.)

2. If creatures can make a real difference to God, God cannot be unsurpassable in reality without being really related to creatures. (This, too, follows analytically or by definition -- in this case, from what is meant by "making a real difference," on the one hand, and by "being surpassable or unsurpassable in reality," on the other. If y can make a real difference to x, x’s reality without real relation to y could only be surpassed by x’s reality if x were really related to y.)

3. But if God need not be really related to creatures, either God can be unsurpassable in reality without being really related to creatures or God can be surpassable in reality. (Here, again, the premise follows analytically or by definition -- in this case from the meaning of "not needing to be really related," on the one hand, and of "being surpassable or unsurpassable in reality," on the other.)

4. God cannot be surpassable in reality. (This also follows analytically, from the definition of God as "the Unsurpassable," or, in Anselm’s phrase, as "the One than whom none greater can be conceived," or, as Farrer might say, as "the One in whom no weakness is to be posited.")

5. Therefore, if God need not be really related to creatures, God can be unsurpassable in reality without being really related to creatures. (This follows as a conclusion from 3 and 4.)

6. But if God can be unsurpassable in reality without being really related to creatures, creatures cannot make a real difference to God. (This is an immediate inference from 2, being its contrapositive.)

7. If creatures cannot make a real difference to God, however, God cannot be really related to creatures. (This, too, is an immediate inference, being the contrapositive of 1.)

8. Therefore, if God need not be really related to creatures, God cannot be really related to creatures. (This follows as a conclusion from 5, 6, and 7.)

9. Either, then, God can be really related to creatures, in which case God also must be so related, or God need not be really related to creatures, in which case God also cannot be so related. (This follows as a conclusion from the contrapositive of 8 and 8.)¹

To avoid any misunderstanding, I should add that, while I hold that God can be really related to creatures, and, therefore, must be so related, I also insist that there is a profound asymmetry between the implied need of God for creatures and the evident need of creatures for God. Whereas creatures need not merely some God or other, but the one and only God there could possibly be, what God needs is not these, those, or any other creatures, but only some creatures, each of which, being precisely a creature, once was not and, therefore, could only have been created ex nihilo a Deo.²

References

AE -- Thomas V. Morris. Anselmian Explorations: Essays in Philosophical Theology. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987.

RF -- Austin Fatter. Reflective Faith: Essays in Philosophical Theology. Ed. Charles C. Conti. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1974.

Notes

While accepting full responsibility for the argument, I also want to acknowledge my debt to Philip E. Devenish and Franklin I. Gamwell who, together with Goodwin, were kind enough to check my reasoning.

2For this reason, I should not wish to defend what Morris speaks of as "a standard tenet of process thought that God needs the [sic] world in order to be who he is." Later in his essay, he is more careful, allowing that, on the process view, "God needs a [sic] world to which to relate himself" (AE 127, 139).