A significant shift occurred in theology in the seventeenth century. “[B]efore the seventeenth century, most Christian theologians were struck by the mystery, the wholly otherness of God, and the inadequacy of any human categories as applied to God” (6). Though this “earlier view never completely disappeared … seventeenth century philosophers and theologians increasingly thought they could talk clearly about God” (6). They began to speak of God univocally, as if the terms we use concerning creaturely realities mean exactly the same thing when applied to God. The failure to recognize and correct this shift led to what William C. Placher calls “the domestication of transcendence.”

The Shift to Univocity

Many seventeenth century theologians either forgot or disregarded the problems of language in regard to speaking of God. The shift away from “analogical” language to “univocal” language caused them to speak of a God who was only greater in degree, but not completely different in kind. This “shift to univocity” – “the growing confidence that our language about God makes roughly the same sort of sense as our language about creatures” (79) – was the first stage of “the domestication of transcendence.”

Prior to this shift, “transcendence … functioned in the Christian tradition, not to make a metaphysical proposal, but as a kind of agnosticism about certain sorts of metaphysical questions. It is not that God is transcendent and therefore distant, unrelated, and not at all immanent, but that our human categories of closeness, distance, relatedness, standoffishness, and the like radically break down when we try to apply them to God” (9). Failure to perceive theological language as merely analogical and not univocal resulted in a God bound to human categories rather than a God who transcends all human categories.

Premodern Theologies Not to Blame

Contemporary theologians often attack the Christian tradition, speaking of “classical Christian theism” as the invention of notable theologians such as Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and John Calvin. Placher proves that this is mistaken. It is not Aquinas, Luther, or Calvin who are to blame for the domestication of transcendence, but their followers. These three theologians guarded the mystery of God.

For example, Aquinas cautions in the preface to his Summa Theologiae: “Now we cannot know what God is, but only what He is not; we must therefore consider the ways in which God does not exist rather than the ways in which he does” (21). He concludes in his Disputed Questions on the Power of God: “Wherefore man reaches the highest point of his knowledge about God when he knows that he knows him not, inasmuch as he knows that that which God is transcends whatsoever he conceives of him” (23). Luther’s doctrine of the “hidden God” and Calvin’s willingness to respect the Bible’s silence and ambiguities also point to a proper caution in regard to God-talk.

Some cite Aquinas’ so-called proofs for the existence of God as evidence that he argued for a knowledge of God apart from revelation. However, a detailed examination of his writings demonstrates that Aquinas uses his proofs to acknowledge that in the face of great mysteries, human terminology breaks down. The proofs merely highlight where the limitations of human reason and explanation leave us grasping for a word to describe what lies beyond us. “God” is simply one adequate term to use to describe the transcendent. These “proofs” do not prove God exists, but argue that certain ultimate realities that transcend our human limitations call for some term to describe them.

The Transcendent God

God is absolute mystery. All language about God falls far short of the reality of God. “Something we can understand and adequately account for in terms of our human categories is not God” (10). As the Orthodox theologian, John of Damascus wrote, “God does not belong to the class of existing things, not that God has not existence but that God is above all existing things, no even above existence itself” (10).

Since God transcends our human categories, it is impossible to discover God through mere human reasoning. All theologies which domesticate God by confining God to categories of human reason fail to truly point to a God worthy of the name, God. For example, process theology domesticates God by subjecting the divine to the structures of human reason. Likewise, “theological functionalism also domesticate[s] God by explicitly seeking to design God to serve our purposes—just the sort of idolatry that most directly contrasts with a full respect for divine mystery” (7).

Everything about God is different, not just in degree, but in kind. To fail to recognize this is to domesticate God. For example, we have being, but God is being itself. Indeed, God is being beyond being. God is being of another kind altogether. Our word simply points to this, but it by no means exhausts it. And it is not simply enough to say that God is a greater being. This domesticates God’s transcendence, bringing God down to a little above our level. As Placher puts it, “One does not define God’s essence and then add existence later. As a result, God’s relation to being is just totally different from anything else’s relation to being, and we cannot imagine what ‘being’ means as applied to God” (75).

This is true in every other area. God is not just wise; God is wisdom itself. This cannot be said of any other person.

Another example: God doesn’t merely love, but God is love itself. Therefore, God’s love is not just greater in degree, but different in kind. It completely exceeds our capacity to communicate or imitate.

This could continue indefinitely. The main point is that every quality or attribute God possesses is not simply greater in degree, but of a completely different kind. We can speak of it analogously, but we should never think we communicate it univocally – it completely transcends us and evades our comprehension.

The Reformed emphasis on “communicable” and “incommunicable” attributes furthered confidence in univocal language. If some attributes are communicable, and others are not, then our experience and expression of God’s communicable attributes is only a difference in degree, and not in kind. And yet, our human expressions of love, wisdom, and power are so far removed from God’s that it does not help to label these attributes as communicable.

Does this leave us completely in the dark? If left to our own human resources, this may be the case. But we have not been left in the dark. God in Christ through the Spirit communicates through events and words to give us the gift of divine knowledge. God accommodates Godself to our human limitations by speaking in words we can understand. Calvin put it like this: “But how is it that he hath spoken to us in the holy scripture? As nurses do to their little babes … God made himself nurselike, who talketh not to her little babe as she would to a man, but hath a respect of the child’s capacity” (58). Furthermore, we do not have to comprehend a subject in order to speak of it. As Placher states, “we can believe something without really understanding it” (32).

The Marginalization of the Trinity

The domestication of transcendence ultimately marginalizes the Trinity. Enlightenment theologians could not explain why belief in the Trinity was important. They defined orthodoxy as beliefs about biblical authority rather than an embrace of Trinitarian doctrine. Thus, the task of religion was reduced to moralizing. God was no longer “the God self-revealed in Christ or the source of a grace so amazing as to astonish every human ethical understanding, but essentially reason’s God, the orderer of things both physical and moral” (173).

Christians embrace the Trinity because of God’s self-revelation in Christ. The doctrine of the Trinity does not arise from human invention, but from wrestling with how to communicate about God in light of the incarnation and the gift of the Spirit. When reason is given the upper hand, and when language about God is univocal, then the doctrine of the Trinity is soon to be jettisoned. Placher writes,

Human reason cannot figure its way to such a God, since a God we could figure out, a God fitted to the categories of our understanding, would therefore not be transcendent in an appropriately radical sense. We can know the transcendent God not as an object within our intellectual grasp but only as a self-revealing subject, and even our knowledge of divine self-revelation must itself be God’s doing. Christian faith finds here confirmation of God’s Triune character: We come to know this gracious God not merely in revelation but in self-revelation in Jesus Christ, and we come to trust that we do know God in Christ through the work of the Holy Spirit. (182)

In order to escape worshipping an idol of our own devising “we cannot simply fit God in as one component of our intellectual systems, or think only of a God who fits our categories and purposes. … God has to come to us” (17). As theologian Eberhard Jungel writes, “Apart from the access to himself which he himself affords, no thinking will ever find its way to him” (186).

The Loss of Divine Action

The use of univocal language in regard to transcendence pits transcendence against immanence in a zero-sum game. In other words transcendence is viewed in contrast to immanence. “Such a ‘contrastive’ account of transcendence … makes divine transcendence and involvement in the world into a zero-sum game: the more involved or immanent, the less transcendent, and vice versa” (111). The result: “Many in the seventeenth century, as they pushed toward univocity of language and clarity of argument, thought of God as one agent among others in the world, so that they started to ask where God was and which things God did” (146).

This was not the way the scriptures nor the fathers nor early Protestants regarded God’s transcendence. They understood God to be at work in and through all things. In other words, it is God’s transcendence that allows God to be immanent. Put another way: God is immanently transcendent and transcendently immanent.

The worst aspect of this pitting of transcendence against immanence resulted in the inability to see how we “participate” with God through God’s grace. The history of controversies concerning human freedom and divine grace is the fruit of this error. In Placher’s words, “The relation between human and divine contributions has become a zero-sum game, and thus the power of grace is finally the enemy of human freedom” (159).

God does not “occasionally interfere” in human affairs. The divine mystery of providence is that God is at work in all events in order to bring things to God’s appointed end, and yet, God is not the author of evil.

If, however, as earlier theologians held, God is an agent in all the world’s events—if, in Aquinas’s terms, the nature of any created thing “would collapse . . . were God’s power at any moment to leave the beings he created to be ruled by it,” or, as Calvin said, “If God should but withdraw His hand a little, all things would immediately perish and dissolve into nothing”—then the picture changes. … Divine action is not an interruption in or a violation of the normal course of things, but precisely is the normal course of things. (190)

This does not imply that all events are of equal importance: “The Bible seems more firmly to say that some particular events are clues to the meaning of the whole” (191). Placher summarizes: “In short, our language about God’s action is, in precisely Aquinas’s sense, ‘analogous’: it enables us to say something true while not understanding what we mean” (196).

Human freedom is not at odds with God’s working. Luther understood this: “Knowledge of Christ and of faith is not a human work but utterly a divine gift. … What the Gospel teaches and shows me is a divine work given to me by sheer grace” (198). Placher adds: “‘No one,’ Paul wrote, ‘can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit’ (1 Cor. 12:3). Not only can we not find God on our own, but even our response to God’s self-revelation is God’s work” (198).

We are empowered through the grace of Christ and the power of the Spirit due to the plan and purpose of God. Our experience is utterly and completely the experience of the one God revealed in three Persons. Thus, the vital importance of the Trinity:

Given the place of God’s self-revelation in Christ and the testimony of the Spirit in Christian claims to speak of a transcendent God, it follows that a Christian understanding of God needs to be embodied in Trinitarian reflection. We cannot give an account of God or of how we come to know God and then add the Trinity later, for the God we come to know is the God self-revealed in the Word and known through the Spirit. (199)

When most seventeenth-century theologians tried to talk about “God,” … they were trying to domesticate God’s transcendence into the categories of human understanding. Absent a Triune God, they had only human efforts to account for our internal appropriation of faith, and only human categories for our understanding of who God is. And therefore, they lost God’s transcendence” (200).

The Problem of Theodicy

A theodicy is an attempt to justify God’s actions in human history, especially in regard to the reality of evil. Historically speaking, the attempt at devising a theodicy is a relatively recent innovation in Christian theology. The Bible presents no theodicy. Likewise, the early church theologians did not attempt to present a theodicy. The attempt to solve intellectual problems of logical consistency capitulates too much to the priority of reason and ignores the fact that our language concerning God is analogical, not univocal.

We do not understand what our words mean when we apply them to God. We find ourselves called to say things even as we have to admit that we cannot explain how they all fit together. We trust that our talk as Christians makes sense in a way that we do not yet see, and so there are things we are willing to leave unexplained. Second, they did not think about evil in relation to an abstract God, but with reference to the Triune God and therefore in the context of the cross of Christ and the comforting work of the Holy Spirit. The cross surely makes a difference when one thinks about whether God is indifferent to our pain. It is often the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit that makes it possible to trust what one cannot understand. (205-206)

Placher comments on Jesus’ remarks concerning the man born blind in John 9:1-3:

Jesus’ interlocutors wanted an explanation of the evil. Like preachers today condemning those who are HIV-positive, they wanted to get God off the hook by blaming the victim. Did the fault lie with the blind man, or his parents? Jesus’ response rejected human efforts to understand such matters. No one, encountering this blind man the day before, could have figured out. Oh, he must have been born blind so that the Messiah could turn up tomorrow and cure him. Yet, in a way that no one could have expected, this man turned out not to have been forgotten by God, but to have his place in God’s promised hope for all things. In contrast to the approach of theodicy, this seems to me the kind of thing Christian faith best says to the victims of suffering: (1) I don’t understand, and I can’t imagine why you should be suffering in this way, but (2) I trust that God has not forgotten you, and that you do not finally lie outside God’s love. (206)

The same lack of explanation is present in the lament psalms of the Bible:

So Jeremiah and the authors of many of the psalms do not explain their sufferings but lament them: They place their cries of pain and grief in the context of the praise of God. They do not understand, but they can get on with their lives in a way that neither denies their pain nor abandons all trust in God to fall victim to despair. So Job never receives an “explanation” for his sufferings, but receives an assurance that God has not forgotten him, and a renewed sense of wonder in the face of God’s self-revelation. (207)

The cross does not offer an explanation but a clear sign that God is not indifferent to our pain and that God has done something about it: “In the light of the cross, we may still not know how to tell the story of the world in which we live, but we cannot tell it as a story of God’s indifference to our sufferings” (209).

Wrestling with our own personal suffering and the presence of evil in the world invites us to trust in the love and faithfulness of God that does not differ in degree, but in kind, from our own. We learn to “trust in the love and faithfulness of this God but [we] have to remember [our] inability to understand what that love and faithfulness mean” (215).

Quotes excerpted from The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking About God Went Wrong by William C. Placher

© Richard J. Vincent, 2008