Creator and Creature

“But God confronts all that is in supreme and utter independence, i.e., He would be no less and no different even if they all did not exist or existed differently. God stands at an infinite distance from everything else, not in the finite degree of difference with which created things stand towards each other. If they all have their being and a specific nature, God in His freedom has conferred it upon them: not because He was obliged to do so, or because His purpose was influenced by their being and nature, but because their being and nature is conditioned by His being and nature. If they belong to Him and He to them, this dual relationship does not spring from any need of His eternal being. This would remain the same even if there were no such relationship.”

Above is a passage lifted out of Barth's Church Dogmatics. In this passage and its surrounding context, Barth is talking about the aseity of God, that is, the freedom of the divine being in itself and in relation to others. The standard claim of the tradition - a claim which Barth more or less follows - is that God does not need us to be God, that God would be God without us. I get what he is saying (and, more importantly, what he is trying to avoid saying) when he follows this line of thought. "Pious blasphemies" such as God does not exist if we do not exist, or God needs us as much as we need God, are just that - pious blasphemies.

And yet...In this and other similar passages, is Barth not in danger of treating that which is other than God – creation – in the abstract? Barth appears to be speaking of human beings or creatures in general, as opposed to the human being Jesus Christ. But if we take the man Jesus of Nazareth as the true creature - as Barth insists we must - then is it really true to say that God "would be no less and no different" even if the man Jesus did not exist or existed differently? Barth, of course, does not want to divinise the man Jesus, or turn the flesh which the Word became into an eternal, divine flesh, as if the creature is co-eternal with the creator. But Barth appears to be speaking of the Creator-creature relationship un-christologically in this instance, which is surely a problem. There must be some other way of articulating this relationship that doesn’t make the man Jesus either irrelevant to the divine being or co-eternal with it.

For those of you who are by God's good grace unaware of the secondary literature on Barth, what I'm on about here is one of the fault lines in Barth studies. The issue being debated is a genuine issue. You only need to read Barth for a while before you begin to wonder what it might mean to say "God could be God..." or "If God didn't..." Of course there is the danger that such wondering is precisely the kind of theological speculation that Barth rejected. Perhaps this is an unavoidable danger, such that the whole debate is destined to be unfruitful at best, divisive and elitist at worst. I have no real interest in picking sides, or in making a contribution which will decide the issue one way or the other (or which will perhaps introduce a "third way", or a fourth way which is even more nuanced than the already existing third ways). That is not theology. That is hell. But I'd be lying if I said that the passage quoted above didn't raise any questions. The Christian theologian is profoundly interested in the claim that the creature Jesus of Nazareth is God. What must be clear to the Christian theologian, however, is that that interest is not for the sake of academic positioning. It can only be for the sake of the Church, for its worship of God and service to the world.