Who’s afraid of the analogia entis?

Millinerd, a former Wheaton and Princeton Seminary graduate—has written an insightful and helpful post on the analogia entis for those interested. His post is a response to the AAR/Karl Barth Society meeting in which George Hunsinger and David Bentley Hart held a debate over the analogy of being. To formulate his response, Millinerd uses the quote from Pope Benedict’s Regensburg address—the same quote I posted on this site for discussion. While he acknowledges that Barth was right to emphasize the sole mediation of Christ between God and humanity—so that “natural theology” as the attempt to speak of God apart from Jesus Christ is ruled out completely—Millinerd uses Benedict’s statement on analogy to broker a kind of ecumenical agreement between Bonaventure, Barth, and Benedict. He articulates three main arguments:

1. First, the analogia entis as articulated by the Fourth Lateran Council emphasizes a still greater dissimilarity in the midst of a great similarity, or as Benedict puts it, “unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness.” Thus, the analogy of being does not obscure the transcendence and otherness of God.

2. Second, the analogy of being protects against the temptation to overemphasize the infinitely great transcendence of God at the expense of affirming a proper relation between God and humanity.

3. Third, the analogy of being, according to Benedict, is intrinsically connected to the logos (reason) and thus to the Logos, Jesus Christ, as the one in whom “all things hold together.” Because God “has revealed himself as logos” (Benedict), our reason is capable of contemplating God. In other words, the analogy of being is an analogy between human reason and divine Reason mediated by the Logos.

In closing his reflections on the analogy of being, Millinerd makes a very interesting and helpful statement: “The matter is not whether there is more than one mediator or more than one foundation, but just how big that mediator and foundation is. The question is not which of the two analogies is true. They both are (with priority, I would submit, going to the analogia fidei). The question is in which can we afford to neglect. The answer is neither.” Millinerd sides with Barth over von Balthasar in giving priority to the analogia fidei over the analogia entis, but he nevertheless keeps the two in a kind of dialectical tension. I admire this position, but I think the question is whether or not the two positions can sustain such a dialectical unity. Barth was dialectical through and through, but he was adamantly non-dialectical on a few positions—one being the “triumph of grace” (Berkouwer) and another being the analogia fidei. I would agree with Millinerd’s statement insofar as we cannot afford to neglect the analogia entis as a subject of discussion in Christian theology, but I would not be so quick to assert that both are equally “true.” I will explain why by addressing the three aforementioned points.

1. Numerous theologians after Barth have criticized him for misunderstanding the analogia entis, and in a way, they are all right. The analogia entis does not undermine the transcendence of God; if anything, it (over)emphasizes God’s transcendence. Eberhard Jüngel makes this argument cogently in his magnum opus, God as the Mystery of the World. However, Jüngel flips the argument around and makes the “infinitely greater” transcendence of God precisely the reason why the analogia entis is wrong, or at least misguided. Why? Because it fails to understand the being of God—and thus the divine-human relation—out of the being of Jesus Christ. Transcendence and immanence are terms, for Jüngel, that must be understood in light of the coming of God in Christ. In this, Jüngel is simply operating under Barth’s own christocentric logic. For defenders of the analogy of being, such terms are defined on metaphysical grounds (starting from our general human condition and reasoning toward God) and/or on faulty biblical grounds (e.g., the imago Dei abstracted from the imago Christi). Consequently, Jüngel wishes to reframe the discussion of analogy in terms of an analogia adventus—an analogy of advent. The advent of God in Jesus Christ is the norm for our understanding of God’s being and human being, and thus the nature of the God-human relation. The point of all this is that while we can affirm Pope Benedict and others in correcting Barth’s misunderstanding of the analogia entis, we must still question the attempt to formulate an analogy of being between God and humanity which fails to think this analogy through a center in christology.

2. The analogy of being is not necessary to hold together mysticism and subjectivism, i.e., the transcendence and immanence of God. The two are held together much more appropriately in Jesus Christ as Immanuel—God with us. He is the unification of divine transcendence and human immanence. He is the ontological unity of divinity and humanity, who is apart from us as the divine Judge and near to us as the one judged in our place. Jesus Christ is thus both God and humanity, the one in whom we discover both an asymmetry and an analogy. If we think through the divine-human relation in light of Christ, we have a way of sustaining a kind of analogy of being but in a radically different form. The analogy is one that exists in Christ alone, not in general humanity. Jüngel understands his analogia adventus to be ontological in nature, but the ontological analogy is found in the being of Jesus Christ. Human being thus corresponds to divine being only by faith alone (sola fide). There is no general analogy between humanity and God, because that analogy is given to human persons; it is not possessed by them. Thus, if we wish to hold together mysticism and subjectivism, we are far better off locating that dialectic in the being of Jesus Christ, not in ourselves as those who attempt to speak of God on our own rational terms.

3. The grave mistake in considering Jesus Christ independently as the Logos—in whom we find the link between God and the general human logos—is that such a theology effectively separates Christ as Logos from Christ as Salvator. The mediation of Christ is thus understood on two separate planes: one understands him as the mediator between prelapsarian creation and God, and the other understands him as the mediator between postlapsarian creation and God. The former views Christ as the one who holds creation together; the latter views Christ as the one who redeems creation and brings about a “new creation.” To use the formulations of Bruce D. Marshall (presented to me by George Hunsinger), the former position understands Christ as “materially decisive” but not “logically indispensable,” while the latter position understands Christ as both “materially decisive” and “logically indispensable.” That is, for the former position, Jesus Christ is presented as the one through whom the world is created, and thus is materially decisive for a created analogy to exist between God’s being and human being. But he is not logically indispensable, in that he does nothing which God the Father or God the Spirit could not do, in that they too are involved in sustaining the world and holding all things together. Christ is only logically indispensable as the savior of the world, as the Judge judged in our place, as the one in whom God reconciles the world. He alone can do this work, and in fact has done it.

I suppose one could argue that Jesus Christ is logically indispensable to the analogy of being, because Christ alone is the Logos. But it remains the fact that this analogy of (created) being is established and sustained apart from the work especially appropriated to the Son: the work of reconciliation. By separating Logos and Savior, creation from new creation, the analogia entis ends up undermining the unity of the person and work of Christ and thus fails to think through all the “ways and works of God” from a center in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In other words, we cannot speak of creation apart from our affirmation of the reconciliation accomplished in Christ. We do not know Christ as Logos apart from our knowledge (in faith) of Christ as Salvator Mundi.

In conclusion, just how big is the mediation of Christ? It is indeed all-encompassing, universal, holistic. And yet there are not multiple mediations of Christ but just one. Jesus is the sole and exclusive mediator between God and humanity, in whom we are reconciled to God and, by faith, brought into ontological correspondence (Entsprechung). That ontological analogy is not natural to the created world but always remains a gift of faith. We are not free to reason our way to God apart from “the way and the truth and the life” that is Jesus Christ. He alone is the Mediator, and his role of mediation encompasses our reason, but not apart from our need for a Redeemer. Christ thus liberates us from our bondage to sin and death in order that we might correspond to God anew. In Christ alone there exists an analogy.

ADDENDUM: Why speak of analogy at all? Why is a doctrine of analogy essential to the Christian faith? What does it accomplish? The doctrine of analogy has two components—ontic and noetic. Our being in relation to God and our knowledge of God are wrapped up in the question of analogy. The classical formulation of analogy as analogia entis located both elements, ontic and noetic, in our created state in the image of God. By defining this “image” in terms of our reason, the old analogy of being understood our ontic correspondence to God in terms of our original created state (which was only partially lost due to the fall) and thus understood our noetic correspondence in terms of our reason which remained intact and free to think metaphysically from our creaturely state to God. The Barthian attack essentially argues that this doctrine of analogy fails to understand humanity in light of Jesus Christ. What Barth and his followers insist upon is the notion that our ontic and noetic correspondence to God is found in Christ alone. Or, to put the matter differently, we are dependent upon Christ alone for our being in the image of God. The imago Dei is not a mediator between God and humanity apart from the sole image of God, Jesus Christ. We are in the imago Dei in that we conform to the imago Christi, and thus we exist in analogical correspondence to God in that God existentially conforms our being in correspondence to Christ. We are conformed to Christ (conformitas Christi) and thus conformed to God. The doctrine of analogy in light of this christological reformulation affirms our true humanity and our certain knowledge of God in light of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. The doctrine of analogy is thus a correlate of christology. Analogy clarifies the significance of God’s coming in Jesus Christ. In conclusion, the revelation of God in Jesus—and the reconciliation between God and humanity actualized in him—is the sole criterion for our ontic and noetic correspondence to God.