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Models Of God's Transcendence
By Robert H. King

"The causal model emphasizes priority in respect to efficacy, but that is by no means the only kind of priority God exhibits. The elusive priority of the self in relation to its action, as well as the priority of persons in relation to one another, is also important and characteristic of religious apprehension of God in some of its modes anyway. On the other hand, the two more personal models, Schleiermacher's and Barth's, include a feature that is conspicuously lacking in the causal model, yet equally important to religious experience, the aspect of immediacy. So there may be good reason for preferring one model to another, while not excluding one or another. It is, after all, with a model that we have to do, and not with the thing itself. The relation of God and the world is unique and mysterious. It is not surprising that several different models have been used to interpret it."

CHRISTIAN theology has traditionally employed a rich and various language to speak of God. He is called wise, just, loving, righteous, almighty, everlasting. The list could be extended. But it is interesting to note that with all of these different ways of speaking of God has gone a persistent uneasiness about speaking of him at all. It is not simply that the appropriateness of certain attributes has been questioned. (Is God really just? Can he be loving and omnipotent?) The whole procedure for attributing perfections to God has been questioned. (Can qualities appropriate to the created world identify God the Creator?) If God is truly transcendent, perhaps he cannot be identified. In order to come to a decision on this question, it will be necessary to examine several different models of transcendence.

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I

An important tradition in Christian theology interprets the transcendence of God on the causal model. God transcends the world as a cause transcends its effect. So even if he cannot be identified as a part of the world, he can perhaps be identified by means of the world. The contingent being of the world, it is argued, implies the necessary being of God, the orderliness of the world his purposive being. Yet causal inference is problematic under the best of circumstances, and in this case must be especially so, since the cause in question can only be inferred. Attempts to demonstrate the existence of God by causal inference have never been very convincing. They are not without their value though, since even if they cannot establish the existence of God, they may help to explain his transcendence. In the tradition of the cosmological argument, for instance, "God" means "first cause." This is a conception of transcendence that should be taken seriously.

What does it mean? Most obviously, it means priority. A "first cause" is necessarily prior to every other cause. But in what sense prior? It is interesting to note that the word "cause" by itself connotes priority. Unless a cause is prior to its effect, it is not actually a cause. But this need not mean that it must be temporally antecedent. A cause may be coterminous with its effect and still be a cause (as when my pushing motion is the cause of a door's opening motion). This is an important point and needs to be noted if theological use of the causal model is to be at all understood. Causal priority is basically priority in respect to efficacy. To cause something is to make it happen. Priority in respect to purpose may also be meant (as when an orderly process is explained as having happened for a "reason"). This particular meaning is probably not so basic though. In any event, the addition of the teleological to the cosmological argument insures that priority in both senses is meant when God is spoken of as cause.

The causal model interprets God's transcendence as priority: priority in respect to efficacy and priority in respect to purpose. But then God is not simply one cause among others. He is called first cause. It must be that his priority is prior to every other priority. To continue with the causal model, this would mean that he is the cause of every cause, the power of every power, the purpose of every purpose. He is not simply transcendent. He is transcendently tran-

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scendent: ultimately transcendent. To indicate ultimacy a model must be qualified. What is significant about this model is that it provides its own qualification. God is the cause of causes. Theological explanation explains every other explanation. But then is it really explanatory? Is it informative? It may be that the causal model does not permit more than definitional identification. Is it possible even to give determinate content to statements about God on this model? Of course it is always possible to fill out the identification somewhat by attributing to God certain of the higher perfections observed in things on the principle that as first cause he ought to possess in an eminent way all that is excellent in his creatures. We might say, for instance, that he is good or powerful, since goodness and power are excellencies universally acknowledged in creatures (and incidentally implied in our "definition" of God). But God, after all, is not a creature. Do we really know what we are saying when we say these things of him? Etienne Gilson, a contemporary spokesman for the causal tradition, admits that this is a problem.

To describe the nature of God is to attribute perfections to Him and, consequently, to give Him various names. It is to call Him good and wise and powerful and so on. The general principles governing these attributions is that God, the first cause, ought to possess in an eminent degree all the perfections to be found in His creatures. The names denoting these perfections must be fitting, but they are only fitting in a certain sense, because it is a matter of transferring them from the creature to the creator. . . . In brief, the names of such perfections denote something belonging to God, the supremely perfect being, but the manner in which these perfections belong to Him escapes us, even as does the divine act-of-being which they are.¹

The causal model implies an ineffable God. That is its basic shortcoming. Now, there is no denying that God is mysterious, but does that mean that he cannot be identified in more than a formal way? The Bible, after all, identifies God determinately-even referentially -yet without sacrificing mystery or transcendence. It must be that some other model is possible.

II

Significant reassessment of the problem must begin with the recognition that within the community of faith God is characteristically

¹ Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas (London: Victor Gollancz, 1957), p. 104.

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identified in a personal way, that is, he is identified in much the same way that persons are identified. Basically there are two ways in which persons may be identified: a descriptive and an ascriptive way. Description is like definition, except that it is generally thought to be more inductive than definition. A person is descriptively identified when his defining characteristics are observed and noted. These characteristics may include certain of his actions, as when it is said of someone, "He is the one who did such-and-such." Ascriptive identification is more denotative. It refers the identifying characteristics to a subject, rather than characterizing the subject further. ("He is the one who did such-and-such.") But do either of these ways apply to God? That is the problem we have now to consider.

Schleiermacher conceives of the transcendence of God on a causal model, but a causal model more directly related to persons and their actions than the traditional one. Schleiermacher's model is self-consciousness, or more precisely, immediate self-consciousness. In relation to personal action, immediate self-consciousness is transcendent and immanent. It is transcendent in that it is beyond observation, even self-observation; immanent in that it is directly intuited. It is not inferred as other causes are. Immediate self-consciousness is implicit in every moment of consciousness and it is prior to every objectification. Like the grammatical "I," it is always subject, never object. It is identifiable, but in an elusive, non-descriptive way.

Schleiermacher conceives of God's transcendence as like self-transcendence, except that God is supposed to determine events absolutely whereas the self only determines things relatively. Can we know anything about God's transcendence then? We can because implied in self-consciousness is what he calls God-consciousness or consciousness of absolute dependence. This is the self's consciousness of an absolute ground to its own relative freedom. In other words, God-consciousness is self-consciousness as consciousness of being absolutely determined in every relative determination.

The self-consciousness which accompanies all our activity, and therefore, since that is never zero, accompanies our whole existence, and negativizes absolute freedom, is itself precisely a consciousness of absolute dependence; for it is the consciousness that the whole of our spontaneous activity comes from a source outside of us in just the same sense in which anything towards which we should have a feeling of absolute freedom must have proceeded entirely from ourselves. . . . As regards the identification of absolute dependence

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with 'relation to God': this is to be understood in the sense that the Whence of our receptive and active existence, as implied in this self. consciousness, is to be designated by the word 'God,' and this is for us the really original signification of the word.²

God is not inferred from the world. He is not inferred at all. He is prior to the world and self-consciousness as self-consciousness is prior to its own actions in the world-with the difference that God is absolutely prior where the self is only relatively prior. Once more qualification is needed to indicate ultimacy. (For the self to be prior in just the same way that God is prior, it would have to act with absolute freedom in relation to its world, as clearly it cannot.) God is the ultimate Whence of our active existence, as the self is not. The self is at best the penultimate whence. Still, it is elusive and difficult to identify. How much more so must God be. Once more we are brought back to an ineffable God.

Unquestionably Schleiermacher takes seriously the hiddenness of God, as he believes the Bible does. But whether he would go so far as to say that nothing determinate can be said of God is not so clear. His model is, after all, the self, and not some impersonal cause. Selves may be known by what they do. Presumably God too may be known by what he does. Schleiermacher speaks of the attributes of God as "modes of action."³ And he says that, for the Christian at least, the redemptive action of Christ identifies God.⁴ Yet he does not follow through on this suggestion as he might have. He does not, for instance, derive all attributional statements about God from the consciousness of redemption. Omnipotence and eternity, two very important identifications, he derives instead from the consciousness of absolute causality considered in itself without regard to redemption.⁵ What is even more significant, he qualifies every attributional statement with the proviso that no action can really identify its subject.

In so far as a plurality of attributes is developed out of the idea of the divine causality, the differentiation can correspond to nothing real in God; indeed, neither in isolation nor taken together do the attributes express the Being of God in itself (for the essence of that which has been active can never be known simply from its activity alone).⁶

² Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1928), p. 16.
³ Ibid., p. 125.
⁴ Ibid., p. 52.
⁵ Ibid., p. 194 f.
⁶ Ibid., p. 198.

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The model of elusive, essentially mysterious self-immediacy -remains for Schleiermacher the primary model, in spite of a certain qualified appreciation for identification through action. It is not surprising that at the close of the introduction to his dogmatics he should entertain the possibility of leaving out statements about God altogether.⁷ If we are to get beyond the problem of ineffability, we must look elsewhere for our model.

III

Barth in his Church Dogmatics may have provided us with the model we seek. It is interpersonal, where Schleiermacher's is intrapersonal, and it is "objective," where his is "subjective." It is what we might call an intention-action model. It identifies the person in terms of intention, intention in terms of action. Who a person is, it is maintained, can be known from what he does. "The being of a person is being-in-act," says Barth.⁸ But this is because action can exhibit intention, the purposiveness of the person, and can do so directly (that is to say, non-inferentially). Barth does not argue this latter point as he might have, but it is easily enough demonstrated by the fact that personal action is most characteristically identified in terms of intention. (E.g., to observe a person "walking" is to identify his action in terms of the intention to walk. This identification is immediate. It does not require inference from something unintentional like "mere movement.") In so far then as a person's intention may be said to identify him (to define his essential self), the person himself may be said to be objectively identifiable in action by others. The same is true of God, only more so, says Barth. He is the Person par excellence. Of him only can it be said absolutely: "He is who He is in His works."⁹

Does this mean that Barth does not credit the mystery of persons or God, their relative or absolute transcendence? Not at all. "There is nothing stranger." he says, "nothing more puzzling to a man than a fellowman."¹⁰ But that is because this relation is not at our disposal, as other relations are. To be personally known, a person must act. He must identify himself. If he will not act, he cannot be known in more than an impersonal way. But if he will act, he can be known, really known, and not just inferred. For all his

⁷ Ibid., p. 126.
⁸ Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1936-62), vol. II/1, P. 271.
⁹ Ibid., II/1, 160.
¹⁰ Ibid., I/2, 41.

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strangeness and objectivity, "there is nothing so constitutive for ourselves as the other man."¹¹ Self and other are correlate terms. So "if in an ultimate sense there is a disclosure, an impartation, a communication, where else will it announce itself" than as it does in this same other man?¹²

For Barth, God is identified by what he does-descriptively and ascriptively identified. It might be argued that Schleiermacher identifies God ascriptively (all things are ultimately determined by God), but not descriptively (since the particular way he determines things is primarily unknown and unknowable to us). This could not be said of Barth. God's action reveals a determinate intention in respect to man. The intention is love. In all that be does God loves. More still, since his being is his act, God is love. But then what becomes of his transcendence? God's transcendence, according to Barth, is his freedom to be and act in this way. His love is radically his. It is not at the disposal of another, yet it is accessible to others. God is free from and free for relationship with beings other than himself.

The biblical witness to God sees His transcendence of all that is distinct from Himself, not only in the distinction as such, which is Supremely and decisively characterized as His freedom from all conditioning by that which is distinct from Himself, but furthermore and supremely by the fact that without sacrificing His distinction and freedom but in exercise of them, He enters into and faithfully maintains communion with this reality other than Himself in His activity as Creator, Reconciler, and Redeemer.¹³

The transcendence of God is his freedom to love. Love is the intention that identifies him, freedom the quality that identifies the intention as his. The aspect of priority characteristic of the other two models is not given up, simply further specified. The priority which characterizes God's action is no indeterminate or elusive priority. It is the priority implicit in radical love: the priority of self-grounded interpersonal action.

The chief difficulty with this model comes when we ask how it is that God's action is identified. If Schleiermacher's model makes it difficult to identify God through his action, Barth's model makes it difficult to identify God's action in distinction from any other. Can

¹¹ Ibid., I/2, 42.
¹² Ibid., I/2, 42-3.
¹³ Ibid., II/1, 303.

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God's action be identified in more than a definitional way? Barth insists that it can. "It is a definite happening within general happening." If it is also "the source, reconciliation, and goal of all other happenings," it is so only because it is also a definite happening among happenings.¹⁴ It would be unintelligible as action were it not distinguishable from other actions. But can it be distinguished? That is the question. In the case of persons generally there is always bodily continuity to fall back on. In fact, bodily continuity is so basic to identification of other persons, it is questionable we could get along without it. Is there anything like this in respect to God? Certainly in no ordinary sense can God be said to have a body. But in the history of his chosen people, there is perhaps something like bodily continuity. There is an objectively observable continuum: a continuum of institution, literature, and custom analogous to bodily continuity in persons (especially if we note how a person can extend his influence through other agencies as though they were extensions of his body). The objective continuum is not in itself "revelation," to be sure, yet without it revelation would not be conceivable-at least on an interpersonal model. The objective history is the medium of revelation, the place or space of God's self-disclosure. God is not bound to it in the way that a person is bound to his body. Yet, it does perform an identifying function. It gives particularity and definiteness to his action. It provides an objective reference for language about God. The separation of Israel and the church from the world is therefore as important in the economy of revelation as their involvement in the world. If God is present everywhere without distinction, it -is as though he were not present anywhere. "The Gospel of the Church of God," says Barth, "is of necessity a defined, circumscribed and limited message."¹⁵

Still, bodily continuity by itself will not suffice for identification of persons-anyway not as persons. Personal identity is more than bodily continuity. Intention may be our best clue to that something more. Men live for a purpose and generally desire to be remembered for the purpose or purposes for which they lived. So we say that Israel and the church in their common history identify God to the extent that they exhibit a continuous intention that can be

¹⁴ Ibid., II/1, 260.
¹⁵ Ibid., II/1, 20.

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ascribed to him. The history of Israel and the church reveals a purpose that is not simply theirs but God's. To be sure, God is not everywhere personally identified, even in this history. Some events or situations identify him more decisively than others, while no event or situation, however decisive, can finally identify him as a person unless he is personally present in the identification. The biblical words, as Barth has so often reminded us, must become God's Word through his active, immediate presence as subject. Yet, when this does happen, if it happens, the identification has a determinate content it would not have were it not for the determinate particularity of the biblical words and the events they describe.

But to return to the matter of history and its identifying role. Certain actions, we say, identify a person more decisively than others. ("He was never more himself." "That action of his -really gave him away.") The action of Jesus Christ, Christians say, is the decisive, identifying action of God: "the supreme and outstanding work and sign of God."¹⁶ So much so in fact that it is called the embodied Word of God. Every other "embodiment" is more like the extensional influence of a person. Why do we say that this action is unique? Why but because it is identical with the person it identifies. Jesus, like God, is what he does. And what he does is to love others with absolute freedom and self-abandon.

IV

In conclusion, we should say something about the relation of the several models to one another. Are they mutually exclusive? Not necessarily. For one thing, they have several features in common. There is, for instance, the aspect of priority. Each in its way interprets transcendence as priority. The causal model emphasizes priority in respect to efficacy, but that is by no means the only kind of priority God exhibits. The elusive priority of the self in relation to its action, as well as the priority of persons in relation to one another, is also important and characteristic of religious apprehension of God in some of its modes anyway. On the other hand, the two more personal models, Schleiermacher's and Barth's, include a feature that is conspicuously lacking in the causal model, yet equally important to religious experience, the aspect of immediacy. So there may be good reason for preferring one model to another, while not

¹⁶ Ibid., II/1, 53.

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excluding one or another. It is, after all, with a model that we have to do, and not with the thing itself. The relation of God and the world is unique and mysterious. It is not surprising that several models have been used to interpret it.

Admittedly there may be some tension between models. It may be necessary to use them dialectically, yet without seeking a synthesizing model-in which case some order of priority ought to be established. Our own preference would be for Barth's model. It has biblical precedent on its side in a way that the other two do not. For it is clear that in the biblical literature God is principally identified in an interpersonal way. He is called Lord, Father, judge and Savior. Where the identification is more intrapersonal (as when he is thought of as an indwelling Spirit), there is usually some accompanying interpersonal identification (as when Paul identifies the Spirit as Christ's Spirit). A further reason for preferring what we have called the intention-action model is its greater intelligibility. Mystery ought not to be excluded, certainly, but neither should it be permitted to swallow up every conceivable identification. Mystery, we may say, is primary. God is, after all, uniquely transcendent-sui generis according to an older tradition. But he is also uniquely immanent-the absolute determinant of our existence. Identification must be permitted, therefore, to qualify mystery. Better still, we should say that what is identified is a mystery, but not just any mystery or mystery-as-such. Rather it is a particular mystery that is identified: the mystery of grace, the mystery of God's free love revealed in Christ.