{"id":76,"date":"2007-02-01T21:43:24","date_gmt":"2007-02-01T21:43:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/archives\/76"},"modified":"2007-02-01T21:50:42","modified_gmt":"2007-02-01T21:50:42","slug":"yet-more-on-modes-and-modalism-barth-and-letham","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/yet-more-on-modes-and-modalism-barth-and-letham\/","title":{"rendered":"yet more on Modes and Modalism: Barth and Letham"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been reading Robert Letham’s The Holy Trinity<\/a><\/em> lately. He’s a Reformed kind of guy, and like many contemporary theologians, he’s spent a lot of time thinking about Karl Barth<\/a>. Now it’s well known that Barth in many places denies that he’s a “modalist” about the Trinity, and yet he says many things like these<\/strong> (these are quoted from Barth’s works by Letham):<\/p>\n

God is one in three ways of being… (276)
\nThe life of God would appear to be a kind of uninterrupted cycle of the three modes of being. (279)
\nGod is who he is… subject, predicate and object; the revealer, the act of revelation, the revealed; Father, Son and Holy Spirit. (281)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Moreover, according to Letham, Barth holds that (in Letham’s words) “Personality is properly ascribed only to the whole Trinity, not to the individual aspects by themselves.” (281) Letham seems to criticize Barth’s views as modalist, but then in conclusion oddly pulls his punch<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

There is this persistent ambiguity at the heart of Barth’s Trintarianism that does not change. If he is not modalistic, he will escape from the charge of unipersonality only with the greatest difficulty. (289)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This attitude, by the way, is highly characteristic of recent theology – they may gently suggest an imbalance or a problem of expression, but there’s an enormous reluctance to unequivocally object to the substance any Historical Great’s claims about the Trinity – be he Barth or some church father. But I digress. We should ask, What does Letham mean by “modalism”?<\/strong> Luckily, his book has a glossary, with the following entry:<\/p>\n

modalism.<\/strong> The blurring on erasing of the real, eternal, and irreducible distinctions among the three persons of the Trinity. This danger can arise when the unity of God, or the identity in being of the three persons, is overstressed at the expense of the personal distinctions. It can also surface where there is a pervasive stress on salvation history, so as to eliminate any reference to eternal realities. When that is so, God’s self-revelation in human history as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is no longer held to reveal who he is eternally in himself. (500)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This definition \/ mini-lecture is unhelpfully metaphorical (“blurring or erasing”). Worse, it treats it as a matter of degree – as if “modalism” were not a claim or set of claims, but was rather some quality to some degree or other had by various writings. Worse, it seems to embody the error, common in theology, of thinking of modalism as simply phenomenal and\/or serial modalism<\/a>. This is confirmed, when he sort of<\/em> defends Barth against the charge:<\/p>\n

In fact, [for Barth] God is eternally the Father, eternally the Son, and eternally the Spirit… Barth certainly does not consider himself to be a modalist. This is clear again when he firmly opposes any refusal to see that God’s self-revelation grants us access to God himself. (289)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bottom line? It seems that Barth isn’t a phenomenal FSH modalist, or a serial FSH modalist. Rather, he’s a noumenal, eternally concurrent FSH modalist. Yes, even if he never liked the label<\/em> “modalist<\/a>“.
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

The most disturbing thing about all this?<\/strong> It’s this part of Letham’s discussion:<\/p>\n

Barth’s translator Geoffrey Bromiley, renders [Barth’s German term seinweise<\/em>, which he suggested as a replacement for “person”] almost uniformly as “mode of being.” For casual readers, this at once conjures up the specter of modalism. Bromiley himself rightly regards such a claim as absurd, for Barth “stays very close to the orthodox formularies,” and his polemic against the term “person” [to the effect that it is misleading to use that term in trinitarian theology] “aims to defend rather than subvert the orthodox position. (277)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Technorati Tags: Barth<\/a>, Letham<\/a>, Latin Trinitarian<\/a>, modalism<\/a>, Reformed trinitarian<\/a>, theology<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been reading Robert Letham’s The Holy Trinity lately. He’s a Reformed kind of guy, and like many contemporary theologians, he’s spent a lot of time thinking about Karl Barth. Now it’s well known that Barth in many places denies that he’s a “modalist” about the Trinity, and yet he says many things like these… Read More »yet more on Modes and Modalism: Barth and Letham<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-modalism","category-theologians"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}