As we have seen, broadly speaking, fallen humans have a tendency to thematize the natural knowledge of God available them into two distinct conceptions of the divine: the mythological and metaphysical concepts of God corresponding to antinomianism and legalism. As we have seen, both views of God represent fallen human’s encounter with God’s hiddenness under the law. Although the knowledge of God gained through the created order and the law is valid, it does not reveal the deepest divine mystery and the most fundamental reality of God, namely, his nature as the omnipotent power of grace that can call into existence new possibilities.
Hence, the biblical view of God both fulfills and transcends mythology and metaphysics. Oswald Bayer famously described Christian theology as occupying a place suspended between “Metaphysics and Mythology.”1 On the one hand, like all the other Axial Age religions, the biblical God is the unitary transcendent metaphysical foundation of all reality.2 Contrary to what some modern theological traditions have asserted, the God of the Bible possesses all the classical theistic attributes: omnipotence (Ps. 115:3, Jer. 32:27, Matt. 19:26), omnipresence (1 Kgs 8:27, Jer. 23:24, Acts 17:28), omniscience (Prov. 15:3, Ps. 147:5, Job 37:15, 1 Jn. 3:20), omnibenevolence (Ps. 145:9, Matt. 19:17, 1 Jn. 1:5). He is not a temporal being among other beings, competing for power with other gods and other lords.3 The Bible does of course describe God’s war for creation against the forces of darkness, but as we will later see this battle takes place only because God permits it as a means of achieving his overall goal for creation.
The biblical God is not only the fulfilment of metaphysics, but also mythology. Indeed, as C.S. Lewis notes, Christianity is finally the “true myth” in that it unveils the abstract truths of reality not merely in the form of a symbolic story but actualizes them as concrete and genuine historical events. Moreover, like the gods of mythology, the biblical God is genuinely personal and not merely an impersonal principle as in the Axial Age metaphysical systems. As personal, he also interacts with human beings person to person without degenerating into a being among other beings. God’s infinity and omnipotence are so great, that his condescension to the finite in no way threatens the transcendence and power of his being. In the biblical narrative, the finite history of the people of Israel, the life of Jesus, and the early Church is truly capable of bearing the infinite. It might even be argued with John of Damascus that the Trinity reconciles the transcendent unity of standard monotheism with the immanent multiplicity of the divine found in paganism.
Just as the gospel fulfils the law, yet also transcends it, so too, the biblical God both fulfils and transcends the frameworks of mythology and metaphysics. As Peter Leithart has shown, the key factor in this is a rejection of a ontology of tragedy in favor of one of comedy. Here Leithart uses the classical definitions of tragedy and comedy proposed in part by Aristotle in the Poetics. Tragic narratives of ones in which the story begins well, but then degenerates into a poor ending. As examples of this, we are reminded of the numerous classical and Shakespearean tragedies wherein an individual in high position falls into misery or more commonly death by the end of the play due to their sin. Indeed, Aristotle uses the term hamartia, the word most commonly used for sin in the New Testament. By comedy, Aristotle designates a narrative where instead of high-born persons who fall, we have low born persons whose lot improves. It is not necessarily humorous per se, though that is possible. Hence, comedy is a narrative that moves from bad to good, rather than as in tragedy from good to bad. In this vein, Dante’s Divine Comedy, is not “comic” because it is humorous. Rather, it is a narrative that leads from bad to good. It begins with the hero from a state of sin (“dark wood”) through a purgation to receive the final vision of the Trinity in heaven.
As we have already seen, mythology and metaphysics have a fundamentally tragic view of reality. In the case of the former, everything degenerates from a primal cosmos and must affect a restoration of the primal order to be put right. Likewise, metaphysics simply makes abstract the tragic degeneracy from the urzeit into an abstract principle. Temporal reality is a shadow, inferior copy, inferior emanation, or simply an illusion that deviates from the supreme reality of the unitary ground of being. As should be clear from our earlier discussion, this tragic view of reality is one based on the law without the knowledge of God’s grace. The law is a rule, an ordering principle, and an ideal. The gods of mythology cannot create anything new, they can only impose an ordering principle to get the chaotic bits of reality under control. Similarly, the god, or unitary principle of metaphysics cannot create anything new. He can impose order on already existent stuff (as with the Platonic Demiurge, Aristotle’s Prime Mover, or the Stoic Logos), or emanate out from himself lesser versions of himself (as in Plotinus’s One). Nevertheless, he can neither create new things, nor new possibilities. Temporal beings either conform to the law of being and gain order and authenticity or deviate from it and degenerate into the nothingness or chaos.
Although the biblical narrative certainly does hold that God has a will for creation in the form of the law, and also makes a story of tragic degeneracy a key element in its narrative (i.e., the exile of both Adam and Israel!), it is not tragic in its deep structures. The biblical narrative is not only a comedy, but as Leithart terms it “deep comedy”- that is comic all the way down to the life of the blessed Trinity. Scripture, Nicaea, and subsequent Christian orthodoxy teach that the very eternal unfolding of the Triune life of God is comic.
In speaking forth his eternal Word, God the Father does not tragically lose himself in his self-communication. In eternally begetting the Son, the Father communicates himself fully and completely (homoousios). This eternal movement of begetting is a comic movement, in that it reproduces a precise image and embodiment of his person. The Father actualizes a kind of mutuality and love which transcends the possibilities of his person considered in isolation. Likewise, the dual procession of the Spirit means that such relationality actualizes itself in a third person who may share and therefore transcend the mutuality and love presented in the interrelationship of two persons. Therefore, through the movements of begetting and procession, the divine life eternally unfolds itself as self-giving mutuality, rather than mere infinite singularity.
Just as God’s act of speaking forth his eternal Word is not a tragic falling away from an original pristine singularity, so too, the reality of the cosmos as God’s own created words, represents yet another comic movement within the Biblical metanarrative. Creation begins as pure nothingness and moves to a good completion through God’s active narration of it into existence. God’s speaking the created order into existence culminates in the creation of humans in God’s own image. As such, humans are God’s speaking and responsible creatures, who like his eternal and uncreated Word can hear and respond to God’s address, particularly through faith and its responsive doxology of obedience.
Again, one can observe a similar reality archetypically represented in the life of God. The Son is good in himself as the self-communication of the Father. As such, he is notionally and relationally distinct from the Father (in that Sonship is notionally and relationally different from Fatherhood), while sharing the fullness of divinity. Hence, neither the derivative Son, nor the derivative creation represent a tragic falling away from the supreme reality of the Father. Creation possesses its own integrity and does not need to be divine as such to be a genuine good in its creaturely and communicative nature. God has ordained creation’s goodness as finite, created, and other than God. Finally, even when humans had tragically plunged themselves and the whole of creation into sin, the biblical God calls forth new possibilities by his Word and actualized a new creation through Christ which surpasses the glory of the first (1 Cor. 15).
The fact that the God of the Bible can call into existence new things means that he transcends the created order, and the intelligible order of the law. The two key components of this reality are the biblical God’s Trinitarian nature and his ability to create ex nihilo. First, as Trinity, God’s being is not subject to the hierarchy of degeneracy that standard metaphysical accounts of reality give. Just because they are derivative of the Father, this does not mean that either the Son or the Spirit is a less authentic expression of the divine ousia. Secondly, because temporal being is not the result of God’s coercive ordering, or an emanation, it is not a system of being which God is part of. He is neither a coercive monarch who remains a being among beings (mythology), or the highest being within a system of being (metaphysics).
Secondly, because God is outside the system of being, he can genuinely be a God of grace. He is a God who by his self-communicating omnipotent Word calls into being realities from nothingness. Hence, the biblical God is the God “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Rom. 4:17). The grace of the biblical God creates what it speaks, as can be clearly observed in Genesis 1. This is true throughout the biblical narrative, wherein God effects redemption by his omnipotent Word (Gen. 3, 12, Isa. 40). Moreover, in the New Testament, Christ is consistently spoken of as the author of the old creation (Jn. 1, 1 Cor. 8:6, Col. 1) as the eternal Word of God because he has also spoken forth new possibilities for creation in establishing redemption (2 Cor. 5:17, Rev. 21:5). Hence, Eberhard Jüngel correctly observes that it is more appropriate to call the God of the Bible not merely a “necessary being” (as in metaphysics), but the “more than necessary being.” This is because the biblical God transcends the order of being and provides the present temporal order with eschatological possibilities which go beyond its present limitations.
- Oswald Bayer, Theology the Lutheran Way, eds. and trans. Jeffrey Silcock and Mark Mattes (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2007), 8. ↩︎
- See defense in: James Dolezal, All That Is in God: Evangelical Theology and the Challenge of Classical Christian Theism (Grand Rapids: Reformed Heritage Books, 2017). ↩︎
- See example of a distortion of the biblical conception of God in: Gregory Boyd, Satan and the Problem of Evil: Constructing a Trinitarian Warfare Theodicy (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001). ↩︎
From the draft manuscript for Lutheran Dogmatics: The Evangelical-Catholic Faith for an Age of Contested Truth (Lexham Press).
Cover image from: “Blessed New Year,” Ascetic Life of Motherhood, August 30, 2023, accessed July 17, 2024, https://www.asceticlifeofmotherhood.com/blog/orthodoxnewyear; other images from: John Hanretty, “Jesus Christ: The Hero of Our Story,” Relevant Radio, September 30, 2022, accessed July 18, 2024, https://relevantradio.com/2022/09/kill-the-dragon-get-the-girl-2/.