In the area of biblical scholarship, many modern Liberals and Fundamentalists see a zero-sum game between the realities of inspiration and historical embeddedness of the biblical texts. On the one hand, Liberals insist that if they can find a human or historically contextual aspect to the text, it must not have come by supernatural revelation. This is because metaphysical univocalism [the belief that words describing God and creatures mean the same thing] implies that there is a zero-sum game between temporal and divine causes. As a result, the assumption is that the human and contextual excludes the divine. On the other hand, Fundamentalists sometimes speak as if they exclude all historical and contextual factors in the composition of the text and read the writings a historically. Again, since the causal agency of the human and divine constitute a zero-sum game within a univocal framework, for divine revelation to take place the divine must replace the agency of the human and temporal.
Indeed, univocal metaphysics are major (though not the sole) source of modernity’s imagined strife between science and religion. In the pre-modern view of God, naturalistic causes and explanations and divine ones did not conflict since there was no zero-sum game between divine and creaturely agency. With univocal metaphysics, naturalistic explanations of phenomenon invariably crowd out divine ones. One can see attempts by early theistic scientists like Isaac Newton making what has often been termed “God of the gaps” arguments in order to find a place for God in a causal order that could increasingly be explained naturalistically. In a number of cases, when there was a causal gap in his theory Newton would attribute the phenomenon to God. Of course, when the naturalistic cause behind the phenomenon was discovered, then God and his causal role were simply pushed back. As things stand in contemporary science, most of the universe can be explained naturalistically. Hence, the chief arguments of the “New Atheist” movement rest on the basis of the onto-theology and univocal metaphysics that they have unconsciously absorbed from modernity. They believe that since science can explain most temporal causes without reference to an eternal cause, like Pierre-Simon Laplace, they have “no need” for the God hypothesis.
Nevertheless, from the perspective of the Bible and pre-modern theism, this is an absurd argument. To use a theater analogy, the claim that the New Atheists are making is that since there is no character in Hamlet named “William Shakespeare,” then William Shakespeare has no causal agency in the play and therefore does not exist. As should be clear, such a claim would completely misconstrue William Shakespeare’s ontological status and causal agency. Moreover, even if one could give a description of the action in the play without any need to make reference to William Shakespeare, such a paradigm of understanding still could not explain why there was a play in the first place or why it was intelligible.
However, beyond the issue of the zero-sum game of divine and creaturely agency there is the problem of evil. Although evil has been a problem for all monotheistic traditions for thousands of years, the version of onto-theology and univocal metaphysics promoted in modernity has complicated this issue significantly. Most importantly, if being and therefore all of God’s attributes can be predicated of God and creatures univocally, then it is only logical to say that God’s moral attributes are creaturely moral attributes multiplied to infinity. For example, when many modern people hear the phrase “God is love,” they simply construe it to mean that God’s love is simply the love that one experiences from their mother or spouse multiplied to infinity. This view of God is not a biblical one (Isa. 55:9). In fact, the univocal conception of God’s attributes gives rise to pervasive belief in what Christian Smith famously termed “moralistic-therapeutic Deism.” Similarly, if one cannot imagine an infinite version of their mother allowing the great crimes of history (the Holocaust, etc.), then the problem of evil becomes unbearable. One will be driven either to Process Theology (in which God has no power) or to atheism.
Another problem created by univocal metaphysics is the problem of projection and idolatry. If God is the highest being among beings, then he must be an infinite embodiment of limited temporal goods. Human beings perceive temporal goods through the lens of what their culture and system of power relations perceives to be good. In light of the confessional Lutheran paradigm’s recognition of the radical damage of original sin to human nature, this problem is especially acute. In light of this situation, metaphysical univocalism exacerbates the human tendency to make God in their own image, that is, according to a likeness pleasing to them.
This results in a return to the old dialectic of legalism and antinomianism. In its legalist guise, univocal metaphysics means that God is simply an infinite embodiment of what a person deems to be good. Not infrequently, what one deems to be good is what one’s culture deems to be good. Although the projecting one’s ideals onto God has been a perennial problem in human history, with modernity’s metaphysical univocalist conception of God and his goodness, it has become all the easier in modernity to make the divine into the embodiment of a culture’s highest values. This can take a right-wing form in fascism (i.e., the Deutsch Christen) or American Christian Nationalism. Or, it can also take a left-wing form in the Liberal Protestant insistence on a God who is caring and accepting in his promotion of personal autonomy, sexual identity, or specific progressive economic programs apart from or contrary to divine revelation.
In modernity and postmodernity, the problem of idolatrous projection present in univocal metaphysics has also resulted in an antinomian response in the form of atheism. Since God is a being among beings, and therefore serves as an embodiment of all one’s culture’s highest ideals, how can such a God be taken seriously as anything other than a covert means of oppression? Ludwig Feuerbach famously contended that human beings could perfect themselves if they would simply stop projecting their potential for perfection onto the imaginary God of western monotheism.1 Feuerbach was followed by Karl Marx who thought religion and God were part of the hegemonic superstructure that legitimated economic oppression by projecting its ethical basis onto the transcendent.2 Friedrich Nietzsche saw the Judeo-Christian tradition as a projection of the resentment of the oppressed in the form of a “slave morality” that valorized slave virtues and promised that someday those who followed said values would inherit the earth.3 Finally, Sigmund Freud saw God as a projection of both the imprinted moral system of the society (superego), as well as an infantile wish fulfilment of the id that its insatiable desires would finally be fulfilled in heaven.4
In light of the aforementioned critiques of theism, the secular solution to the problem of a “sky bully” God is remarkably similar to ancient mythological theogonies. God, or the idea of God, must be killed off for the sake of human freedom and flourishing. Among the New Atheists, Richard Dawkins famously promoted an advertisement that read “There’s Probably No God. Now Stop Worrying and Enjoy Your Life.”5 Of course, antinomianism can never solve the problem of legalism, because it still operates within the rubric of the law. The threat posed to human life by the law and its demands can never be solved by its delusional denial or rejection. In the end, antinomian modernity and postmodernity’s attempt to do away with God to receive freedom simply creates a new idol of human autonomy over older projected ideals. The God of onto-theology is replaced by the deified individual. The crushing legalistic force of older power systems is simply replaced by the new legalism of a personal autonomy. Seen from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, the ultimate end is not human flourishing, but personal self-destruction through hedonism and nihilism.
[1] See: Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2008).
[2] John Raines, ed., Marx on Religion (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002)
[3] Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
[4] Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1989).
[5] Andy Bannister, The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist or: the Dreadful Consequences of Bad Arguments (Oxford: Monarch Books, 2015), 17.
Image from Port Huron First United Methodist Church, accessed February 22, 2023, https://phfumc.org/sermons/may-30-does-the-trinity-matter/.
From the draft manuscript for Lutheran Dogmatics: The Evangelical-Catholic Faith for an Age of Contested Truth (Lexham Press).