God and Creation in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth by Tyler R. Wittman

Abstract

Reviewed by: God and Creation in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth by Tyler R. Wittman Matthew Levering God and Creation in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth. By Tyler R. Wittman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv + 315. ISBN: 978-1-108-47067-4 (cloth). Wittman’s guiding question is the following: “Does it suffice to articulate God’s perfection as set forth in God’s works, or must we confess something about God’s perfection as logically antecedent to and possibly obtaining without those acts that ground created reality?” (12). Both Aquinas and Barth, he argues, hold that “questions about God’s relation to creation are bound up with questions about divine act and being” (15). Yet, Aquinas and Barth disagree about how to formulate God’s perfection. Wittman summarizes their different approaches: “Aquinas maintains that God’s external acts correspond to God’s internal being, whereas Barth maintains that God’s external acts correspond to God’s internal acts” (16). The first section of the book focuses upon Aquinas’s theological account of God’s being and activity. Wittman argues that Aquinas’s five ways for demonstrating the existence of God belong to the properly theological project of reckoning with “the things that have been made” and determining how God has therein clearly manifested “his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity” (Rom 1:20). Wittman reminds us that “pure act” is not a definition of God: the human mind cannot comprehend infinite actuality. At all times, Aquinas is keenly aware that to speak of the “causality” of infinite actuality is to speak analogously: God cannot be placed under any genus, including that of “cause.” Wittman emphasizes that divine “simplicity” is a negative doctrine [End Page 161] whose purpose is to ensure that we do not reduce God to a thing among other things. According to Aquinas, God is efficient cause of finite actuality and also exemplar cause of finite actuality, in the sense that creatures are finite similitudes of divine actuality. God is also final cause of finite actuality. God’s goodness means that he creates all things so that they are ordered to share, in diverse modes and to differing degrees, in his goodness. Humans are ordered, by grace but in a manner that takes up and fulfills human nature, to share in the goodness of God’s own beatitude. Given that goodness is self-diffusive, would not perfect goodness be compelled to create or compelled to become incarnate? Wittman answers that the self-diffusion involved here has to do not with efficient causality but with final causality. Considered in himself, God’s infinite goodness “is his own end” and does not need any further diffusion in order to be perfectly fulfilled (64). As a result, God is perfectly Lord in his acts. He is impeded by nothing, depends upon nothing, and stands to gain nothing. This does not mean that he is “unmoved” in the sense of not caring about anything but himself. On the contrary, it means that in his creative (and redemptive) acts, the infinitely blessed and perfect God works, and he works with utmost mercy and love rather than neediness or frustration. Whereas creatures simply are existing modes of relation (or dependency) upon God, God has no “real relation” with creation— which simply means that God is not in a relation of dependency, because God’s beatitude is the source of creation, not the fruit of creation. The fact that God has no neediness is what enables him to be perfectly immanent and freely active in creation. Given that God creates in infinite wisdom and love, what does this mean for our apprehension of God’s “intellect” and “will”? Continuing his survey of Aquinas, Wittman notes that we know that God has these perfections (see Eph 1:11), but we are speaking analogously rather than univocally. Abstracting the reality signified from any finite mode of signification, Aquinas delves into the reality of divine will. On the one hand, there is no “free will” in God willing himself: this must be “necessary,” because God cannot fail to love his own goodness. But there is...