Barth and the Analogia Entis

(I'm making no apologies for not blogging for a while. Either it works, or it doesn't. Hardly anyone reads this thing anyway.)

I have come to a realization about Barth and the analogia entis. (For the non-theologians, that's the "analogy of being" - We say God "is", and we "are", but we can't talk about both "be"ing in the same way, because God is perfect; so there the being of everything else and the being of God are just analogous, not univocal).

I really only encountered the analogia entis in Aquinas, who I read through Barth's lens, and in Barth's huge opposition to it. And I was always pretty sure that Barth was dead on in his criticism of it: we can't take the fact of our being, and make an analogy to figure out that God exists.

Turns out that the consensus is actually that Barth didn't understand the analogia entis correctly. I don't really know about that, I need to look into it some more. But I did realize something important about the analogia entis in general.

I was at AAR/SBL/EPS/ETS in the last week, talking to some actual Barthian guys, and made the comment "God is the only thing to which the term 'being' can really apply, we just have derivative being; it's not the same thing." No one had a problem with that. Turns out, that's actually the way the analogia entis is supposed to run (I ran into this through Hans Boersma).

Barth deals with the analogia entis in his section about the knowledge of God, and what he opposes, he is right to oppose. It's not a way to come to knowledge of God outside of revelation. It's a terrible base for theology, it ends in a terrible, twisted natural theology that's just idolatrous. He's right about that. (I also am about to reread this section of the KD, I want to take a closer look at what he says)

But that's not the point of the analogia entis. It might run the risk of being used for natural theology, but apparently, the point is to say that we can only understand our being by making an analogy to God's, who is the source of all being. We can't know our being, we can't know ourselves, without first knowing God - otherwise nothing makes sense. "We can't know ourselves without knowing God" - that's Calvin, by the way, in the beginning of the Institutes.

When we run the analogy that way, it's kind of the heart of orthodoxy - of course, like a lot of things, it runs a risk of misuse. We just have to use it correctly. And I think there's a lot of truth here - I don't understand anything about reality, about anything the way it really is, or about any truth, unless I first have a relationship with God who grounds and determines all these things: without the cognitive tools (T.F. Torrance) to deal with reality and God, which I get through revelation, I don't know anything - I just might think I do.

There's a lot more in here to be thought out, more than one blog post can handle - I'm working on it though.