The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking about God Went Wrong

by William C. Placher

William Placher looks at "classical" Christian theology (Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, Martin Luther) and contrasts it with the Christian discourse about God that evolved in the seventeenth century. In particular, he deals with the notion of transcendence that gained prominence in this era and its impact on modern theology and modern thinking today. He persuasively argues that useful lessons can be drawn from premodern thinking about God, especially when viewed within the context of contemporary objections to it. This reexamination, according to Placher, has practical and profound implications for modern theology.

Genres: Theology, Religion, Philosophy

240 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1996

Reviews

[Patrick Schlabs · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book addresses the major shift in thinking about God and thus, language about God in the years after the enlightenment. Placher points to the wisdom of Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin and explored what their thought and language of God can restore to us in the 21st century. The final chapter on the inadequacy of theodicies is worth the price of the book.

[Jon DePue · Rating 4 out of 5]

This isn't just another book about the question of modernity. Rather, in this ambitious work, Placher makes a case for how human beings should think and talk about God, showing how the dawn of the modern age in the seventeenth century brought with it the loss of an appreciation for divine transcendence. Instead of suggesting a wholesale retrieval of premodern theology, or the adoption of a postmodern theology, Placher offers his readers a detailed treatment of Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin. These pre-Enlightenment theological giants knew something that their modern (and I would also add postmodern) successors seemed to forget: Theology must begin by trusting the self-revealing God who, dialectically, remains beyond human comprehension, and forego any hopes of explaining its assertions to the satisfaction of non-Christians. Such efforts inevitably confuse God with more familiar realities, allowing systems of human thought to control divine revelation. (One is reminded at the point of Barth's critique of Christian apologetics in CD I/2.) However, I wonder if the fundamental problem is not simply the domestication of God's transcendence, but also the domestication of the explosively universal character of Christian truth-claims revealed in Jesus. Jesus himself is disclosed as the Lord of truth, space and time, history, and Judaism, which necessarily means that God's self-revelation will have universal significance. This might be a bit picky, but I couldn't really think of anything else. The book is just really damn persuasive.

[Alex Strohschein · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a challenging but rewarding read about how the classical theology of the medieval period and the Reformation dramatically changed as time went by. Although Aquinas, Luther and Calvin affirmed the mystery of God, subsequent theologians and philosophers (e.g. Jansenists, Arminians, Puritans, Enlightenment thinkers) sought to comprehend and understand God (e.g. developing schemes for understanding free will and God's sovereignty) leading to a contorted theology. One of the most interesting aspects of this is the increase in self-scrutiny and examination, particularly among the Puritans. Where Calvin urged believers to trust in Christ, the Puritans became far more introspective; now one had to examine oneself to ensure they were living faithfully to God rather than relying on the grace and mercy of Jesus. Placher closes by offering thoughts on evil and God's transcendence. This is well worth another read. The book is mostly a chronology of ideas; the material causes of changes to theology are not so much addressed.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

"To say this—or to make any other criticism of some turn modernity took—is not to propose a simple return to the premodern. We could not go back into that world if we wanted to, and we would not want to if we could. It was a world of terrible injustice and violence, and some aspects of its theology both reflected and even contributed to those horrors. Christian theologians supported oppressive social structures and all sorts of bigotry; the male bias of the tradition is only one of its most obvious faults. If contemporary theology engages in critical retrievals of insights from premodern theology, then the retrievals must indeed always be critical, keeping in mind that what we retrieve was often embedded in contexts we can no longer accept. To engage in such critical retrievals while acknowledging our debts to modernity is to synthesize something new."

[Joshua]

Approaches to theology proper underwent significant changes during and after modernity. This had downstream effects for discussions of soteriology and other doctrines. An ascending rationalism led to discarding and redefining classical theological categories, which had delicately articulated God's aseity and agency without asserting full comprehension of His mode of action or being. Placher does well documenting this theological history, and helpfully brings Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin into conversation over against subsequent figures, both in theology and philosophy.

However, this book contains major flaws which make much of its content unreliable:

1. Placher (a self-professed Barthian) is squeamish about Scripture's use of male pronouns to refer to God. This indicates Placher's own thinking about God has gone significantly wrong, and hamstrings any critiques against revisionism that he offers (nevertheless he does point out some real problems in modern theology).

2. Placher stacks the deck in choosing Luther and Calvin to serve as exponents of a premodern approach. Though he was influential, it's historically inaccurate to isolate Calvin as the fountainhead or benchmark of the reformed tradition. This reductionistic approach leads Placher to wrongly treat Calvin's style and method as determinative, and then label developments in reformed thought after Calvin as devolutions. Placher largely ignores the important work of Richard Muller, which contradicts many of Placher's interpretations of reformed thinkers.

3. Placher misunderstands and distorts the teaching of Puritans and reformed scholastics, unfairly lumping them in with other novel modern theological and philosophical approaches. Placher also perpetuates poor Barthian scholarship about covenant theology, leading him to offer demonstrably inaccurate and bizarre interpretations of documents like the Westminster Confession and Canons of Dort.

As theological literature developed after the first generation reformers, the order of topical presentation shifted (e.g. prolegomena came first, instead of doctrine of God), but this does not necessarily evidence a material change in doctrine, nor signal a creep toward rationalism. The teaching of post-reformation reformed thinkers, even into the mid-18th century, is arguably quite in continuity with Calvin (and Aquinas) in many areas, and also resistant to novel philosophical trends of the day. A related fact, which leads Placher into several misinterpretations, is a failure to account for differences in emphasis or rhetoric depending upon context. For instance, a sermon will have a much more pointed focus than a systematics text, but a thinker's entire corpus must be considered in order to render judgments about his theological priorities.

It's true that modern thinking about God and many other areas of theology did go wrong, but within reformed thought, this shift is not widespread until closer to the 19th century, as departures from the theological and philosophical frameworks of the reformed confessions (and tradition that birthed them) began to occur. Generations of theologians after Calvin not only preserve classical theology, but also defend it against modern errors, and articulate and develop it in new contexts.

[Ben Crosby · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very rewarding read, focusing primarily on the way in which God becomes in the modern period understood as a being among beings in the world rather than as the Being about which we can only speak analogically - and its consequences for how we understand grace, the limits of theological language, evil, and more. One might note that the account he gives of the classical, pre-modern Christian tradition is a decidedly postliberal one, but this is a feature, not a bug (though I'm not sure he gets Thomas' five ways quite right, even if he gets closer than many, if not most). Certainly his diagnosis of one of the key problems with modern theologizing strikes me as right-on, and the project of a critical retrieval of pre-modern accounts of the limits of our language about God is one that I entirely endorse.

[Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Placher is never an easy read but is always rewarding. His Calvinist leanings come through more strongly here than in the other books I've read from his corpus, but the final chapter on theodicy is alone worth the price of admission.

[Shannon Greene · Rating 3 out of 5]

Placher is a deep-thinking theologian and clearly well-versed in the subject matter. I personally am a Wesleyan with Process theology tendencies, while he leans toward Calvinism and away from Process theology. Because of that, this wasn't my favorite theology text, although it was informative. 

[Christian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paradigm shifting.