Many Things

Eavesdropping on the Great Conversation

I love chatting with people. There’s something delightful about hearing another person’s experiences and thoughts on life and the world. The axiom “everyone you meet has something valuable to teach you” is apt—so far as it goes (though, truth be told, most of us also have quite a bit that’s not valuable too!). One of the conversations I’ve come to love most is the one where, unexpectedly, someone says something that echoes a thought I heard from someone else days or years earlier. If you ask a few more questions, you often find that both of them have drawn from the same well.

I cannot count how many times I’ve heard someone quote a lyric only to learn it was a reference to someone else—like how Letters to Cleo’s “You’ve Got to Be Cruel to Be Kind” is a cover of a Nick Lowe song—which was actually lifted from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Sources have sources. And sometimes, behind the people shaping our thinking today, there stands a deeper, quieter voice: one that shaped theirs. Such issues as how we think about God and his character—no matter how intuitive or original we think our thoughts to be—are often the product of a greater conversation that’s been happening all around us for centuries.

John Webster (1955–2016) is one of those voices. When I began my theological education in 2014, I was delighted to discover just how interconnected the world of theologians, poets, and philosophers really is—that there’s a great conversation unfolding across centuries, and that I’d only just been invited to pull up a chair at the grown up table, so to speak. As I attempted to listen politely, to follow the paper trail of the authors I was reading, tracing footnotes and following arguments, I started to hear one voice over and over again. Dr. Webster quickly showed himself to be in the background to many of the most thoughtful voices I was encountering as a fledgling theological student.

As Kevin Vanhoozer remarked, John Webster “was born for such a between-the-times as this.” Among students in Reformed seminaries in the United States he has been monikered “your favorite theologian’s favorite theologian.” Yet, as he would remark of his Cambridge education in theology, he only entered into the discipline of theology as a young student “because I could not think of anything else I wanted to do.” That he did not think of an alternative is a fact for which many of our favorite theologians are surely indebted.

A Scholar Without A Backup Plan

John Webster was born on June 20, 1955 in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire. He was brought to Christ out of the “watery suburban Methodism” of West Yorkshire and spent his formative years as a young man in a “tough version of Calvinistic Christianity.” He was educated in his early years at the all boys Bradford Grammar School and, upon his graduation, began study in languages and literature at Clare College, Cambridge as an Open Scholar, switching shortly thereafter to a track in theology. 

Though his growing interest in dogmatic theology was, by Davidson’s account, quickly outstripping the “fairly thin soil” of Cambridge, Webster entered into graduate studies at Clare College as a Beck Exhibitioner. It was during this period that Webster discovered the theology of Eberhard Jüngel—a German theologian whose influence was not as yet appreciated in English speaking theology. Webster found in Jüngel an emphasis upon the uniqueness of Christian claims about God and the fundamental starting point of divine revelation for doing theology. He completed his PhD at Cambridge on Jüngel and, in 1986, it was published as the monograph Eberhard Jüngel: An Introduction to His Theology. In many respects, it was through Jüngel that Webster discovered Barth whose theological emphasis would come to characterize much of the early shape of Webster’s theological project. Having set before him the “problem of modernity,” his Cambridge professors spurred Webster on to make speech about God intelligible in a university setting where critical-theological methods captivated the attention of the academy. For Webster, Barth’s emphasis—even his insistence—upon God’s primacy and acts (so often overlooked) served as the corrective to many of the ills of postliberal theology. 

Webster’s academic career would span St. John’s College in Durham (1982-86), Wycliffe College in Toronto, Canada (1986-96), the University of Oxford as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity (1996-2003), the University of Aberdeen (2003-2013), and, finally, St. Andrews University (2013-6), indicating both the depth to which he was esteemed and the breadth of those who knew him as a teacher and friend. He founded the International Journal of Systematic Theology and his writings include twelve monographs, four major edited volumes, and a large number of influential shorter publications. By all accounts, Webster was engaged in significant theological work before his untimely death: a work on creation and providence, a lecture series on perfection and providence, a highly anticipated commentary on Ephesians, and the first volume of an anticipated five volume dogmatics. 

I. Theology With Its Head On Straight

In this essay I want to focus on John Webster’s articulation of the doctrine of God’s aseity in his essay “Life in and of Himself,” first published in 2008. I argue that Webster understands a distinctly Christian doctrine of aseity to be one which recognizes God’s perfect life in se as one that is triune in nature: that is, the divine life a se should not be conceived apart from the imminent relations of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This will be demonstrated first by setting Webster’s essay within the larger context of the constructive project of “Theological Theology.” Second, this essay will briefly examine the topic of aseity within its broader historical articulation, slowing down to consider how this doctrine experienced certain “deformations” in the works of Clarke, Schleiermacher, and Tillich. Thirdly, this essay will turn to consider Webster’s attempt to correct these deformations of aseity historically conceived in his essay “Life in and of Himself.”

II. “Theological Theology”

In 1996, John Webster was appointed Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford. Upon his appointment, Webster gave an inaugural lecture which many of his students consider to mark the late period of Webster’s life. This lecture, “Theological Theology,” in the words of Vanhoozer, “set the tone that would increasingly dominate his constructive work for the next twenty years.” 

In many respects, Webster’s project of theological theology sought to call theologians to trust the resources of their own discipline—of Scripture, ultimately, and the great works of dogmatic theology second—and resist the temptation to be unduly directed by the latest metaphysical or hermeneutical trends. This is not to say that Webster discouraged engagement with other disciplines. Nor did he encourage isolation from the wider guild of, say, biblical criticism—to name only one example. Rather, Webster encouraged his students to be faithful in culture rather than be faithful to culture: to draw upon the wells of the wisdom of the Christian tradition, to be attuned to the distinctly cultural and religious practices of Christianity, and to consider the distinct manner in which Christian theology argues from authority as fides quaerens intellectum rather than towards authority—as tends to be the case in the modern university. He called for a distinctly Christian recasting of theology’s relation to the culture of the Christian faith and practice: a culture to which “it so often finds itself dissociated.” So, too, Webster would call for the doctrine of aseity to be recast according to the culture of the Christian faith and practice in its distinctive doxological contours. 

III. The Doctrine of Aseity in Historical Context  

At its most essential level, the Christian doctrine of God’s aseity considers God’s perfect life in and of himself, a se.  Christian theology has historically confessed God as absolute self-sufficiency according to his triunity. Correlatively, this self-sufficiency sets God in contrast to all creaturely things as contingent beings. As Augustine observed, “God exists in the supreme sense, and the original sense, of the word. He is altogether unchangeable, and it is he who could say with full authority ‘I am who I am.’” So too observed Anselm: “He alone has of himself all that he has, while other things have nothing of themselves.” Thus the historical Christian confession that God neither derives life from himself nor is God dependent upon anything outside of himself. As the Westminster Confession of Faith stated in 1648, “God has all life, glory, goodness, blessedness, in and of himself; and is alone in and unto himself all-sufficient, not standing in need of any creatures which he hath made, nor deriving any glory from them, but only manifesting his own glory in, by, unto, and upon them.” 

Yet, the rise of the Enlightenment brought with it remarkable philosophical challenges to the orthodox consensus of the 16th and 17th centuries. The influence of figures like Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, and Newton began to reframe the confessional paradigms of the previous two generations in wider theological discourse. In Webster’s estimation, the doctrine of aseity was one of those matters which became reframed and suffered a resulting kind of “deformation.” The vision of God in his full objective and expressive being became deformed and eclipsed by a conception of God that became increasingly defined by “conditions of conceivability” and a reference to man’s rational apprehension of God instead of God’s “replete life in himself . . . anterior to rational work on our part.” In his telling of the history of this deformation, Webster touches down upon three particular examples to which we will now turn our attention: Samuel Clarke, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Paul Tillich. 

IV. Samuel Clarke

In 1704, Samuel Clarke (1675-1729) delivered the influential Boyle Lecture, “A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God.” This lecture series, named after the 17th century philosopher Robert Boyle (and endowed by the same), were intended to be a series of sermons on the relationship of Christianity and the new philosophy emerging in the late 17th century: with a particular apologetic bent “against notorious Infidels, viz., Atheists, Theists, Pagans, Jews, and Mahometans.” In this respect, Clarke’s lectures—both in 1704 and a second lecture given in 1705—were an attempt to synthesize Christian thought with Newtonian metaphysics. Yet, they were not without their consequences. Notably, among his several points of departure from the confessional theology of earlier generations, Clarke spoke of God as “some one unchangeable and independent Being” and, thereby, as the foundation of all that exists apart from God in se. In Clarke’s attempt to give an apologetic for the necessity of God and, thereby, the foundation of existence itself, he sets discussion of God’s aseity in comparative terms. God is conceived of as a se in these terms in order to avoid, as an apologetic concern, the absurd notion of “an infinite succession of changeable and dependent beings.” In this way, Clarke’s conception of God’s aseity marks a move away from a consideration of God in himself to one almost entirely defined according to its cosmological function. 

V. Friedrich Schleiermacher 

Dubbed “the Prince of the Church” after his death, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) was widely considered to be an apologist who had saved the Christian faith in the university and broader culture. His influence upon modern theology in the 19th and 20th centuries was such that Barth would declare him to be “the great Niagara Falls” to which all the theology of those two centuries was inexorably drawn. In many respects, Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith—a work where he sought to demonstrate the harmony of Reformed and Lutheran theology—set as its foundation the notion that the essence of religion is the feeling of absolute dependence. As a secondary notion, God’s existence must therefore proceed as a necessary consequence if this feeling exists. Thus, for Schleiermacher, God’s attributes are merely beziehungen: that is, relations of God to us. So too, by extension, God’s aseity in a certain sense:  

If the feeling of absolute dependence comprises a reference to divine omnipotence, it is no longer necessary to bring out the independence of God as a special attribute. For if one remains at all true to the derivation of the word, it is, as the opposite of that dependence in which we find ourselves simply a negative attribute. . . which coincides with the scholastic ‘aseitas,’ virtually ‘existence from self.’

Though Schleiermacher would insist that God is without external determination, he nevertheless conceives of him as inseparable from “our receptive and active existence.” Thus, the “whence” to which one’s feeling of absolute dependence gestures is God, both as the “co-determinant in this feeling” and the one “to which we trace our being in such a state.” Aseity, therefore, is collapsed into his conception of omnipotence and eternity which are thus expounded almost entirely with reference to Schleiermacher’s anthropology: “any further content of the idea [the expression of the feeling of absolute dependence and God as its “whence”] must be evolved out of this fundamental import assigned to it.”

VI. Paul Tillich

As Clarke framed the matter of God’s aseity in cosmological terms, and Schleiermacher in those of his anthropology, so too Paul Tillich (1886-1965) turned to a consideration of God’s aseity in close relation to anthropology: “The question of the cause of a thing or event presupposes that it does not possess its own power of coming into being. Things and events have no aseity.” Aseity is considered with the subject as its point of departure: “Causality expresses by implication the inability of anything to rest on itself. Everything is driven beyond itself to its cause and so on indefinitely. Causality powerfully expresses the abyss of nonbeing in everything.” In this sense, reflection upon the limitation of the self gives rise to a kind of anxiety of “not being in, of, and by oneself, of not having the ‘aseity’ which theology traditionally attributes of God.” Thus, the concept of aseity becomes almost entirely and inseparably joined to its anthropological subject as the necessary precondition for the sense of transcendence.  

VII. John Webster On The Doctrine of Aseity 

As noted above, the doctrine of aseity has often been discussed purely in terms of its apposition to contingency in modern theology: that is, aseity is presented as most comprehensively understood in terms of God’s non-contingency. Yet, as Webster observed in his 2008 essay, “Life in and of Himself,” the doctrine must be understood in light of the fundamental rule of Christian confession of the Trinity: Deus non est in genere. This confession of God’s triune nature must accord with the “particular being of the triune God in his self-moved self-presentation.” By extension, aseity ought not to be understood purely, or even primarily, as composed of a contrastive or comparative element. For Webster, this error, so dominant in much of modern theology, produces a pathology whereby the distinctly Christian contemplation of God in his triune life ad intra is replaced with a vision of two reciprocal realities: God and creature, in some sense necessary for the other’s existence. In “Life in and of Himself,” Webster calls for a turn from a concept of aseity in theological discourse anchored in an abstracted and theoretical contrast between self-existent and created being. Instead, Webster argues for the practice of theology to be returned to its doxological character through careful consideration of the imminent triune life—that is, the “matchless and utterly replete being in and from himself.” 

Webster’s argument is developed in four stages. First, he considers the doctrine of aseity in its historical development, tracing its articulation in both modern and pre-modern theology—considering its catholic consensus and certain “deformations” of the same. Second, Webster contends for an understanding of God’s aseity which is “filled out” according to the terms of God’s intra-trinitarian relations; 3) Third, Webster continues by considering how the manner of the triune life a se serves as the foundation by which God gives himself ad extra in creation. Here, Webster spends the majority of his time reflecting upon the manner in which this dimension of the triune life is expressed in Augustine’s Tractates on the Gospel of John and Calvin’s commentary on the same. 4) Lastly, Webster offers some final reflections on the pathology and material exposition that undergirds a dogmatic conception of aseity.   

For Webster, the forms of aseity espoused by Clarke, Schleiermacher, and Tilich are too speculatively derived. If they are to be supplanted, he suggests that they must be so with a view of divine aseity that is richer and more substantially consistent with a distinctively Christian dogmatic conception of the same. Thus, Webster suggests two ways by which we might better articulate a notion of God’s aseity. First, we must consider the Trinity in its immanent dimension: “the glory and the plenitude of the life of the Holy Trinity in its self-existent and self-moving originality, its underived fullness.” Second, Webster argues that we must recognize the manner in which God’s aseity ad intra constitutes the ground of his self-communication ad extra. 

With respect to the former, as with so much of his theological project, Webster argues that we must reorient discussion of God’s being toward a doctrine of the immanent trinity—God in se—and the triune activity in the economy of nature and grace. We must, he argues, move away from a notion of God’s aseity which locates its definitional matter in terms that are inseparably attached to contingency. In other words, Webster attempts to move the concept of aseity away from the kind of discourse which ironically defines divine self-existence in derivative terms: “God is from himself, and from himself God gives himself.” 

Moreover, for Webster, a right understanding of God’s aseity does not merely locate it as anterior to the triune life, but recognizes that God’s trinitarian relations ad intra are his life. In other words, for God to be a se is for him to be so as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: God a se is the perfection of paternity, filiation and spiration in which he is indissolubly from, for and in himself, and out of which he bestows himself as the Lord, saviour and partner of his creature. Generation, filiation, and spiration thus serve as contours to the doctrine according to the personal properties of the trinity, rightly apprehended. This is not to suggest derivation, composition, or contingency within the divine life. Rather, the contrary. Here Webster utilizes John of Damascus’ Exposition of the Orthodox Faith to speak of the manner in which classical trinitarian theology has distinguished between, 1) the aseity common to all three persons by virtue of their shared possession of the divine essence, and 2) the aseity which may be spoken of as proper to the person of the Father as alone αγγενητος (unbegotten): “The Father, accordingly, is a se not only according to essence (as God) but also as a property of his own person; but neither to the Son nor to the Spirit, who are begotten and proceed from the Father respectively, can aseity be attributed as a personal property.” In this way, Webster seeks to safeguard the precise language necessary to speak of the personal relations of the trinity ad intra in order to deny an understanding of aseity that is anterior to the divine life. He insists: “Filiation is not a lack but a mode of God’s eternal perfection, intrinsic to the wholly realized self-movement of God. Begetting—and likewise spiration—are the form of God’s aseity, not its result or term, still less its contradiction.” So conceived, Webster argues, God’s aseity is not merely a kind of absence of external contingency or causation. Rather, moreover, it is the infinitude of divine life which God is in and of himself according to his being Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 

VIII. Back to Praise: Doctrine for Doxology

Thus conceived, and only thus conceived, God’s triune life in se serves as the pattern in which the self-same plentitude of God’s life is communicated ad extra. This is how we get life. For Webster, this is how to best understand Christ’s communication of the divine life of the Father, as the Son, through the Holy Spirit in the economy of redemption. God who is the fountain of divine life (Ps. 36:9) communicates this “secret and hidden spring” through the revelation of Christ: “And so we have an open fountain at hand to draw from,” Webster remarks, quoting Calvin. Accordingly, Webster observes, God’s divine life can both be spoken of in Scripture as that life which God possesses in eternity past in the mutual relation of the Father and Son and in its form as the “overflowing plenitude” as a gift given to his creatures. 

So considered, Webster’s argument seeks to move modern dogmatic accounts of aseity away from cosmological and anthropologically oriented frameworks—as exemplified in the theologies of Clarke, Schleiermacher, and Tillich—and to recast the doctrine according to the culture of the Christian faith, as expressed in the broader tradition of Scriptural exegesis and dogmatic theology. Reframed in this way, God’s triune self-sufficiency becomes the sole ground from which his works ad extra—creation, providence, and redemption—proceed toward their doxological end. For Webster, God is from himself according to his triunity, and from himself he gives himself to be known in Christian confession and praise.