A recent article by Kevin Hector considered the disagreement between Bruce McCormack and me over the relationship between the doctrines of election and the Trinity raising a number of crucial issues such as the proper relation of the immanent and economic Trinity, the nature of God's freedom and the identity of the logos asarkos. In this article I explore how and why Barth's dialectical understanding of the triune God's freedom from and for creatures disallowed equating God's ontological freedom with election in the manner suggested by McCormack and Hector, because that would reduce God's omnipotence to his omnicausality, the immanent to the economic Trinity.In a recent IJST article (vol. 7, no. 3, July 2005) entitled 'God's Triunity and Self-Determination: A Conversation with identified several crucial questions in an attempt to resolve a disagreement between Bruce McCormack and me over how to conceptualize the relationship between the immanent and economic Trinity: (1) Can we say that God's determination to be with us is the basis of God's triunity? (2) Must we identify the Son's being as eternally toward-incarnation? (3) How does God's freedom relate to God's eternal decision to be God-with-humanity? Central to the discussion are the issues of just how to conceive God's freedom and how exactly to conceive the logos asarkos. In this response I hope to show that Kevin Hector did not properly interpret the concept of divine freedom that I offered in my book, Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity; 1 that he then incorrectly equated triunity and election; that he mistakenly assumes that Barth's emphasis on God for us meant that Barth no longer emphasized God's freedom from us (whereas Barth always
Harper and Row, 1985) xi; hereafter abbreviated Creation. 2 Ibid. xii. Among other things, this thinking eventually leads to these conclusions: (1) "The Spirit is the principle of evolution" (Creation 100); (2) "The Spirit is the holistic principle ... he creates interactions,... cooperation and community [and] is the 'common Spirit of creation' "; (3) "The Spirit is the principle of individuation. ..." Therefore "selfpreservation and self-transcendence are two sides of the process in which life evolves. They are not mutual contradictions. They complement one another" (ibid. 100). 3 Ibid. action ad extra (cf. The Trinity [n. 5 below] 109 ff.). Thus Moltmann writes: "God withdraws into himself in order to go out of himself. He 'creates' the preconditions for the existence of his creation by withdrawing his presence and his power. ... Nothingness emerges" (Creation 87). For Moltmann "The doctrine of the Shekinah is the logical result of making God's pathos the starting point" (Trinity 30). 5 Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, The Doctrine of God (New York: Harper & Row, 1981) 19; hereafter abbreviated Trinity. 6 Ibid. 19-20. 7 Ibid. 6. 8 Ibid. 17. 9 Ibid. 16. 10 Ibid. 18. n Ibid. 19. 16 Ibid. 8, emphasis mine. 17 Ibid. 18 Trinity 92. 19 Creation 89, emphasis mine. 20 Ibid. 90.
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