2.trinitarian Theology (Freedom and Necessity in Modern) (Gallaher, Brandon) 2016

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Freedom and Necessity

in Modern Trinitarian
Theology
B RA N D O N GA LLA H ER
1
3
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For Michelle
. . . more distant than stars and nearer than the eye
T. S. Eliot, ‘Marina’
Foreword
We have more or less got used to the idea that theology cannot be done as if we
could be spectators of the divine nature and action from a stance that is
nowhere in particular. Not only does theology presuppose a God whose action
has both established and maintained relation with what is not God (i.e. us
among other things), it also works on the assumption that only the contem-
plation of this action can give us access of any kind to any understanding of
‘what’ God is, what it is to be God, the divine essence. About this latter, it is
strictly impossible to speak, except on the grounds of how divine action has
impinged on us as acting and knowing subjects.
So from the start of any theological enterprise, we are stuck with a dual
requirement. What we say of God must be grounded in what God has done in
our regard; in the act of God in relation to the finite order. And what we say of
God must do justice to the completely unconstrained character of God’s action
as something that belongs in no causal chain or interactive pattern but is
eternally and ‘necessarily’ what it is. Forget the first of these points and
theology becomes an exercise in metaphysical arrogance—not to say
nonsense—seeking to analyse the infinite as it is in itself, beyond all related-
ness. Forget the second and theology sinks towards mythology, chronicling
the adventures of a spiritual agent among others, though vastly superior.
Positively, we want to say that what God does in our regard is of a piece
with what God is, not an arbitrary or groundless act; and we want also to say
that, unless that act is an act of utterly unconditioned freedom, it simply is not
really God we are speaking of, and we have no hope of being delivered from
whatever tangles and slaveries are created by the interaction of rival finite
agencies.
Brandon Gallaher, in this magnificently learned and sophisticated study of
three of the greatest theological minds of the last century, shows how thinking
about all this in the context of specifically Trinitarian theology brings us up
against the most fundamental questions of theological method. But he also
suggests ways through—not by resolving problems with tidier and more
satisfying theological schemes, but by making us clarify again and again the
shape and grammar of the basic narrative out of which Christian theology
grows. God’s freedom is a freedom to be God; that must be axiomatic. But it
must also be a freedom to be the God revealed in Jesus Christ. What is freely
shown, embodied, and enacted in the incarnate reality of Jesus is what it is
to be God, not a passing phase of divine life or a mere aspect of it. And this
in turn means that if the reality of Jesus is to be characterized above all as
a reality shaped by dispossession, by the free putting of oneself at the disposal,
viii Foreword
or even at the mercy, of an other, then God’s own eternal freedom (that-
in-virtue-of-which God exerts the activity of being eternally God) is an eternal
movement of dispossession, emptying into the other.
Put more simply, God’s freedom is the freedom to be bound in faithful love.
Only a freedom quite outside the competing forces of rival finite identities can
be free in this way. And this is where the doctrine of the Trinity provides the
essential key, in its absolute denial that there is in the divine life any collision
or competition of identities, any more than there is a competition of identities
between finite and infinite. What we learn to say about God in the Trinitarian
context is that there is in God no ‘selfhood’ to defend as we understand it; so
that the act of being God is sheerly self-bestowing, so much so that it can be
embodied and expressed in contexts that are as far as can be imagined from
freedom or perfect self-presence—in the dereliction on the cross, in the realm
of the forgotten dead.
The three theologians examined here share this general set of assumptions
and give them immensely complex but often exceptionally poignant and
memorable expression. All seek to find a way of acknowledging that all we
say of God is about God in relation to the finite—but that to make sense of
this, we have to see that relatedness as rooted in God’s eternal character.
Relatedness is the ground of what we say because relatedness is what we
cannot avoid speaking of where God is concerned, in eternity or in time, in
God’s self or in God’s action ad extra. This involves some sailing close to the
wind: language which might imply that God’s being God somehow depended
on the history of the finite universe, language which might qualify eternal
freedom in the name of eternal relationality. But all of them clearly want to
affirm both of the requirements we began with. And to make full sense of how
they do this, we need a very resourceful and nuanced discrimination between
different usages of the word ‘freedom’. Brandon Gallaher provides just such a
set of analytic tools, and brilliantly allows us to read his theologians in the light
of what they intend. He helps us resist leaping to negative conclusions on the
grounds of the risks they take for the sake of doing justice to the irreducible
relatedness of God to God—in which the relation of God to what is not God
is rooted.
This is a book which raises issues of the most basic theological interest. It is
very far from being a monograph on a single rather technical point in
dogmatics or philosophy of religion; it points to the deepest questions of
theological method, and to the question of how to express a thoroughgoing
Christian ontology. In discussing thinkers from the Catholic, Orthodox, and
Reformed worlds with equal insight and sympathy, it models an ecumenical
engagement that goes far beyond institutional courtesies and pacific formulae.
It reminds us that to do theology at all, whatever our confessional location, we
have to tackle the issues raised by speaking of divine freedom and divine
relatedness—because these are the questions that the narrative of Jesus Christ
Foreword ix
ultimately obliges us to think through: not as detached observers or as
enthusiastic mythographers, but as created persons seeking to understand
what it means for them to be made sharers in the divine nature by the divine
liberty. It is a book of signal and unusual importance in its breadth of reference
but also in the fundamental nature of its agenda, and it will repay detailed and
repeated study by all interested in theology’s integrity and creativity.
Rowan Williams
Magdalene College, Cambridge
Feast of Mary Magdalene 2015
Acknowledgements
This book is a revision of my doctoral thesis for the Faculty of Theology and
Religion, University of Oxford. I would like to say I have simply taken too long
on this project. But perhaps it is better to say: it took as long as it needed.
Certainly, the study had a life of its own.
During its composition I was first a postgraduate student at Regent’s Park
College, Oxford (thanks to Dr Robert Ellis and the Fellows) followed by a
Stipendiary Lecturer of Theology at Keble College, Oxford (thanks to Prof
Markus Bockmuehl) then a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the
Faculty of Theology and Religion, Oxford (thanks to Prof Johannes Zachhuber)
affiliated with Regent’s Park (thanks to Dr Robert Ellis and Prof Paul Fiddes)
and presently a Lecturer of Systematic and Comparative Theology at the
Department of Theology and Religion, University of Exeter (thanks to Profs
Francesca Stavrakopoulou and Morwenna Ludlow).
As a doctorate the work took its final shape at the Centre for Research on
Religion (CREOR), Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University (thanks to
Prof Torrance Kirby). It came to a conclusion as a book while I was a
Distinguished Guest Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, University
of Notre Dame (NDIAS) (thanks to Profs John Betz, Brad Gregory, Cyril
O’Regan, and Dr Donald Stelluto) and a Visiting Scholar at the Centre
for Interdisciplinary Study of Monotheistic Religions (CISMOR), School of
Theology, Doshisha University (Kyoto, Japan) (thanks to Profs Katsuhiro
Kohara and Junya Shinohe and Dr Juichiro Tanabe).
I am immensely grateful for financial support from the British Academy.
Thanks are also due to the Overseas Research Students (ORS) Awards
Scheme and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)
of Canada.
I am indebted above all to my doctoral supervisor Prof Paul S. Fiddes for his
wisdom, patience, exacting standards, creativity, and compassion. He taught
me that to be a creative theologian is to have a sympathetic communion with
one’s sources and openness to the world.
Metropolitan Kallistos Ware of Diokleia has been to me both a friend and
father in Christ and has shown me the vision of the Fathers: an oecumenical
Orthodoxy freed from all provincialism. Dr Rowan Williams, my DPhil
External Examiner, has been ever gracious and inspiring. Remarks in his
Bulgakov book inspired the thesis, which he then examined with compassion
and insight. I am honoured he agreed to write a foreword.
Prof George Pattison, as the Internal Examiner of both my MSt and DPhil,
has always challenged me as a thinker. His refusal to be satisfied with settled
xii Acknowledgements
orthodoxies and his fearlessness on the path of dialogue remain an inspiration
in my recent work on comparative theology.
Great thanks especially are due to Prof Aristotle (‘Telly’) Papanikolaou, who
read my manuscript for Oxford University Press, and provided important
insights and critiques. He has become a trusted friend, mentor, and intellectual
co-worker in the current re-envisioning of Orthodox theology.
Thanks to Amber Schley-Iragui for Chapter 3’s diagram and Boris Jakim for
generously sharing his unpublished translations over many years.
I am grateful to Canon A. M. (‘Donald’) Allchin (†), Profs John Behr, John
J. O’Donnell SJ (†), and Michael Plekon for crucial early guidance and
mentorship.
Thanks to Dr Alexey and Prof Lucy Kostyanovsky for proofreading and
checking my Russian translations; Dr Matthew Baker (†), Profs Peter Bouteneff,
Matthew Bruce, Gavin D’Costa, Nicholas Denysenko, Dr David Dunn,
Prof Paul Gavrilyuk, Dr Oliver Herbel, Prof Alexei Klimoff, Drs Romilo
Knežević, Julia Konstantinovsky, Irina Kukota, Profs Paul Ladouceur, Andrew
Louth, Michael Martin, Jennifer Martin, Paul Meyendorff, Dr David Newheiser,
Fr Aidan Nichols OP, Profs Cyrus P. Olsen, Marcus Plested, Fr Andrei Psarev,
Dr John Romanowsky, Prof Joost van Rossum, Fr Nicholas (Sakharov),
Dr Jonathan Seiling, Prof Vera Shevzov, Dr Oliver Smith (†), Prof Jonathan
Sutton, Prof Alexis Torrance, Fr Tikhon (Vasilyev), Drs Daniel Whistler,
Roman Zaviyskyy, and Regula Zwahlen for discussion of drafts and critical
engagement; and Prof Nicholas (Fr. Maximos) Constas and Dr Susan Griffith
for help with Patristic sources. Only the mistakes are mine.
The last year and a half at the University of Exeter’s Department of
Theology and Religion has been a wonderful transition from postdoctoral
research to regular academic life. I am especially grateful to the kindness and
grace shown to me by Profs David Horrell, Morwenna Ludlow, Francesca
Stavrakopoulou, our administrator, Susan Margetts, my close teaching col-
leagues (Dr Susannah Cornwall and Prof Esther Reed), and students.
Special thanks are due to Oxford University Press and the Theological
Monographs Series for their great patience and generosity, especially,
Prof Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tom Perridge, and Karen Raith. I am especially
thankful to Susan Frampton for copy-editing the book, to Donald Watt
for proofreading, to J. Naomi Linzer for creating the index, and to Saraswathi
Ethiraju for managing its production. I am grateful to many friends for
encouragement over the years, especially, Fr Matthew Baker (†), Profs Markus
Bockmuehl, Federico Caprotti, Fr John Chryssavgis, Profs Will Cohen,
Paul Gavrilyuk, Fr Ian Graham, Nick and Helen Graham, Fr Oliver Herbel,
Amber and Charles Iragui, Frances and Simon Jennings, Fr Romilo of Hilandar,
Sr Seraphima of St John the Baptist Monastery, (Essex), Dr Alexey and
Prof Lucy Kostyanovsky, Profs Paul Ladouceur, Morwenna Ludlow, Andrew
Marlborough, Fr Stephen and Anna Platt, Fr Porphyrios (Plant), Fr Richard
and Jaime René, Dr Albert Rossi, Joel and Barbara Schillinger, Fr Peter and Irina
Scorer, Patricia Scott and Gregory and Christopher Sprucker.
Acknowledgements xiii
This book would not have been written without my family’s long-suffering
love and support: Dr Donald and Yolande (†) Gallaher, Tiffany Gallaher,
Massimo Savino, Safia and Ilyas Boutaleb, Howard (†) (and sine qua non)
Anne (‘Arnee’) Holloway, my children (Sophie, Ita, Alban, and Maria) and
especially my wife, Michelle, who is pure gift: Should I tell what a miracle
she was.
University of Exeter
Holy Saturday
30 April 2016
B.D.F.G.
Excerpt from The Paradiso by Dante Alighieri, a verse rendering for the
modern reader by John Ciardi. Copyright © 1961, 1965, 1967, 1970 by John
Ciardi. Reprinted by Permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All Rights
Reserved.
Copyright © Karl Barth. Church Dogmatics. 4 vols. Edinburgh: T & T Clark
International UK, 1956–75. Used by Permission of Bloomsbury Publishing
Plc. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpts from ‘Marina’, ‘Burnt Norton’, and ‘Little Gidding’ from THE
COMPLETE POEMS AND PLAYS OF T. S. ELIOT 1909–1962 by T. S. Eliot.
© 1969 by Valerie Eliot, are reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
Also from COLLECTED POEMS 1909–1962 by T. S. Eliot. Copyright 1936 by
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Copyright © renewed 1964
by Thomas Stearns Eliot. Reprinted by Permission of Houghton Mifflin Har-
court Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
Portions of Chapters 5–8 appeared in an earlier form as ‘“A Supertemporal
Continuum”: Christocentric Trinity and the Dialectical Reenvisioning of
Divine Freedom in Bulgakov and Barth’ in Correlating Sobornost: Conversa-
tions Between Karl Barth and Russian Orthodox Theology, eds John
C. McDowell, Scott A. Kirkland, and Ashley J. Moyse (Minneapolis: Fortress
Press, 2016), 95–133. Copyright © 2016 by Augsburg Fortress Publishers and
reprinted by permission. All Rights Reserved.
‘The Well Dressed Man With a Beard’ from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF
WALLACE STEVENS by Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens
and copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred
A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of
Penguin Random House LLC. Also from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF
WALLACE STEVENS by Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1955, 1966 by Wallace
Stevens. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpts from ‘Crazy Jane on God’ and ‘Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop’
reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster,
Inc., from THE COLLECTED WORKS OF W. B. YEATS, VOLUME I: THE
POEMS, REVISED by W. B. Yeats, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright ©
1933 by The Macmillan Company, renewed 1961 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. All
Rights Reserved.
Contents
References and Abbreviations xvii
INTRODUCTION: THE ABSOLUTE FREEDOM

OF GOD AS MYSTERY AND ‘PROBLEMATIC’
1. Freedom and Necessity as Trinitarian Mystery and ‘Problematic’ 3
2. Divine Freedom—A Dialectical Approach: From Freedom to
Necessity—The Shape of a ‘Problematic’ (A) 12
3. Divine Freedom—A Dialectical Approach: From Necessity to
Freedom—The Shape of a ‘Problematic’ (B) 22
PART I. GOD AS BOTH ABSOLUTE AND

ABSOLUTE-RELATIVE IN SERGII BULGAKOV
4. ‘Sophiological Antinomism’—Sergii Bulgakov’s Debt to and
Critique of Vladimir Solov’ev 45
5. God as Absolute and Absolute-Relative in Bulgakov:
Theological Antinomy in the Doctrine of God 70
6. Divine Freedom and the Need of God for Creation 95
PART II. DIVINE SELF-DETERMINATION

IN J ESUS CHRIST IN KARL BARTH
7. Trinity and the Doctrine of Election in Karl Barth 117
8. Trinity, Freedom, and Necessity in Karl Barth—A Dialectical
Approach 142
PART III. JESUS CHRIST AND THE TRINITARIAN

APPROPRIATION OF THE DIALECTIC OF FREEDOM
AND NECESSITY IN HANS URS VON BALTHASAR
9. The Metaphysics of Love—Four Steps 165
10. The Trinity, Creation, and Freedom—More on the Fourth Step 186
11. Christ, Creation, and Divine Possibilities—‘Sheltered
within’ the Trinity 203
xvi Contents
CONCLUSION: THE ABSOLUTE FREEDOM OF GOD

AND THE MYSTERY OF DIVINE ELECTION
12. Concluding Unsystematic Systematic Postscript 227
Bibliography 251
Index 287
References and Abbreviations
The Library of Congress System for Russian transliteration (except for certain
names) is used. For the Bible, the RSV is used, unless otherwise indicated.
Given the bulk of criticism, a hybrid system of citation has been used: a) the
abbreviations listed below for frequently cited works and some series; b) and
the author’s name and date of publication for all other works (except a few
‘classics’). Where the original of a work is simply cited, the translation is my
own. Where two or more separate sentences have the same citation, the
citation will be given in the last sentence. Full titles and information are
provided in the Bibliography.
AA Athanasius’ Against the Arians

AB Sergii Bulgakov’s Agnets Bozhii
AHT Rowan Williams’ Arius: Heresy and Tradition
Amb. Maximus the Confessor’s Ambigua
AW F. W. J. Schelling’s The Ages of the World—Third Version
BB Bulgakov’s The Burning Bush
BC John Zizioulas’ Being as Communion
BL Bulgakov’s The Bride of the Lamb
C Bulgakov’s The Comforter
CCSG Corpus Christianorum, Series Graeca
CCSL Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina
CD I–IV Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, vols. I–IV
Cht. Vladimir Solov’ev’s Chteniia o Bogochelovechestve
CL Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Cosmic Liturgy
CO Zizioulas’ Communion and Otherness
CRDT Bruce L. McCormack’s Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic
Dialectical Theology
CSEL Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum
CSG Paul S. Fiddes’ The Creative Suffering of God
DN Dionysius the Areopagite’s Divine Names
enn. I–VII Plotinus’ Enneads, vols. I–VII
FC The Fathers of the Church
xviii References and Abbreviations
Filo. Solov’ev’s Filosofskie nachala tsel’nogo znaniia

FKh Bulgakov’s Filosofiia Khoziaistva
G Bulgakov’s ‘Glavy o Troichnosti’
GCS Die grieschischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten drei
Jahrhunderte
GL I-VII Balthasar’s The Glory of the Lord, vols. I–VII
GNO Gregorii Nysseni Opera
H I-III Balthasar’s Herrlichkeit, vols. I–III
HH Bulgakov’s ‘Hypostasis and Hypostaticity’
I Bulgakov’s Ikona i Ikonopochitanie
IAP Bulgakov’s ‘Iuda Iskariot—apostol-predatel’’
IiI Bulgakov’s ‘Ipostas’ i Ipostasnost’’
IJST International Journal of Systematic Theology
IIRM Issledovaniia po istorii russkoi mysli
IV Bulgakov’s The Icon and its Veneration
KB Balthasar’s The Theology of Karl Barth
KD I–IV Barth’s Die kirchliche Dogmatik, vols. I–IV
K Bulgakov’s Kupina neopalimaia
Krit. Solov’ev’s Kritika otvlechennykh nachal
LDH Solov’ev’s Lectures on Divine Humanity
LG Bulgakov’s The Lamb of God
NF John Behr’s The Nicene Faith
NPNF Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (first and second series)
OF John of Damascus’ The Orthodox Faith
OM Martin Heidegger’s ‘The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of
Metaphysics’
PE Bulgakov’s Philosophy of Economy
PG Patrologia Graeca
PGT Pavel Florensky’s The Pillar and Ground of the Truth
PIG Fiddes’ Participating in God: A Pastoral Doctrine of the Trinity
PIK Solov’ev’s The Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge
PL Patrologia Latina
PM Schelling’s Philosophie der Mythologie
PO Schelling’s Philosophie der Offenbarung
De Pot. Thomas Aquinas’ De Potentia
References and Abbreviations xix
PR 1–3 G. W. F. Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vols. 1–3

PTS Patristische Texte und Studien
REU Solov’ev’s La Russie et l’église universelle
RUC Solov’ev’s Russia and the Universal Church
S Florensky’s Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny
SB Rowan Williams’ (ed., trans., and introd.) Sergii Bulgakov
SC Sources chrétiennes
SEET Studies in East European Thought
SG Aquinas’ Summa contra gentiles
SJT Scottish Journal of Theology
SN Bulgakov’s Svet Nevechernii
SS Bulgakov’s ‘A Summary of Sophiology’
SSVSS 1–12 Sobranie sochinenii Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, vols. 1–12
ST Aquinas’ Summa Theologicae
SVTQ St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly
SW I–XIV Schelling’s Sämmtliche Werke, vols. I–XIV
SWG Bulgakov’s Sophia, The Wisdom of God
SWKG Fiddes’ Seeing the World and Knowing God: Hebrew and
Christian Doctrine in a Late-Modern Context
SysTh 1–3 Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Systematic Theology, vols. 1–3
ThD I–IV Balthasar’s Theodramatik, vols. I–IV
TD I–V Balthasar’s Theo-Drama, vols. I–V
TF Bulgakov’s Tragediia Filosofii
TH Balthasar’s A Theology of History
TK Jürgen Moltmann’s The Trinity and the Kingdom
ThL I–III Balthasar’s Theologik, vols. I–III
TL I–III Balthasar’s Theo-Logic, vols. I–III
U Bulgakov’s Uteshitel’
UL Bulgakov’s Unfading Light
Urk. Urkunden zur Geschichte des Arianischen Streites 318–328, ed.
H.-G. Opitz, Athanasius Werke, 3.1
De Ver. Aquinas’ De veritate
WP Adrienne von Speyr’s The World of Prayer
WSA The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st
Century
Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is
freedom.
(2 Cor. 3:17)
Introduction
The Absolute Freedom of God
as Mystery and ‘Problematic’
Freedom and Necessity as Trinitarian

Mystery and ‘Problematic’
Any Trinitarian theology that is honest must begin with its defeat. It is
impossible—being bound by the flesh—to worthily draw near and serve, let
alone conceptualize, the King of Glory who is without beginning, uncircum-
scribable, and changeless, beyond both affirmations and negations.1 This
‘defeat’ of theology as realized in worship, however, is not merely a negative
posture. On the contrary, defeat or ‘un-mastery’2 for the Christian can flower
forth awe, a wonder at something joyous and inconceivable, which is the basic
contemplative attitude out of which theology should arise. It is through awe
that we come to experience the Trinity and the nexus of this experience is one
of divine-human love, what might be called the ‘mystery of freedom and
necessity’. Here John of the Cross (1542–91) is helpful in unpacking the
theme of our study.
Man has a desire for God implanted in him by God, John claims, and God
in seeing this love—like a ‘hair’ fluttering at the soul’s neck—comes down in
freedom to arouse it, to make man captive to it, but in arousing it, God
Himself becomes ‘wounded’ by a ‘crazy love’ (eros manikos) for creation,3
captive to it Himself since ‘The power and the tenacity of love is great, for love
captures and binds God himself [pues Dios prenda y liga].’4 But how can God
be ‘bound’ if for Him, as Spirit, Freedom itself (2 Cor. 3:17), ‘all things are
possible’ (Mt. 19:26; and of Christ: 28:18, Jn. 17:2) because no one can resist
1
Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite, Mystical Theology, 1.2 and 5 [PTS 36; 1.2, ll.3–7, 143 and
5, 11.5–9, 150], 136 and 141.
2
Coakley 2013, 43ff. and see 255–6, 343–4, 2002, 3–54 and compare Lossky 1976, 23–43,
1974, 13–43, S. Sakharov 1991, 39–42, 208–13, and Adrienne von Speyr, World of Prayer [=WP],
294–8.
3
Cabasilas, Life in Christ, 6.3, 164 [PG 150/SC 361, 2: 6.16, 648A, l.4, 52–3]; compare
Dionysius, Divine Names [=DN], 4.10–18, esp. 13–14 [PTS 33; 154–63, esp. 158–60], 78–83.
See Evdokimov 2001, 191–4.
4
John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle, 32.1, 599 [Cántico espiritual, Vol. 2: 32.1, 189] and see
31.1–10, 595–8 [ibid., 184–9]. (Unless otherwise indicated, I shall use the English literary
convention of ‘man’ when referring to ‘humanity’, male and female.)
4 Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology

His will (Rom. 9:19)? Thus, just as it would be incorrect to conclude that God
cannot call or is unjust in calling the Gentiles to be engrafted into Israel, so too
it would seem that we would be in error (mē genoito (Rom. 9:14)) in saying
that God had to call us, was impelled to bind Himself to us in Christ (Rom.
9:15ff.). God, John continues, freely becomes the ‘prisoner’ of the soul and he
‘is surrendered to all her desires…those who act with love and friendship
toward him will make him do all they desire…by love they bind him with one
hair’.5 Yet no credit is due to the soul in attracting the ecstatic desire of God in
Christ through its love. The soul cannot of its own power ‘capture this divine
bird of heights’. God’s love is free and He was ‘captivated by the flight of the
hair’ because He first gazed at us, loved, and came down to arouse our desire in
taking flesh.6 The love that John speaks of is the desire of the soul for the Son
of God, Jesus Christ, as the ‘Bridegroom’, but this love is divine since the
Son of God ‘is the principal lover’.7 The Word, the Son of God, together with
the Father and Spirit is hidden by His essence, which is love itself, and
therefore is present in the ‘innermost Being of the soul’.8 God out of a free
ecstatic self-giving and self-receiving love, an ordered outward-going desire
(marrying eros and agape=‘love-desire’)9 which is both Trinitarian and Chris-
toform, has become bound by His own desire for creation, allowing His life to
be determined by the creature as a certain freely willed necessity for Him
creating a divine-human joint captivation of love.10
In thinking about such a form of love-desire we are immediately thrown still
deeper into awe when we remember that the same God who is self-captivated
by us is said to have always loved us with an ‘everlasting love’ (Ps. 103:17,
Is. 54:8, Jer. 31:3) in Jesus Christ (Jn. 17:20–6). Divine love freely and ever-
lastingly covenants itself to us (Is. 55:3–5) in Christ (Heb. 7:22), who, being
‘before all things’ (Col. 1:17), is the foundation of creation (Col. 1:16) as the
‘Lamb slain from the foundation of the world’ (Rev. 13:8 [KJV]). Such a love
will not, indeed, cannot turn back from its commitment to creation in Him
(Ps. 110:4/Heb. 7:21 and see 6:17–18). The author of 1 Peter puts this neatly:
‘He was destined before the foundation of the world but was made manifest at
the end of the times for your sake’ (1 Pet. 1:20). This union of Christ + world +
Father/God is quite simply an eternal union of love (Jn. 15:9, 17:20–6 and see 2
Thess. 2:16–17) and it is the eternality of this union of creation with God in
5
John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle, 32.1, 599 [Cántico espiritual, Vol. 2: 189].
6
John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle, 31.8, 598 [Cántico espiritual, Vol. 2: 188].
7
John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle, 12.2–3, 516 [Cántico espiritual, Vol. 2: 73–4] and 31.2,
596 [Cántico espiritual, Vol. 2: 185].
8
John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle, 1.6, 480 [Cántico espiritual, Vol. 2: 24] and see 11.3–4,
511–12 [Cántico espiritual, Vol. 2: 67–8], Living Flame of Love, 1.6–15, 643–6 [Llama de amor
viva, 2: 243–7], 2.34, 670–1 [ibid., 280–1] and 4.14, 713 [ibid., 334].
9
See Paul Fiddes, Seeing the World and Knowing God [=SWKG], 150ff.
10
See Coakley 2013, esp. 2–27, 308–34.
Freedom and Necessity as Trinitarian Mystery and ‘Problematic’ 5

Jesus Christ (Jn. 17:24) that is so theologically problematic. If God has always
desired to be in union with us in Jesus Christ, has He not then always been
freely captivated by us in the way John of the Cross describes above? More
audaciously yet, do we not need to exist in order that God might be lovingly
(albeit freely) captivated by us in Christ? How can we conceive such a God? In
other words, what we have called the mystery of freedom and necessity is
Trinitarian in character, for if God has always loved us, it would seem
plausible that the free ‘self-captivation’ of God has an eternal basis in God as
Trinity. The tensions here are the bounds of the mystery of freedom and
necessity which defeat us. Herein lies the Trinitarian depths of this mystery,
for if God has an everlasting love for us in Christ and He is eternally Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit, then it would seem that God is God as Trinity only as
God for us in Christ.
This mystery of freedom and necessity is firstly an experience of revelation
but it can be conceptualized in terms of a question: ‘How can God as Trinity be
free in creation and redemption if in His everlasting love, His mad desire for
creation, He has eternally bound Himself to the world in Christ?’ By stating
the mystery as a ‘question’, however, we do not mean to imply that a particular
interpretation of the data of revelation leads us to a specific theological
‘problem’ with a determinate doctrinal ‘solution’. Rather, the question here
is, to adapt Martin Heidegger on philosophy, a theological path or way
forward into whose ‘total and original meaning’ we are called to enter. Our
speaking about God will correspond to the mystery of His love for us in Christ
by our remaining in conversation with the question and in being placed in
relationship to it, that is, attuned to it by it in our response.11 This question
need not rule out an intellectual aporia. We are not faced with an impassible
way preventing an illumination of the depths of the mystery, and so we will
speak in this work not of a ‘problem’ of divine freedom and necessity but of
what we will call a ‘problematic’. A problem, as Gabriel Marcel famously
argued, has certain defined dimensions. We lay siege to it and reduce it insofar
as it can be definitely ‘re-solved’ by the application of a specific technique
which we control and which anyone can apply to it and obtain the same
‘result’. A ‘mystery’, in contrast, is something which defies technique and
which involves us personally such that it can be thought only in a sphere
where the distinction between what is ‘in us’ and ‘before us’ no longer is
appropriate and has no ruling claim.12 By ‘problematic’ we understand an
intellectual mystery to which we can respond conceptually but which, in
contrast to a problem, defies the application of technique, for any mystery
makes a personal and spiritual claim on us. Unlike a problem, therefore, a
problematic has no ultimate (re)solution and any response to it, while by no
11
Heidegger 1956, 40–1, 66ff.
12
Marcel 1935, 169–70 [1949, 117–18] and see 1950–1, I, 211ff. [1951, I, 227ff.].

means necessarily ‘private’, simply clarifies for one the dimensions of the
mystery and drives us further into its depths. We shine, as it were, a light on
a forest track creating an opening that spills out at its edges into darkness,
allowing us to go deeper on the path of the question.
This book aims to respond to the problematic in two ways. Firstly, it
critically and constructively discusses the nature of the problematic and the
response it evokes in Sergii Bulgakov (1871–1944) (Part I: chs. 4–6), Karl
Barth (1886–1968) (Part II: chs. 7–8), and Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–88)
(Part III: chs. 9–11). Secondly, throughout our work, we shall constructively
respond to the problematic by drawing on select ideas from these conversation
partners to articulate our own tentative synthetic response in counterpoint
to their exegesis which will culminate in the Conclusion in an ‘unsystematic
systematic’ theology of divine freedom and necessity. As shall be clear in
chapters 2–3 of this Introduction, we frame the problematic and the terms
of any response ‘dialectically’ through a complex interweaving of three differ-
ent senses of ‘freedom’ and ‘necessity’ that exist in a creative tension from
which emerges what we mean by divine freedom.
What are the basic lines of the problematic of freedom and necessity that we
shall explore? On the one hand, Christian theology affirms that God is
absolutely free as an eternal trihypostatic movement of pure self-giving and
self-receiving love, Holy Trinity as a texture of divine desire, ‘who alone has
immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has ever seen
or can see’ (1 Tim. 6:16). This God, out of an everlasting love for us in Christ,
set us apart, chose, and called us through His grace (Gal. 1:15, Eph. 2:8–10) but
yet is in no way impelled to create and redeem the world in Him, and, indeed,
as some have claimed, might have been satisfied with His own life of love (cf.
Rom. 9:13ff.). On the other hand, Christian theology also affirms that this
same God, who is uncontainable (1 Kgs 8:27), out of everlasting humble love
becomes subject to the parameters of flesh and temporality through emptying
Himself and taking on the form of a slave (Phil. 2:5ff.). This same everlasting
love of God for His creation in Christ, self-giving, self-emptying, and self-
receiving, has neither beginning nor ending since God has eternally chosen the
eternal Son to be Jesus of Nazareth (1 Pet. 1:20), the ‘Lamb slain from the
foundation of the world’ (Rev. 13:8 [KJV]), leading us to the admittedly hard
conclusion that the created world seems inseparable from the Trinity. Put in
volitional terms, God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit out of His everlasting
love for creation has eternally chosen to be God for us in Christ. Christ,
through this eternal self-determination, has become part of God’s own self-
identity. Yet if there was no world, there could be no Christ, so there is a tension
or dialectic at work in this divine love for creation between God’s absolute
freedom and, in the incarnation, the necessity of the world for Him as God for
us in Jesus Christ. The meaning of ‘dialectic’, as we shall see, changes accord-
ing to the context of the respective thinker’s response to our problematic, so it

can be understood broadly as the interplay of two distinct but mutually
defining realities, roughly similar to Balthasar’s notion of ‘polarity’, or, as a
contradiction between mutually opposed realities, as in Bulgakov’s ‘anti-
nomism’ and Barth’s ‘dialectical theology’. The different senses of ‘freedom’
and ‘necessity’ will be outlined in chapters 2–3 (with a diagram at the end of ch. 3).
Why choose these three theologians? All three of these writers exhibit a
form of what we might call ‘anticipatory Christology’ in which God out of an
everlasting love for creation freely binds Himself to that creation absolutely
and eternally in the incarnate Son, Jesus Christ, with all that implies, including
sin and death. This form of Christology complicates the issue of divine
freedom, and consequently the doctrine of the Trinity. It gives the world in
relation to God a sort of external necessity by making God dependent on the
existence of the world, for, we seem to be compelled to say, quite simply, if
there was no world, there would be no Christ. Creation must exist if God has
freely determined that He will be God for us in Christ. But how can we say this
if God is free to love and not to love us in Christ? All three theologians, in
attempting to embody the necessary but free nature of the Incarnation,
presenting God’s relationship to creation in Christ as a sort of oxymoronic
‘free necessity’, are not without problems in their respective attempts to re-
imagine the doctrine of God in terms of the primacy of Christology. Our
triumvirate were forced to rethink the meaning of both divine freedom and
necessity, and it is here that we shall see some of their most creative theology.
However, we will argue, drawing on aspects of all three of our theologians and
especially Barth’s notion of eternal divine election, that while Christology
certainly intensifies the problematic of freedom and necessity in Trinitarian
theology, it may just provide a key to its reasonableness—though not a rational
explanation which dispenses with mystery. It is the articulation of a Christo-
logical ‘key’ to unlock a problematic (ironically) created by Christology in the
doctrine of God, which shall increasingly become the focus of our study,
culminating in the Conclusion.
Such a vision of the fabric of the doctrine of God as being, as it were,
intrinsically Christological is by no means ‘new’.13 Indeed, more generally,
some Patristic scholars now argue—albeit within the context of a broad some-
what territorial dismissal of systematic theology—that Patristic ‘Trinitarianism’
is so inseparable from ‘soteriology’ and ‘Christology’ that the categories should
be avoided or even jettisoned.14 What was unprecedented was that our writers
13
e.g. ‘Since he pre-existed as one who saves, it was necessary that what might be saved also
be created so that the one who saves might not be in vain [Cum enim praeexsisteret saluans,
oportebat et quod saluaretur fieri, uti non vacuum sit saluans]’ (Irenaeus, Contre les hérésies,
3.22.3 (SC 211, 438–9) and compare Luther: ‘He created us for this very purpose, to redeem and
sanctify us’ (Large Catechism, 64, 419 [Die Bekenntnisschriften, 36, 660]); see Jenson 1997, 72–3).
14
See Ayres 2004, 3–4, 2007a, 141–2, Behr, The Nicene Faith [=NF], 2ff., 2007 (responding to
Ayres 2004), 150–1 (Ayres’ response: 2007b, 166–71).

explored the notion that creation, cross, and Trinity were eternally bound up
together within the relatively recent discipline of systematic theology, where an
account of the Trinity, with Christology as a chapter of Trinitarian teaching,15
becomes foundational for an account of all reality.16 This makes them suspi-
cious of discussing the Trinity outside the relationship to creation God estab-
lishes in redemption in Christ, since God chooses to not be God without the
world He has created and redeemed.17 Moreover, incarnation and creation
always already presuppose man’s fall into sin and God’s reconciliation of
creation with Himself through the cross and resurrection. To speak of God as
Trinity, to see Him and know Him as an eternal movement of love, can only be
done, properly speaking, in light of God’s prior initiative in His self-revelation,
His seeing, knowing and loving of His broken world in Christ crucified. For a
Christian theologian, one cannot be properly ‘theocentric’ unless one is first
‘Christocentric’, for one cannot speak of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
(immanent Trinity) except in light of how He has first spoken of Himself in
Christ (economic Trinity). It is for this reason that they rejected the scholastic
tendency to treat the oneness of God (de Deo Uno) apart from and before God
as Trinity (de Deo Trino).18 All of our theologians, for example, drawing on
nineteenth-century kenoticism,19 adapt the language of ‘self-emptying’ for the
Trinitarian relations, thereby wedding revelation with God Himself. Jürgen
Moltmann puts this approach neatly: ‘The content of the doctrine of the Trinity
is the real cross of Christ Himself. The form of the crucified Christ is the
Trinity.’20 Therefore, to adapt an image from George Pattison, all three theolo-
gians only gaze upon the icon of the Trinity in their work by first casting an eye
to the icon of Christ beholding them. They cannot see God without seeing and
being seen by Christ.21 Such a kenotically reconceived ‘threefold God’, as
Barbara Hallensleben argues for Balthasar and Bulgakov (her words might
also be applied to Barth), is a ‘underivable free dynamism of love which is
able to express a type of self-movement of God’ subject neither to external
compulsion nor mutability.22
In the articulation of such intratrinitarian kenoticism, it is indisputable
that our writers were products of their age and were all drawing on
aspects of German Idealism, not just Hegel, as is often mentioned in
15
Rahner 2004, 120.
16
See R. Williams 2007c, 142, 149-n. 190 and 2004, 50.
17
See R. Williams, Sergii Bulgakov [=SB], 169 and compare 2007b, 80–1.
18
But contrast Sonderegger, 2015, xi–xxv, 7–9 (this volume arrived too late to take into
serious account).
19
See Law 2013, 36ff., Colyer 2007, Gavrilyuk 2005, and Gorodetzky 1938, esp. 156–74.
20
Moltmann 1995, 246 and see 207, 235ff., The Trinity and the Kingdom [=TK], 160 and
compare Jüngel 1983, 343ff., esp. 350, 382–7 and (the famous) 1972.
21
See Pattison 2005, 158–60, 165 (on the Rublev Trinity and Spas icons); see Ouspensky and
Lossky 1983, 198, 200–5 and Bunge 2007.
22
Hallensleben 1999, 35.

suspicious tones, but also Kant, Fichte, and Schelling. Indeed, some of the
distinctive terminology they use in their God-talk, such as ‘posited’ (gesetzt),
‘self-determination’ (Selbstbestimmung), ‘self-realization/actualization’ (Selbst-
verwirklichung), ‘self-differentiation/distinction’ (Selbstunterscheidung), ‘in/
for/with-itself ’ (an/für/bei-sich), and ‘primal decision’ (Urentscheidung), is
adapted by them from German Idealism, though often entirely transformed
in its meaning. Thus Bulgakov and Balthasar both wrote large works exam-
ining and critiquing Idealism and Romanticism,23 while some critics are now
acknowledging that Barth’s love of a little ‘Hegeling’24 in his theology points
to an unacknowledged engagement with the thought-forms of the Idealism
of Hegel and Schelling mediated through the work of the German Lutheran
theologian Isaak August Dorner (1809–84).25 This influence will be dis-
cussed at points in the text but due to the restrictions of space and the fact
that the fundamental trajectory of this work is constructive, such discussion
will necessarily be schematic. Despite the importance of this tradition for our
writers, we can no more legitimately reduce modern systematic theology to
just one of the allegedly heterodox ingredients of its ‘soup’ than we can, for
example, accurately sum up Augustine’s Trinitarian thought by the ‘Neoplat-
onic’ work of Plotinus or dismiss Tillich as simply ‘Heideggerean’. This
book, therefore, should not be taken as a historicist examination of the
afterlife of Idealism in modern systematic theology. Rather, it is concerned
with responding constructively to theological difficulties in our writers that
they inherited along with Idealism from the wider Christian tradition;
although Idealism was an important recent stop along this path. Moreover,
our work is a contribution to the mainstream tradition of systematic the-
ology and so it has not attempted to engage with the many important
analytic discussions of God and necessity produced in the last forty years.26
Nor do we argue that Bulgakov, Barth, and Balthasar directly influenced one
another’s thought; we are examining these writers as they shared a common
problematic. Their different responses will help us in the contemporary
rearticulation of the dialectic of divine freedom and necessity in Trinitarian
theology. Nevertheless, such historical ‘links’ between our writers do in fact
exist. The friendship of Barth with Balthasar and their mutual influence is
uncontroversial despite their famous debate concerning the analogia entis.27
23
Sergii Bulgakov, Die Tragödie der Philosophie (Darmstadt, 1927 [Russian–1993]) and Hans
Urs von Balthasar, Apokalypse der deutschen Seele (Salzburg, 1937–9).
24
‘I myself have a certain weakness for Hegel and am always fond of doing a bit of “Hegeling”.
As Christians we have the freedom to do this…I do it eclectically’ (K. Barth to W. Herrenbrück,
15 February 1952, cited at Busch 1976, 387).
25
See Dorner 1994 [1883] (cited at Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics [=CD], II/1, 330, 493) and
commentary at Bruce 2013.
26
e.g. Platinga 1974, Swinburne 1994, Rowe 2004, and Leftow 2013.
27
See Chapter 7.2.

Furthermore, there exists a growing critical literature on the interrelation of
Bulgakov and Balthasar, and, in particular, Balthasar’s critical appropriation of
Bulgakov’s intratrinitarian kenoticism.28 The historical connection, however,
between Barth and Bulgakov is less well known.
We learn from an amusing passage of a letter of Barth to his secretary
Charlotte von Kirschbaum (1899–1975)29 that Barth, then teaching at Bonn,
had met Bulgakov in September 1930 at a conference at the University of Bern.
Their mutual friend. the Orientalist Fritz Lieb (1892–1970),30 who later wrote
on Bulgakov, possibly served as the mediator31 and Bulgakov sends his
greetings to Barth via Lieb in a letter a month after their meeting.32 The
event mentioned was the second East–West theological conference from 6 to
12 September 1930 on the theme of the Epistle of the Ephesians. Barth
mentions a number of people who gave papers on the first day of the
proceedings, towards which he is quite scathing, saying he does not feel like
attending the rest of the conference. The only one who made an impression,
and that more on the strange side, was Bulgakov, wearing the traditional
priestly long hair, cassock, riassa, and cross, or in Barth’s words, ‘in the get-
up of a Russian priest, as he stands in a picture book, but speaking with more
considerable passion and not without a speculative verve’. Afterwards, Barth
went out to dinner with Bulgakov, Lieb, and his brother-in-law Karl (‘Kari’)
Lindt and got further ‘peculiar insights’ on the divine Sophia and other
Russian Theologoumena.33 It appears that Barth then became curious about
Russian theology and read a 1925 German Reader of Russian thought which
included a selection from Bulgakov’s early sophiological dogmatica minora,
Svet Nevechernii (Unfading Light) (1917).34 He is, though not mentioning
Bulgakov directly, scathing about Russian religious philosophy and theology,
which he says ‘obliterat[e] the frontiers of philosophy and theology, of reason
and revelation, of Scripture, tradition and direct illumination, of spirit and
nature, of pistis and sophia (but also the distinction between the economic
Trinity and the immanent Trinity)’.35
It is interesting to note, since Barth accuses Russian thought, and it is
reasonable to think he was aiming his comments at Bulgakov, of blurring
the lines between the immanent and economic Trinity, that the excerpt of
28
See Chapter 9.1.
29
‘73. Barth in Bern to von Kirschbaum in Munich, 7.9.1930’ in Barth-von Kirschbaum
Briefwechsel 1925–1935 (Karl Barth Gesamtausgabe V.45), 146–51.
30 31
See Lieb 1962. Lieb 1934, 1965.
32
Bulgakov sends greetings via Lieb to ‘Prof. K. Schmidt and K. Barth’ (‘S. N. Bulgakov.
Pis’ma k Fritsu Libu’ [c.Oct. 1930] (IIRM, 2001/2002), #7, 385).
33
‘73. Barth in Bern to von Kirschbaum in Munich, 7.9.1930’, 149.
34
See ‘Sergej Bulgakow—Kosmodizee’, 195–245=Svet Nevechernii [=SN], 165–211 [Unfading
Light [=UL], 181–239]) at Barth CD, I/1, 478–89, 481.
35
ibid., 481; He may also have had in mind Georges Florovsky (see Baker 2015, 303–9).

Bulgakov in the said Reader includes his early discussion of God as both the
Absolute and the Absolute-Relative (vis-à-vis creation), which Bulgakov
would sixteen years later develop in his Christological treatise Agnets Bozhii
(1933). This passage has great resonance with Barth’s later doctrine of the
Trinity. Indeed, Georges Florovsky (1893–1979), who knew both men well,
observed the connection as early as 1968 and precisely because he thought
both men risked collapsing God and creation in their theologies in their
assertion that the Son of God as a member of the Trinity is already the
Lamb of God sent from eternity.36 Following the meeting mentioned above,
Bulgakov, likewise, appears to have developed an interest in Barth’s work,37
but it is unclear, unlike say Nicholas Berdyaev (1874–1948)38 and Florovsky,39
whether his knowledge of Barth ever went beyond ‘Barthianism’, that is, the
slight caricature of dialectical theology current in Orthodox circles of the
day.40 Our work, therefore, aims, amongst other things, to tease out some of
the profound parallels of these two thinkers noted by Florovsky who, with
Balthasar, stand as a sort of triumvirate over modern systematic theology in
Orthodoxy, Protestantism, and Roman Catholicism.
This book, therefore, explores these three writers because they each had a
similar theological problematic, concerning freedom and necessity, with quite
different responses. Moreover, it is hoped that through the analysis, compari-
son, and critique of the thought of each and the attempt to synthesize aspects
of their thought, contemporary theology might be aided in its construction
of a doctrine of the Trinity that coherently weaves Christology into its
fundamental fabric.
36
Florovsky, ‘Renewal’ (1968), 5–6 (see Baker 2015, 315–16) and compare Meyendorff
1978, 170.
37
See ‘S. N. Bulgakov. Pis’ma k Fritsu Libu’ [27 May 1931] (IIRM, 2001/2002), #13, 401.
38
See Berdyaev 1929, 11–25 and ‘N.A. Berdiaev. Pis’ma k Fritsu Libu (1926–1948)’ (IIRM,
2002), #6, 261–2, #8, 274–6, #9, 282, #17, 296, #30, 327–8 (see also Bambauer 2002 and Busch
1976, 219).
39
See Busch 1976, 215, Peterson 1993, Arjakovsky 2002, 387, Payne 2004, and Baker 2015.
40
Bulgakov, Sophia, the Wisdom of God [=SWG] [1937], 13; Rubin 2010, n. 22, 68 wrongly
identifies Bulgakov as the author of a 1934 anonymous article in Put’ which discusses Barth (see
Arjakovsky 2002, 310, 400, 662, 668–9, and 719).
Divine Freedom—A Dialectical Approach

From Freedom to Necessity—The Shape
of a ‘Problematic’ (A)
What do we mean when we speak of ‘freedom’ and ‘necessity’? These terms

have been used throughout theological and philosophical history in a bewil-
dering number of different ways. A history of the dialectic of freedom and
necessity in Christian theology is beyond the scope of this work and would
depart from its systematic theological remit, so in this chapter we shall explore
selected conceptual aspects of the problematic in the history of theology and
philosophy which are relevant to this work.
At least three respective forms of ‘freedom’ and ‘necessity’ will recur
throughout our analysis in the case of both the infinite and the finite, although
differing according to each case.1 What follows outlines what is meant by each
of these forms. When applied to the infinite, these forms of freedom and
necessity are different conceptual aspects of what we shall call Absolute
Freedom,2 by which is meant the eternal divine movement of love which is
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, both in Himself (immanent) and for the world
(economic). In describing these forms as ‘conceptual aspects’ of Absolute
Freedom we wish to emphasize their heuristic status (they are in no way to
be taken as eternal psychospiritual powers or potencies in the manner of
Schelling) as intellectual tools aiding us in dimly discerning a mystery that is
ultimately beyond both affirmations and negations.
To begin, freedom is to have a free will or the power to act from within
oneself 3 insofar as one has power over oneself or is self-determining, causa sui.4
1
Hereafter, F[reedom]1, F2, and F3 and N[ecessity]1, N2 and N3. See the diagram at the end
of ch. 3 summarizing our scheme.
2
Here compare Couenhoven 2012 (in Barth), McCormack 2010b, 64 and 2013, 123–4, and
Bruce 2013, ch. 5.
3
i.e. autexousia, autexousion from adj. autexousios.
4
Balthasar, Theo-Drama [=TD], II, 213–15 [Theodramatik [=ThD], II.1, 192–4] and
Telfer 1957.
The Shape of a ‘Problematic’ (A) 13

If one has such an internal capacity in the soul, then one can say that the actions
that flow from such a free will depend upon oneself or are in our power.5
Moreover, we must deliberate about those things that are in our power and can
be done.6 However, such deliberation presupposes that we can choose between
at least two possible acts (‘a’ or ‘b’) that are contingent, which is to say that we
can just as well do ‘a’ as we can do its opposite, ‘b.’7 Freedom in this sense,
therefore, has a direct relation to rationality, for a rational being leads his nature
rather than is led by it, as is the case with irrational beings.8 As Diadochus of
Photiki (400–c.486 AD) puts it: ‘Free will is the power of a deiform [logikes:
rational] soul to direct itself by deliberate choice towards whatever it decides.’9
This sort of freedom prima facie applies absolutely to God, who, although He
does not deliberate, as this implies ignorance,10 is pre-eminently free or all-
powerful (pantexousios)11 because He has His Being completely from Himself
(i.e. aseity) where will and nature are one. It is not, however, self-evident that
human beings have this form of freedom, at least not absolutely. Besides being
subject in their faculty of will to temporality and passion,12 they are always
relative to others on whom they depend in their willing for certain choices and
circumstances and so they must deliberate, since their will is not their essence. It
could be argued, however, that one can still posit this form of freedom of
humanity insofar as the will, through the grace and kenosis of God in creation
and redemption, is made inviolable.13 It is not surprising, therefore, that we see
Basil the Great (329–79) and Maximus the Confessor (580–662) holding that
the autexousia is the imago dei insofar as man is potentially God because he is
gifted with the grace of self-determination.14 Thus, freedom in its purest sense as
unencumbered self-determination would seem to imply omnipotence but, as we
shall see, it can actually be conceptualized diversely.
If freedom, as we have described it, can be summarized in the concept of
‘self-will’, then this may be found in two senses which are our first two forms of
freedom: (F1) without ratio and (F2) with ratio. F1 or the exertion of self-will
lacking any ground or reason (ratio) is ‘negative’ insofar as a will that has no
5
John of Damascus, The Orthodox Faith [=OF], 2.26, 257 (FC 37) [PTS 12; 40, 97–8]; on (in)
voluntary acts, see Nicomachea, 3.1.1109b 30ff.
6 7
ibid., 3.2.1112a 20ff. Damascene, OF, 2.26, 257 (FC 37) [PTS 12; 40, 97–8].
8
ibid., 2.27, 258 (FC 37) [PTS 12; 41, 98–9].
9
Diadochos of Photiki, ‘On Spiritual Knowledge’, 5, SC 5, 5, 86 (The Philokalia, 1:254) and
see Maximus the Confessor, Disputation with Pyrrhus, 23 and 25, 10–12 [Disput s Pirrom,
294A–C, 154–7]; 55, 22–3 (referencing Diadochos) [ibid., 301C, 168–9]; 61, 24–5 [ibid., 304B–D,
170–1]; and 101, 35 [ibid., 312D–313A, 180–3].
10
Damascene, OF, 2.22, 250 (FC 37) [PTS 12; 36.95–9, 91] and Maximus, Disputation, 25,
11–14 [Disput s Pirrom, 294B–295A, 154–7] and 87, 31–2 [ibid., 308C–309B, 176–7].
11
See Adamantius, Rec. Fid., III.9.128, 118–19 [PG 837E/GCS 4, 128, l.6–9].
12
Maximus, Disputation, 139, 46 [Disput s Pirrom, 325A, 199–200].
13
See Lossky 2001, 73.
14
Basil of Caesarea, ‘Homily on Psalm 48’, 8, 324–5 (FC 46) [PG 29b.449B–C] and Maximus,
Disputation, 61, 25 [Disput s Pirrom, 304C–D, 170–1].

need of anything but its own pure self-assertion is defined by its lack of
constraints. Such freedom from and over oneself, often described as power,
allows one to say that one need not have acted in a determinate fashion. Yet F1
has sometimes been used to define the ‘shape’ of God as such, as, for example,
can be seen in the form of radical divine monarchy found in Vladimir Solov’ev
(1853–1900).15
A G/god characterized by groundless freedom is often found within radical
monism, so that in Plotinus (205–70), who wrote perhaps the first treatise in
the West on divine freedom and necessity,16 the One, which is supremely self-
sufficient in itself,17 the best and the simplest, is also most free.18 Being most
free, the One is a substanceless willing of itself beyond alterity but the world still
inevitably flows out of it in an eternal non-temporal ‘radiation [perilampsis]’.19
However, such thinking also can be found in Christianity. Arius (c.280–336)
held that God was an Ingenerate ‘monad and principle of all things’ who is
‘supremely alone without beginning’20 and since He ‘exists in Himself ’, he is
inexpressible21 even to the Son who, as the subsequent generate dyad, neither
shares in a part of God nor, it seems, participates in the same substance.22
Despite this apophaticism, God is said to be ‘the source of all things’ and ‘the
cause of all things’ by his will.23 By the same will, God as the Unbegotten
(agennetos) and Unoriginate (agenetos) generates/begets the Son to be not out
of a ‘substrate’ over against Him but out of nothing (ex ouk onton estin)24
before ‘aeonian times’ as ‘a perfect creature [ktisma] of God, but not as one of
the creatures, an offspring [gennema], but not as one of the offsprings’.25 The
Son, therefore, has a beginning (‘there was once/a time when He was not’),26
an ‘interval’ separating him from the Father before which he was not begotten
or created,27 is possibly mutable,28 and is an instrument made by God to create
15
See ch. 4.
16
Plotinus, Enneads [=enn.], VI.8, Vol. 7, 221–97 (‘On Free Will and the Will of the One’).
17
Plotinus, enn., 7: VI.9.6, 325; cf. Proclus, Elements, 10, 12–13.
18 19
Plotinus, enn., 7: VI.8.7, 20, 246–51, 292–5. enn., 5: V.1.6.28, 30–1.
20
Urkunden zur Geschichte des Arianischen Streites 318–328 [=Urk.] (Athanasius Werke,
3.1), 6.4, 8, 12–13, 13 [Behr, NF, 136–7] and see Urk., 1.4–5, 2–3.
21
Thalia l.35, Athanasius, De Synodis, 15 [Behr, NF, 140–1 and see NPNF 4, 457–8,
R. Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition [=AHT], 101–3].
22
Thalia vi, Athanasius, Against the Arians [=AA], 1.6.1–3, ll.1–6, 115 (Werke, I.1.2) [NPNF
4, 309/R. Williams, AHT, 101].
23
Urk., 6.4, 7–8, 13 [Behr, NF, 136].
24
Urk., 1.4–5, 1–2, 5, 3 [Behr, NF, 139] and Thalia ii, Athanasius, AA, 1.5.3–4, ll.12–15, 114
[R. Williams, AHT, 100]; cf. Hanson 1985.
25
Urk., 6.2–3, 9–10, 12 [Behr, NF, 136] (gennetos and genetos are synonymous: Urk., 1.4–5,
2–4, 3 [Behr, NF 139]).
26
Urk., 4b.7, 21, 12, 19, 7–8; 12.3, 19; 14.10, 8, 15, 4–5, 27, 32, 21–3; etc.
27
Urk., 14, 18, 22–6, 22–3.
28
Thalia v, Athanasius, AA, 1.5.8, ll.28–34, 114–15 [R. Williams, AHT, 100] and see 1.35–6,
144–6 [NPNF, 326–7] (cf. Urk., 4b.8–10, 8 and 14, 21ff., 23ff.) but see Urk., 6.2, 9, 12; cf.
R. Williams, AHT, 113–15.

the world (and humanity, in particular).29 Arius’ divine voluntarism was most
likely directed at Origen (185–254), via the critique of Methodius of Olympus
(d. c.311) in his Xeno: de creatis,30 who argued that in order for God to be called
‘almighty’ he needed an eternal creation over which he could exercise His
eternal power,31 which risked creating a necessary relation and even continuity
between God and the world.32
However, F1, which is what is commonly meant by ‘omnipotence’, can be
seen in some forms of orthodox theology, especially when it wishes to
emphasize freedom as an arbitrary assertion of power lacking any rational
ground except that the actor chose to act. Thus, for example, in Duns Scotus
(c.1265–1308), we see that both divine and human wills are wholly uncoer-
cible.33 The will as such has ‘superabundant sufficiency’ in its self-determination
insofar as its actions have an ‘indeterminacy of surpassing perfection’34 so that
what it wills need not be because the will is always already contingent.35 The
will’s action has no other ground than itself.36 One can give no other reason
why the will causes any action except that it wills: ‘There is no other cause to
be found except that the will is will.’37 Being ‘free’ is more essential to the will
than even its direction in wanting, seeking, and desiring an object, and thus the
will is completely groundless or lacking in a ratio.38 Unsurprisingly, God, for
Duns Scotus, is absolutely free and everything He does and effects in creation
and redemption through His will, including the moral law itself,39 has—without
any creaturely qualifications—the nature of the accidental and so is wholly
unnecessary, resting on a groundless decision.40 Divine freedom as F1 is a
limit or boundary concept (Grenzbegriff) distinguishing God from the world
insofar as it is defined by its being uncompelled, lacking in constraints, and so
only free because it is free not to have acted in a determinate fashion. Such a
blind voluntarist understanding of radical freedom is literally ‘arbitrary’ insofar
as it is a ‘blind, purely actual discharge of energy’.41 However, it can far too easily
be divorced from love, which is itself a reason for an act of will.
29
Thalia ll.5–6, [Behr, NF, 140] De Synodis, 15, Thalia iii, Athanasius, AA, 1.5.4–5, ll.15–18,
114 [R. Williams, AHT, 100] and Urk., 4b.9–10, 8.
30
Photius, Bibliothèque, 5: cod. 235 [PG 103.301b–304b], 107–16 [‘On Things Created’,
176–82].
31
Origen, First Principles, 1.2.10, 23–6 [SC 252, 132–9, ll.303–95].
32 33
See Patterson 1982 and NF, 43–6. Duns Scotus 1997, Ord. 4. d.29, 151–2.
34 35
ibid., In metaph. 9, q.15, 140–1. ibid., In metaph. 9, q.15, 148.
36
‘Nothing other than the will is the complete cause of volition in the will’ (Duns Scotus,
Op. Ox. [=Ord.] 2, d. 24, q.un., n. 22 as cited in Pieper 1960, 184 and see 140–2).
37 38
Duns Scotus 1997, In metaph. 9, q.15, 139–40. Pieper 1960, 142.
39
See Duns Scotus 1997, Ord. 4. d.46, 186ff. and T. Williams 1997 (but in contrast: Vos et al.
2003, 58–64).
40
See Duns Scotus 1987, Op. Ox. 1, d. 2, q.1, a.2, 52–6 and T. Williams 1998.
41
Pieper 1960, 142.

By contrast, F2 is self-will that acknowledges a ground or ratio to its willing.
All humans have free will, as the crown of their rational nature, which is good,
as it is from God, and this free will must will its end, which is the good of its
nature. The end of human nature is to glorify Him and in glorifying Him
to love and know Him by whom they were created and enjoy Him forever,42
so this is the basis of all voluntary acts. F2 is deeply intuitive because it assumes
that there always exists some reason, love, or goodness, which is the cause
of an action.43
In the case of God, His end is for Him to love and take joy in Himself as
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and this is accomplished through the Father’s
begetting of the Son and spiration of His Spirit and the Son and Spirit’s
affirmation of the same. Against the F1 of the One/God seen in some
Neoplatonism, the Christian tradition sees the freedom of God as being
expressed in the generation by the Father, as the monarchos of the Trinity,44
of the Son, and the Spirit. The Son and then the Spirit, in turn, obediently and
freely accept or consent to their generation and with it their divinity. In this
fashion, they affirmatively constitute the Father as the Father God and divine
source.45 This fully reciprocal or mutual movement of divine self-generation
and self-affirmation is the ‘process’ by which God becomes fully united as a
communion of divine persons living in and through one another. God, in
short, constitutes Himself as a reality wholly grounded in love (F2) through an
eternal reciprocal trialogue or circulation: the monad from the beginning
being stirred into movement as the dyad, which, having rested in the triad,
eternally returns again to its source.46 Thus, Athanasius (c.299–373), albeit
focusing on the dyad, writes that the Son is willed (thelestho) and loved
(phileistho) by the Father and by the same will the Son ‘loves (agapai), wills
(thelei), and honours (timai)’ His Father so that there is one will ‘from the
Father in the Son, so that here too we may consider the Son in the Father and
the Father in the Son’.47 Indeed, so intimate and loving is the bond of the
42
See Westminster Catechism, Q.1, 676 (Comp. Irenaeus, Contre les hérésies, 4.17–18 (SC
100, 574–615)) and Geneva Catechism, Q1–2, 9; compare Catechism of Christian Doctrine
(‘Penny Catechism’), 1, 3.
43
See Davidson 1963.
44
Here see Lossky 1974, 71–96 and 1976, 55–63 and John Zizioulas, Being as Communion
[=BC], 40ff., Communion and Otherness [=CO], 34–6, 113–54, 2010, 22–4, 41–5 (but see
Loudovikos 2011, 691–2 and 2013, 269–70), the Vatican PCPCU statement: ‘Greek and Latin
Traditions Regarding the Procession of the Spirit’ (1997) (with response at Zizioulas 2010, 41–5)
and Pannenberg 2007, 81–2 (where he argues that the mutuality of the Trinity is in the service of
the monarchy of the Father).
45
See Loudovikos 2011, 691, 2013, 269–71 and Pannenberg, Systematic Theology [=SysTh], 1:
273, 280, 311–13, 320, 324–5, 329, 2007, 81ff. and compare Balthasar, Theo-Logic [=TL], III,
236–7 and Bulgakov, Agnets Bozhii [=AB], 121–2 [Lamb of God [=LG], 98–9].
46
See Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 29.2, 70 [PG 36/SC 250, 76B, ll.13–18].
47
Athanasius, AA, 3.66.3–4, ll.8–13, 379 (Werke, I.1.3) [NPNF, 430 revd] (See Loudovikos
2011, 691 and 2013, 269–71).

Father and the Son that Athanasius describes the Son as the living internal will
(boule) of the Father by which everything external came to be created.48
Ideally, however, divine generation is characterized by both F2 and F1, as we
shall see later in Bulgakov and Balthasar, insofar as the foundation of the
divine life is the ground of mutual love, but this love is a groundless free gift,
being both the Urgrund and the Ungrund.49 The will in divine generation is of
one essence with its nature, which is wholly good, so we cannot speak of a will
apart from the goodness of the nature—as if God could not will His own
goodness, could not love Himself—but this does not mean that God is not
good in accordance with His will. Indeed, the principal object of the divine
will, as Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) held, is His essence50 and this, being His
own goodness and Being, He wills necessarily.51 Therefore, God, in a sense,
necessarily but freely wills His own goodness; He necessarily but freely loves
Himself, but goodness is the assumption behind the willing.
Like F1, F2 can be applied to God’s relationship to the world. We are told
famously in the Timaeus of Plato (c.427–348 BC) that the world came into
being through ‘a mixture and combination of necessity and intelligence’,52 where
intelligence, which is identified with the Good,53 persuaded necessity ‘to bring
about the best result’.54 Earlier in the Timaeus, the same reality is described
mythically by speaking of a demiurge who embodies and imitates in becoming
intelligence or the Good in itself/Being,55 which is, arguably, a sort of Platonic
‘God’.56 The demiurge is the first and ‘best of causes’ of the good and beautiful
cosmos that flows out of him.57 Being perfectly good, this ‘God’ had no jealousy
in him and ‘willed [eboulethe] all things to be as like himself as possible.’58
But once again, as we saw earlier with F1, there are Christian parallels to the
application in this context of F2. God is ‘full beyond all fullness’ and He
brought creatures into being ‘not because He had need of anything’ but instead
He desired that they should participate in Him and that He ‘might rejoice in
His works through seeing them joyful’.59 But God’s love and joy for His
creatures cannot be separated from His own love and joy as Trinity, so we
must say that He loves and takes joy in Himself in all things.60 Indeed, in God,
48
Athanasius, AA, 3.63–5, 376–9 [NPNF, 428–9] and 2.2.5, l.25, 31.5, l.19, 179, 208 [Anato-
lios 2004, 112, 126]; see Widdicombe 2004, 159–222.
49
F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom, 86–91 [SW,
VII: 406–9].
50
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles [=SG], 1.74, 163–4; cf. 1.72–3, 159–62.
51
See Summa Theologicae [=ST], 1.19.3co, 10co, SG, 1.80, 173–4 and De veritate [=De Ver.],
Vol. 3: 23.4co, 110–1.
52 53
Plato, Timaeus, 48a, 66. ibid., 30b, 42.
54
ibid., 48a, 66; see Zizioulas, BC, 29–30, CO, 16, 104 and 250ff., and 2012, 193–4.
55 56
Following Numenius, 25, 24–7. See Alcinous, Didaskalikos, 9–10, 16–17.
57 58
Plato, Timaeus, 29a, 41. ibid., 29e, 42 (revd).
59
Maximus, 400 Chapters on Love, 3.46, PG 90.1029C (Philokalia, 2:90).
60
Meister Eckhart, Serm. 56, 142–3.

unlike in creatures where the acts of understanding and will are not their Being
but accidental, there is but one simple act of intelligence and one simple act of
will, so God ‘by understanding his essence . . . understands all things, and by
willing his goodness, . . . wills whatsoever he wills’.61 Thus, as we shall see with
Balthasar, the procession of creation is founded on the divine processions62
insofar as God wills things other than Himself in willing Himself—creatures—
since their end is His goodness.63 The predominant Christian tradition asserts
that He does not necessarily will these created things, because He would attain
His goodness regardless of their creation. God naturally wills, desires, and
loves Himself but in regard to things not Himself, which do not affect this
desiring, loving, and willing, the will of God is not determined to one course or
is underdetermined.64 The divine will is perfectly free, having no necessary
relation to any particular created end, and so possesses indifference65 to any
particular possibility of creation.66 Given divine absolute power (potentia
absoluta), there are many more possibilities available to God than the
determinate execution of power ultimately commanded by Him (potentia
ordinata).67 This is a key distinction we shall later see Barth critically building
on and being rejected (as it is identified with nominalism) by Bulgakov and
Balthasar. In short, God would be God without willing the world, so His willing
of it is voluntary, not natural, although certainly not contrary to His nature.68
Yet creation is not only freely willed to be out of love by God but freely sustained
by Him in love. Following John of Damascus (670–750), we speak of providence
(pronoia) which is the good will of God as Creator manifested in his actions
towards it as Provider in guiding things through to their appointed end.69 The
choice of all actions to be done—good and bad—lies with us. However, their
accomplishment depends on the absence or presence of divine co-operation
with us through God’s one providential will which has two aspects—approval
(kat’ eudokian) and permission (kata sygchoresin)70—that are described as two
divine ‘wills’.71
There also exists, however, F3, which includes ‘necessity’ within it as an
element of dependence, neediness, vulnerability, or the freedom to be wound-
ed by love, a divine-human nexus of desire.72 The etymological connection
of ‘necessity’ and ‘need’ (which assumes ‘dependence’) is clearer in German
61
Aquinas, De Potentia [=De Pot.], Vol. 3: 9.9co., 156 and see SG, 1.75, 164–5.
62
I, Commentary on Sentences [=Sent.], d.10, q.1, a.1co and see ST, 1.34.1.3ad and De Pot.,
1:2.3.6ad, 62.
63 64
ST, 1.19.3co. ibid., 1.41.2.3ad.
65 66
De Pot., 1: 1.6.7ad, 37 and see SG, 1.82, 176–9. ST, 1.19.3 and 1.25.5.
67
ibid., 1.25.5; cf. Bruce 2013, chs. 1–2, Oakley 2002, Moonan 1994, Courtenay 1990.
68 69
ST, 1.19.3.3ad. Damascene, OF, 2.29, 260 (FC 37) [PTS 12; 43, 100].
70
ibid., 2.29, 261 (FC 37) [PTS 12; 43, 101–2].
71
ibid., 2.29, 263 (FC 37) [PTS 12; 43.71–2, 102]; see Bouteneff 2006 and Louth 2002, 140–4.
72
See John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle, 31–2, 595–601 [Cántico espiritual, 2: 184–93].

where Notwendigkeit has this dual sense deriving from Not. F3 assumes a form
of self-limitation, a curbing of F1–2, by freely entering into relation and even
putting itself in need to another. If F1–2 involves some form of an exertion of
will, then F3 involves the sacrifice of the will, which is to say that freedom in
this sense is self-assertion through self-giving. With the formulation of F3 our
work builds on the fundamental quasi-Barthian insight of Paul Fiddes that
‘God freely chooses to be in need’,73 although this idea needs greater clarifi-
cation. Yet even if we say that F3 is the curbing of F1–2, it also must be seen as
the culmination or even synthesis of the two basic forms of freedom. One
cannot freely give oneself away unless one has an ungrounded power to do so
if and when one wishes (F1). But such a power is motivated by love (F2)
insofar as one has the will to sacrifice oneself (F3). Thus F3 is both the kenosis
of F1–2 and their ultimate fulfilment and flowering.
F3 is prima facie creaturely freedom, since as a creature one cannot simply
assert oneself because one needs a web of relationships to others (persons,
places, and things) in order to exercise one’s self-will. Choices only exist in a
world where I’s, as it were, bump up against one another. Creaturely freedom,
in short, presupposes something which is not the self—whether it is called
impersonally, a ‘Not-I’,74 or, more personally, a ‘Thou’,75 which assumes, to
adapt Boris Pasternak (1890–1960), ‘the two basic ideals of modern man . . .
the idea of free personality and the idea of life as sacrifice’.76 Furthermore, in
being a free being, one not only operates within a specific context influencing
one’s character and ultimately the sorts of choices that one makes, but one
becomes oneself in relation to others. The ‘I’ is always constituted, as Bulgakov
realized, by the ‘you’ which is another I, a ‘co-I’ or, more intimately, a ‘Thou’.77
This is a point which is central to much modern Russian thought, especially
Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), which is that freedom is not constrained by
otherness but in fact is the result of it insofar as I become myself only through
revealing myself for, through, and with the help of another.78
But even if our freedom is always in some sense dependent, we can still
choose between possibilities (F1–2). The question becomes whether in the act
of choice we can acknowledge our dependence on others in that choice and
appropriate this dependence by deepening our loving need for the Other. The
Other’s deepest desires become my desire; the Other’s good becomes my good;
the Other’s suffering becomes my suffering and determines the shape of my
73
Fiddes 2001a, 181 and see 2000a, 210–15, SWKG, 148, 292, 386–7, and The Creative
Suffering of God [=CSG], 63–71; compare Moltmann, TK, 58 and contrast LaCugna 1991, 355.
74
See Fichte 1994, 3ff., 40ff.
75
See Feuerbach 1997, 56ff., 76ff. (but later Ebner, Buber, Rosenzweig, Brunner etc.);
compare Pavel Florensky, Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny [=S] [1914], 438–40 [Pillar and Ground of
the Truth [=PGT], 314–15].
76
Pasternak 1997, 10. 77
Bulgakov, ‘Glavy o Troichnosti’ [=G], (1928), 1: 35.
78
Bakhtin 1984, 287.

being. I am because I pour out my Being for the Other (amo ergo sum) by
living with, through, and in him (perichoresis, circumincessio).79 This vision
of freedom through bearing one another’s burdens, substituting one for
the other, exchanging love, was what Charles Williams (1886–1945) called
‘co-inherence’.80 Williams understood it to be both a ‘natural fact’ and a
‘supernatural truth’ that was ‘one of the open secrets of the saints’.81 F3 is,
in contrast to F1, wholly positive. It is, to use an old distinction, not freedom
from but freedom for82 because it emphasizes the capacity of the person to give
to another not despite but because of their internal and external constraints
and (even) compulsion, which they appropriate and make their own. F3,
which we might call ‘dependent freedom’, is the free will to be in need, to
freely love my brother, to depend upon him so that his life is a portion of my
life (‘our brother is our life’)83 even if it requires my death. Thus F3 might be
called Christoform freedom, for when we love in this way, we are arguably not
only reflecting God as Trinity in whose perfect image, Christ Jesus,84 we were
formed, but attaining His perfect likeness by being subject to God.85
But can we apply F3 to God? It would seem not if God is a God who by
definition cannot be in need. However, this book will attempt to establish,
following our writers, that God’s eternal free perichoretic life of love,86 where
each hypostasis wholly participates in the other, cleaves to the other for its
life, lives one in the other, can rightfully be described as a life where each of the
divine hypostases needs the Other. It is a life where each divine person subsists
by being fully and freely dependent on the other while yet remaining totally
itself. Such a free eternal life in dependence is the joyful way of obedience
and even can be described, without impugning the divine coequalness, as the
voluntary subordination through the Spirit of the Son to the Father where
the Son ‘co-inheres obediently and filially in the Father, as the Father authori-
tatively and paternally co-inheres in him’.87 F3 can thus be seen to apply to the
internal life of the Trinity.
Furthermore, we will explore the possibility that Trinitarian co-inherence
can be reinterpreted kenotically, as in our writers, and then applied to
the divine economy. We shall argue that the Father God as the Lord of the
79
See R. Williams 2008, 36.
80
See C. Williams 2000, 94 following Prestige 1969, 282–301 for perichoresis.
81 82
C. Williams 1939, 69, 236. R. Williams 2008, 39.
83
S. Sakharov 1991, 371; compare Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Α, Anthony the Great, 9, 3
[PG 65.77B].
84
See Irenaeus, Apostolic Preaching, 22, 53–4.
85
See Diadochos, ‘Spiritual Knowledge’, 4, SC 5, 4, 86 (Philokalia, 1:253).
86
See Damascene, OF, 1.8, 186–7 (FC 37) [PTS 12; 8.250–65, 29], Ps-Cyril of Alexandria,
De Sacrosanto Trinitate, 10, PG 77.1144B, Athanasius, AA, 3.3, 309 [NPNF, 395], Gregory of
Nazianzus, Or. 31.14, 127–8 [SC 250, 149A, 302–5] and Augustine, De Trin. (CCSL 50)
6.8.9.11–14, 6.10.12.54–6 [Trinity, 211, 214]; see Harrison 1991 and Otto 2001.
87
C. Williams 1939, 39–40 (discussing Origen).

Universe, long suffering, of great compassion and filled with pity, as Origen
observed, is not simply impassibile, but can and is in His impassibility
voluntarily affected by the passion of love for us.88 The Father God is freely
sympathetic for His creation as a man is for His son, and so gives us, through
His Spirit, His only Son, who empties Himself in creation and redemption and
becomes dependent in His freedom on the world. In the love of the Trinity,
adapting Eberhard Jüngel, we see free self-relatedness that begins with self-
lessness understood as the heightening and expanding of the self by a ‘pure
overflow, overflowing being for the sake of another and only then for the sake
of itself ’.89
If dependent freedom (F3) includes a sense of ‘need’ or ‘necessity’ within it,
then we must now turn to a delineation of the different senses of ‘necessity’
and their interrelationship to the forms of ‘freedom’ just outlined.
88
Origen, In Ezech. Hom. 6.6.3, 92–3 [SC 352, 228–31, ll.28–52]; for commentary, see Ware
2016, 229–32.
89
Jüngel 1983, 369 and see 222ff., 372, 385 (Compare ibid., 314ff. and Moltmann, TK, 57ff.).
Divine Freedom—A Dialectical Approach

From Necessity to Freedom—The Shape
of a ‘Problematic’ (B)
With our exploration of the diverse forms of freedom in the last chapter, we
discovered that at least one form (F3) implied ‘necessity.’ However, it shall
be argued that all the forms of freedom we detailed have their respective ‘poles’
in forms of necessity.
The first to be mentioned is the concept of necessity, which can be named
N1, understood as external compulsion, given constraint of power, in contra-
distinction to N2, which is internal or natural compulsion, given the constraints
of one’s nature. Besides N1 and N2, whose poles are F1 and F2, freedom as
self-will with and without a ratio or ground, we have N3, which is what we
shall call ‘free dependence’, in contrast to F3, which is ‘dependent freedom’.
Building on what was said at the outset, these different senses of freedom
and necessity are meant (a) to summarize the different conceptual aspects of
uncreated and created freedom and necessity used throughout history; and (b)
to evoke the divine life of love-desire or Absolute Freedom which includes
within it, and even can be said to be generated by, the perfect tension of F1–3
and N1–3.
All Being in its creativity realizes itself, is free, by a tension between
moments of freedom and necessity, moments, that is, of a subject freely but
necessarily reaching out and encountering an Other who defines it as itself,
acts on it as a necessity. A ‘perfect tension’, as I define it, is one in which all the
elements of the immanent-transcendent divine process which is Freedom—
involving both moments of what we call freedom and moments of what we call
necessity—exist within an eternal and completely fulfilled synthesis. It is,
therefore, an identity. In this synthesis there is no need to look outside itself
for any element to complete itself as itself. All the elements live in and through
one another but yet remain distinct even as they are one in the divine identity.
This does not rule out, however, God’s free self-determination to become what
He always eternally is as Holy Trinity, a perfect tension of the hypostases, in
The Shape of a ‘Problematic’ (B) 23

history in Jesus Christ. Such a decision is contingent and might not have been
taken, and God would still be who He is if He had not so decided. Being and
Becoming in God coincide and Being is merely proved to be what it already
always is in its becoming in history.
Such perfect tension in the creative realization of Being of the uncreated
differs from the ‘imperfect’ creative tension of the created. Here any creature
to realize itself also, like the uncreated, must live through and by another, but,
in contrast to the divine, this other for the created is always outside itself,
does not form an identity with it.1 The freedom of the creature is forever
encountering others who act as a necessity upon it and, as the creature is finite,
this tension of creative self-realization is ultimately unfulfilled. Being and
Becoming in the creature, unlike in God, never coincide and the Being of
the creature is in some sense perpetually deferred. In other words, we are
distinguishing between the relationship of Being and Becoming/creativity in
the divine and the same in creation.
The first of our forms of necessity is external necessity (N1), which is the
polar opposite of F1, because the emphasis in N1 is upon compulsion from an
arbitrary exertion of power from without; in such a state we lack any form of
self-determination. N1 was classically captured by Aristotle (384–22 BC), who
regarded it as the basic sense of necessity, which is ‘that because of which a
thing cannot be otherwise’.2 Now if something cannot be otherwise, then it is
because one cannot act according to impulse. What prevents such spontaneity
is external ‘compulsion’ or an ‘act of violence’ (biaion, bia),3 that is, necessity
understood as a cause of action outside the agent. Aristotle, accordingly,
quotes Euenus of Paros (fifth century BC) that ‘every necessary thing [ana-
gkaion pragma] is by nature grievous’4 and John of Damascus shows that
this understanding continued down into Christianity5 when he writes that
‘Necessity is a cause of violence [bias].’6
What happens when you apply this notion to ‘God’? Plato’s demiurge in
the Timaeus finds the visible universe in disorder and reduces it to order by
looking to the eternal pattern of the good in implanting reason (nous) in the
soul of the world and soul in the body of the world. However, his activity is
compelled and constrained by a pre-existing intractable ‘givenness’ in refer-
ence to which he acts and upon which he acts. Not only must he follow
the pattern provided by the ideas of the beautiful and the good in ordering the
cosmos7 but also he is faced with a pre-existing ‘space’ or ‘receptacle’ of Being
1
Compare Przywara, Analogia Entis, 201–14, esp. 212–13.
2
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 5.5.4, 1015b2–3, 224–5 (there are four other senses besides this
‘basic one’).
3 4
ibid., 5.5.2–4, 1015a27–b7, 222–5. ibid., 5.5.2, 1015a30, 224–5.
5
See Chadwick 1983 and Patch 1935.
6
Damascene, Dialectica, 108 (FC 37) [PTS 7, fus. 68.1, 140].
7
Plato, Timaeus, 29a, 41.

(khora) which is itself neither Being nor becoming8 and a universe in ‘inharmo-
nious and disorderly motion’ that contains formless characterless material.9
Unsurprisingly, when necessity is referred to in the Christian tradition,
from the Fathers to the Middle Ages, it generally is N1. The demiurgic
vision of God was rejected—being rapidly replaced by creatio ex nihilo10—
because God, being uncreated and wholly other than creation, was said to be
uncompelled by definition.11 As Maximus put it: ‘Who then attributes
necessity to God? Consider, my friend, if thou wilt, the blasphemy of such
a proposition!’12
At least three reasons exist for the traditional rejection of applying necessity
to God. Firstly, in the ancient world, necessity was closely associated with the
divine power of fate13 or the fates14 that limited Being.15 Of course, the Fathers
understood God as unlimited.16 It is inconceivable for such a God to be
externally compelled. The Fathers argued that if there was some power that
restrained God Himself 17 or if God was not Creator and sovereign over the
actions of men, then this power—call it ‘fate’, ‘necessity’—would be Lord of all,
not God Himself.18
Secondly, as far back as Parmenides of Elea (c.540 to fl. c.480 BC), it was held
that a personified ‘Necessity’ (later, ‘fate’) guided the heavens by holding the
limits of the stars,19 which the ancients commonly believed determined future
human actions: ‘If then each star effects some primary necessity, / It’s a myth.’20
John of Damascus wrote that ‘the movement of things which are always the
same’ belonged to necessity, presumably alluding to the pagan cosmological
belief, and then equated it with fate.21 It is, Methodius of Olympus tells us,
possible for man to determine before he acts for good instead of evil, as he has
received a mind that is free of all necessity, that is, compulsion, in the choice of
what he, as his own master, chooses as best: ‘We are not slaves to Fate or to the
whims of Fortune.’22 With the pagan identification of Fate with the stars,
8 9
ibid., 48e–53, 67–73. ibid., 30a, 42; see Zizioulas, CO, 16.
10
A gloss on Gen. 1 from at least 2 Ma. 7:27–9 (see G. May 1994).
11
See Zizioulas, CO, 14ff., 206–49, 250ff., Florovsky 1974–89, 3: 43–78 and 4: 39–62.
12
Maximus, Disputation, 25, 13 [Disput s Pirrom, 294D, ll.14–16, 156–7] (tying Origen to
Monothelitism).
13
heimarmene or moira, both from meiromai: to be apportioned, receive one’s due.
14
moirai: the apportioners.
15
See Euripides, Phoenissae, ll.999–1000, Parmenides, §298, Kirk, Raven, Schofield 1993, 251
and Damascene, OF, 2.25, 256 (FC 37) [PTS 12; 39.10–13, 96].
16
e.g. ibid., 1.8, 176–7 (FC 37) [PTS 12; 8.1–29, 18–19].
17
See Eusebius of Caesarea, Préparation évangélique, 6.3.2–5, 122–5 (SC 266).
18
ibid., 6.6.59–60, 156–7 and Irenaeus, Contre les hérésies, 2.5.4 (SC 294, 58–61).
19
Parmenides, §305, 258.
20
Gregory of Nazianzus, ‘On Providence, Poem 1.1.5’, 54 [PG 37.426.25/Poemata Arcana, 24–5].
21
Damascene, OF, 2.25, 256 (FC 37) [PTS 12; 39.11, 96].
22
Methodius, Symposium, Logos 8: Thecla, 13, 120 and compare De autexusio, 120–38
[Photius, Bibliothèque, 5: cod. 236, 116–25/PG 103.304b–307b].

Cicero (106–43 BC) acknowledged,23 as did the Christian tradition,24 that free
will was negated and necessity, in practice, collapsed into the deified stars.25 In
deifying the stars, providence was then thought to be inevitably expunged and
this either would make God responsible for evil, as he created this necessity,26
or, as Gregory of Nazianzus (329–90) wrote, ‘God, too, subject to fate,/ unwill-
ingly bearing the tyranny of his own weaving.’27 God, in short, would not be
God properly speaking if He was said to be subject to the stars.
Thirdly, freedom, with the locus of freedom being (as was said earlier) in the
free will, is expressed in voluntary acts which are, by definition, uncompelled,
uncoerced—so having their locus of motion in the agent himself—and done,
moreover, in full awareness of the particular circumstances of the action.28 Thus,
if necessity was identified with compulsion and coercion, then it would be the
direct opposite of freedom and the free will, for such a will only wills what it
does, whether it be good or evil, out of a spontaneous impulse involving pleasure,
desire, and wish. Necessity, in contrast, is always, for this sort of thinking, in
reference to an external force and involves pain not pleasure as in a free act.29
A free man, therefore, is one who, not being a slave, who is under violent
compulsion/necessity, acts under his own impulse and so ‘exists for himself
and not for another’.30 How then could God, being pre-eminently free, existing
for Himself eternally, be said to be subject to compulsion like a slave? Freedom,
whether that of God or man, is generally incompatible,31 in the traditional way of
thinking, with necessity, as necessity is more often than not taken to be N1.
A concern for N1 is particularly notable in the Romantic period. Here it
takes the form of the contradiction between the natural order structured by
cause and effect and human freedom faced by moral imperatives. Famously,
for Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), the final level to cognition, which begins
with the senses and goes from there to the Understanding, is Reason.32 Reason
is the faculty of completeness and unity. It characteristically assumes as a
principle that one will find the unconditioned for a whole series of conditioned
cognitions of the understanding with which the unity of the series will be
23
Cicero, On Fate, 9, 272 and 17–19, 279–81.
24
e.g. Eusebius, Préparation, 6.6.54–6, 154–5 (SC 266) and Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Fatum,
43.27–44.19, 71–2 [GNO 3.2, 43–5].
25
See ibid., 36.14, 67 [GNO 3.2, 36–7].
26
Eusebius, Préparation, 6.6.56, 154–5 (SC 266).
27
Gregory of Nazianzus, ‘On Providence, Poem 1.1.6’ (De eodem argumento), 76 [PG
37.431.17–18].
28
See Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, 3.1.1111a 21–5.
29
See Magna Moralia, 1.12.1187b 31–15.1188b 23.
30
Metaphysics, 1.2.11, 982b 25–6, 14–15 and compare Damascene, OF, 2.25ff., 255ff. (FC 37)
[PTS 12; 39.1, 96ff.].
31
But see Augustine, de civ. Dei, 5.10, 194–5 [PL 41.152–3/CCSL 47, 1: 140–1] and (citing
Augustine) Aquinas, De Ver., 3: 22.5co, 51–3; see Couenhoven 2012.
32
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A299/B355, 387.

completed.33 It therefore generates certain transcendental ideas through which
it seeks to base the latter series as ultimate foundational principles that might
give unity a priori to Understanding’s ‘manifold cognitions’.34 The categories
of Understanding would otherwise be scattered, as they are concerned with
distributive unity. However, this demand in reason for the unconditioned,
either as a series, a boundary, or a discrete object, cannot be met by experience
because within the appearances within it we never encounter directly any
unconditioned reality.35 By extension, Reason’s ideas are identified with tran-
scendental objects (i.e. the Self, the Cosmos, and God) without any regard to
the limitations of experience, which has no access to such objects. Reason,
therefore, is led, ‘unavoidably’, to certain necessary ‘rational’ (or ‘sophistical’,
as Kant prefers) illusions,36 the most famous of which are his four rational
antinomies.37 These antinomies will later be appropriated positively by Bul-
gakov and Pavel Florensky (1882–1937) as reflecting the nature of truth itself
as a self-contradictory judgement (Part I). Bulgakov and Florensky were
interested in the fourth antinomy between the assertion that an absolutely
necessary Being belongs to the world, either as its part or as its cause, and that
such a Being exists nowhere in or outside the world as its cause.38 However,
following after F. W. J. Schelling (1775–1854) and G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831),39
they above all laid great stress on the third antinomy between (human)
freedom and necessity. Kant holds that if one does not hold to his dualism,
one has equally rational arguments for both transcendental freedom (or ‘an
absolute causal spontaneity beginning from itself ’40) and, in contrast, one can
argue that freedom is an ‘empty thought-entity’ and ‘mirage’.41 Everything
happens solely according to the empirical necessity of laws of nature, where
no cause exists that was not itself previously an effect of a prior cause
reaching back in an indefinite but unbroken series where compulsion is
the norm.42
Freedom, however, is needed for the purposes of morality, and for Kant
freedom is always rational or grounded (F2), so Kant resolves this antinomy
by arguing that the human subject has a dual character: empirical and
33
ibid., A307–8/B364–5, 392 and see A409/B436, 461, A497/B525, 514.
34 35
ibid., A302/B359, 389. ibid., A510/B538, 521.
36
ibid., A339/B397, 409, A582/B610, 559, A619/B647, 577, A644–5/B672–3, 591 and
A702–3/B730–1, 622.
37 38
ibid., A405–567/B432–595, 459–550. ibid., A452–60/B480–8, 490–5.
39
e.g. G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic, §35Z, 73, §48, 91–4, §158, 232–3, Lectures on the
Philosophy of Religion [=PR], II [1824], 395–403 [Vorlesungen, 295–304], and Schelling, System
of Transcendental Idealism, 47, 203ff. [SW, III: 395, 593ff.], Philosophical Inquiries into Freedom,
59–64, 74–8 [SW, VII: 382–6, 395–8], ‘Stuttgart Seminars’, 204 [SW, VII: 429], and Ages of the
World [=AW] [1815, 3rd Vers.], 5–6, 23ff., 36ff., 78–9 [SW, VIII: 209–11, 234ff., 251ff., 305–6].
40
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A446/B474, 484.
41 42
ibid., A447–8/B475–6, 485, 487. ibid., A445/B473, 485.

intelligible.43 As the subject of the world of sense, a being in time, its actions
would stand wholly under constant natural laws where the series of appear-
ances would be an unbroken, incomplete, and necessitous chain of cause and
effect. As an intelligible reality, a thing-in-itself, outside the conditions of time,
insofar as time does not condition things-in-themselves but only appearances,
its causality would not stand in the series of empirical conditions but would
itself be wholly unconditioned, moving out freely from itself. Freedom (F2)
and natural necessity (N1) are asserted in one and the same action—each
independent of the other—depending on whether one speaks of that action
empirically or transcendentally/intelligibly.44 However, just as God, for Kant,
is completely unknown, so too freedom is utterly ‘inscrutable’,45 in religious
language, a ‘mystery’.46 We can be certain of freedom’s existence on the
practical basis that we have an awareness of an obligation to comply with
the moral law which assumes the autonomy of the will as a necessary conse-
quence47 but its reality—a theoretical explanation or positive presentation of
the idea—is completely unknown.
Here we must turn from the external compulsion of N1 to N2, which is
internal necessity, meaning that a nature or being has a certain structure, a
lawfulness, even a determinate pattern of relationality, personality, which
constrains it from acting in certain ways and compels it to act in others. As
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) put it: ‘One must gradually learn that what we
call fate does not come upon humans from outside, but emerges from within.’48
Thus, as a human being, I am constrained by my nature from going too
long without nourishment, as it requires food and therefore I am compelled
to eat or I will die. In the case of God, we might say that, as God as Father, Son,
and Spirit is the eternal act of love, what we have called Absolute Freedom,
being a love that is always already freely given by one hypostasis to the other, He
cannot cease to be such, to love in freedom. God cannot be otherwise than
Himself (eternal, omniscient, omnipotent etc.)49 even when the Son empties
Himself and takes flesh. In other words, the eternal life of love-desire or
Absolute Freedom is characterized by both a free will to love the Other (F2)
and an internal imperative, being such a God, to remain such a God (N2).
This is why Augustine (354–430) could speak of a ‘certain blessed necessity’
43 44
ibid., A539/B567, 536. ibid., A557/B585, 545.
45
Critique of Practical Reason, 178 [Kants Gesammelte Schriften, 5:47] and see Critique of
Judgment, 156 [ibid., 5: 275].
46
Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 145 [ibid., 6: 144–5].
47
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 106–7 [ibid., 4: 460–1] and see Critique of
Practical Reason, 176–80 [5: 46–50].
48
‘Rilke to Franz Kappus [12 August 1904]’, 98–9, quoted in Louth 2002, 143.
49
See Augustine, de civ. Dei, 5.10, 194–5 [PL 41.152–3/CCSL 47, 1: 140–1] and Aquinas,
De Ver., 3: 22.5co, 51–3.

characteristic to the divine life because ‘it is necessary that God always lives
both immutably and most happily’.50
Likewise, John Calvin (1509–64), claiming precedence in Augustine and
Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153),51 has the notion that there can be sin or
virtue where there exists necessity (rightly understood). This kindredness of
freedom and necessity takes different forms in God and in creation. Thus,
man, as he is sunk down into sin after the Fall, by necessity (N1), wills evil
inevitably but this in no way makes him less culpable or in some sense free in
his sinning (F1/2). God, in a similar way, is good of necessity (N2), since He
cannot be evil, but He does not therefore obtain less praise for His goodness, in
acting and willing such (F2), because He simply cannot do otherwise than be
good. Lastly, the devil, following his fall from heaven, is set inevitably and
necessarily in evil ‘but his wickedness is no less culpable [for that].’ In God, His
necessity (N2) is at one with His free will (F1 and F2) as they are ‘combined
together’ in the divine goodness or are concomitant.52 God, and here He
differs from creatures, is what He is by nature but in such a fashion that
He wills to be such and ‘he also wills what he wills in such a way as to have it
naturally’,53 as, for example, is the case with Father, who naturally as well as
willingly begets the Son.54 This is the case because the divine goodness,
wisdom, power, righteousness, and will are ‘united together’ in what Calvin
describes as a ‘circular connection’ which cannot be broken apart.55 Here we
see one of the roots of Barth’s actualism, though taking Calvin in a completely
new direction, where God eternally chooses His own being, with the vision
of God as being the One who loves in freedom.56 For that matter, it is also
reminiscent of the dynamism in Bulgakov of God as Trinity as a free act of self-
positing. For Calvin, God to be God is groundlessly free (F1) but this freedom is at
one with who He simply necessarily must be as a good God (F2 and N2):
Since, then, God wills to be whatever he is, and that of necessity, there is no doubt
that just as he is good of necessity, he also wills to be so, a state which is so far from
coercion that in it he is to the greatest degree willing [voluntarius: voluntary].
I would say ‘free’, if it were agreed between us that this should be understood as
‘self-determined’.57
Conceptually, therefore, the divine life, which cannot be said to be anything
but one of an Absolute Freedom (2. Cor. 3:17), is characterized by something
like what we call ‘freedom’ and something like what we call ‘necessity’. Here
Absolute Freedom is not simply being defined by itself, namely F2, resulting in
50
Augustine, c. Jul. imp., 5.2.53, 577 [CSEL 85/2, 258–9] and see Couenhoven 2012, 397ff.
51
Augustine, nat. et gr., 46, 54, 252 [CSEL 60, 272–3] and Bernard, Concerning Grace and
Free Will, 4, 18–23 and 10, 56–7.
52 53
Calvin, Bondage and Liberation of the Will, IV, 333–4. ibid., IV, 334.
54 55
See Aquinas, ST, 1.41.2co. Calvin, Bondage, IV, 334.
56 57
Barth, CD, II/1, 257. Calvin, Bondage, IV, 334.

a vicious circularity. What we are arguing is that when evoking the divine life
of love-desire, one must use both notions of freedom (F2) and necessity (N2),
which clarify, temper, and refer to one another, thereby (in the tension)
generating what we mean by Absolute Freedom. This builds on the idea,
inspired by Schelling’s identity philosophy, that the divine life as an abso-
lute identity of real and ideal is a self-revelation of the One God to Himself
as an Other in Himself, and God is the ‘living link’58 between the two,
which means that identity (freedom, the subject) includes difference within it
(necessity, object).
Schelling may be of use here in understanding how freedom and necessity
might be included as moments within Absolute Freedom. He argues that
God’s experience of the world, his own self-consciousness as Being for the
world, must not be understood to be an anarchic freedom, as in a wild and
orderless self-positing of fantastic chimeras. Nor can it have any imperson-
alized necessary givenness, or limitation, but God’s Being as absolutely free is
an ordered freedom and every absolutely free act originates from the inner
necessity of His absolute nature.59 In short, absolute freedom is absolute
necessity. Thus, God did not consult with Himself/itself about the best pos-
sible world to create but freely chose to create the world based on the necessity
of His/its nature as love and goodness.60 Schelling’s later thought might seem
rather (literally) voluntarist in inspiration61 (‘All choice is the consequence of
an unilluminated will.’) with the collapse of internal freedom of the groundless
variety (F1) with internal necessity (N2). But Schelling claims, in a point
brought up later by Bulgakov, that if God acts with ‘good reason’, choosing
the best world from an infinite number of possibilities, His freedom is the
‘least degree’ or ‘highly subordinate’. Schelling tries to avoid a sort of acci-
dentalism with divine freedom, and here Bulgakov and Balthasar are indebted
to him, by identifying it with necessity: ‘all, genuine, that is, absolute, freedom
is an absolute necessity’.62 It is precisely because this is the case that divine
Being is unprethinkable (Unvordenklichkeit des Seins),63 since ‘It is impossible
to adduce any further ground for an act of an absolute freedom; such an act is
because it occurs in such a given manner, that is, it is unconditional and thus
is necessary.’64 Yet even such a groundless act of freedom is grounded as it
58
See Schelling, Darlegung des wahren Verhältnisses der Naturphilosophie, SW, VII: 54
(where he is discussing Being) as cited in Bowie 1993, 65.
59
Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 47 [SW, III: 395]; cf. Philosophical Inquiries
into Freedom, 62–4, 74–8 [SW, VII: 384–6, 394–8].
60 61
ibid., 76–8 [ibid., 396–8]. See AW, 77 [SW, VIII: 304].
62
‘Stuttgart Seminars’, 204 [SW, VII: 429–30].
63
See Philosophie der Offenbarung [=PO], ‘Another deduction [etc.]’, SW, XIV: 337ff. and
esp. 341 and see PO, SW XIII: Lec. 10, 204ff.
64
‘Stuttgart Seminars’, 204 [SW, VII: 429].

flows from the necessity of the divine nature, which is wholly love/the Good; a
marriage, as it were, of F1–2 with N2.65
In the third draft of his Ages of the World (c.1815), Schelling seems to read
the play of his famous triad of potencies—Being in/for/with itself66—through
the dialectic of freedom and necessity. These, for Schelling, are one in God,
although, insofar as one can distinguish the two, necessity is the ground (‘first
and oldest’) of freedom ‘because a being must first exist before it could act
freely’. Necessity is identified, therefore, with the nature of God, which cannot
not be and Schelling, in typical fashion, has it in conflict with freedom in
creation, where God is said to overcome the necessity of His nature through a
free creative act.67 In the necessity of God, which grounds freedom, there
exist two eternal potencies: (a) that eternal potency of ‘egoity’ or selfhood
which allows the being which is love to exist for itself (‘eternal force
of selfhood, of retreat into itself, of Being in itself ’), which seems like a
version of our N2 married, as it were, to F1–2; and (b) that eternal potency
which is love but which does not seek its own but which instead pours
out itself in an absolute commitment that cannot be withdrawn and is
therefore ‘the outpouring, outstretching, self-giving Being’,68 which seems
like our F3.
The first potency Schelling refers to as the ‘No’ or ‘negating force’ of Being
which is the ‘highest Being-in-itself ’ and is ever withdrawing into itself,
thereby making creation impossible. This first potency precedes and grounds,
although also attempts to repress the second force which rises from within it as
the ‘Yes’ which affirms Being in its eternal outstretching, giving, and self-
communication of its Being to the world.69 As Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
puts it: ‘After the final no there comes a yes/And on that yes the future world
depends./No was the night. Yes is this present sun.’70 The Yes and the No in
this scheme both claim to be God and exclude one another in having
Being and in not having it, and God ‘is the third term or the unity of the
Yes and No’,71 freedom and necessity, which they posit outside and
above themselves as the third potency finally constituting the eternal nature
of the Godhead in relation to Being as absolutely free72 or the ‘eternal
freedom to be’.73 The Absolute YES rises from the Yes and the No, Absolute
Freedom climbs up from freedom and necessity, Absolute Self-Positing
from affirmation and negation in an ‘unprethinkable decision [unvordenkliche
65
See AW, 25–6 [SW, VIII: 236–8] and see Wirth 2003, 5–31.
66
See Schelling, PO, SW, XIII: Lect. 12, 251ff. and XIII: Lect. 13, 266ff. and Philosophie der
Mythologie [=PM], SW, XII: Lect. 3, 49–65 (see Beach 1994, 116ff.).
67 68
Schelling, AW, 5 [SW, VIII: 209–10]. ibid., 6 [ibid., 210–11].
69
ibid., 9, 11 [ibid., 215, 218].
70
Wallace Stevens, ‘The Well Dressed Man with a Beard’, ll.1–3, 247.
71
Schelling, AW, 11 [SW, VIII: 218].
72 73
ibid., 19, 27 and see 74 [ibid., 228, 238–9 and see 299–300]. ibid., 26 [ibid., 238].

Entscheidung]’74 of self-granting rising out of self-denial constituting God.
God as eternal freedom75 has ‘the most utterly free divine will’, being a ‘pure
actus’,76 which one cannot climb up behind to understand its fruition. The
Godhead is absolutely free because it generates itself eternally through a
dialectic of moments of what we call ‘freedom’ and what we call ‘necessity’.
This is an idea we shall return to repeatedly with our writers and, in particular,
Balthasar. This ‘abyssal freedom’ takes up and integrates necessity in a volun-
tary self-affirmation, that is, God self-actualizes Himself by modifying and
transforming necessity in a marriage with freedom. In this way, the Godhead
grounds itself, is its own destiny and necessity, and cannot be ‘overwhelmed’
from anything external except that it can, being the Good itself as it is eternity
itself (not just ‘good’ and ‘eternal’), while remaining the One utterly free God,
‘be overcome by the Good such that God yields to Love and makes Himself
into Love’s ground’.77
Certainly we have here a conception of God that is, without extensive
qualification and discernment, problematic for more ‘orthodox’ theology.
God comes to Himself/itself as a ‘becoming God’, as Martin Heidegger
(1889–1976) observed,78 and even becomes Trinity in and through creation.79
Yet the application of necessity to God’s eternal free life of desire can also be
found in a more ‘orthodox’ context in regards to the ‘mutuality’ in the
Trinitarian relations we mentioned earlier. We must say, for example, that,
since God is eternally a Tri-personal united movement of love, that God the
Father cannot not beget His Son or spirate the Spirit because He would then
cease to be God as Trinity, which appears to be a form of N2 without in any
way denying God’s freedom.80 Indeed, as Athanasius observed,81 if Jesus is the
truth and the life (Jn. 14:6), then He is such even of the Father God, so that
the Father, as Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928–2014) summarizes him, ‘would
have no truth and no life, if he were without the Son . . . It is not the case, then,
that the Father is God by Himself, even without the Son . . . the Fatherhood of
God depends on there being this Son . . . even the divinity of the Father is not
independent of his relationship to his Son. How could he be the one God
without being the Father?’82 By extension, we can contend that, since God is
74
ibid., xxxiii, 12ff. [ibid., 197, 220ff.] (see xxxii) and compare, in the context of Barth,
McCormack 2010b, 64 and 2013, 123–4 and Bruce 2013, ch. 5.
75
Schelling, AW, 26, 31, 40 [SW, VIII: 237–8, 244, 256].
76 77
ibid., 26, 74 [ibid., 237, 299–300]. ibid., 77–8, 26 [ibid., 303–5, 237–8].
78
Heidegger 1985, 109.
79
e.g. Schelling, PO, SW, XIII: Lect. 15, 321–4, 330ff., XIII: Lect. 16, 337–40.
80
See Athanasius, AA, 1.29.1.10–11, 139 [NPNF, 323] (see Pannenberg 2007, 81) and AA,
1.14, 123–4, 34, 143–4, 2.2, 178–9, 3.6, 312–13 [NPNF, 314–15, 326, 349, 396–7], Ad Serap., 1.24,
PG 26.585B–588C [Anatolios 2004, 223–4], Damascene, OF, 1.8, 178 (FC 37) [PTS 12; 8.48–9,
20], Aquinas, ST, 1.41.2co. and ad 5 and De Pot., 1: 2.3co, 59 and 2:5.3co, 93.
81 82
Athanasius, AA, 1.20, 129–30 [NPNF, 318]. Pannenberg 2007, 81.

love, He is constrained from hating Himself or destroying Himself but is
compelled to love Himself as Trinity. Nor need we identify, as John
Zizioulas seems at times to hold, this divine internal ‘necessity’ (N2) with
the ousia in contradistinction to F2, which is identified with the hypostasis,
so that freedom=personhood and necessity=nature.83 This is all the more
the case if God’s essence is always already hypostasized in a free move-
ment of love, as Zizioulas in fact claims,84 for then His freedom is His
perpetual affirmation in begetting the Son and spirating His Spirit that He
must freely be what He in fact is in these personal acts (as we will see later
in Balthasar).
Here we are returning to issues surrounding the famous Arian question,
expressed classically by Eunomius (c.335–94), ‘Did the Father beget the Son
willingly or unwillingly?’ If the Son existed as another within Him, it was
alleged, then He did not beget by choice, but by nature, thus meaning that God
was not free in His self-generation but begot necessarily. Yet, in contrast, if the
Son was not within the Father, but was begotten by His will, then the will
existed before the Son and the Son is not coeternal, and the Son clearly might
not have been generated just like creation.85 Athanasius, arguing against
Arianism (especially Aëtius of Antioch ( fl. 350) and Arius), contended that
the begetting of the Son is primary, proper to, internal, essential, and from the
divine and eternal essence of the Father. The creation of the universe, as what
is external to God, is from the will of the Father and that ‘living will’ is His
proper Offspring—the Son. Creation, in contrast to the Son, is secondary and
contingent and comes into existence from without or outside (exothen) the
divine essence and is therefore external to the living will that caused it and
need not have been.86 Athanasius’ distinction, with some notable exceptions,
eventually became normative for Trinitarian theology in the East up until and
following the settlement of the Arian controversies in 381.87 John of Damascus
is typical of this tendency and, in a famous passage, speaks of begetting as an
‘action [or ‘work’] belonging to His nature [physeos ergon] and proceeding
from His substance’ in contradistinction from creation as a ‘work of His will
[theleseos ergon]’, which, being produced from nothing, is mutable and there-
fore not by nature and coeternal.88
83
Zizioulas, CO, 18–19, 166, 214, 232, 278, and BC, 43ff., 49ff., 121 n. 126 but contrast 2013,
106ff. (see Farrow 2007 and Loudovikos 2013); compare Yannaras 2004, 171ff., 2006, 26ff., 2007,
235ff., 258ff., and 2015, 243–50.
84
Zizioulas, BC, 41 and 44 n. 39.
85
Vaggione 1987, 181–2 and compare Athanasius, AA, 3.62, 375–6.
86
ibid., 2.2, 178–9 [Anatolios 2004, 112] and 1.29, 138–9 [NPNF, 323–4].
87
e.g. Epiphanius of Salamis, Panarion, 2.5.69.26.5–6, 2: 346–7 and Ancoratus, 52 (GCS 25)
[PG 43. 105C–8C].
88
Damascene, OF, 1.8, 179 (FC 37) [PTS 12; 8.67–72, 21].

On the one hand, Athanasius did not wish to say that divine generation was
by the will, as willing implied mutability, ignorance, and some sort of parity
between creation and generation.89 He held that one can no more say that God
might not have generated His Son—though indeed one can legitimately say
God might not have created and redeemed the world—than one can say that
God might not have been good.90 The Father is simply not Father without His
Son and so was indeed never without Him.91 This seems like N2; but since
‘necessity’ for Athanasius was identified with an external law above God (N1),
he argues that God is good and Father not by free will or by ‘necessity’ but
transcends both (‘human contrarieties’) in being good and generative by
nature.92 On the other hand, Athanasius still wished to respond to the Arian
challenge: ‘Since then the Son is by nature and not by will [bouleseos], is He
without the will [atheletos] of the Father and not with the Father’s will [me
boulomenou]?’ Thus, he argues that, although the Son is not from or by will
(since He is the will of the Father), yet we cannot say that He who is essentially
almighty and beloved is ‘without’ the will/intention (boulesis) or will-desire
(theletos) of the Father. God did not begin to be good by will, and for the
Father to beget His Son is to be so good; yet He is not good in begetting and
loving His Son without that will. It is impossible to say, then, that the Father
did not ‘have Him in mind’ as what He purposed so that He is not generated in
free love (F2), ‘for what He is, that also is His will-desire [theletos]’. The
Father’s subsistence, although we cannot say that it could be otherwise, is by
His intention, and since the Son is proper to the divine essence, the Son is not
without His willingness or ‘contrary to His judgement [para gnomen]’. So the
Son is generated not necessarily but freely because it is not by or from the will;
yet, nevertheless, it is not arbitrary and not counter to that divine will.93
Athanasius, in the apt phrase of Georges Florovsky (1893–1979), was advo-
cating for divine generation being a ‘free necessity’.94 In our terminology,
Athanasius was reaching towards something like a marriage of F2 with N2
in characterizing the divine life. In later writers, arguably, we see a move
towards such a union of freedom and necessity in Trinitarian theology with
the idea of the ‘concomitance’ of the divine will with its nature in begetting
and spiration.95
89
Athanasius, AA, 3.62, 375–6 [NPNF, 427–8].
90
ibid., 3.66.5–6, ll.19–25, 380 [ibid., 430].
91
ibid., 1.29.1.10–11, 139 [ibid., 323]; here, see Pannenberg, SysTh, 1: 273, 280, and 312.
92
Athanasius, AA, 3.62.3–4, ll.15–18, 375 [ibid., 428].
93
ibid., 3.66.1–3, ll.1–10, 379 [ibid., 430].
94
Florovsky 1974–89, 7: 53 but contrast: ibid., 4: 53.
95
See Cyril of Alexandria, Dialogues sur la Trinité, 2.457a, 340–1 (SC 231), Gregory of
Nazianzus, Or. 29.6, 73–4 [SC 250, 80C–81C, 186–9], Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius,
NPNF, 5, 8.2, 202–3 [GNO, 2: 3.6, 15–22, 191–4], Aquinas, ST 1.41.2 and De Pot., 1: 2.3.2ad, 8ad,
12ad, 60, 62, 63.

The relationship of F2 and N2 traced above can be seen in the modern
period in Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), who influenced Bulgakov and Balthasar
through Idealism. God or nature is absolutely infinite Being, substance, caused
by and existing in itself, conceived through and by itself, 96 so called free
because it exists from the ‘necessity of its own nature alone, and is determined
to action by itself alone’.97 N2, therefore, not only means that God’s Being,
understood in the broadest sense, requires God to do certain things but that
God is totally self-sufficient; He need not be conditioned by another. Yet
Spinoza, along with many others,98 argued that the divine self-sufficiency
assumed the divine necessary existence.99 It is besides our purpose to prove
the mistakenness of the jump from N2 as divine self-sufficiency to N2 as
divine necessary existence, but it needs little proof that this implication has not
inevitably been drawn from divine unconditionality, in instances from the
Anaphora of the Byzantine Liturgy of St Basil100 to Kant’s transcendental
ideal, especially since the ontological argument is held only by a minority of
theologians and philosophers. Furthermore, we shall see various attempts to
rethink divine self-sufficiency (N2) in our writers, none of which assumes the
ontological proof.
So far we have mainly been discussing N2 as God’s relation to himself but
can we apply N2 to God in His relationship to the world? In Platonism, ‘God’
or the ‘One’ is understood to be perfectly good, possessing a freedom of self-
will that is grounded by His own sheer goodness. However, God, being
perfectly good, has certain constraints on his nature such as not being able
to be otherwise than good, and he must express this goodness externally; thus,
his goodness spills out of himself in the forming of the world from an eternal
pre-existent matter. In Plotinus, for example, although he argues that the One
is beyond either chance101 or necessity,102 by which it seems he means N1, he
holds to some form of N2, since he repeatedly speaks of things ‘flowing’ out
from the One and reality as an ‘overflow’ from the One.103 Anything, when it
comes to perfection, produces or makes something else because it does not,
indeed, cannot ‘endure to remain by itself ’.104 The Good simply would not be
the first principle, perfect, best, and the ‘productive power of all things’, if it
remained in itself ‘as if it grudged to give of itself or was impotent’: ‘Something
must certainly come into being from it [the One], if anything is to exist of the
96 97
Spinoza, Ethics, 1, defs. 1–6, p. 3 and 4.Pref., 162. ibid., 1, def. 7, 3.
98
See Anselm, Proslogion, 1–4, 90–5 and Debate with Gaunilo, 113–31; Descartes, Medita-
tions, 5th Med., 142–9; Leibniz, New Essays, 4.10.7, 437–9; Hartshorne 1965; and (recently and
brilliantly) Hart 2013, 109–22.
99
Spinoza, Ethics, 1, def. 11, 10ff.
100
See Basil, ‘Liturgy of St Basil’ [Prex Eucharistica, Spicilegium Friburgense 12, 230–43].
101 102
Plotinus, enn., 7: VI.8.14, 274–7 and 7: VI.9.5, 319. ibid., 7: VI.8.9, 255.
103
e.g. ibid., 5: V.2.1, 58–61 and 7: VI.7.12, 127; but see 6: VI.4.5, 289.
104
ibid., 5: V.4.1, 143.

others which derive their Being from it: that it is from it that they come is
absolutely necessary.’105
The world, therefore, acts after all in some way as an external necessity (N1)
on God/the One, given His own internal necessity (N2) in forming it as the
Good who must flow out of Himself. This sort of Neoplatonic reasoning of
the self-diffusiveness of the Good has a long after life106 and it forms part
of the argument of Bulgakov. However, more recently, we see it in Jürgen
Moltmann, when he argues that for God to be the sort of Being He is in His
perfection, that is, self-communicating, co-suffering love, is to be creative: ‘It is
impossible to conceive of a God who is not a creative God.’107 The conception
of God as one who need not love the world would contradict His Being as a
free ‘love’ beyond the creaturely oppositions of ‘choice’. It is axiomatic for God
to love freely in creation for He is God and this free love-desire—in which
one can even say God ‘needs’ the world—is one where necessity and freedom
coincide.108
One of the central tasks of this monograph is to argue that there exists an
explicitly Christoform problematic of divine freedom and necessity which
is that God acts on the basis of love and He has determined to be Himself
as love for us in Christ. This self-determination is a sort of freely chosen
(F2) internal necessity (N2) for God, because by His own free choice He can
become dependent on the world (F3) and by His own free choice He
can become constrained from acting otherwise than as a God who has deter-
mined to be God for the world in Christ. In order for Him to be this particular
man, Jesus of Nazareth, an internal necessity, though freely chosen, seems to
compel Him to create a world in which this man exists. The world, therefore,
acts as a sort of external necessity (N1) on God, given His own freely chosen
(F2) internal necessity (N2) to be out of His own free will dependent on the
world (F3) in taking flesh. And, as we shall see momentarily, this is a freely
dependent act of divine condescension from which God will not turn back.
God graciously condescends to become man for our sake even to the point of
becoming dependent on His creation and by this free divine humanization,
man is made God by divinization, ‘For the Logos of God (who is God) wills
always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of His embodiment.’109
Angelus Silesius (1624–77) is typical of the radical Christocentrism of such
theology, which looks towards Barth,110 in arguing that God is necessitated to
love by His own eternal self-determination to be God as man for us in
105
ibid., 5: V.4.1, 142–5 and see Timaeus, 29–30a, 41–2.
106
See Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 38.9 [PG 36.320C–321A/SC 358, 120–3], 45.5 [PG
36.629A–B], Festal Orations, 66–7, 165, Dionysius, DN, 4.1 [PTS 33, 143–4], 71–2, Aquinas,
SG, 1.37, 83 and ST, 1.19.2co, 3.1.1co.
107 108
Moltmann, TK, 106. ibid., 53–8 and 107.
109
Maximus, Amb. 7, PG 91.1084C–D (Constas 2014, 1:106–7).
110
Despite Barth’s criticism of Angelus Silesius: CD, II/1, 281–2.

Christ,111 since ‘Love rules o’er everything; even the Trinity / Itself has been
her subject throughout eternity.’112 More famously, in Hegel, whose complex
legacy lies behind all our writers, God as immanent Trinity (a ‘playing of love
with itself ’)113 risks becoming a static corpse unless the universal Father
becomes actual through creation and reconciliation in His particular Son.114
The Father can only be God through the world by revealing Himself to
Himself in it by particularizing and objectifying Himself in it, and in this
way bring about the reconciliation of the world through His Son. Therefore,
God to be truly living, fully self-conscious, must be actual, and this requires
externalization, a concretization of Himself as an Other over against Himself
in the world, that is, the ‘labour of the negative’, which is to say that the infinite
must necessarily be tested by the crucible of the finite, risking the loss of itself
in alienation in order to be an absolute free and necessary Being.115 The finite
is, therefore, ‘an essential moment of the infinite in the nature of God’ insofar
as God ‘finitizes himself ’ by externalizing Himself outside of Himself in
radical alterity, but this is still His positing of ‘determinations within himself ’,
since ‘outside him[self] there is nothing to determine’.116 Thus, when God
creates a world and takes flesh as Christ, He wills or thinks it, and this is to
determine Himself by positing Himself over against Himself as finite so that
there are two finite realities—God and the world—but this is simply a show
because this world is something of Himself He has posited to be Himself.117
This is to say, quite simply, that the finite is a moment of the infinite divine
life,118 so that just as God is finite, like me, so too I am infinite, like God. (Here
we have at least some of the roots of sophiology.) If this is the case, then God
truly needs the world: ‘Without the world God is not God.’119 Have we not
arrived here at a new form of necessity?
It is at this juncture that we must speak not merely of freedom, and, in
particular, a ‘dependent freedom’ (F3), but of what I will call ‘free dependence’
(N3). N3 is the other side of the free love of F3 except that in this context the
emphasis is placed on its freely irrevocable nature. If N1–2 involve various
forms of the bondage of the will, N3 involves the free acceptance of the
bondage of the will to another so that the will cannot but be for another
because it has chosen and accepted its own complete self-giving. In the case of
man, N3, as a free dependence, is usually perceived as an external weight
driving one on, moral necessity or a dependence that is entered into freely,
given one’s external obligations and internal desire to sacrifice oneself, to be in
111
‘When God for the first time bore God’s son, then he / Chose [auserkorn] without further
ado for childbed you and me’ (Angelus Silesius, Wanderer, 1.151, 15 [Wandersmann, 21]).
112 113
ibid., 5.241, 129. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §19, 10.
114
i.e. the ‘Kingdom of the Son’: PR, III [1831], n. 67, 274–5, 365–71 [Vorlesungen, 282–7].
115 116
Phenomenology, §19, 10. PR, I [1824], 307–8 [Vor., 212–13].
117 118
ibid., I [1824], 308 [ibid., 212]. ibid., I [1824], 308–9 [ibid., 212–13].
119
ibid., I [1824], n. 97, 308.

need (F3). We can see the interplay of F3 and N3 in 1 Corinthians. Thus, when
the Apostle Paul (c.5–c.66) writes that in His preaching of the Gospel ‘neces-
sity [anagke] is laid upon me. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!’ (1 Cor.
9:16), it is clear that this necessity (N3) to preach is from Christ (1:17) and it is
a part of Paul’s apostleship, which he tells us is by God’s grace (15:9–10). He
even describes this state as being a ‘slave of Christ’ (7:22) but he is not helpless
in the matter, for he speaks of preaching of his will or not (9:17). Though he is
free from all men in order to gain them for the Gospel, he has freely put
himself in need (F3) to all men and, irrevocably so, as he has in fact enslaved
himself (edoulosa) to them (N3) (9:19).
It should be noted here that just as F3 is both the kenosis and flowering of
F1 and F2, so too likewise is N3. N3, as free loving boundness to the Other,
involves both the modification and transformation of an external necessity
(N1) that only knows coercion and of the naturalism of an internal necessity
(N2) that simply does what it does. But this would not be giving the fullest
picture of free dependence (N3), for it could not be so steadfast in its
commitment to the last if it was not driven to give itself (N1) and in some
sense fulfilling who it is (N2) as a Being made to love another who simply loves
to be itself.
Could N3 be applied to God? We shall contend that God, insofar as He has
freely bound Himself to the world in Christ and has made its joys and
sufferings to be His very own, is in need and cannot do otherwise than He
has in fact chosen to be: God for us in Christ. God, one might say, who is
absolutely free in Himself as love (F2), yet utterly dependent upon Himself,
gives Himself to the world in free love by choosing (F3) to be Himself as the
God of divine desire for us in Christ (N2). He lays upon Himself an external
necessity of the world in His love for it in Christ (N1). This love for the world
in Christ is faithful and utterly committed because it has put itself in need to
the world (N3). Divine desire for the world is not arbitrary. It is the external
but free expression of God’s own intra-dependent eternal but irrevocable
desire for Himself, where each hypostasis freely gives its all to the Other
(F3). In giving everything away, the divine hypostases cannot but be in and
through the Other (N3).
We will argue that such love dares, indeed, ecstatically desires to make itself
vulnerable in the world (F3) by freely making itself captive to its creation even
unto death on a cross (N3). It is for this reason that Metropolitan Philaret
(Drozdov) of Moscow (1782–1867) could speak of the Trinity, as it were, as a
‘heavenly Cross of love’ which is the foundation of the cross of Christ:120 ‘The
love of the Father is the crucifying one. The Love of the Son is the crucified one.
The love of the Holy Spirit is the one triumphing in the power of the cross.
120
Drozdov 1848, 32 [1992, 7].

So has God loved the world!’121 God is freely captive on the cross because
His own law of love always already freely binds Him.122 In short, we will explore
a possible response to the problematic we have traced concerning Christology
and divine freedom where Absolute Freedom embraces in itself, in a perfect
tension, F3 and N3 because it has always already freely chosen out of love (F2)
to be God as God for us in Christ (N2) even unto ‘servitutis extremum
summumque supplicium’123 (N1) which will not turn back from its love (N3).
The axis of F3–N3 appears, therefore, in this work as a sort of theological ideal
of the balance that needs to be struck between freedom and necessity in any
response to the problematic. We will first attempt specifically to elaborate this
axis in dialogue with our writers and try to make a case for its application to
God both in Himself and in His relationship to the world. Secondly, we will
more generally argue for the coherence of a form of divine self-determination
focused on Jesus Christ.
The argument up until now assumes that what we have called ‘dependent
freedom’ (F3) lives in a perpetual tension in and through what we have called
‘free dependence’ (N3). In order to express God’s Absolute Freedom towards
the world, F3 by itself, as articulated in the quasi-Barthian idea of Fiddes
that ‘God freely chooses to be in need’,124 is insufficient. One needs some
reference to what we have called N3 because merely asserting God’s free
‘neediness’ (as it were), as Fiddes does, lacks the sense of the total irrevocable-
ness of divine self-giving. Fiddes intends to indicate this irrevocableness, or
N3, in the idea that, if God so gives Himself, then he ‘cannot be otherwise’.125
But expressed just like that, it seems to wipe out the implication of F3 that God
need not have so chosen to be in need. F3 cannot be simply identified with N3,
for then N3 overshadows F3 and one risks losing the sense of the contingency
of the free love-desire of God. At its extremes, it seems to make it impossible to
speak of God as a Trinity of relations apart from His relationship to us and
indeed the relations constituting the world. For this sort of theology, God and
the universe—out of God’s good pleasure in which there is no ‘otherwise’—are
eternally co-existent.126 In other words, Fiddes risks collapsing the immanent
and the economic Trinity. These are all difficulties, as we shall see, also found
earlier in Bulgakov, who Fiddes creatively engages with in his ‘sophiological’
magnum opus.127 We want to argue in contrast to such thinkers that one
needs to give both F3 with N3 their full force by seeing them in a dialectic.
It is not only inevitable but even desirable for any theology of divine
self-determination that the divine economy both ‘could have been otherwise’
121
ibid., 30 [ibid., 4; following N. Sakharov 2002, 98].
122
Drozdov 1848, 32 [1992, 6–7].
123
Cicero, Against Verres, 2.5.169 at Hengel 1977, 51.
124
Fiddes 2001a, 181 and see SWKG, 148, 292, 386–7, CSG, 63–71 and 2000a, 214.
125
CSG, 71, 74ff., 119, 121, 132ff., 142 and 262 and SWKG, 292.
126 127
ibid., 264, 291–3, 384, and 386–7. ibid., 289, 383–7, and 392–3.

(F3) and ‘could not have been otherwise’ (N3). Absolute Freedom as a concept
embraces both notions, and once one emphasizes one position, then one must
immediately correct it with the other.
Keith Ward has critiqued Fiddes’ notion of a wholly self-decided God who
chooses to make creation necessary to Him as being incoherent because God,
he argues, must have a nature that lies behind His self-choice. Moreover,
he maintains that the argument utilizes a ‘Pickwickian’ notion of choice, as
it denies there is any sense in saying that God ‘could have chosen otherwise’ if
God chooses to be the kind of a God who is God for the world.128 In Ward’s
view, this amounts to a choice that is no choice at all. Ward has identified in
Fiddes’ theology problems with a theological idea that should, nevertheless
against Ward, be central to modern Trinitarian theology. Our book responds
to these problems in both its exegesis and its synthetic response to the
problematic. In this context, it looks to Christology for resources to respond
to the very difficulty it has caused with the doctrine of God.
In arguing for a notion of Absolute Freedom that presupposes a dialectic of
F3 with N3, we are quite consciously departing,129 following Bulgakov and
Florensky, from Leibniz’s principle of the ‘identity of indiscernibles’, arguably
entailed by his law of contradiction.130 Ontological identity need not exclude
difference, as we saw earlier with Schelling. On the contrary, we follow Heidegger
when he argued that identity, as ‘Sameness’, is a ‘belonging-togetherness
[Zusammengehörigkeit]’ or mutual indwelling of thinking and Being. This
belonging-togetherness of thinking and Being which is identity exists
in man’s appropriation or enownment (Ereignis) of Being and Being’s appro-
priation of man, and this presupposes difference. Ereignis=enownment is
understood as the act/event of appropriation in which humans and Being
are en-owned (ge-eignet) to one another or come into their own towards each
other.131 Thus, identity and difference, sameness and differentiation belong or
dwell together for Heidegger. This ‘place’ of that which belongs together which
is ‘not-a-place’ (Fiddes)132 is a mysterious Between (Zwischen) or perdurance/
dif-ference (Austrag). As a ‘place which is not a place’, it is the enowning
event/act (Ereignis) by and to Dasein whereby Being and beings come to
128
K. Ward 1996, 177–9. (i.e. to interpret words in an idiosyncratic fashion, like Dickens’
character Mr Pickwick, in order to avoid problems (see Dickens 1981, 24–5)).
129
Compare Milbank 2004.
130
See Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics, 9, 14–15, and ‘From the Letters to Clarke
(1715–16)’, 4.4–6, 327–8 and see 2.1, 321.
131
Heidegger 2002a, 28 [90] (revd) and see ‘The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Meta-
physics’ [=OM], 47 (see Inwood 1999, 54–7, Polt 2005, and Hemming 2002, 103–77); Ereignis is
variously translated: ‘event’/‘act’, ‘appropriation’, etc. With ‘enownment’ (or ‘enowning’) we
favour a standard translation. See Hoftstadter 1979, 17–37, Heidegger 1999, xix–xxii, and Emad
2007, 31–3.
132
See Fiddes 2001b, 35–60, SWKG, 218–65 (esp. 249ff.), 320–1, 325–6 (we will return to this
idea in Bulgakov in 5.3).

presence as apart from and toward each other in a clearing (Lichtung), since
‘Man and Being are appropriated [sind übereignet] to each other. They belong
to [gehören] each other.’133 We want to appropriate these ideas theologically
and suggest that God and the world are enowned one to the other in Jesus
Christ and exist in Him in a loving tension of unity in difference, albeit
initiated entirely by God. Moreover, ‘contraries’ like ‘freedom’ and ‘necessity’
and the fact that the divine economy ‘could have been otherwise’ and ‘could
not have been otherwise’ likewise belong together in any attempt at articulat-
ing Absolute Freedom in itself and for the world. We will pursue a dialectical
or antinomic trajectory, especially in Parts I and II on Bulgakov and Barth, in
order to articulate an understanding of God and the world and freedom and
necessity where they exist in an identity-in-difference in Christ.
However, a dialectical trajectory, it will be argued (chs 8, 9), by itself is
insufficient in articulating the difference in unity between God and the world
in Christ. Such a position so greatly emphasizes the paradox of God’s simul-
taneous existence as utterly different from His creation and His complete
identification with it that we lose all sense that there might be both a non-
contradictory dissimilarity and similarity between the uncreated and the
created. What is needed is a way of relating God to the world in Christ that
maintains the difference and the identity of the two without continually falling
into conceptual contradiction: this is what the polarity of similarity/dissimi-
larity gives us. To claim that two realities are dissimilar is not the same as
saying they are utterly different. It assumes a background of similarity, not
total identity, which endures in the dissimilarity and on which basis one can
say ‘this’ is not like ‘that’. If there were no basic similarity between God and the
world, then there could be no foundation for saying that they are dissimilar, in
some way different. Here, following the lead of David Tracy, we will turn to
the concept of analogy in Part III as developed by Balthasar. In particular, we
will adapt the Balthasarian idea of Christ as the ‘concrete analogy of Being’134
in further articulating a response to our problematic that might complement
and temper antinomy/dialectic.135
We have described three historical and conceptual forms of freedom and
necessity. Firstly, there is freedom as self-will without any sort of ground or
ratio. Secondly, there exists freedom, which acknowledges its ratio. Thirdly,
we have freedom in dependence or a dependent freedom that chooses to be in
need. These three forms of freedom are in a polar relationship with their
counterparts in necessity. F1 is a non-rational self-groundedness or a sheer
self-positing. It is the mirror image of N1, which constrains one from effecting
133
Heidegger 2002a, 31–2 [95], 36, and see OM, 65ff. [132ff.]; cf. 2000, 148 (see Fiddes,
SWKG, 222ff.).
134
Balthasar, Theology of History [=TH], n. 5, 69.
135
Compare Milbank 2009a, 112ff., 176ff., and 2004.

F1 N1
F3 N3
F2 N2
Figure 1. The Absolute Freedom of the Trinity=the Trinitarian life of love-desire
F1. Freedom as self-will, without ratio.
F2. Freedom as self-will, acknowledging ratio (e.g. love-desire).
F3. Freedom in dependence/dependent freedom which is a freedom to be in need.
N1. Necessity as external involving constraint of freedom and compelled activity.
N2. Necessity as internal involving natural compulsion given the constraints of one’s nature.
N3. Necessity in freedom/free dependence which is an irrevocable acceptance of necessity (e.g. moral
necessity).
one’s will and compels one to certain actions. F2 is freedom that is grounded
in itself, but what it is grounded in is its Being as love-desire. This is the mirror
image of N2 which is an internal compulsion of Being where one must express
oneself externally by the very lawfulness or inner constraints that determine
the activity of one’s own Being. Finally, F3 defined as ‘dependent freedom’ is
the free will to love, ecstatically desire another, to be in need, but this self-
giving and self-receiving love-desire could have been otherwise. It is in a polar
relationship, a ceaseless creative tension, with N3. N3 is defined as ‘free
dependence’. Once one chooses to be in need, one already always acts accord-
ing to that love and it could not have been otherwise. Whereas F1–F2 is the
exertion of the will, N1–N2 is its compulsion and bondage. Moreover, whereas
F3 is the free self-giving of the will to another and its self-receiving in turn, N3
is its free acceptance of its compulsion and bondage to another. Finally, F3 as
well as N3 is simultaneously the kenosis and flowering of F1–F2 and N1–N2,
respectively. Taken together these two sets of three aspects of freedom and
necessity evoke what we call Absolute Freedom, by which is meant the divine
life of love-desire of God as Trinity in and for Himself. These forms of freedom
and necessity can be summarized in Figure 1.
We shall use the terminology just outlined to aid the analysis of our three
theologians through which we hope to discern an adequate response to the
problematic of freedom and necessity.
Part I
God as both Absolute and
Absolute-Relative in Sergii Bulgakov
‘Sophiological Antinomism’—Sergii
Bulgakov’s Debt to and Critique
of Vladimir Solov’ev
Sergii Bulgakov (1871–1944) is a thinker who is increasingly viewed by critics

as the greatest Orthodox theologian of the twentieth century. He is also a
figure whose philosophical and theological oeuvre,1 in its breadth and depth, is
comparable to such younger Western luminaries as Paul Tillich (1886–1965),
Karl Barth (1886–1968), Karl Rahner (1904–84), and Hans Urs von Balthasar
(1905–88).2 Recent criticism has emphasized the role of the Greek Fathers, the
Eastern Orthodox liturgical ethos,3 and the sacramental-poetic metaphysics in
Bulgakov’s theology and sophiology more generally.4 However, it still remains
the case that to understand Bulgakov’s sophiology, one must above all under-
stand his complex relationship to the work of Vladimir Solov’ev (1853–1900).5
This chapter will lay out the basic ideas and terms utilized in the version of
the problematic we have outlined as it is presented and responded to in
Bulgakov’s O Bogochelovechestve [On Godmanhood] (1933–45) (see chs. 5–6).
The discussion in this chapter will be in two stages. First, we will look at his
appropriation and critique of Solov’ev’s sophiology in his pre-revolutionary
philosophical work.6 We will then turn to an introduction to Bulgakov’s
theological methodology, ‘theological antinomism [antinomizm]’.7
Bulgakov’s interpretation of Solov’ev’s idea of ‘Sophia’ began life as his
response to the need in his own philosophy of economy for a form of
1
See Akulinin 1996 and Naumov 1984.
2
Overview: Vaganova 2011, 333–69, Arjakovsky 2006, Nichols 2005a, Coda 2003, 7–66,
Gallaher 2002, Valliere 2000a, 227–371, Williams, SB, Evtuhov 1997, and Zander 1948.
3
See Louth 2009 and Gallaher 2013a; see Sergii Bulgakov, Radost’ Tserkovnaia [1938]
[Churchly Joy].
4
See M. Martin 2014, 2016.
5
See Bosco 1992, Seiling 2008, chs. 3–6, and Vaganova 2011, 144ff., 259–69.
6
See Valliere 2010, Seiling 2008, R. Williams, SB, Rosenthal 1996, and Evtuhov 1997.
7
i.e. not as the usual English meaning, which is an alternative expression for ‘antinomianism’,
but as the philosophy of antinomy.

‘transcendental subjectivity’ embracing both the subject and nature. However,
it quickly evolved into a metaphor for understanding the tension between
God and the world. Put negatively, Sophia is neither divine nor creaturely but
in between both realities. Put positively, she is both divine and creaturely.
However, the ambiguity of this metaphor quickly proved to be a double-edged
sword for Bulgakov. Solov’evean ‘Sophia’ was bound up with a determinism,
which made creation a natural necessity for God (N1) overshadowing divine
freedom (F1–2). In response to this problem in Solov’ev, Bulgakov attempted
to turn a potential liability into a benefit by applying, in ‘theological anti-
nomism’, the positive interpretation of Sophia as a living antinomy, both
divine and creaturely, to God Himself. However, this theological move, sim-
ultaneously asserting God’s utter transcendence from the world as ‘Absolute’
and His complete identification with it as ‘Absolute-Relative’, simply opened
up a version of our problematic to which he had to respond (see chs. 5–6).
4.1 SO P HIA AS A LIVING ANTINOMY—THE

ORIGIN S OF BULGAKOVIAN ANTINOMISM
Bulgakov’s early sophiology was formulated in response to Neo-Kantianism

and, in particular, Kant’s third antinomy.8 Kant contended that reason was
faced in nature with a rational antinomy between freedom and necessity
whose solution was found in conceiving the subject and its activity dualistic-
ally as both an intelligible and empirical reality with freedom and necessity
holding sway in their respective realms.9 With a series of articles from 1896–8
critiquing the work of the German Neo-Kantian legal philosopher Rudolph
Stammler (1856–1938),10 Bulgakov began the slow process of putting forward
a particular interpretation of this latter solution while attempting to avoid a
crude dualism. He wished to hold together in nature as a whole both necessity
and freedom. Necessity implied for him an empirical account of the world as
conforming to natural laws (e.g. cause and effect). By freedom he understood a
space outside but still at the root of this empirical world where there might
exist a free ‘transcendental subject’ in but not of history. Bulgakov considered
the latter dialectic as philosophically crucial, for ‘the question of freedom
and necessity is the basic problem of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel.’11
8 9
See Seiling 2008. See ch. 3.
10
See Bulgakov, ‘O Zakonomernosti Sotsial’nykh Iavlenii [Concerning the Lawfulness of
Social Phenomena]’ (1896), 1–34 and ‘Zakon prichinnosti i svoboda chelovecheskikh deistvii
[The Law of Causality and Freedom in Human Action]’ (1898), 35–52.
11
‘Osnovnye problemy teorii progressa’ [1902], 74 [‘Basic Problems of the Theory of
Progress’, 106].
‘Sophiological Antinomism’ 47
However, freedom, for Bulgakov, is not a negative concept, like our F1 so
lordly in its force that it is beyond all necessity. It is not unlimited by law or
givenness (dannost’) of nature as a ‘nondeterminism, noncausality, or absolute
occasionalism’ floating in the ‘extramundane emptiness of nonbeing’. Rather,
freedom is a positive intelligible reality, our F2; the ability to (relatively) act
from one’s self, given one’s self-existence (a se—as in aseity). It is ‘to commence
causality from oneself ’ and thereby ‘refract’ the causative chain of necessity as
one wills. In this way, one disrupts but does not negate ‘the principle of general
mechanism’, acknowledging the necessity that reigns in the orderly succession
of cause and effect, since experience, following Kant, presupposes this order.12
Freedom (F2) in humanity is limited in its power by necessity (N1) but this
very limitation gives it shape by allowing it to seize itself in its individuality,
since it only becomes conscious and reflective ‘in its opposition to necessity’.13
Freedom and necessity are poles, which by their opposition and mutual self-
limitation imply and depend on one another. Kant is being subtly adapted
here through Bulgakov’s reading of Fichte, Hegel, and especially Schelling with
their positive concern for antinomy.
It should be noted, however, that Bulgakov was extremely critical of all of
these thinkers and argued that their work fell into various forms of the
Trinitarian heresy of modalistic monism.14 Indeed, he considered what he
called the ‘mechanical materialism’15 of Marx and others to be the ‘shadow’16
of what he referred to as ‘idealistic subjectivism’17 seen in the ‘Luciferian pride’
of the grand ‘panlogistic’ idealistic systems of Hegel and Fichte.18 Both were
forms of ‘monistic philosophy’ or ‘monism’19 which were practically united in
a ‘mechanistic worldview’ where ‘there is no living nature but only a mech-
anism.’ The ‘confused spirit’, Bulgakov wrote, only can flit between these two
poles searching for a living nature.20
Bulgakov saw his understanding of the relationship of freedom and neces-
sity as ‘opposite’ to that of Kant. In Kant, freedom only exists ‘for the
noumena’, beyond what can be experienced in the intelligible realm of the
thing-in-itself in contradistinction from ‘the world of experience . . . [where]
necessity wholly reigns’.21 Bulgakov drew on the psychology of Idealism
but consciously contrasted himself with Kant. To be a free being was to be a
12
Filosofiia Khoziaistva [=FKh] [1912], 214 [Philosophy of Economy [=PE], 199].
13
FKh, 224 [PE, 208].
14
Tragediia Filosofii [=TF] [1927/1993], 329 (see Hadot 1957, J. Martin 2015a, and O’Regan
2014, 305–21).
15
Bulgakov, ‘Priroda v filosofii Vl. Solov’eva’ [1910], 18. 16
FKh, 100 [PE, 87].
17
‘Priroda’, 18.
18
FKh, 59 [PE, 46], Svet Nevechernii [=SN] [1917], 189 [UL, 209], and TF, 355 (see critique of
both writers: 459–518). On idealism: Seiling 2008 and Gallaher 2006b, 54–74.
19
Bulgakov, FKh, 100 [PE, 87]. 20
‘Priroda’, 18.
21
SN, n. 1, 191 [see: UL, n. 36, 475–6 (my trans.)].

self-conscious created unihypostatic spirit as ‘an indivisible union of self-
consciousness and self-Being or self-foundation, of hypostasis . . . and nature’.
Experience as the consciousness of oneself as a free being thereby requires
my encounter with what is not myself, the Not-I, sheer givenness. This self-
assertion of the I by its Nicht-Ich is not the positum of J. G. Fichte (1762–1814)
where all of reality is in and from my own self-derivation as an other to
myself.22 This Not-I is the co-I, the thou or we, other I’s whom I bump into as
the world experienced over against me. This reality constrains me, limits me,
and therefore serves as a conditioning necessity on me. In this way, I begin to
apprehend myself as free, to experience a world which I am in but not wholly
of.23 Bulgakov, therefore, holds that ‘on our understanding, freedom exists
only where there is necessity, that is, in creaturely self-consciousness’.24
Bulgakov was attempting to both build on and go beyond the dualism of the
Kantian subject towards a new interrelation of the subject and its object, spirit
and matter and freedom and necessity. He was explicitly inspired by Schel-
ling’s notion of an identity of opposites.25 If we are free only in relation to the
world that limits us and this generates our experience of that world, then
the ‘subject is given to us only in interaction with the object, as a subject-
object: I am in the world or in nature, and nature is in me.’26 Action or creative
production is that factor which allows for the creative conjunction or ‘mutual
penetration’ of subject and object, spirit and matter/nature and freedom
and necessity.27
This mutual penetration of opposites, in Heideggerean language, their
Zusammengehörigkeit, reflected the reality of God as Trinity, as trihypostatic
unisubstantial Spirit who is ‘simultaneously subject and object for itself ’.
However, in God, different from creation, there can be no necessary egress
of the subject out of itself into the object so that ‘subjectness-objectness is
postulated in a single, identical, timeless act: the mystery of the holy Trinity
and intratrinitarian life!’28 In God there is no polarization or mutual limitation
of freedom and necessity as in Him there are no boundaries. God is beyond
both freedom and necessity understood as discrete moments in the sense
that, following Schelling, His freedom is in a perfect union with His necessity:
‘The freedom of the Absolute has no boundaries and therefore perfectly
coincides with absolute necessity.’29 God wishes what He can do and He
can do everything He wishes. Wishing and becoming merge in one perfectly
22
‘‘Ipostas’ i Ipostasnost’ [=IiI]’ [1925], 313 [see Gallaher and Kukota, ‘Hypostasis and
Hypostaticity’ [=HH], 18] and see Agnets Bozhii [=AB] [1933], 112ff. [LG, 89ff.].
23
See IiI, 313–14 [HH, 18–19], G [1928], 1: 32–7, and for Fichte, see Gallaher 2006b, 56–8.
24
Bulgakov, SN, n. 1, 191 [see UL, n. 36, 476 (my trans.)].
25 26
FKh, 95ff. [PE, 83ff.]. FKh, 125 [PE, 113] and compare AB, 113 [LG, 90].
27
FKh, 128–9 [PE, 116]; see SB, 120–4, Hughes 2002 and Valliere 2010, 181–4.
28 29
Bulgakov, FKh, 126 [PE, 114]. FKh, 224 [PE, 208]; see ch. 3.
free act that, in being one with necessity, already always contains sufficient
grounds for its realization.
Nevertheless, this synthesis of freedom and necessity rules out all occasion-
alism as if God might wish anything whatsoever. God only wishes what is good
and can only be what He is, which is love, so God does not wish anything that
is not love. In revealing Himself, He reveals Himself freely and necessarily and
He accepts no limits on His power except those He sets for Himself through
love, leaving room for creaturely freedom and in this way ‘limiting himself and
humiliating himself voluntarily in the name of free love’. Absolute free will,
Bulgakov writes, is a ‘holy will, and the highest freedom lies in capitulation to a
certain holy necessity (Schelling)’.30 God, for Bulgakov, in His own Triune
eternal life is a free movement of love-desire who exists because He loves
(F2) and He cannot but love Himself as He is such as Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit (N2). Bulgakov differs in this context markedly from Schelling for
whom the Trinity comes to be as a result of creation.31 As I intend to show
in this study, in creation, God’s freedom is a free self-giving that does not
baulk in dependence on the creature (F3), but in giving itself so totally and
effectively it cannot turn back from its free dependence on creation (N3).
How, more precisely, did Bulgakov re-envision the Kantian subject? Neo-
Kantian philosophy held that in order for one’s representations to be made the
objects of thought, all particular acts of cognition had to be referred to a non-
empirical ‘transcendental subject’ of knowledge given in the act of ‘transcen-
dental apperception’,32 the I in ‘I think’. This subject provided a ‘formal
condition, namely the logical unity of every thought in which I abstract
from every object’ so that every particular cognition could be referred to a
centre where it was known as precisely universally valid, objective.33 However,
the (Neo) Kantian subject, Bulgakov argues, is ‘idle/empty [prazden]’, a
hollow man, an armchair ‘I’ perceiving reality as a play but not acting in it,
a passive formal unity of self-consciousness when the subject is in truth a
‘working energy’ which seizes its own subjectivity in and through the given
world.34 For Bulgakov, therefore, such a subject had to be a transcendental
subject of labour who imparts unity to the many disparate acts of the economic
process—otherwise nothing founds and objectifies all the noetic-praxic
processes.35 Such a subject would bring together the multifariousness of experi-
ence. It had to be ‘simultaneously transcendent to and immanent in history’
by organizing experience into a unified continuum of time and binding it
together with an unbroken chain of causation (causal necessity) as well as
30 31
FKh, 224–6 [PE, 208–9]. See SN, 180–3 [UL, 199–202].
32
See Kant, Pure Reason, B131ff., 246ff. and see B427, 455, A492/B520, 512, and A545/
B573, 539.
33
ibid., A398, 440 and on Hermann Cohen, see Poma 1997, n. 30, 282.
34 35
Bulgakov, FKh, 127–9 [PE, 115–16]. FKh, 139–40 [PE, 126–7].

being the initiating cause of action (freedom).36 Moreover, it had to unite in
itself a host of polarities including freedom/necessity and subject/object-nature
so that the free subject did not exist in some realm apart from nature and nature
was not reduced to a mere mechanism but each lived in and through the other.
The Kantian subject failed to achieve any of these tasks, he argued (and here
he was building on earlier Idealist critiques of Kant) because, being empty, a
headpiece filled with straw, it simply does not exist. It is neither an empirical
reality nor a noumenal one, for one cannot enter into the transcendental realm,
but, in the end, it is a necessary ‘methodological fiction’. Such a stuffed hollow
man is a ‘device’ to give universal validity to knowledge but only ends up
subjectifying both knower and known.37 Nor can God, although he contains
all the oppositions in unity within Him, act as the needed transcendental
subject. We cannot say God ‘causes’ the world because this would make what
is absolute wholly relative, placing Him as transcendent in a necessitous
immanent series and continuity of causes and effects.38 One cannot explain
the ultimate origin of the world by empirical causality.39 God indeed is the
Creator of the world, but its origin is from the ‘creative fiat’ of God who
‘posits’, not causes it.40
What was needed, Bulgakov believed, was some sort of version of this
hypothesized transcendental subject; yet one ‘in’ but not wholly ‘of ’ nature.
Such a subject, while wholly intelligible, independent, and free of the empirical
necessity of cause and effect, would still stand at the root of nature as its
animating cause. This subject could not be coextensive with God as Absolute
or with any one individual because it would then fail the test of being able to
exist as the perfect mono-dualistic mediation of the transcendental and the
empirical, or, put theologically, the divine and the creaturely. Bulgakov be-
lieved that ‘mediation’41 was needed because it was assumed that there was a
fundamental dualism between the transcendental and the empirical, the
noumena and the phenomena. In practice, God was identified with the first
and the creature, being in the world, with the second so that a ‘bridge’ was
needed. In short, the desired subject had to be not only in but not of nature,
but also identified but not coextensive with God and individual human beings.
The form of causality Bulgakov sought was a cause, to adapt Kant, beginning
its effects in the sensible world from itself ‘without its action beginning in it
itself ’ because effects in the world of sense cannot begin from themselves if the
law of cause and effect is to hold.42
36
‘Osnovnye problemy’ 75 [‘Basic Problems’, 107] and FKh, 142 [PE, 129].
37
FKh, 140–1 [PE, 128].
38
SN, 142–3 [UL, 155]; see Slesinski 2007, 136–7, 142–3, 2008, and Gavrilyuk 2015, 454.
39
Bulgakov, SN, 165–6 [UL, 182].
40
SN, 142 and 166–7 [see UL, 154 and 183–4 (my trans.)].
41
See Milbank 2009b (commentary: Gallaher 2006a, Dunn 2012, R. May 2013).
42
Kant, Pure Reason, A541/B569, 537.
This is where the influence of Solov’ev becomes critical, for Bulgakov found
his desired transcendental subject in Solov’ev’s ‘Sophia’. Firstly, Sophia, as
Bulgakov interpreted Solov’ev, was a unique subject in but not of nature since
she was not a limited human subject but ‘humanity’ as an ‘intelligible essence’.
She was an ‘integral, universal and individual organism’ in whom one finds the
consciousness and the unity of the ‘all’ (i.e. vseedinstvo) of nature, so ‘in this
sense humanity is the world soul’.43 Secondly, Sophia was a new vision of
nature as a living personal reality, a sort of quasi-subject, the soul of the world
(natura naturans).44 She united in herself subject and object and all the other
polarities previously mentioned, especially freedom and necessity. Sophia, in
other words, in her all-embracing sacramental wholeness45 as the embodiment
of all-unity was able to overcome Neo-Kantian dualism through being a
perfect living mono-dualistic mediation of all polarities. Indeed, in an early
essay on Solov’ev, Bulgakov asked rhetorically what idea Solov’ev gave to
modern thought and he replied to his own question that it was ‘positive all-
unity’.46 This Solov’evean vision was, he argued, a development of Schelling’s
identity philosophy47 free of what he calls the ‘Schellingean dogmatism’.48
Yet the most important polarity Sophia united was God and the world.
Sophia is, in common with pantheism, an intelligible ‘living substance [sus-
hchestvo]; [so] nature is the subsistent [sushchee], nature is the absolute’ or
what Bulgakov will refer to later as the Divine Sophia undergirding all reality.
But in contradistinction from pantheism, ‘nature is other than God [drugoe
Boga: lit. the “other of God”], His creation and image, a second absolute,
which becomes absolute as a result of a process, and in time’49 or what
Bulgakov will later refer to as the (quasi-empirical) Creaturely Sophia. Yet
these two realities are ultimately one Sophia as a living personal antinomy
embracing the absolute and the relative.50 Here we see positively the nascence
of what will become a basic theological antinomy for Bulgakov (see ch. 5):
Sophia as both divine and creaturely. I refer to this as Bulgakov’s positive both/
and vision of Sophia.
Bulgakov sometimes claimed without much elucidation that this Solov’evean
distinction (as well as that between God as Absolute and Absolute-Relative)
was simply a restatement of the distinction of Palamas51 between essence and
43
Bulgakov, ‘Priroda’, 36. 44
FKh, 143 [PE, 130].
45
See Valliere 2010, 174–5 and compare van Kessel 2012, 262ff. and M. Martin 2014, 159ff.
46
Bulgakov, ‘Chto daet sovremennomu soznaniiu filosofiia Vl. Solov’eva?’ (1903), 195 [see
Pain and Zernov 1976, 42] and see Valliere 2010, 174–5.
47
See Bulgakov, FKh, 98–107 [PE, 85–94].
48
FKh, 107 [PE, 93] and see ‘Priroda’, 31; see Valliere 2010, 175–6, 182ff.
49
Bulgakov, ‘Priroda’, 33; see Vladimir Solov’ev, Kritika otvlechennykh nachal [=Krit.]
[1877–80], SSVSS, 2: 315–24, esp. 317–18, 323.
50
Bulgakov, ‘Priroda’, 32.
51
See Gregory Palamas, 150 Chapters (Toronto, 1988), §§132–45, 237–51 [PG 150.1214A–
1222C].

energies.52 He certainly knew of Palamism53 by at least 1910 through
Florensky54 and his own involvement55 in the Athonite name-glorifiers con-
troversy (imiaslavskie spori) (1910–18).56 Nevertheless, the Sophia distinction,
besides being different from the Palamite one, comes from Solov’ev,57 whom
he knew at least seven years before encountering Palamas.58 Parallels between
the two systems, while heuristically useful for interpreting Bulgakov, should be
treated with caution.59
However, there is an ambiguity in Bulgakov’s appropriation of Solov’ev.
Sophia can be understood not only positively but also (and perhaps
more famously) negatively, as neither divine nor creaturely but a ‘bridge’
between both realities. Sophia is said to be a tertium quid, ‘a certain metaxu60
in Plato’s sense’, ‘an ineffable, incomprehensible borderland [gran’] between
the creaturehood-Being [bytie-tvarnost’] and the supra-Being, existence-
essence [sushchest’]61 of the Godhead; neither Being, nor supra-Being’. Rather,
she is a ‘between’ situated in the midst of God and the world.62 She is, in a
manner of speaking, a ‘fourth hypostasis’63 but she does not ‘participate in the
inner-divine life: she is not God’. But neither is she created since ‘the world is not
outside Sophia, and Sophia is not outside the world, but at the same time the
world is not Sophia’.64 This negative neither/nor vision of Sophia is perhaps
52
e.g. Bulgakov, AB, 144n [LG, 122n] and Nevesta Agntsa [=NA] [1945], 72 [Bride of the
Lamb [=BL], 63].
53
See SN, 122–4 [UL, 131–4]; IiI, 316 [HH, 23–5], Kupina neopalimaia [=K] [1927], 212,
249–50, 254–5n [Burning Bush [=BB], 117–18, 138, 179–80 n. 16] and 288; Ikona i Ikonopochi-
tanie [=I] [1931], n. 1, 264 [IV, n. 47, 35], AB, 139–40, 144n [LG, 116, 122n], O Sofii Premudrosti
Bozhiei [1935], 32–3 and 36, 58–9; Dokladnaia Zapiska [1936], 8–10, Sophia, the Wisdom of God
[=SWG] [1937], 33n; NA, 23–4, 71n, 72 and 335 [BL, 18–19, 61n, 63, and 309].
54
See Florensky, ‘Ob Imeni Bozhiem’ [1921], Sobranie Sochinenii, Vol. 3 (1), 558–60 (see
Alfeyev 2002, 2: 112–13), and S, n. 127, 660–1 [PGT, n. 128, 468–9].
55
See Bulgakov, ‘Afonskoe delo’ [1913], ‘Smysl ucheniia sv. Grigoriia Nisskogo ob imenakh’
[1914], 292–304 and 336–43 and Filosofiia imeni [1953] (see Evtuhov 1997, 210–28, Alfeyev
2002, 1: 585ff., 2: 144–95, and Zaviyskyy 2011, ch. 4).
56
See Grillaert 2012, Reznichenko 2012, Vaganova 2011, 307ff., Senina 2011, Zaviyskyy 2011,
ch. 4, Nedelsky 2006, Alfeyev 2002, 2007, 241–307, Gourko 2005 (on Bulgakov, 1: 202–42),
Leskin 2003, Horužij 2003, and Denn 2003.
57
See Gallaher 2009a, 622–3; Solov’ev knew Palamas: ‘Mistika—Mistitsizm’, Stat’i iz Entsiklo-
pedicheskago Slovaria, SSVSS, 10: 245, and RGALI, Fond 446, opis’ no. 1, ed. khr. no. 42: Vladimir
Sergeevich Solov’ev, ‘Zapisnaia knizhka, Vol. 1, 1880-e gody’, 70 ll, p. 8 (Solov’ev’s notebooks in the
Russian State Archive of Literature and Art in Moscow; thanks to Dr Oliver Smith (†) for this
citation). On Solov’ev’s engagement with Patristic writers (on theosis), see Pilch 2015, chs. 1–2.
58
Bulgakov, ‘Chto daet [etc.]’, 195–262.
59
See Rossum 2008, Zaviyskyy 2011, chs. 2–4, and Louth 2013 (response: Asproulis 2013).
60
Favourite Platonic notion: Bulgakov, K, 265, 268 [BB, 145, 147], I, 262 [IV, 32] and NA,
135, 244 [BL, 123, 223].
61
sushchest’=sushchestvovanie (existence) + sushchnost’ (essence). (Thanks to Dr Alexey
Kostyanovsky for his insight on this term.)
62
SN, 193, 195 [see UL, 217, 219 (my trans.)].
63
SN, 194 [UL, 217] and qualification: IiI, 317–18 [HH, 27–9].
64
SN, 194 [see UL, 217] and 202 [UL, 228].
closest to Solov’ev’s conception. It never really disappears from Bulgakov’s work
but it is gradually superseded by what I have called the positive both/and vision
of Sophia whose seeds are also found in Solov’ev.
The positive vision of Sophia as both divine and creaturely becomes crucial for
Bulgakov’s later thought. He used it as the basis for re-envisioning the distinction
between the immanent and the economic Trinity. God as Trinity is understood,
in an antinomy, to be both wholly transcendent to everything as ‘Absolute’65 and
relative to a creation for which He is their ‘God’. As the Absolute as ‘God’, He
is defined by and in reference to the world and so becomes ‘Absolute-
Relative’.66 Here we see the nucleus of the problematic in Bulgakov. If God
is defined by His creation, which is an internal necessity for Him (N2), then
how can he truly be said to be transcendent and so free from the world (F2)?
Sophia as a new vision of subjectivity-cum-nature—at once both creaturely
and divine and neither fully divine nor fully created—being empirico-intelligible,
faces toward God and toward creation. She is the ‘union of antitheses, coin-
cidentia oppositorum, transcends reason and pulls it apart antinomically’.67
Sophia serves as the ‘transcendental subject of knowledge, of economy, of
history’68 precisely by being a living antinomy. She founds and synthesizes all
the multiple economic acts into a creative unity, ‘transforming the subjective
into the transsubjective, synthesizing the fragmented actions and events that
make up economy, knowledge and history into a living unity’.69 She is able to
found human production in nature because she is the world soul animating
that nature and is so precisely as the principle of humanity.70 Being such a
world soul, she hammers together into a unity in diversity all human subjects.
Sophia serves as the creaturely mediation of the unity of subject-object and all
other worldly polarities that exists in God’s pre-eternal intratrinitarian life.
A tall order indeed!
But what of causation? Sophia rules over history as ‘Providence’ as history’s
‘objective lawfulness/causal necessity [zakonomernost’],71 as the law [zakon] of
progress’.72 She does this precisely by bringing the ‘infinite multiplicity
of experience’ together in one space and in all moments of time tying it
‘with an unbroken causal connection’.73 Thus, not only is she the cause in,
but not of, the world, but causality itself in nature. Through this new subject
which is also an object/nature, Bulgakov could assert suprarational resolutions
of the dialectics of a host of polarities and problems without in any way
65
SN, 192 [UL, 214].
66
See SN, 167ff. [UL, 184ff.], I, 261 [IV, 30–1] and AB, 143ff. [LG, 121ff.].
67 68
SN, 215 [see UL, 245 (my trans.)]. FKh, 144 [PE, 132].
69 70
FKh, 144 [PE, 132] (revd). FKh, 145 [PE, 132].
71
Russian calque of Gesetzmässigkeit (lawfulness) variously translated: Seiling 2008, Chap. 3.
I.2, n.295 and Gerschenkron 1973, 176–81.
72
Bulgakov, FKh, 171 [see PE, 154] (revd).
73
FKh, 142 [PE, 129]; compare SN, 201 [UL, 227].

demonstrating the said resolutions. If Sophia was initially drawn on to respond
to problems in political economy that presupposed a Kantian ‘God’, unknown
in Himself but needed to ground science and ethics, then gradually she became
a purely theological means to hold together the God of Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob and His creation in a perfect difference in unity. Through Sophia, God
can freely will the world without being completely identified with it, as she is
(depending on the passage!) (quasi-) divine. Through Sophia as well, as she
is (quasi-) created, the world can be said to be in a perfect eternal union with
God without collapsing back into Him and becoming a necessity for Him. The
concept of Sophia, then, becomes for Bulgakov a sort of conceptual panacea
for all number of philosophical and theological ills. But such a notion, because
it means everything, comes to mean nothing in particular and indeed we shall
see that this is also the case for Solov’ev. One sees, then, in both thinkers the
danger of ontological monism.
Yet Bulgakov was not uncritical in his appropriation of sophiology and
perceived its latent (albeit eclectic) Gnosticism.74 This cannot be said—it is sad
to say—for some of the past and present enthusiasts for sophiology who see it
as one more species of modern esotericism. Admittedly, in the first flush of his
encounter with Solov’ev’s thought, Bulgakov was uncritically enthralled by
the poetic-erotic aspects of Solov’ev’s devotion to ‘the Eternal Feminine’
and Solov’ev’s dabbling in the occult. This led Bulgakov to a rather absurd
credence in the hysteric Anna Schmidt (1851–1905), whose Third Testament
and correspondence with Solov’ev he published. Schmidt believed herself to be
the incarnation of Sophia and offered herself as a ‘bride’ to Solov’ev (who
realized she was disturbed) as a Christ ‘bridegroom’ figure.75 Bulgakov would
later regard this poetic-erotic aspect of sophiology as ‘heresy and spiritual
fornication’ to which he was once enthralled and had now turned firmly to the
teachings of the Church.76 All things considered, Bulgakov considered the
major difficulty with what I have called the negative notion of Sophia as a
‘neither-nor’ bridge (neither fully divine nor creaturely) between God and the
world to be that it was characterized by rationalism, determinism, and ultim-
ately monism. All of these problems he identifies in Solov’ev. It is for this
reason, that Bulgakov builds his mature theology on what I have called the
‘positive’ (albeit antinomic) notion of Sophia as both divine and creaturely.
But before we turn to Bulgakov’s antinomism we must look at both his
major criticism of Solov’ev’s sophiology and Solov’ev as the inspiration of
his antinomism.
74
SWG, 9–10 and see AB, 137 n. 2 [LG, 114 n. 18] and ‘S. N. Bulgakov, Pis’ma k
G. V. Florovskomu’ (IIRM, 2002), 204. See Vaganova 2011, 70–85.
75
See Bulgakov, Tikhie dumy [1918], 71–114.
76
‘Prot. S. Bulgakov. Iz Pamiati serdtsa. Praga (1923–4) [Prague Diary]’, entry of 29 October/
12 November 1923 (IIRM, 1998), 199 and see ‘Prot. Sergii Bulgakov. O Vl. Solov’eve’ (IIRM,
1999), 216–17 (see Zaviyskyy 2011, ch. 5).
4. 2 THE S OLOV ’ EVEAN ABSOLUTE AND

THE BULGAKOVIAN CRITIQUE
Solov’ev’s account of the self-generation or self-differentiation of the Absolute,

which Bulgakov criticized, is coextensive with his Trinitarian theology77 but it
is as if the first—with its intense abstraction—is the logical truth of the
second.78 This is not surprising because Solov’ev, following Hegel and Schel-
ling, sees Trinitarian teaching as a speculative teaching79 not unique to
Christianity.80 Much of the obscurity of his teaching comes from his (mostly
unexplained) mixing of the canonical Christian language about God with its
Neoplatonic and Idealist counterparts, which forms, in the manner of Hegel,
its philosophical ‘content’. He argues, following Schelling and the German
mystic Jacob Boehme (1575–1624),81 that God is the Absolute or ‘divine
principle’82 who is (variously) the subsistent (sushchee), supersubsistent
(sverkhsushchee), and absolutely subsistent (bezuslovno-sushchee) One.83 Firstly,
one must speak of God as the supersubsistent subject or Absolute proper, who
completely transcends every finite limited content (‘negative absoluteness’),84 is
free from every kind of Being,85 because He ‘exists’ as absolutely One (i.e. hen).86
This existence is general or abstract insofar as He has no particular determin-
ation. Put in terms of our terminology, the One is a radical version of F1.
‘Translated’ into Christian Trinitarian terms, and one is forced to do this
constantly in reading Solov’ev, God as the subsistent One as such is a ‘hypos-
tasis’ or Absolute Subject and, principally, He is the hypostasis of the Father as
the ungenerated ground of the Trinity or monarchos.87 Here existence or the
ekstasis of personhood precedes essence, as is the case with the personalism of
Lev Karsavin (1882–1952) and his student Vladimir Lossky (1903–58), who
77
I am indebted to O. Smith 2011 and Romanowsky 2011. Bibliography on Solov’ev: Groberg
1998–9, 299–398 and Kornblatt et al. 2009, 277–87.
78
But see Fiddes, SWKG, 382 (on Solov’ev and Bulgakov: 381–7).
79
Solov’ev, Chteniia o Bogochelovechestve [=Cht.] [1877–81], Lect. 6–7, SSVSS, 3: 80–111
[Lectures on Divine Humanity [=LDH], 74–104]. See Bulgakov’s objection: SN, 145 [UL,
158–9].
80
See Hegel, PR, III [MS], 79ff. [Vor., 17ff.] and Schelling, PO, SW, XIII: Lect. 15, 312ff. and
PM, SW, XII: Lect. 4, 78.
81
See Schelling, ‘System of Philosophy in General’, 149 [SW, VI: 150], Philosophische
Einleitung in PM, SW, XI: Lect. 11, 273ff., PO, SW, XIII: Lect. 8, 173–4 and see 160ff. [Grounding
of Positive Philosophy, 211–12 and see 201ff.] and Jacob Boehme, Mysterium Magnum, 29, 1, 254.
82
Solov’ev, Cht., 4: 48 [LDH, 45].
83
See ibid., 6: 83ff. [ibid., 77ff.], Filosofskie nachala tsel’nogo znaniia [=Filo.] [1877], SSVSS, 1,
333–7 [Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge [=PIK], 97–101] and Krit., 306.
84 85 86
Cht., 2: 19 [LDH, 17]. Filo., 348 [LDH, 113]. Krit., 308–9.
87
Cht., 6: 87 [LDH, 81] and compare La Russie et l’église universelle [=REU] [1889], 245–8
[Russia and the Universal Church [=RUC], 152–5]; see Schelling, PO, SW, XIII: Lect. 15, 310–36,
XIV: Lect. 25, 37.

influenced John Zizioulas and Christos Yannaras.88 God, then, as the hypostasis
of the Father, the One, the monarchos, is wholly unconnected to anything. He is
defined negatively by His separation from everything particular, finite, and plural
as the Kabbalistic En-Sof ‘free from the all [vse], as absolutely united’.89
Yet such a relationless indeterminate conception of the Absolute would
ultimately collapse into pure negative nothingness because—a key idea of both
Solov’ev and Bulgakov—Being (bytie) is thinkable only as a concrete relation
of a subsistent reality to its own objective essence (sushchnost’) or content
(soderzhanie).90 In this way, it serves as the principle of the otherness of its
own Being.91 Put in terms of the dialectic of freedom and necessity, Solov’ev
argues that the freedom of the Absolute depends both on it not being bound to
anything that exists and on it not lacking anything that exists. If, however, it
was merely free from every kind of Being, then it would simultaneously lack
every type of Being and so be ‘deprived’ of Being as a sort of external lack and
could not be said to be free from it. Being, in such a case, ‘would then be for it a
necessity’ insofar as perfect freedom implies that there is nothing that is not
dependent upon one: ‘that which does not depend on me, which is given apart
from me, is for me a necessity, which I must endure whether I desire it or
not’.92 The Absolute, therefore, in order (ostensibly) to avoid the external
necessity of ‘lack’ (N1) must not merely be a negative absolute, our F1. It also
must simultaneously be a positive potentiality (‘positive nothing’),93 our F2,
which contains the ‘positive force or creating principle’. The One is a ‘nothing
that is’, ‘a positive nothingness’ in containing, being both nothing and every-
thing, the all.94 This ‘all’ is its Other, which Solov’ev will call ‘Sophia’.
One must, therefore, speak of two different ‘centres’ or ‘poles’ of the
Absolute: the One (‘Father’) and its Other (‘Sophia’). The second pole of
the Absolute, Sophia, is negative unmediated potentiality. Neoplatonism was
influential here, so it is not surprising that Solov’ev identifies the second pole of
the Absolute with ‘prima materia’ (i.e. intelligible matter or the Plotinian dyad
(he aoristos duas)).95 This second Absolute is ‘essence’ or the ‘spontaneous
potential of Being’ which the first Absolute needs to affirm in itself in order
88
e.g. Lossky 1976, 56ff., Zizioulas, BC, 44, Yannaras 1991, 33–6. On Karsavin, see Rubin
2013, 108ff., 130ff., 246ff., Horužij 2009, and Meerson 1998, 148ff. (key texts: Noctes
Petropolitanae (St Petersburg, 1922), O Nachalakh (Berlin, 1925), and O Lichnosti
(Kaunas, 1929)).
89
Solov’ev, Filo., 346 [PIK, 111 (revd)]; on Solov’ev’s hybrid Kabbalism (mixed with Gnos-
ticism, Renaissance esotericism, and Boehme), see Burmistrov 1998, 2007, 159–64 and Rubin
2010, 26ff., 47ff.
90
Solov’ev, Cht., 6: 83 [LDH, 77] and 7: 104 [ibid., 96–7] and see Bulgakov, SN, 104 [UL, 109].
91 92
Solov’ev, Filo., 349 [PIK, 113]. Filo., 348 [PIK, 113].
93
Filo., 348–50 [PIK, 113–15].
94
Filo., 348 [PIK, 113] and see Krit., 309–10; see Bulgakov, SN, 147ff. [UL, 160ff.].
95
See Plotinus, enn. 5: V.4.2.8–9, 144–5, 5: V.1.5, 26–7, 2: II.4.2ff., 108ff, and 2: II.4.5, 117
(compare Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1.6.5–6, 9–10, 987b19–23, 988a9–17, 44–5, 46–9).
not to become a pure negative nothingness.96 Here plays out the same dialectic
of Being and Nothingness we traced above in regards to the freedom and
necessity of the Absolute. If the Absolute were to assert itself only as an
Absolute as such, then it could not then be Absolute because its Other or
not-absolute would be outside of it ‘as its negation or boundary’ and it would
then be wholly ‘limited, exclusive, and not free’: ‘If the absolute were to remain
only in itself, excluding its other, then this other would be its negation, and as a
consequence it itself would no longer be absolute.’97 If anything were outside
God, some ‘being’ apart from His divine substance, then it would limit Him as
He would no longer be Absolute.98 For the Absolute to be Absolute it must
include its opposite/Other, being thereby a unity of itself and its opposite.99 This
observation is central to Bulgakov’s ontology as well.
This same point can also be viewed more explicitly in terms of the classic
One-Many dialectic. If the One is such only by the absence of multiplicity,
then its unity would be merely ‘accidental not absolute’ and multiplicity would
‘have power over it’. True absolute unity, the One, En-Sof, the Father is only
such through generating or positing multiplicity in itself but still remaining
totally one and so ‘constantly triumphing over [multiplicity], for everything is
tested by its opposite’.100 The Absolute as a first principle, therefore, simply
states in abstract form the truth that God is love. Love is self-denial of a being,
self-affirmation of it by an other, and thereby through self-denial ‘its highest
self-affirmation is realized’.101 Bulgakov, despite his criticism of Solov’ev’s
rationalism, was drawing his theological methodology and epistemology,
‘antinomism’, and even indeed aspects of his intratrinitarian kenoticism,
straight from Solov’ev’s teaching on the Absolute. The Absolute, for Solov’ev,
is both antinomic, in that it is constituted by the perfect union of contraries
(sc. the One (‘Father’) and its Other (‘Sophia’)), and kenotic, insofar as divine
self-affirmation presupposes loving self-denial.
For Solov’ev, the Father as the One is the ‘principle of its own other’ or ‘will’
insofar as it/He posits—he will also speak of the same eternal act as ‘deter-
mining’, ‘possessing’, ‘relating’, and ‘causing’—its/His Other, which is His
essence. What the One posits by its own will is its own and a part of it insofar
as it posits it but also simultaneously distinct from it insofar as it posits it.102
God, therefore, in contrast to Himself as En-Sof, the One, as the absolute
supersubsistent Father, is also perfectly complete in that He possesses His
Other as the totality of essence (i.e. all content, every determination). This
96
Solov’ev, Filo., 350 [PIK, 114–15] and see Krit., 311, 313–15.
97
Filo., 349 [PIK, 113–14] and see Krit., 310, cited at Bulgakov, SN, n. 3, 140 and n. 2, 167
[UL, n. 117, 460 and n. 3, 469].
98 99
Solov’ev, Cht., 6: 85 [LDH, 78]. Krit., 310.
100
Cht., 6: 89 [LDH, 82] and see Krit., 310–11.
101 102
Filo., 349 [PIK, 114] and see Krit., 310. Cht., 7: 104 [LDH, 97].

essence is also referred to as the All (i.e. pan)103 understood as ‘every type of
being in a certain aspect, specifically in its positive force or creating prin-
ciple’.104 God determines Himself, therefore, positively over against the Other
insofar as He possesses the All (so being completed, finished, fully, whole, etc.)
and is not ‘capable of having anything outside of itself ’.105 In other words,
the hypostasis of God the Father contains the All in Himself (‘positive abso-
luteness’)106 as His essence or ousia in an eternal act and in this way can be
said to have Being. The divine All is the positive ‘content’ of God which, being
possessed, is the fullness of Being or essence.107 It is, quite simply, ‘the idea of
the absolute good, or more precisely, absolute goodness or love’, which is the
inner unity, integrality, and fullness of all ideas in God.108
Solov’ev refers to this divine essence-love, the All or Other of the One/
Father, as ‘Sophia’, echoing Boehme,109 and ‘all-unity [vseedinstvo]’,110 echoing
Schelling’s Spinozist notion of Alleinheit or All-einigkeit.111 He is, therefore,
identifying Sophia with the substantia or ousia of God as love.112 This will
later become a cornerstone of Bulgakov’s late sophiology, which speaks of
God’s ousia as the divine Sophia and creation as the creaturely Sophia.113
Hence, God as the Absolute is not only hen (the ‘One’) or the hypostasis of
the Father but also pan (the ‘All’) or Sophia the ousia of God. This makes Him
hen kai pan114 or He is, building on Schelling again, the All-One Subsistence
(sushchee vseedinoe).115
The Father as ‘the absolutely subsistent [absoliutno-sushchii]’116 solely
possesses His content of the All (Sophia) potentially in an immediate and
undifferentiated unity, that is, God is the All ‘in Himself [v sebe]’117 or He is
‘Being-in-itself [v-sebe-bytie]’.118 Nevertheless, He is not content to possess the
103 104
Cht., 4: 48 [LDH, 45] and 7: 113 [LDH, 106]. Filo., 348 [PIK, 113].
105 106
Filo., 346 [PIK, 111]. Cht., 2: 19 [LDH, 17].
107
Cht., 4: 48 [LDH, 45] and 7: 113 [LDH, 106].
108
Cht., 4: 57 [LDH, 53 (revd)]; cf. 5: 69, 7: 109–11, 9: 136 [LDH, 63, 102–4, 128].
109
Boehme, Mysterium Magnum, 6, 2. 28 and 29, 2–5, 254–5 (for Boehme and sophiology,
see M. Martin 2014, 39–61).
110
Solov’ev, Cht., 10: 144 [LDH, 135] and REU, 251 [RUC, 158–9]; also, ‘all-integrality
[vsetselost’]’, the ‘ideal all [ideal’noe vse]’, and ‘all-one [vseedinoe]’ (Cht., 4: 58, 5: 70 [LDH, 53,
64]). See ‘Vseedinstvo’, SSVSS, 10: 231.
111
See Schelling, PO, SW, XIII: Lect. 15, 310, 333, XIV: Lect. 31, 195, ‘System of Philosophy in
General’, 170–1 (universe/totality=Das All) [SW, VI: 181–2] and The Philosophy of Art, 24 [SW,
V: 375]; Spinoza: Ethics, 1.Def. 6, p. 3, Prop. 11, 10, Prop. 15, p. 14, Append., 35 and 4.Pref., 162
(see Solov’ev, ‘Poniatie o Boge’ [1897], SSVSS, 9: 23ff. [‘Concept of God’, 50ff.]). Compare
Boehme, Mysterium, 6, 1 and ‘Second Apologie’, Part I, 89, 19.
112 113
Solov’ev, REU, 249 [RUC, 157]. Bulgakov, SWG, 23–36, 54–81.
114
Solov’ev, Filo. 337 and 346 [PIK, 101 and 111] and Krit., 309; compare Boehme, Myster-
ium, 29, 2, 254.
115
Solov’ev, Cht. 6: 84–5 [LDH, 78–9] and see Krit., 169, 188; cf. Schelling, PM, SW, XII: Lect.
3, 60–5, Lect. 5, 80ff. and esp. 96.
116 117
Solov’ev, Cht., 6: 90 [LDH, 83 (revd)]. Cht., 6: 86 [LDH, 79].
118
Cht, 7: 103 [LDH, 96].
All solely in Himself, but, building on Schelling’s Potenzen, must have it also in
two other mutually exclusive eternal acts or positings for himself and with
Himself.119 In order that God the Father as the One can will the All or Sophia
as His Other, the Other must be ‘represented by or to that which is’. Thus, the
Suprasubsistent, the Divine Subject, determines itself and so has Being as
the All-One Subsistence not merely as will but also as representation, as an
object for itself. This ‘represented essence’ receives the possibility of acting on
the Suprasubsistent which represents it (i.e. subjectivity) and so both Supra-
subsistent and the essence as representation can will.120 If this is the case, then
the represented essence clearly is personal or upholds the essence hypostatically.
In theological terms, we are speaking of the Logos who is as an object to the
Father who includes multiplicity in His unity, that is, God is the All ‘for Himself
[dlia sebia]’121 or He is ‘Being for-itself [dlia-sebia-bytie]’.122 When the hypos-
tasis of the Logos, the divine principle of form as a producing unity, unites
Himself with the divine multiplicity of Sophia, as a produced unity or the
principle of humanity, they together comprise the integral divine organism at
the heart of God: Christ.123
Lastly, the Suprasubsistent as subject, which was separated from that which
it represents as object, is united with it again. The Suprasubsistent finds itself
in the represented essence and vice versa. Here we have a new third mode
of Being, a sort of subject-object, following Schelling’s intuition which
Bulgakov so highly prized. In this third reality, which presumably can also
will, the first two interact or feel one another—namely, feeling.124 We have
finally arrived, in Christian terms, at the Holy Spirit whom the Father
posits as maintaining Himself in an actual mediated and differentiated
unity with His content, Sophia. By His Spirit, the Father finds Himself in
His Other, the Son, as eternally returning ‘to itself [k sebe]’ and ‘subsisting
with itself [u sebia sushchee]’,125 that is, God is ‘Being-with-itself [u-sebia-
bytie]’.126 Although we shall see shortly that Bulgakov is very critical
of Solov’ev’s Trinitarian thought, he does clearly adapt the notion of
the Father’s self-revelation or self-positing of Himself as Trinity from
Solov’ev.
This highly rationalist Trinitarian theology where God necessarily generates
or posits Himself is extended to creation and it is here that the greatest
problems with Solov’ev’s theology emerge. The second Absolute or pole of
the Absolute as it is the principle of Being in its multiplicity, is attracted
119
Cht, 6: 94–5 [LDH, 87–8]; see Valliere 2000b, 121–2.
120 121
Solov’ev, Cht., 7: 104 [LDH, 97]. Cht., 6: 86 [LDH, 79].
122 123
Cht., 7: 103 [LDH, 96]. Cht., 7: 113–16 [LDH, 106–9] and 8: 121 [LDH, 113].
124
Cht., 7: 104 [LDH, 97]; compare Filo. 347–74 [PIK, 112–37] and REU, 241–3 [RUC,
148–50].
125
Cht., 6: 90 [LDH, 83].
126
Cht., 7: 103 [LDH, 96]; see Filo., 357–9, 375ff. [PIK, 121–3, 139ff.].

towards Being and searches for it in deprivation as the ‘craving for Being’.127
The Absolute, therefore, needs the Other. In order to manifest itself in
freedom, to know itself beyond the pull of the necessity of the Other (‘there
is consequently necessity, a divine fate’), to quench its thirst for Being, it
ultimately must concretize itself outside itself as the world to possess itself in
freedom.128 Creation is conceived thereafter differently according to the
period of Solov’ev’s thought. But in every period, like Solov’ev’s teaching on
the Trinity, it is characterized by rationalism, determinism, and pantheism.129
In whatever form creation may be conceived, for Solov’ev, and he is here
rehearsing Schelling’s theomachy of the Absolute, in order for the Absolute in
itself to be free, to be unified and unchanged ‘in all the multifaceted creative
works of its essence or love’, it must eternally triumph over its necessity. It so
triumphs by externalizing itself so that ‘Freedom and necessity are correlative—
the first being real only through the realization of the second.’130 In terms of our
terminology, God possesses not merely F1, a raw discharge of pure divine will
unencumbered by anything, freer than free, but also F2. He is, possessing F2,
a movement of sheer positive desire into the Other for the sake of love.
This movement of love only takes place because God already always has an
internal need (N2) of an Other (whether divine nature, Being, or the world) to
define himself. In short, God needs the world and must create it in order to be
a truly free God.
In this very context, Bulgakov feels that Solov’ev is akin not to Kant, who
with his thing-in-itself acknowledged a mysterious unknowable reality beyond
man, an ‘absolute NOT’, but to Hegel and Schelling. With their grandiose
systems of metaphysical speculation, they would not acknowledge proper
bounds to human reason.131 Solov’ev, Bulgakov writes, ‘generally sins by an
excessive rationalism in his theology’. He conflates a speculative account of the
self-generation of the Absolute discernible to reason with the Christian reve-
lation of the Holy Trinity, which is the crux of reason, resulting in ‘an
excessive deduction of creation’.132 This can be seen particularly in Solov’ev’s
characterization ‘without elucidation’ of the ‘transcendent absolute’ by the
‘problematic’ kabbalistic notion En-Sof which he then ‘illegally and without
any explanation’ equates with the hypostasis of the Father. On this basis,
he then ‘rationally deduces its relation to the world’ and the world and the
Absolute’s ‘mutual determination’ of one another.133 En-Sof and God the
Father, Bulgakov continues, are treated as synonymous when they are actually
quite distinct ideas ‘belonging to different planes’. En-Sof is ‘the transcendent
127 128
Filo., 353 [PIK, 118] and see Krit., 313. Filo., 351 [PIK, 116].
129
Cht., 9: 137–40 [LDH, 129–31] and REU, 251–3 [RUC, 160–1].
130 131
Filo., 352 [PIK, 116] and see Krit., 313. Bulgakov, SN, 139–40 [UL, 151–2].
132
SN, 140 and n. 2, 167 [see UL, 152 and n. 3, 469 (my trans.)].
133
SN, 140 [see UL, 152 (my trans.)] and for Kabbalism, see SN, 130–3 [UL, 140–3].
Godhead before disclosure’134 or, alternatively, the ‘NOT-something’ of nega-
tive theology.135 In contrast, God the Father is ‘the first hypostasis of the triune
God’136 which concerns ‘God who has disclosed Himself in the world—at the
beginning of this disclosure’.137 We shall see in chapter 5 that ‘God’ as
Absolute, for Bulgakov, exists in two antinomic forms—as a ‘Not-Something’
negating relationship, and as Holy Trinity, who is Absolute Self-Relation-in-
Itself. Antinomism, for Bulgakov, becomes the means by which he attempts to
tame the rationalism and determinism of sophiology by asserting a supra-
rational unity in difference for a host of ‘opposites’.
Bulgakov specifically notes how Solov’ev, having ‘completely swallowed up
and excluded’ the ‘Other’ ‘by the notion of the all-one absolute’, then imports
metaphysical ‘need’ into the Absolute, thereby ‘limiting [the absolute] by means
of some incomprehensible fashion not in accordance with its notion’. Creation
cannot be impelled if it is a divine free act of God: ‘The “Other” can only be
created entirely without compulsion and is not posited according to metaphys-
ical necessity.’138 Bulgakov is objecting here not simply to Solov’ev’s rationalism,
but to God being made into what Barth would later call a ‘world-principle’.139
Ironically, however, Bulgakov, despite his best attempts to correct the excesses of
sophiology through antinomism, seems to fall into the very same mistakes as
Solov’ev. He makes creation into a derivation of love, a result of ‘sophianic
determinism’, although stripped of rationalism and as only one of the possibil-
ities of the antinomy of creation (see ch. 6). The picture is further complicated,
as was mentioned earlier, by the fact that Bulgakov’s very antinomism, as a
reaction to Solov’ev’s arguably rational determinism, seems to have its roots in
Solov’ev’s notion of the absolute as a harmony of opposites. Another possible
source of inspiration for Bulgakov’s antinomism is the fact that Sophia is so
polyvalent in Solov’ev’s thought that it is unclear, in the system, what cannot be
said to be her role. Not only is Sophia all-unity but also she is the ideal human
and to this Solov’ev adds that she is the body of God140 and the eternal but fallen
soul of the world. As the Anima mundi, through the various incarnations of the
Logos, Sophia gradually acts once again as the bond and unity of creation.141
Indeed, Aleksei Losev (1893–1988) lists ten quite different, even he admits,
logically contradictory aspects of Sophia.142 Thus, Sophia, in Solov’ev, is a living
antinomy, a metaphor for difference-in-unity, as in her is united any number of
‘opposites’, from ‘freedom and necessity’ to ‘God and the world’. One can,
arguably, speak of a tacit Solov’evean ‘antinomism’ that becomes the basis for
Bulgakov’s unique articulation of our problematic as well as his response. But
134
SN, n. 4, 140 [see UL, n. 118, 460 (my trans.)].
135
SN, 140 [see UL, 152: lit. ‘NOT-what.’ (my trans.)].
136 137
SN, n. 4, 140 [UL, n. 118, 460]. SN, 140 [UL, 152].
138 139
SN, n. 2, 167 [see UL, n. 3, 469 (my trans.)]. Barth, CD, II/1, 321.
140 141
Solov’ev, Cht. 7: 115 [LDH, 108]. Cht, 9: 140 [LDH, 131].
142
Losev 2000, 200–24.

what was the antinomism that Bulgakov developed both in reaction to Solov’ev’s
sophiological excesses and as an indirect inspiration of its celebration of paradox
and contradiction?
4.3 BULGAKOVIAN ANTINOMISM
Bulgakov argues that by meditating on revelation we are given two self-

definitions of God as Trinity. The first self-definition is that of the ‘Absolute’
and it itself is dual. Apophatically, the Absolute (properly speaking) is a wholly
Other transcendence, an eternal NO, whose pursuit eventually negates
even the relational name of ‘God’. Kataphatically, the Absolute (or properly,
‘Absolute Relation’)143 is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Absolute
Self-Relation-in-Itself, immanent Trinity, an eternal YES. The second self-
definition is the Absolute as relative to or immanent in the world (i.e. the
‘Absolute-Relative’ or ‘Absolutely relative’). It is affirmed kataphatically as
the economic Trinity, a divine YES to creation, ‘God’ for us, since, as Bulgakov
quotes Gregory of Nazianzus, ‘The name Theos is a relative name, just as also
the name Lord.’144 ‘God’ is a relative concept always in reference to a specific
‘creation’ for whom it is their God.145 The Absolute out of a free self-giving
love posits Itself as ‘God’, thereby accepting in Himself the differentiation of
‘God’ and the ‘world’.146 If creation is an internal divine self-differentiation,
then when God creates the world, He is ‘born’ or ‘becomes’ ‘God’ with a world
and cannot be otherwise (N3) since He has given Himself with a free but
necessitous self-sacrificial humble love (F3) that could have been otherwise.147
We shall examine this dual self-definition in chapter 5.
By arguing that the notion and even reality of ‘God’ presupposes relativity,
Bulgakov was building critically on his predecessors. Solov’ev, like Bulgakov,
held that all Being, even divine Being, implies relativity.148 Bulgakov also
drew from Schelling, with his account of the Absolute’s self-differentiation
through self-affirmation, whose favourite phrase from Newton (‘Deus est vox
relativa’)149 Bulgakov repeatedly cites.150 Therefore, ‘God’, properly the
143
Bulgakov, I, 261 [IV, 30].
144
Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 30.18, 108 [SC 250, 128A, ll.9–12, 264–5] as quoted (para-
phrase) at Bulgakov, SN, n. 1, 167 [see UL, n. 2, 469 (my trans.)] and see SWG, n. 4, 60; see Lingua
2000, 37ff.
145 146
Bulgakov, SN, 103 and 167 [UL, 109, 184]. SN, 103 [UL, 109].
147
SN, 104 and see 165–9 [UL, 110 and see 181–6].
148
SN, 104 [UL, 109] and see Solov’ev, Cht., 6: 83 [LDH, 77] and 7: 104 [LDH, 96–7].
149
Isaac Newton 1713, 482.
150
See Bulgakov, SN, n. 1, 167 [UL, 184, n. 2, 469] (from Schelling, Darstellung des philoso-
phischen Empirismus, SW, X: 261, 279 but see PO, SW, XIII: Lect. 14, 291) and see Bulgakov,
SWG, 60 n. 4.
Absolute, is both the ‘NOT-is [NE-est’]’ as well as immanent Trinity, Absolute
Self-Relation-in-Itself, and, as He posits Himself as ‘God’, economic Trinity.
He accepts to be in relationship to a world and receives existence in revealing
Himself: ‘He is, He is ON [i.e. ego eimi ho on: Ex. 3:14 (LXX)], The One Who Is
[Sushchii] [Ex. 3:14], Yahweh, as He revealed himself to Moses.’151 (Note the
parallel with the positive both/and vision of Sophia.) These two self-definitions
of God—the Absolute (in its two forms) and God as Absolute-Relative—are in
an antinomic relationship, being conceptually contradictory, where the thesis
and antithesis cannot be harmonized by human reason. This is well expressed
by an image used frequently by Bulgakov taken from Nicholas of Cusa
(1401–64),152 ‘an archangel with a flaming sword of antinomies bars the
way to human understanding, commanding that it bow down before incom-
prehensibility in a podvig of faith’.153 Effectively, this leads to two paths
in theology, the apophatic and the kataphatic, which must be continually
balanced through faithful reasoning, with the kataphatic always existing on
the basis of the apophatic.154 However, as we shall see, there is great ambiguity
in this system. The Absolute as Self-Relation-in-Itself (immanent Trinity)
appears to be a conceptual (kataphatic) projection of the Absolute-Relative
(economic Trinity) so that the only apophatically consistent ‘God’ is Divine
Nothingness. Apophatic theology, if it can be said to apply to the immanent
Trinity, enters in with the monarchy of the Father (see ch. 5).
We have emphasized the ultimate roots of Bulgakov’s antinomism in
Solov’ev as this is less well appreciated. Bulgakov’s thought, however, is but
one example of a broad quest in modern Russian thought and culture155 for a
unity that respects uniqueness and difference. This search for a unity in
difference begins in the early nineteenth century with the Slavophile philoso-
pher Ivan Kireevsky (1806–56). Kireevsky famously upholds ‘integrality’
(tsel’nost’), which he understands as ‘wholeness of Being, both external and
inner, social and individual, intellectual and workaday, artificial and moral’,
where variety flourishes in unity.156 But this same cultural trend continues
down right through into the late twentieth century, as seen in Mikhail Bakhtin
(1895–1975). In Bakhtin’s famous writings on the novels of Dostoevsky,
we see a ‘polyphony’ and ‘dialogism’157 which marries profound pluralism
151
SN, 102, 104 [UL, 108, 109].
152
See SN, 127 [UL, 137] and Cusa, De Visione Dei, Vol. 2: 9.39–11.47, 697–701.
153
Bulgakov, SN, 141 [see UL, 153 (my trans.)]. (On the untranslatable podvig (roughly,
‘spiritual struggle’ or ‘ascesis’) in Bulgakov, see Radost’ Tserkovnaia, 30–4 [Churchly Joy, 44–50]
and for commentary, see R. Williams, SB, 65–6.) Cf. Bulgakov, SWG, 61, TF, 388 and I, 260.
154
SN, 104–5, 119, 121, 127, 146 [UL, 110–11, 128, 130, 137, 159] (see Gallaher 2013b).
155
See Akhutin 1991, Blank 2007, and Poole 2001.
156
Kireevsky 1911, 1: 218 [1998, 229]. ‘Integrality’ is reminiscent of sobornost’: Khomiakov
2006, 275–9 [1998, 135–9] and Zenkovsky 1927.
157
Bakhtin 1984, 40; see Blank 2007, 31–3, who compares Kant, Bakhtin, and Florensky.

to unfinalized unity, seen in the image of the ‘church as a communion of
unmerged souls, where sinners and righteous come together’.158 However,
the more immediate and better-known source of Bulgakov’s antinomism is
Florensky, whose reading of sophiology was influential upon him due to their
strong friendship.159
Truth itself, for Florensky, must take the formal logical form of an antinomy
or ‘self-contradictory judgement’ where the antithesis entrains its thesis and
vice versa.160 In the background to Florensky’s argument lie Nicholas of
Cusa and, especially, Kant.161 Truth, he argued, must be stated in a self-
contradictory judgement because, if a rational formula is true, then it will
foresee all objections, itself providing the bounds or limit of all its refutations.
Materially speaking, truth is, as Nicholas of Cusa puts it, a coincidentia
oppositorum that necessarily involves multiple determinations that logically
cancel each other out or are irreconcilable but which must be held together in
faith.162 In heaven, certainly, there is only one Truth but on earth we have ‘a
multitude of truths, fragments of the Truth, noncongruent to one another’.163
Florensky applies this antinomic vision of truth to all the major Christian
dogmas. For example, in the Chalcedonian horos with its alpha privatives
concerning the two natures united in Christ, we see a coincidentia oppositorum
of the thesis that these natures are unconfused and unchanged (asygchytos,
atreptos) with the antithesis that they are indivisible and inseparable (adiairetos,
achoristos).164
But there is an even more important passage in Florensky that is crucial for
the development of Bulgakov’s antinomy of the Absolute and Absolute-
Relative. Florensky speculated that God brings about a correlation of Himself
with His creatures through the condescension of Himself as the unconditional
and absolute Holy Trinity. He does this through allowing Sophia (‘love-idea-
monad’), as a sort of ‘fourth’ hypostatic bridge element, entry into the life of
His hypostases, so that, ‘Remaining all-powerful, God treats His creatures as if
He were not all-powerful . . . Remaining ‘one’ in Themselves, the Hypostases
make Themselves ‘other’ in relation to creation.’165 Antinomies, thesis with its
158
Bakhtin 1984, 26–7 and see 289.
159
See R. Williams, SB, 116ff. and Rubin 2010, 314 (critique of Florensky).
160
Florensky, S, 147ff., 153 [PGT, 109ff., 114].
161
See Florensky, S, 153, 158–9 [PGT, 114, 117–18] and ‘Kosmologicheskie antinomii
I. Kanta’ [1909], 596–625 (see Schneider 2013, Žust 2002, 198–200, 254–7, Slesinski 1984,
142–9, and Zenkovsky 1953, 2: 880–3); compare Bulgakov, SN, 127–30 (Cusa), 139–40 (Kant).
162
Florensky, S, 156–7 [PGT, 116] and see Bulgakov, SN, 127–30 and 141 [UL, 137–40 and
153]; cf. Schneider 2013, 36–41, Slesinski 1984, 144–6, Cusa, De Docta Ignorantia, 1: I.4.11–12,
8–10 and I.22.67–69, 36–8 and De Visione Dei, 2: 9.38–39, 697, 13.54–55, 705.
163
Florensky, S, 158 [PGT, 117].
164
Florensky, S, 164 [PGT, 121]; cf. Denzinger-Schönmetzer, §302, 108.
165
Florensky, S, 323 [PGT, 236]; see Vaganova 2011, 269–76 and Slesinski 1984, 116–18,
172ff. and 196ff. and 1995, 471–3.
antithesis, Florensky argues, are the constitutive elements of the unutterable
religious experience (and so of religion itself) of its mysteries. These mysteries
cannot be put into words except in the form of contradictions166 and thereby
require the response of faith: ‘Thesis and antithesis, as warp and woof, bind the
very fabric of religious experience. Where there is no antinomy, there is no
faith.’167 But how did Bulgakov adapt these fundamental insights?
Antinomism, for Bulgakov,168 is especially characteristic of religious
consciousness with its contact with the mystery of the transcendent world.
Religious experience, for reason, contains what appears to be a contradiction.
On the one hand, one has God, as the object of religion, what is given to
religious consciousness, who is something, which is utterly transcendent, alien
to what is natural and external to man and the world. On the other hand,
God reveals himself to the religious consciousness of man: ‘he touches it,
he enters within it, he becomes its immanent content’. Both moments of
religious consciousness are given simultaneously as ‘poles, in their mutual
repulsion and attraction’. The object of this consciousness, the Godhead, is
both ‘transcendentally-immanent or immanently-transcendent’ since God
is necessarily both (error comes from emphasizing only one of the poles)
the one who dwells in light inaccessible (1 Tim. 6:16) and the one who
condescends to reveal Himself to the world and dwell with man as a man
(Jn. 14:23).169 When we translate these basic elements of experience into the
language of the philosophy of religion, ‘we immediately see that before us is
clearly a contradictory combination of concepts resulting in an antinomy’,
since the transcendent cannot be simultaneously immanent and remain tran-
scendent and vice versa.170 Antinomy admits of two contradictory, logically
incompatible, but ‘ontologically equally necessary assertions’, which testify to
the existence of a mystery beyond which reason cannot penetrate but which is
‘actualized and lived in religious experience’.171 Yet rational impossibility and
contradictoriness are not the guarantee of a real impossibility, so we should be
spurred on to lay bare and realize the antinomies of religious consciousness to
their furthest consequences to discern the mystery.
Antinomy, Bulgakov contends, is neither logical contradiction nor dialect-
ical contradiction. Logical contradiction results from error in thought where
thought does not conform to its own immanent standards insofar as there
exists an ‘inadequate grasp of the object of thought from the side of logical
form’.172 In contrast, the dialectical contradiction of Hegel does not result
166 167
Florensky, S, 158 [PGT, 117]. Florensky, S, 168 [PGT, 120].
168
See Seiling 2008, ch. 6.II, Lingua 2000, 33–54, Coda 1998, 56–72, and Kukavin 1994, 2:
630–1.
169
Bulgakov, SN, 99 [see UL, 103 (my trans.)].
170
SN, 99 and see 102ff. [UL, 104 and see 107ff. (my trans.)]; compare SN, 29, 39ff. [UL, 6–7,
20ff.].
171 172
SWG, n. 18, 77. SN, 100 [see UL, 105 (my trans.)]; cf. SWG, n. 18, 77.

from an error but from what Hegel mistakenly regards as the very nature of
the ‘critical self-consciousness of formal thought’. Thought, Hegel argued,
continually moves and changes positions, considering itself superior to all
contradictions because, whenever it encounters a stop in its movement, it
arbitrarily sublates it to move on to a new point.173 Antinomy is quite
different, therefore, from these latter two forms of contradiction in that it is
concerned with the inadequacy of thought to its given object or objectives. On
the one hand, if the object were completely transcendent to thought, it would
then not only be inadequate to thought but cease to be an object for thought
itself, since it would be inconceivable. On the other extreme, in turn, if the
object was entirely adequate to thought, then it would be fully immanentized.
This is the case with divine or transcendent reason (razum=Vernunft), since in
God thought and Being coincide in the same act (the subject-object) and
transcendence and immanence also are transparent to one another. In God
there are no antinomies, gaps, and hiatuses, as these constitute the ‘natural
property of human reason’. Human or immanent reason (rassudok=Ver-
stand), in contrast, where there is a disjunction between transcendence and
immanence, simply cannot make that which is, its object, Being, ‘entirely
immanent to itself ’ by subordinating it to the laws of its own thinking, since
‘between [the laws of thought] . . . and Being is disclosed a disjunction, which
also finds its expression in antinomies’. When an antinomy is found, it is a
sure sign of the transcendence of the object in question and of the shipwreck of
rationalistic approaches to reality, which make all nature fully cognizable.174
Antinomic thinking does indeed seize its object but it is only made partly
immanent to itself to a ‘certain limit, which is also disclosed in the antinomy’
which is to reason ‘a precipice and abyss, but at the same time it cannot not go
to this point’.175
Bulgakov was certainly aware that Kant had argued that he had ‘cleared up’
his antinomies by reason. However, he felt that the limited competence of
reason, the ‘antinomicity of its structure’, was disclosed by this demonstration,
so that Kant’s solution did not at all disprove the basic ‘antinomism in
thinking’ with its supposition of the inadequacy of thought to its object.176
In other words, Kant believed that his antinomies were the result of a denial of
the dualism of the noumenal and the phenomenal and that this could be
rationally resolved once thought recognized its said limitations. Bulgakov, in
contrast, is arguing that reason cannot resolve its antinomies nor should
it even attempt to resolve them. The way of truth is found through grasping
both theses of the antinomy in a difference in unity. Antinomism is in fact
173
SN, 100–1 and see 141 [UL, 105 and see 153].
174
SN, 100 [see UL, 104–5 (my trans.)].
175
SN, 100–1 [see UL, 104–5 (my trans.)].
176
SN, 100 and see 143 [see UL, 104 and see 155–6 (my trans.)].
quite natural to thought: ‘Lawful/Necessitous antinomies [zakonomernye anti-
nomii] are entirely inherent to reason.’ It determines the limits of thinking and
lays out its possible lines of activity. In experience, thought does not create its
own objects (as some Neo-Kantians believed) but is given them or has them
imposed upon it in the stream of life and these objects are more or less
adequate to it, so antinomies will naturally arise in all thinking.177
As was mentioned earlier, in the case of religious understanding, with its
consciousness of mystery, it is only the fire of faith which through its striving
holds together in unity both sides of the antinomy. This striving itself acts as
the motor of religious life.178 If it is natural for all reason to produce anti-
nomies, given that the basic building block of self-consciousness all too easily
falls into contradictions, then this is the case above all with reason when it is
concerned with God. The ‘object’ of God is immanent in reason but never-
theless radically transcendent to it. Indeed, Bulgakov argues, like Florensky,
that if one does not encounter antinomies in religion, one knows something is
wrong and one probably has stumbled into the realm of rationalist religion
which negates faith.179 Nor was Bulgakov insensitive to the linguistic texture
of all thought, including religious thought. Bulgakov later applies, in his Die
Tragödie der Philosophie (German: 1929/Russian: 1991), his antinomic think-
ing to language. Bulgakov focuses on the antinomic form of the basic
linguistic-existential judgement/sentence, ‘I am A’ with its three moments of
hypostasis/subject, logos/predicate, and ousia/copula. Bulgakov saw the sen-
tence as an icon of the Trinity.180 Taken as a whole, these three moments in
their unity as a sentence express the rational human subject’s self ’s affirmation
of itself in its self-consciousness as substance.181 Human spirit is ‘a living,
ceaselessly self-realizing sentence’182 and, in this way, it is a living witness to
the Trinity which is sealed upon it.183 The subject as a sentence, however, is
riven by antinomies where each moment defines itself against the others; yet
this is not anomalous but what structures and constitutes human spirit.184
Bulgakov called, therefore, for a ‘critical antinomism’, echoing Kant’s
own critique of reason, in both metaphysics and epistemology, which
would replace dogmatic rationalism.185 Such an undertaking would reveal
the antinomic structure of reason, its very real limitations, in order to avoid
177
SN, 101 [see UL, 106 (my trans.)]. (See n. 71 above.)
178 179 180
SN, 104, 141 [UL, 110, 153]. SN, 101 [UL, 106–7]. See TF, 317–18.
181
Bulgakov, TF, 325 and ‘Substance is a living sentence, which contains a subject and also a
predicate and a copula’ (TF, 518 and see 317ff.). See Krasicki 2010, Reznichenko 2012, 200–25,
Meerson 1998, 170–2, and Hadot 1957. Compare Bulgakov’s Filosofiia imeni [1953] (see
Arjakovsky 2009, R. Williams 2009, and Gourko 2005, 1: 202–42).
182 183
TF, 318. ibid., 389–90; see Hadot 1957, 245–6.
184
‘Reason necessarily [zakonomerno] comes up against antinomies, determining its struc-
ture and objectives . . . The antinomies which tear apart reason—they themselves build it up and
determine it’ (Bulgakov, TF, 327–8; see Hadot 1957, 241–3).
185
Bulgakov, TF, 328 and see NA, 250 [BL, 229].

the one-sidedness of rationalist systematizing, thereby not tearing down but
building up reason: ‘Criticism consists precisely in the clarification of the
structure of reason and its foundations not for the purposes of the dethroning
of reason, but on the contrary, for the purposes of its strengthening.’186
Furthermore, such criticism would encourage a knowledge of the existence
of both planes in any antinomy (e.g. God as Absolute and Absolute-Relative)
without confusing the two by jumping from one to the other.187 Moreover, a
critical antinomism would simultaneously hold both elements of any anti-
nomy together in an ordered unity, avoiding the dualistic temptation of
localizing the truth of an assertion (e.g. if God is Absolute-Relative, then He
is not simultaneously Absolute).
An unsurpassable abyss exists for reason between the antinomy of the NO
of apophatic theology and the YES of kataphatic theology. This abyss cannot
be crossed through rational dialectic188 but only through reason’s stepping
back in all humility from the abyss of the incomprehensible, the mysterious,
which is its admission that it can go no further. The ‘stepping back of reason’
before incomprehensibility is the heart’s feat of faith. Semen Frank
(1877–1950) called it a ‘free hovering’ between opposites ‘in the unity of two
knowings’ in which ultimate truth was revealed.189 For faith there can be
nothing that can be understood to its end, for ‘faith is the child of mystery, a
podvig of love and freedom’ which must not fear ‘rational absurdity’, for
precisely in such absurdity ‘is revealed eternal life, the boundlessness of the
Godhead’.190 To humble faith, the unknowable and unnameable God reveals
Himself by a name, a word, a cult, different manifestations, and finally by the
Incarnation.191 Faith at work in religious experience sees the unity beneath
the antinomies, ultimate mystery, understood as the pre-eternal ground of the
created world. Theology, when faced with the antinomy of God’s existence
as the Absolute and Absolute-Relative, is forced rationally, on the one hand,
to humbly acknowledge their contradiction. It then provides, as Valery
A. Kukavin put it, a ‘logically non-contradictory mystical-phenomenological
description’ of each side of the antinomy.192 On the other hand, theology is
compelled to realize that contradictions will only be synthesized in faith’s
vision of the Kingdom of Heaven where there are no contradictions.193
We have come to the end of our (inevitably schematic) introduction
to Bulgakov’s sophiology and, as inspired by the vision of Sophia as a living
antinomy, his theological methodology (sc. antinomism). Indeed, to call
Bulgakov’s thought simply ‘sophiology’ says very little and ignores his creative
interpretation of Solov’ev and extension of the somewhat undeveloped
186 187 188

TF, 328. NA, 250–1 [BL, 229–30]. SN, 141 [UL, 153].
189 190
Frank 1983, 95. Bulgakov, SN, 104 [see UL, 110 (my trans.)].
191 192
SN, 146 [UL, 159]. Kukavin 1994, 631.
193
ibid., 631 and see Florensky, S, 158 [PGT, 117].
thoughts of Florensky. His thought is, therefore, more accurately called a
‘sophiological antinomism’ or, perhaps, ‘antinomical sophiology’. We have
also seen, in particular, how he saw freedom and necessity as mutually self-
dependent and self-defining, in an antinomic relationship where both had to
be held together in faith. In chapters 5 and 6, we shall see that the rudimentary
outline of our axis of dependent freedom (F3) and free dependence (N3) can
be discerned in the God–world relation.
God as Absolute and

Absolute-Relative in Bulgakov
Theological Antinomy in
the Doctrine of God
In chapter 4, we introduced Bulgakov’s ‘sophiological antinomism’ as an

attempt to hold together a host of polarities from ‘freedom and necessity’ to
‘God and the world’. Much of Bulgakov’s legendary obscurity comes not from
the fact that there is no ‘structure’ to his thought—for antinomism is precisely
such a frame—but often this structure, especially in his late work, is simply
presumed without explanation or executed imprecisely and, finally, sometimes
completely ignored. In this chapter, we shall apply his sophiological antinomism
to the doctrine of God giving (as it were) a phenomenology1 of ‘God’ in His two
self-definitions: Absolute and Absolute-Relative. Through this phenomenology
we shall see how our problematic forced itself upon Bulgakov insofar as ‘God’ as
Absolute is radically transcendent in His freedom, but, as Absolute-Relative, He
is only called ‘God’ in relationship to the world having a necessary relationship
to it. We shall see how the outline of the form of our axis of F3–N3 can be
discerned in Bulgakov’s kenotic account of Trinitarian theology and then is
expressed in the divine economy. With this divine phenomenology we can turn
in chapter 6 to a critical exposition of the problematic and Bulgakov’s response
to it, finally laying out the first stage of our own constructive response.
5.1 GOD AS AN ABSOLUTE N OT -I S
Bulgakov’s thought is paradoxical and often less than clear in his great trilogy
O Bogochelovechestve (1933–45), partially due to the fact that it is not preceded
1
i.e. a kind of phenomenology of religious experience and faith, not phenomenology in a
Husserlian sense.
God as Absolute and Absolute-Relative in Bulgakov 71

by both an explanation of his antinomism and an antinomic résumé of his
system. Thankfully, just such a résumé can be found in the second chapter of
his The Icon and Icon-Veneration (1931). The context of this chapter is his
exploration of the ‘antinomy of the icon’, by which he means the fact that
God is unrepresentable but in taking flesh He is imaged after us, depictable.2
To clarify this antinomy, he lays out three basic theological antinomies, each
with its respective theses and antitheses. These antinomies have far broader
significance for his system than iconography and consequently our exposition
of his system will use these antinomies as a rough framework:
I. Theological Antinomy (God in Himself )
THESIS: God is the Absolute, consequently, a pure NO, the Divine Nothing.
(Apophatic theology).
ANTITHESIS: God is the absolute self-relation in Himself, the Holy Trinity.
(Kataphatic theology).
II. Cosmological Antinomy (God in Himself and in creation)
THESIS: God in the Holy Trinity possesses complete fullness and all-
blessedness, is self-existent, immutable, eternal, and therefore is absolute.
(God in Himself).
ANTITHESIS: God creates the world out of love for creation, with its
temporal, relative, and becoming Being, and he becomes God for it; he
puts Himself into correlation with it.
(God in creation).
III. Sophiological Antinomy (The Wisdom of God in God and in the world)
THESIS: God, who in the Holy Trinity is consubstantial, reveals Himself in
His Wisdom, which is His Divine life and Divine world in eternity, fullness,
and perfection.
(Uncreated Sophia—Divinity in God).
ANTITHESIS: God creates the world by His Wisdom, and this Wisdom,
constituting the Divine foundation of the world, abides in temporal-spatial
becoming, immersed in non-being.
(Created Sophia—Divinity outside God, in the world).3
Bulgakov’s three antinomies are interlinking perspectives on different theo-
logical issues. So, for example, the thesis of the second antinomy concerning
the fullness of the life of the Holy Trinity in God Himself is identical in content
to the first antinomy’s antithesis, but the second antinomy is focused on the
economia and the first on theologia. Let us begin with those theses that focus
on God as He is in Himself apart from creation—the theological antinomy,
2
Bulgakov, I, 258 [IV, 25–6].
3
Bulgakov, I, 264 [see IV, 35–6 (my trans.)]; see Vaganova 2011, 329–33.

together with the thesis of the cosmological antinomy (i.e. the antithesis of the
theological antinomy) and the thesis of the sophiological antinomy.
The ‘Absolute’, ‘God’ in Himself, is wholly transcendent to the world both
as ‘Absolute Relation’4 or Holy Trinity, pure relationality,5 which is expressed
in kataphatic theology, and as the ‘Absolute’ proper which is the absence of
all relations whatsoever, God as pure divine nothingness, as expressed in
apophatic theology.6 God as Absolute Divine Nothing is ‘an unconditional
negation of all definitions’, being ‘an eternal and absolute NO to everything, to
every something [chto: what]’, even nothingness itself insofar as nothing is a
conceptual ‘shadow’ of something: ‘God is the NOT-something [NE-chto: lit.
‘NOT-what’] (also the NOT-how, and the NOT-where, and the NOT-when
and the NOT-why). This NO is not even nothing [nichto] insofar as with
it there still entails a connecting relation to some something [chto].’ The
Absolute as ‘NOT-something [NE-chto]’ is ‘supraqualified’ (so not only
without but beyond qualities) as the/a ‘Supra-something [Sverkh-chto]’.7 One
cannot call the Absolute ‘God’ because ‘God’ is a relative term in reference to
someone for whom it is their God or a God.8 One cannot even say this NOT
‘exists’ insofar as ‘Being is a correlative concept’ and ‘to exist is to be for
another’ and this NOT being supra-relative, supra-immanent9 is beyond even
Being itself (‘Being is not proper to the Godhead’), so one is left with saying
oxymoronically that He ‘is’ a ‘NOT-is [NE-est’]’.10 Here one is reminded of the
Neoplatonic philosopher Damascius (c.462–post 538), who argued that we
cannot even say that we can know that we know that we do not know God
(=the One). We are in a state of ‘transcendent ignorance’ (hyperagnoia) about
Him which is like staring at the sun up close until one sees neither the sun
itself nor the objects it illumines, ‘since we have completely become the light
itself, instead of an enlightened eye’.11 This would appear to leave us not with
awe but stupefied silence and a vain pointing to a something beyond even the
one we call upon as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who ‘abides in the sanctuary
of transcendent silence’.12
But is this not the end of all theology? Why do we need such a self-definition
of God? On the one hand, ‘God’ as NOT-something is needed as a ‘necessary
ground of the idea of God’ insofar as it witnesses to the fact that God’s Being is
indescribable, unfathomable, changeless, inaccessible, and so forth.13 One
cannot rationalize such a God or control Him in any way since the Absolute
4 5
Bulgakov, I, 261 [IV, 30]. SN, 182 [UL, 202] and I, 260 [IV, 29].
6 7
I, 261 [IV, 30]. SN, 102 [see UL, 105 (my trans.)].
8
SN, 103 and 167 [UL, 109 and 184]; see 4.3.
9 10
SN, 104 [UL, 109] and AB, 143 [LG, 121]. SN, 102 [see UL, 108 (my trans.)].
11
Damascius, Traité des premiers principes, 1, 3rd part, 25, Vol. 1, 84.
12
Damascius, Traité des premiers principes, 1, 3rd part, 25, Vol. 1, 84 [Problems and Solutions
Concerning First Principles, Part 2, Sec. 3, 29, 127].
13
Bulgakov, I, 260 [see IV, 28 (my trans.)].

and Transcendent are more profound and full of content than the relative and
immanent and so stand as the latter’s source.14 On other hand, ‘God’ as ‘pure
zero’ is not a religious idea at all insofar as religion (religio) in its true sense, as
seen in the Old and New Testaments, presupposes a religious ‘binding’ of
creation and the ‘God’ who reveals Himself to it so that an ‘Absolute outside
creation and outside religion’ is a ‘Divine Nothing’.15 A negative definition of
the Absolute in itself is a nonsensical abstraction as Being, and the Absolute is
beyond Being, only begins to be in the face of a definite boundary; otherwise it
collapses into nothingness.16 A purely apophatic definition of the Absolute is
unthinkable, for it effectively does not exist, becoming irrelevant,17 a little like
an extreme version of Joyce’s artist as the ‘Creator’ who lies ‘within or behind
or beyond’ his creation, ‘invisible, refined out of existence, paring his finger-
nails’.18 Thus, the Absolute, if it exists and means anything, must be relative to
be in its absoluteness, just as the transcendent must be immanent to be in its
transcendence.19 The NO of apophatic theology is mute and empty in itself,
for it requires the YES of kataphatic theology to have ‘resonance’.20
5.2 GOD AS AN ABSOLUTE TRINITY OF LOVE
The Absolute ‘God’ in Himself also is, as was said earlier, not only the absolute
NO, complete absence of relationality, but is joined antinomically with an
absolute YES, absolute relationality, difference and definition in Himself, that
is, the Holy Trinity as the Trihypostatic unisubstantial Spirit or Personality,
the immanent Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity (divine triunity). Both the
apophatic (thesis of theological antinomy) and the kataphatic (antithesis)
absoluteness are equally primordial to the Godhead and can only be taken
together as ‘an identity of contraries (coincidentia oppositorum)’.21 Thus,
strictly speaking, the ‘Absolute’ is only the divine abyssal ‘NO’ which exists
in a theological antinomy with ‘Absolute Relation’, the divine YES of the
Trinity. However, for the sake of simplicity and following Bulgakov’s own
frequent practice, we shall take the ‘Absolute’ in a broad sense to presuppose
both self-definitions or what is, arguably, one dual self-definition.22
Bulgakov seems to identify the contraries of apophatic and kataphatic
precisely in the personal groundless ground of the Trinity—the Father. He is
14 15
U, 407 [C, 360]. I, 260 [see IV, 28 (my trans.)].
16 17
U, 443 [C, 391] and see Kołakowski 2001, 23. Bulgakov, U, 443 [C, 391].
18 19
Joyce, Portrait of the Artist, 165. Bulgakov, U, 407 [C, 360].
20
U, 407, 443 [C, 360, 391].
21
I, 260 [see IV, 29 (my trans.)]; for the Trinity: O’Donnell 1995, Coda 1998, 87–129,
Meerson 1996, 1998, 159–86, Lingua 2000, 63–94, Papanikolaou 2011, 2013.
22
Bulgakov, I, 261 [IV, 30].

luxuriant in his apophatic-kataphatic description of the Father.23 The Father is
Absolute, the principle, source, monarchos, the Initial and Revealed hypos-
tasis, Love-Will, Love itself, and the heart and Will of Love, First hypostasis,
God proper, autotheos, and ho Theos. The Father is defined in reference to
and contradistinction from His revealing hypostases, the Second and Third
hypostases (the two not-First hypostases), the dyad of the Son and Holy Spirit:
‘The Father is God, revealing Himself in the Two revealing hypostases,
divinely emptying Himself in the eternal kenosis of the Father. He is the initial
hypostatic Love, the Depth that is being revealed, the unsearchable but self-
manifesting Abyss, the Divine Principle, arche. The Dyad of the Son and Holy
Spirit is the double image of Revealing Love, and They receive Themselves
from the Father and God.’24 God the Father, then, reveals Himself as Love by
His ‘two hands’, the Dyad, the Son and Spirit.
One could argue, however, that the use of the idea of ‘self-revelation’ is
not an application of an apophatic-kataphatic antinomy but is merely
an instance of an Idealist notion that personality (‘spirit’) is a dialectic
of self-consciousness.25 Under the latter theory, which Bulgakov certainly
utilizes, an ‘I’ presupposes as its self-affirmation a ‘co-I’ to whom it can say
‘Thou’, but to confirm this it needs a third term, so it presupposes a ‘he’
through which its unity is then realized as ‘we’ or ‘you’.26 God, for Bulgakov, is
one ‘Divine I, the Absolute Subject, Holy Trinity’ as a ‘trihypostatic subject’ in
whom exist three I’s,27 so for God to know Himself as Himself, the Father
must reveal Himself to Himself in and through His ‘Dyad’ of the Son and
Spirit. Does this not lead, as Vladimir Lossky claimed, to the notion that God
the Father is an individual Fichtean ICH whose Son and Spirit are simply
necessary manifestations of His self-consciousness of Himself as Absolute?28
Bulgakov, however, was not unaware of such pitfalls in Idealism and he is at
pains to emphasize the equi-divinity of the hypostases and the freedom of self-
revelation. Indeed, his emphasis on divine self-revelation was above all a
rejection of causal categories for the divine which is found in the doctrine of
God from the Cappadocians to Aquinas and on to Solov’ev and recently
Zizioulas.29 He thought applying ‘causation’ to God would lead to imperson-
alism, monarchism, subordinationism, and determinism: insofar as the Father
causes the Son and Spirit, then they must be understood as simply His own
necessary self-definitions which are then associated with Him by a relation of
identity. Thus, ‘self-revelation’ shorn of causal language, although it may have
adapted the dialectic of self-awareness, was an attempt to transcend, not a
capitulation to, the excesses of Idealism.30 Bulgakov used self-revelation, pace
23 24
See epecially U, 407ff. [C, 360ff.] and SWG, 38ff. U, 428 [C, 376–7].
25 26
R. Williams 1975, 61. Bulgakov, U, 66 [C, 54] and see G, 1: 34ff.
27 28
U, 67–8 [C, 55–6]. R. Williams 1975, 61–2.
29 30
See Zizioulas, CO, 113–54. Bulgakov, U, 72ff. [C, 59ff.].

Lossky, as he wished to identify the Father as the suprapersonal groundless
ground of the Trinity. If the Father is utterly transcendent but yet reveals
Himself as love through His Dyad, then not only does He show that His freedom
is one of personal love (F2) but that this love-desire is an utterly groundless gift
of God to God (F1): ‘The Absolute loves; He is the Father . . . If the Son and the
Holy Spirit are Love and the revelation of Love, the Father is Love itself, the very
Heart of Love and, truly, the Will of Love.’31 We will return to this issue but first
let us explore the dialectic of freedom and necessity in God and creation.
God is a Trihypostatic Unisubstantial Personality made up of three distinct
hypostases. They share one fully hypostatized unknowable divine essence,
which is God’s ‘Being-according-to-itself [po-sebe-bytie]’ or ‘Being-in-itself
[bytie-v-sebe]’, that is, His pre-eternal unchangeable bliss.32 In this unchange-
able bliss, where there is neither addition nor diminution, God’s Absolute life
of Freedom includes perfectly unified moments of what we call freedom (F2)
and what we call necessity (N2).33 To be God is to be free but this freedom is a
necessary reality for God insofar as He is the pure act of love as self-positing
(actus purus or actus purissimus), a notion drawn as much from Aquinas as
Schelling.34 God as the Absolute Self-Relation-in-Himself, a perfect self-
realization in love-desire, does not have to create the world to complete
Himself. He is under no ‘determinate necessity’. In our terminology, there
exists no N1–2 upon God inflicted by the world.35 God in Himself, and this
applies only to the theses of the cosmological and sophiological antinomies
(not the antitheses), does not need the world: ‘God as Absolute is completely
free from the world, or “supraworldly”, is not conditioned by it to any degree
whatsoever and does not need it at all. The creation of the world, or the arising
of the relative, in no sense whatsoever is causally compelled or necessary for
the Absolute, as a moment of its life.’36 In creating the world, in choosing to
freely give Himself to us in becoming Absolute-Relative, at least from one side
of the antinomy, God’s choice is not ‘Pickwickian’37 as it could have been
‘otherwise’ (F3).
As Trihypostatic Spirit, God is Absolute Relation-in-Itself. Unlike created
unihypostatic spirit, Trihypostatic Spirit encounters no limitations, since that
with which it is in relation is fully contained within itself, as in Schelling’s
identity-in-difference. Created spirit, being unihypostatic, must find all of the
persons in the external world by which it is conditioned. In contrast, Absolute
Spirit finds all of its persons in itself.38 Unihypostatic spirit is static and unfree
unless it proceeds out into the world and posits and seizes itself over against
31 32
U, 446–7 [C, 394]. AB, 250–1, 433 [LG, 222, 404].
33
AB, 250 [LG, 222].
34
NA, 48–50 [BL, 41–2], I, 261, G, 1: 59 and see SN, 181–2 [UL, 199–201] (Schelling).
35
AB, 141–2 [LG, 119–20].
36
SN, 142–3 [see UL, 154–5 (my trans.)]; cf. K, 267–8 [BB, 146–7].
37 38
K. Ward 1996, 177–9. Bulgakov, AB, 117 [LG, 94]; compare G, 1: 38ff.

that world as a givenness-necessity. Trihypostatic Spirit, quite differently,
posits itself in a pure internal activity. God’s revealed nature is not, as is the
case with created spirit, a fact or givenness that encounters Him as a resolute
external limit. Rather, His nature, while existing in complete facticity, is a
divine pre-eternal act. As the purest creative activity, God’s nature is com-
pletely transparent to Him.39 Since God’s self-positing does not require
givenness-necessity, He surpasses creaturely freedom and necessity by pos-
sessing a ‘superfreedom’ which is a ‘supra-necessity’.40
Creaturely spirit faces an indeterminate number of possibilities, as tasks to
be realized or not, generated by the opposition of freedom and necessity. In
contrast, divine Spirit never encounters different possibilities,41 since in Him
there is neither more nor less in a ‘reign of total determinism in total
freedom’.42 The life of God as Trihypostatic Spirit is wholly freedom and
wholly necessity.43 For God, human freedom remains transparent, and the
future is open to Him where there are no different possibilities but ‘there is
only reality, the real fates of the creature’.44 Human freedom being changeable
only passes over to determinacy by its free act of choice between possibilities.45
In contrast, in the divine life, choice is overcome—adapting Maximus the
Confessor—so that for randomness, changeableness, one has ‘free determin-
ism’ and for many possibilities one has a single or unique possibility.46
Yet if one can say that God in Himself, Absolute Trihypostatic Spirit, does
not need the world and need not have created it, one cannot also claim that
God is bound by His omnipotence. God is, as we shall see Barth also arguing,
free in regards to His freedom.47 Thus, for Bulgakov, it is not as if His divinity
acts as a law making God immobile in His absoluteness and aseity so that He
cannot create the world, which is ‘a notion that diminishes the grandeur of
God’.48 On the contrary, God as Absolute is certainly capable of creating the
world in a freedom which is one with necessity. This capability is not any
natural development of Himself as in Solov’ev and Hegel, but, here echoing
Athanasius and Aquinas, creation is viewed as a work of God, since He has His
Being from Himself and can act freely from Himself (the a se of aseity).49 For
God as Absolute, and this, as we shall see, is in contradistinction from Himself
as Absolute-Relative, no external or internal necessity (N1–2) apart from His
freedom exists for Him in se to create the world. The creating of the world is
the creative outworking of His free love understood as a synthesis of freedom
and necessity. Thus, to reiterate, we may say (only) in relation to God in or
39 40
NA, 50 [BL, 42]. NA, 138ff. [BL, 126ff.].
41
NA, 37, 145, 148 [BL, 31, 133, 136], i.e. Maximean ‘variations’ (tropoi) of divine ‘themes’ or
‘seeds of being’ (logoi) (NA, 63–5 and see 146–7 [BL, 55–6, 134–5]).
42 43
NA, 150–1 [BL, 138]; pace McDermott 2009, 47. Bulgakov, NA, 138 [BL, 127].
44 45
SN, 191 [UL, 213]. NA, 153 [BL, 140].
46
NA, 153 [BL, 141]; On Bulgakov and Maximus: Seiling 2008, ch. 5.
47 48 49
Barth, CD, II/1, 303. Bulgakov, AB, 142 [LG, 120]. FKh, 214 [PE, 199].

according to Himself (the thesis of the cosmological antinomy) the world need
not have been created: ‘In relation to the life of Divinity itself, the world could
also not be.’50 Yet we cannot help noticing that this account of the thesis of the
cosmological antinomy which holds together divine freedom and at least two
ontological possibilities in regard to the world (that the world could and could
not be) seems to directly contradict Bulgakov’s account of Absolute Spirit.
This account denies that God is free in a creaturely sense insofar as such
freedom implies the opposition to necessity and the existence of different
possibilities (see ch. 6).
But what did Bulgakov mean by the divine ‘nature’? Following Solov’ev and
Boehme,51 Bulgakov held that the central theme of Trinitarian teaching was, in
Solov’ev’s words, the ‘self-revelation of the all-one Godhead’.52 Bulgakov
identifies the Trinity, reminiscent of Barth,53 with revelation insofar as it
presupposes a subject, the Father, a predicate, the Son, and, a copula, the
Spirit between them: ‘It presupposes that which is revealed, that which reveals,
and a certain unity or identity of the two: a mystery and its revelation.’54 God
the Father eternally reveals Himself to Himself through His ‘Dyad’, the Son
and Spirit, in and as their common nature or substance (ousia). But what does
God reveal Himself as? The dynamic mystery of the unity of love. Love, desire
for an Other, is above all an activity. In His perfect unchangeable bliss, God is a
perfectly free and perfectly necessary act of revealing Himself to Himself as
a Triunity of self-giving, self-exhausting, self-receiving, and self-emptying
hypostases in, by, and as their common ousia of love.55 (Later, with both
Barth and Balthasar, we shall also see the identification of divine Being with
love and even, in Balthasar’s case, created Being with love.) God realizes
Himself as a unity, as a Triune Personality in, by, and as love-desire through
each of the hypostases with their own ‘I’s’ positing one another by denying
themselves and going out of themselves into another whereby they unify and
identify their I’s56 in a complete self-giving. We have called this movement a
dependent freedom (F3). I would argue that in Bulgakov’s account of God in
Himself, Absolute Freedom includes a perfect unity of moments of freedom
and necessity (F2–N2), while His activity of self-giving (F3) is completely self-
grounded. It is given with an eternal definitiveness so that we end up with
what I have called free dependence (N3). Here we see the emergence in
Bulgakov of our axis of F3–N3 and we shall return to an account of it below
with his intratrinitarian kenoticism.
50
AB, 141 [LG, 119 (revised)].
51
See Solov’ev, Cht. 8: 121–2 [LDH, 113–14], REU, 242–4 [RUC, 149–51], and Boehme,
‘Apologie’, Part I, 64–9, 16 (see Gallaher 2012b, 220ff. and O’Regan 2002, 31ff.).
52
Solov’ev, Cht., 6: 82 [LDH, 75–6].
53
Barth, CD, I/1, 295–6; see Papanikolaou 2011.
54 55
Bulgakov, U, 407–8 [C, 360] and compare TF, 317–18. SWG, 23–36.
56
AB, 117–18 [LG, 94–5] and compare G, 2 [1930]: 80–1.

Divine love, for Bulgakov, is not merely a ‘property’ but God’s very revealed
substance. However, this substance is not only a ‘pre-eternal act of Love’ which
establishes the ‘triunity of the Divine Subject, as the pre-eternal mutuality of
love’,57 but, echoing Fichte’s Tathandlung,58 it also is a ‘divine fact, not only as
power, but also as its activity, not only as breadth but also as depth’.59 In
other words, God as Holy Trinity’s self-manifested ousia or divinity (theotes)
is a dynamic love-desire and Bulgakov, like Solov’ev, calls her ‘Sophia’.60
Love-Ousia is, therefore, God’s pre-eternal divine activity (actus purissimus)
of self-revelation as a substance of freely but necessarily loving and yearning
for Himself as Trinity: ‘But such self-positing of itself in the Other and through
the Other is Love as an efficacious act, the ontology of love. God is love, and, as
Love, He is the Holy Trinity.’61 Indeed, if Sophia is God’s self-revealed nature
(ousia) as divine love-desire, then there is a sense, though Bulgakov is unclear,
in which ousia is the unrevealed source. It is the mystery and depth of the
undisclosed hypostatic ‘Being’ of God the Father understood as primordial
divine dazzling darkness, Divine Nothingness, and the Abyss of Love. An
antinomy, therefore, maybe even a ‘fourth theological antinomy’, would seem
to exist between ousia, as the unrevealed divine nature, and Sophia, as His self-
revelation or self-revealed nature.62 Of course, we seem to have here the
danger of subordinationism and even an abyssal monism (a God beyond
God as Trinity) with there being a collapse of the Paternal hypostasis and
ousia. However, more often than not Bulgakov simply speaks of one identity:
Ousia-Sophia.
As God the Father’s revealed nature, Sophia is transparent to the hypostases
who reveal her, the dyad of the Son and Spirit, and they live in and by their
self-revelation in and as her. Sophia, in this way, becomes hypostatically
characterized by the Father as Wisdom (for the Logos)63 and Glory (for the
Spirit).64 The Father God first reveals Himself to Himself in Sophia as the
Wisdom of the Word, self-knowledge, and He does this by revealing Himself
in Sophia in the second hypostasis, the Logos.65 But then God’s self-revelation
as Divine Glory follows on His self-revelation as Wisdom because God takes
glory in Himself as Wisdom. Thus, God’s self-revelation as Glory reposes as
it were on His self-revelation as Wisdom, as the ‘accomplished revelation of
57 58
G, 1 [1928]: 54. See Fichte 1991, I.1ff., 93ff., 1994, 5, 48, and 1998, 1.2, 110.
59
Bulgakov, I, 262 [see IV, 33 (my trans.)].
60
See K, 246, 259, 267–8 [BB, 136, 142, 146–7] and later AB, 124ff. [LG, 101ff.] and
‘Revelation’ [1937], 177–8; compare Solov’ev, REU, 249 [RUC, 157] and Boehme, ‘Apologie’, 16.
61
Bulgakov, G, 1: 68 and ‘Nature in the Godhead is His eternal life, self-determination, self-
positing, actus purissimus’ (ibid., 59); cf. NA, 50–1 [BL, 43].
62
In detail: Gallaher 2012b, 218ff.
63
Bulgakov, AB, 130–1 [LG, 107–8], U, 217 [C, 185], and SWG, 41ff.
64 65
AB, 131 [LG, 108]; see Lingua 2000, 92–4. Bulgakov, AB, 131 [LG, 108].

the Word’.66 But if God’s self-revelation in Wisdom is in the Logos, then it
follows that His self-glorification of Himself as Glory about Wisdom is His
self-revelation in the Holy Spirit (Jn. 16:13–14) as the third hypostasis.67 The
Son or Word and the Spirit form, as was said earlier, a ‘dyad’ and ‘bi-unity’68
where the two by the Spirit reposing on the Word reveal in Sophia the Father
as Absolute Love-Desire.69
Besides characterizing Sophia as Wisdom and Glory, Bulgakov, following
Solov’ev again, also identifies her with the ‘divine world’70 and the ‘All’ or ‘All-
unity’ (Vseedinstvo). As the divine world, Sophia is the personified ‘Prototype
of creation’.71 In her, following the divine ideas tradition,72 lies the ‘the pan-
organism of ideas, the organism of the ideas of all about all and in all’ which
are the ‘pre-eternal prototypes of creation’, which He possesses as His own
particular content.73 The content of God, the pleroma of the divine world in its
panoply of forms, is the divine All. This All is not merely a collection of
abstract ‘properties’ of God but the living ‘wholeness’ of God which is the All-
unity or the perfect ‘integral wisdom [tselomudrie]’ of God’s total life.74 Most
importantly, echoing Solov’ev,75 Sophia is imprinted with the Son’s image
through the love of the Spirit between the Father and the Son. This is the
image of the heavenly man or Godmanhood, the principle of humanity.76 It is
divine, after the Logos, and human, after Sophia, who is divine corporeality as
the pre-eternal and all-embracing essence of human corporeality.77 Sophia is,
therefore, the ‘self-revelation in bi-unity’ of the Son and Spirit of the Father,
that is, ‘she is the self-revelation of the Holy Trinity as the Father in the Son
and the Holy Spirit’.78
66
AB, 132 [LG, 109].
67
AB, 133 [LG, 110]; for pneumatology, see Zaviyskyy 2011, ch. 7, Nichols 2005a, 151–96 and
Graves 1972.
68 69
See Bulgakov, U, 209–51 [C, 177–218]. U, 217, 446 [C, 185, 394].
70
AB, 124ff. [LG, 101ff.] and compare Lestvitsa iakovlia [1929], 44 [ Jacob’s Ladder, 28]; see
Solov’ev, Cht., 7–8: 116ff. [LDH, 109ff.].
71
Bulgakov, ‘Summary of Sophiology [=SS]’ [1936], 43.
72
See Plato, Timaeus, 29a–b, 30d–31a, 41, 43, Alcinous, Didaskalikos, 9, 16–17, Origen, First
Principles, 1.2.2, 15–16 [SC 252, 92–5, ll.25–62], Comm. Jn., 1.34.243–5, 83 (FC 80) [PG
14.89B–C/SC 120, 180–3], Plotinus, enn. 5: V.7, V.9, 222–31, 286–319, Augustine, div. qu.,
Q.46, 79–81 (FC 70) [PL 40.29–31/CCSL 44A, 70–3], retr., 1.3.2, 14–15 (FC 60) [CCSL 57,
12–13], Dionysius, DN, 5.8 [PTS 33, 187–8], 101–2, Maximus, Amb. 7, PG 91.1077C–1088A
(Constas 2014, 1: 94–111), Aquinas, SG, 3a.47, 109–10, ST, 1.15 and De Ver., 1: 3.1–8, 136–67.
73
Bulgakov, AB, 135, 148 [LG, 112, 126].
74
AB, 135 and see 131 [LG, 112, 108] and IiI, 317 [HH, 25] and compare Solov’ev, Cht., 4: 48,
58 [LDH, 45, 53], Cht, 5: 70 [LDH, 64] and Cht., 10: 144 [LDH, 135].
75
See Gallaher 2009a, 622–6.
76
Bulgakov, NA, 130–5 [BL, 118–23]; cf. U, 218, 413–15, 430 [C, 186, 366–8, 378].
77
‘Evkharisticheskii Dogmat’ [1930], 24 [‘Eucharistic Dogma’, 128–9] and see AB, 135–40
[LG, 111–17]; compare Solov’ev, Cht., 8: 121, 126 [LDH, 113, 118].
78
Bulgakov, AB, 133 [LG, 110].

When God the Father reveals Himself in and as Love by His dyad, as was
said earlier, He personalizes His nature uniquely according to the ‘character’ of
the hypostasis in question. It appears that this essential ‘personalization’ is
possible because Sophia as the revealed divine ousia is ‘not a hypostasis but
hypostaticity [ipostasnost’]’.79 What Bulgakov precisely meant by ipostasnost’
is frankly obscure. All things considered, he certainly did not mean crudely
that Sophia was literally a fourth member of the Holy Trinity in some sort of
crude Gnosticism. This was, however, what was alleged by some during the
controversy that raged surrounding his sophiology beginning in the mid-
1920s and culminating in the condemnations by rival churches and investi-
gations by his own church of the mid-1930s.80 He did indeed describe Sophia
in his Svet Nevechernii (1917), following Florensky,81 as a ‘fourth hypostasis’
but would later qualify (not clarify!) this poeticism with the equally difficult
notion of ipostasnost’.82 Sophia, Bulgakov explained, is a living intelligent
entity or living reality/essence (sushchnost’) in God. She is both the essence
of God and the living self-revelation in love of the Trihypostatic Spirit. She is
always fully hypostatized in the Holy Trinity83 and, though not a hypostasis
but ousia, she might be described loosely as a ‘person’ as she has quasi-
personal otherness. She is a divine capacity to be hypostatized by and with
divine hypostases. Thus, Bulgakov, rather mysteriously, argues that Sophia
‘responds’ to God’s love of her (has desire for Him) with a reciprocal or
requited, although not hypostatic, love.84 The famous phrase, ‘eternal femin-
inity’, means, for Bulgakov, that Sophia is an active-passive activity of love-
desire or ‘reciprocating orientation [otvetnoi obrashchennosti]’.85
Now this difficult conception may mean two things. It may mean simply
that she is a quasi-subject insofar as God as Trinity loves Himself in His self-
revelation in Sophia as the object of love-desire or ‘love of Love’,86 and as
Sophia is hypostaticity, a reciprocating orientation and eternal femininity, she
can desire God in return as a subject. In contrast, it may mean that, insofar as
the self-revelation of God in His Divinity is Sophia or Godmanhood, which is
hypostatized by the Father through the Son and Spirit, they relate to Him on
the basis of or ‘out of the Divine-Humanity, or Sophia’. Sophia is the basis of
the hypostatic relations. She is the element and context of personification,
79
IiI, 323 [HH, 41].
80
On the sophiology controversy: Zaviyskyy 2011, ch. 5, Gallaher and Kukota 2005, 6–11,
Gallaher 2013c, 29–44, Klimoff 2005, Geffert 2004, 2005, Arjakovsky 2002, 433ff., Eneeva 2001,
and Eikalovich 1980.
81
Florensky, S, 349 [PGT, 252].
82
Bulgakov, SN, 194 [UL, 217]. Later ‘clarified’: IiI, 317 n. 1 [HH, 27 n. 39) and see K, 254 [BB,
140]; see R. Williams, SB, 117ff. and 165ff.
83
See Bulgakov, G, 1: 60–1.
84
AB, 127ff. [LG, 104ff.], IiI, 317–18 [HH, 27–9], and NA, 47–8 [BL, 40].
85
IiI, 318 n. 2 [HH, 29 n. 46]; cf. Gallaher and Kukota 2005, 14–15.
86
Bulgakov, SN, 193 [UL, 217] and IiI, 316 [HH, 25].

being love itself. God the Father, then, desires His Son and Spirit and He does
this through loving His Divinity as Sophia or Godmanhood and totally giving
Himself to it. In response, the Son and Spirit desire the Father in return and
in loving Him hypostatize Sophia for Him, and acting as it were for her
or through her, ‘the Divine-Humanity loves Him as its source or principle,
as God’.87
We saw earlier how God constitutes Himself as a Triune Personality by
His self-revelation. This was understood as the activity of Trinitarian self-
positing where every divine hypostasis reveals itself to the Other in, by, and
as their common ousia or Sophia/Love by complete self-renouncing, self-
emptying, self-giving, and self-receiving to the Other. This divine life of self-
positing by the trihypostatic Spirit in, by, and as Sophia is then simultan-
eously love-desire and intratrinitarian kenosis: ‘This dynamic [aktual’nyi]
self-positing is love: the flames of the divine trihypostases flare up in each of
the hypostatic centers and are then united and identified with one another,
each going out of itself into the others, in the ardor of self-renouncing
personal love.’88
How does Bulgakov understand this intratrinitarian kenotic love-desire?
Sacrifice as the self-revelation of love. The Father, as the initial and revealed
hypostasis, freely begets His Only-Begotten Son and in this begetting gives His
Being away in a free ‘self-renunciation’ and ‘self-emptying’. We have called
this a dependent freedom (F3). It is a free self-giving love for and to the Other
which is so total and definitive, as a free dependence (N3), that it is a ‘sacrificial
ecstasy of all-consuming, jealous Love for the Other’.89 The Son, in turn, has
his own sacrifice, which is that He passively but freely receives His Being from
His Father as the Only-Begotten with a dependent freedom (F3) (‘the accept-
ance of birth as begottenness’). In this way, He acknowledges the Father’s deity
in His divine generation of Him. (We will see this same filial reception
of divine self-generation later with Balthasar.) The Son is utterly emptied
(‘self-depletion’) in the name of the Father in a free dependence (N3). He
both pre-eternally sacrifices Himself and is sacrified by the Father so that He
might be the mute Word of the Other: ‘Sonhood is already a pre-eternal
kenosis.’90 This state of the loving ‘mutual sacrifice of begetting’ that Bulgakov
is evoking in this ‘begetting-begottenness’ of the Father and Son is both a
limitless ‘pre-eternal suffering’ that undergirds the ‘Divine all-blessedness’ and
(shades of Hegel) a ‘voluntary hypostatic dying’. This latter condition is an
understanding of the concept of death which is liberated from creaturely
87
U, 429–30 [C, 378]; here, see R. Williams, SB, 165–7.
88
Bulgakov, AB, 118 [LG, 94–5] and for kenosis, see AB, 121ff. [LG, 97ff.], G, 1: 68–9, and
Radost’ Tserkovnaia, 5–9 [Churchly Joy, 1–7] (see Gavrilyuk 2005, Lingua 2000, 63ff. and
esp. 104–6, Coda 1998, and Valentini 1997, 71–93); compare Hegel, PR, III [MS], 77ff., 83ff.,
132–3 [Vor., 16ff., 20ff., 68–9], and Schelling, PO, SW, XIV: Lect. 25, 39ff.
89 90
Bulgakov, AB, 121–2 [LG, 98–9]. AB, 122 [LG, 99].

temporal notions.91 The life of Absolute Freedom includes within it in har-
mony both a free will to sacrifice or dependent freedom (F3) and a resolute-
ness of that will or free dependence (N3). God’s life is a ‘Living Love’ but this
means it is sacrificial in character, since ‘Love discovers itself in sacrifice,
because it is also eternal life, for Life is also Love, just as Love is also Life.’92
This eternal living sacrificial life is the manifestation of ‘the victorious power
of love and its joy only through suffering’.
The eternal sacrifice would be a tragedy in God if it were not continually
resolved ‘in the bliss of the offered and mutually accepted sacrifice, of suffering
overcome’.93 The Father and the Son are identified in their common desire for
one another through this mutual self-revelatory sacrificial self-renunciation.
But this self-revelation of love-desire of the Father-Son, while existing in truth,
cannot be accomplished except (drawing on Augustine)94 by the bond of
the gift of the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father and rests on the
Son as their ‘mutual love’ in truth and beauty: ‘I am Thou and Thou art I; I am
We’ (summarizing Jn. 14:9–10). This procession is no longer a sacrificial
act as such but the self-testimony of God’s love and His accomplished
self-consciousness of Himself as Trihypostatic love-desire. The Holy Spirit is
the union of the two in infinite difference and even ‘distance’, that is, their
‘hypostatic relation’ by whom they reveal themselves to one another as love.95
However, the procession of the Spirit still is a pre-eternal ‘kenotic self-
renunciation’,96 like the Father and the Son. The Spirit actively and freely
accepts with a dependent freedom (F3) that He will not proclaim Himself, but,
with a resolute free dependence (N3), He only proclaims what the Son says in
the name of the Father.97 He is the Face of the Son in His Glory as the Word of
the Father but the Glory cannot be seen in itself, like the light of the Sun which
shows the Sun but not itself: ‘The Third hypostasis is hypostatic revelation not
concerning itself.’98
Bulgakov, not surprisingly, argues that ‘if the cross is the symbol of sacri-
ficial love in general then the Holy Trinity is the strength of the cross
manifested in mutual self-renouncement in the innermost depths of the tri-
hypostatic Subject. And so the Holy Cross is the symbol not only of our
salvation, but also of the Most Holy Trinity.’ The cross could be said to be a
symbol of the Trinity precisely because of the particular self-surrender of each
91
AB, 122–3 [LG, 99–100] (see Ware 2016, 227); compare Hegel, PR, III [MS, 1824, 1827,
1831], 124ff., 219–20, 326, 370 [Vor., 60ff, 150–1, 249–50, 286].
92 93
Bulgakov, G, 1: 69. AB, 122 [LG, 99].
94
See Augustine, De Trin. 4.20.29, 5.11.12, 15.17.27, 15.17.31, 15.19.37 (CCSL 50) [Trinity,
174, 197, 418, 420–1, 424–5], s. 71.12.18, 256 [PL 38.453–4], and ep. Jo. 7.6, 108 [SC 75, 322–5]
(see Meerson 1998, 180, 182–6, and on Augustine and Bulgakov, see Tataryn 2000, 66–97).
95
Bulgakov, AB, 123 [LG, 100] and compare G, 1: 66ff. (quoting ‘Augustine’ on the Spirit to
the Father and Son as ‘amor unitivus amborum’ when it is from Aquinas, ST, 1.36.4.1ad).
96 97 98
Bulgakov, U, 221 [C, 188]. AB, 123 [LG, 100–1]. U, 221 [C, 188].

of the hypostases, since ‘Love is the discovery of oneself and of what belongs to
oneself not through self-affirmation but through self-giving—self-positing
through self-renouncement.’99 We shall see later how Balthasar adapted this
aspect of Bulgakov’s thought.
Here, with the image of the cross as the symbol of the Absolute as Trinity,
we are at the very cusp of the other side of the cosmological antinomy, which
is the Absolute as Relative. We have seen how for God in His Freedom
as Absolute there is a unity in Him of moments of freedom and necessity
(F2–N2) and this is expressed in intratrinitarian kenosis as a perfect synthesis
of dependent freedom (F3) and a free dependence (N3). But in this eternal life
of self-desire there is no need/necessity of God for the world—the world just as
well might not have been, let alone have been redeemed. Indeed, Bulgakov
even claims the Absolute as immanent Trinity is not properly speaking called
‘God’ since it is radically transcendent in its Absolute Freedom.
However, one wonders whether his describing of the divine life kenotically
is witness to a certain confusion between the Absolute and the Absolute-
Relative. In only knowing God as Absolute-Relative, we forever create our
vision of the Absolute based on what we know about it in revelation—that is,
as Absolute-Relative. Bulgakov contends, as we saw earlier, that if one pursues
the Absolute purely in itself without the corresponding assertion of the
Absolute Relation-in-Itself, the immanent Trinity, then one will end up in a
pure negation, outside of religion itself. Furthermore, the Absolute, if it is to be
even thinkable (i.e. have significance), must be relative in its absoluteness or
immanent in its transcendence.100 Thus, God as Absolute Self-Relation-in-
Itself, immanent Trinity, is parasitic on or even a projection of God as
Absolute-Relative, economic Trinity. Bulgakov’s antinomies appear to blur
on closer examination, for the mystery of the Holy Trinity exists only as a
mystery revealed by itself in revelation, the relative. Analogical talk of ‘Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit’ presupposes the existence of a relation to us (energies) or
God as Absolute-Relative. It might be argued, then, that God as Trinity in
Himself (essence), as a purely immanent absolute relation in itself, not only is
unknowable but simply does not exist for us except as a dogmatic abstrac-
tion.101 An apophatically consistent Absolute, therefore, would only reflect the
thesis of the theological antinomy as a pure Nothingness. However, such a
conception would lead to a form of ‘metaphysical suicide’ by not having
any created limits by which to define itself.102 Methodologically, radical
apophaticism will self-destruct unless it is accompanied by a corresponding
99
G, 1: 68–9 and ‘The Holy Trinity is a substantial pre-eternal act of mutuality in self-
renouncing love, finding that which is being rendered in mutual surrender’ (G, 1: 67).
100 101
U, 407 [C, 360]. AB, 144n [LG, n. 2, 122]; cf. U, 407 [C, 360].
102
U, 443 [C, 391].

kataphaticism with a positive notion of God founded on God’s own necessary
self-revelation as Creator, economic Trinity.
5.3 GOD AS AN ABSOLUTE-RELATIVE

TRINITY OF CREATIVE LOVE
‘God’, for Bulgakov, is not only the Absolute but He is also the Absolute-
Relative, Creator-Redeemer, economic Trinity, the antithesis of the cosmo-
logical antinomy. Both self-definitions must be held together in faith. He
exists, and here Bulgakov adapts Palamite language to sophiology, in the
sense of divine energy, by a freedom where He can remain Himself in
renouncing the bliss of His essence by changing the mode by which He enacts
that essence. He enters into becoming as ‘a special form of the fullness of
Being’, limiting and emptying Himself by embracing change and process in
the creation and redemption of the world.103 Bulgakov refers to this second
revelatory self-definition of God, using the Idealist jargon, as God’s ‘Being-
for-itself [bytie-dlia-sebia]’.104 In paradoxical language, Bulgakov argues that
when God as Absolute, without ceasing to be Absolute, posits in Himself ‘the
relative as independent Being—a real, living principle’, He thereby introduces
‘duality’ into the ‘unity of that which is without distinction’. A ‘coincidentia
oppositorum’ is established by the Absoute in itself (i.e. in the Absolute).105
Where once there was only ‘absolute self-relation in Himself, the Holy
Trinity’,106 now there appears the difference between God and the world.
The Absolute stands over against itself as Absolute-Relative, ‘it becomes
correlative to itself as relative, for God is correlated to the world, Deus est
vox relativa, and, creating the world, the Absolute posits itself as God.’107
Thus, ‘God’ as Absolute immanent Trinity, without ceasing to be transcend-
ent, ‘by the very act of this creation gives birth also to God. God is born
with the world and in the world’ and religion, which presupposes divine
self-revelation, begins.108
Here, it might be argued, in this vision of creation as divine kenosis, we find
an economic expression of the synthesis of F3 and N3 that characterizes the
Freedom of God as Absolute expressed in intratrinitarian kenosis. Bulgakov,
in this context, appears to fulfil the theological ideal of a balance of divine
freedom and necessity towards the world we set forth in our Introduction. The
103 104
AB, 333 [LG, 302]. AB, 251–3 [LG, 222–5]; cf. AB 433 [LG, 404–5].
105 106
SN, 167 [see UL, 184 (my trans.)]. I, 264 [see IV, 35 (my trans.)].
107
SN, 167 [see UL, 184 (my trans.)].
108
SN, 104 [see UL, 110 (my trans.)]; for divine economy: Coda 1998, 130–49, Lingua 2000,
95ff., Valliere 2000a, 291–371, and Nichols 2005a, 33ff.

world, although it is a free necessity for God, being established on the same
kenotic foundation as God Himself, as a union of dependent freedom (F3) and
free dependence (N3), still need not have been. The Absolute Godhead ‘in His
own intradivine life remains transcendent for the creature’ and is not under
any necessity towards it in His perfect self-giving, self-receiving, and self-
emptying (F3–N3). But simultaneously the Absolute freely allows, out of a
dependent freedom (F3), the world to be an internal necessity (N2) for
Himself. As Absolute-Relative or the Creator, He ‘strips Himself of His
absolute transcendentality’ in creation.109 This is described as, echoing
Hegel, the ‘Golgotha of the Absolute’ insofar as ‘the world is created by the
cross taken upon Himself by God for the sake of love’ which is ‘sacrifice-
bearing love’ and a ‘love-humility’.110 God becomes the world’s Creator-
Redeemer in His divine power poured out in creation which is ‘the same
Godhead, one, indivisible, everlasting’. He ‘makes Himself God and from the
unconditional Absolute becomes relatively Absolute’ and so dependent on the
world such that He is absolutely and definitively its God in a free dependence
(N3). He ‘gives up in Himself a place for the relative; by an inexpressible act of
love-humility He posits it [the relative, creature] next to Himself and outside
Himself, limiting Himself by His own creation’.111
However, Bulgakov, it might be argued, is simply repeating the theo-genesis
of Hegel, Schelling, and Solov’ev where God as Absolute posits Himself as an
Other in whom He can seize Himself externally in the world and even as the
world.112 The Other, in this sort of thinking, is needed for God’s ‘self-
development [samorazvitie: self-evolution] or self-completion’, so creation
becomes a ‘determinate necessity’ for God.113 Bulgakov foresees this objection
and argues that this self-generation of God by God as Creator in and even (in
some sense) as the world—‘the idea of God’s becoming God . . . together with
becoming of the world’—necessarily follows if one ‘fully accepts Christian
revelation’. If the world is to be real not just for itself but also for God, then it
must be real with His own reality, and so both temporality and becoming must
be real for God. Furthermore, the world as the object of God’s love-desire is
even of or in God in that God now not only lives in eternity as non-becoming
Being but in time as becoming Being. Bulgakov holds that His own antinomic
understanding of God is quite different from the pantheism seen in Idealism.
Rather, God becomes ‘not for Himself but for the world’ insofar as there is in
God no necessity of self-completion but He becomes as Absolute, God for the
world out of a free love of creation (see ch. 6). Furthermore, there is ostensibly
109
110 111
SN, 168–9 [see UL, 185–6 (my trans.)]. SN, 192 [see UL, 214–15 (my trans.)].
112
See AB, 120, 141–2, 156 [LG, 96–7, 119–20, 134], I, 261–2 [IV, 30–1], and SN, 178–80 [UL,
195–8].
113
AB, 142 [LG, 120 (revd)].

retained here, in contradistinction from Idealism, where God is identified with
the world ‘as different states of one immanently evolving principle’, the notion
that God as Absolute remains wholly transcendent, utterly free, unchanged in
His absoluteness. Nevertheless, He has allowed Himself to be subject to change
in the world with the result that creation exerts an internal necessity (N2) on
the sheerly free God.114
The immanent Trinity is always present in the economic without (some-
how) the immanent being the ‘ground’ to the economic or the economic being
a consequence of the immanent.115 Thus, the immanent Trinity is ‘the very
same self in Its proper depths and foundation’ but, simultaneously, ‘it also
remains other and in this sense transcendent to the life of the “economic”
Trinity’.116 If the Absolute reveals itself, as Absolute-Relative, then this pre-
supposes in revelation itself, in the Absolute-Relative, the Absolute as a
concrete reality, so even if we can only know God as Absolute through
revelation, by the Absolute-Relative, revelation still contains real traces of
the transcendent.117 Therefore, the distinction of the Absolute and the
Absolute-Relative exists only for creation in its limitation.118 It is not, how-
ever, for creation a logical contradiction resulting in absurdity which ‘annuls
itself when it is fully clarified’ but for creation (not God) it is ‘an ontological
distinction’ expressed in two self-determinations of God that simply cannot be
harmonized by rational thought.119 No intradivine distinction exists for
God because ‘God is self-identical both in His own supraworldliness, as the
absolute Transcendent, and in His own creative energy, as Creator and
Pantocrator.’120 If we ask what ‘nature’ lies behind God’s self-determination
as Absolute-Relative, we can only reply it is His life as Absolute, as the
Absolute is wholly in but beyond Himself as Absolute-Relative.
Creation is understood as divine sacrificial self-limitation ‘in the name of
love for creation’. It consists (Bulgakov is at his most obscure here) of God as
Trinity creating an outside, making limits for Himself, although He is unlim-
ited, and then pouring forth ‘outside’ of these established limits into becoming
or ‘extra-divine but divinely posited Being-nonbeing, i.e. creation’.121 To draw
on a late-modern ‘sophiology’ to illumine this Bulgakovian intuition, at the
‘heart’ of God is a space, a khora or ‘space’/‘place’ which is ‘not-a-place’ (i.e.
‘space’ in the literal sense), as Fiddes has called it,122 created by the relations of
love of the Holy Trinity which Bulgakov calls the Divine Sophia. This is an
idea we alluded to when discussing Heidegger’s notion of the belonging-
togetherness of difference and identity. Bulgakov is creatively adapting the
114 115
AB, 156–7 [LG, 134]. I, 262 [IV, 31].
116
I, 251 [IV, 222 (revd)]; compare SN, 144–6, 167 [UL, 156–9, 183–4] and ‘Iuda Iskariot—
apostol-predatel’’ [=IAP] [1930–31], 241–2.
117 118 119
U, 409 [C, 361–2]. SN, 192 [UL, 215]. NA, 250 [BL, 229].
120 121
SN, 192 [see UL, 215 (my trans.)]. Bulgakov, AB, 251 [LG, 223].
122
See Fiddes 2001b, 35–60, SWKG, 218–65 (esp. 249ff.), 320–1, 325–6.

Lurianic Kabbalistic mythos of tsimtsum (or zimzum) via Solov’ev.123 ‘Nothing’,
in this context, for Bulgakov, is a relative not absolute or pure nothingness (me
on not ouk on (adapting Schelling’s terminology)), although Bulgakov argues
more as one had expected that it is in fact from absolute nothing.124 As a
‘creaturely nothing’, not the divine nothingness of God as NOT-is,125 it is
equated with becoming as the state of Being which is incomplete, temporal,
awaiting continuation and completion.126 But if this is the case, then from
whence is the said Being that can be in such a state of (relative) nothingness,
becoming? In a word: God.
Creation is envisaged as the spilling out of the love-desire of God as Trinity
into nothing, as if into what Fiddes has called a ‘place which is not a place’ of
wisdom.127 Bulgakov describes it as the ‘immersion in “becoming”’ of the divine
Sophia or ousia, as the ‘Prototype of creation’, in the ‘capacity of created
Sophia’.128 This is certainly a version of creatio ex nihilo, although it seems
more creatio ex deo, as the ‘nothing’ is in some sense in God. Divine withdrawal
as creation, for Bulgakov, makes it possible, not unlike Fiddes’ portrayal again,
for the world to dwell in between the relations of God as Trinity. Correspond-
ingly, God as Trinity dwells in the world, to quote Fiddes, as a divine mysterious
form of ‘hidden, patient and suffering presence, persisting with created persons
in their growth and development, and acting in persuasive and sacrificial love
rather than coercion’.129 God trihypostatically ‘makes room’ for creation in His
self-giving and self-receiving kenotic life of love.130 He accomplishes this, so
Bulgakov relates, by trihypostatically establishing His own essence or Being, His
proper divine world, the divine Sophia, All-unity, as ‘becoming divinity’.131
In this context, Bulgakov will often speak of the Divine Sophia in its
multiplicity (the ideal All) as the Maximean logoi which he calls the ‘divine’
or ‘ontic seeds’ of the Logos in creation. He identifies these seeds with both the
divine ‘ideas’ and the Palamite ‘energies’,132 speaking, for example, of ‘divine
ideas-energies’. These divine seeds-ideas-energies are said to be ‘submerged in
non-being in the divine act of creation’. Through divine Being positing itself in
non-being, nothingness, divine Being acquires, and here Bulgakov borrows a
Hegelian notion (Andersein), ‘otherness of Being [inobytie] in the world’.133
123
See Scholem 1955, 260–4, 1974, 129–35 and Solov’ev, REU, 250, 257 [RUC, 157, 167].
Compare Moltmann, TK, 59–60, 108–11, 1993b, 86ff., 155–7, 1996, 296–308 and Schelling’s ‘die
Einschließung’ (contraction) in AW, 88ff. [SW, VIII: 317ff.]. For critique, see Fiddes, SWKG,
252–4. On Kabbalism in Bulgakov, see Rubin 2010, 80–2 and Burmistrov 2007, 164–6, but
see 163.
124
Bulgakov, U, 222 [C, 189].
125
See SN, 169–78, esp. 170–5 [UL, 186–95, esp. 188–92].
126 127
AB, 146–7 [LG, 124–5]. See Fiddes, SWKG, 249–56.
128 129 130
Bulgakov, SS, 43. Fiddes, SWKG, 252 and see 264. SWKG, 254.
131
Bulgakov, AB, 149 [LG, 126]; compare SN, 178–9 [UL, 195–7].
132
see AB, 149–50 [LG, 127], NA, 21–4 [BL, 17–19]; see Rossum 1993.
133
Bulgakov, IAP, 239; cf. Hegel, Science of Logic, 118ff.

Divine being, being ‘mixed [srastvoril]’ with ‘nothing’ and ‘immersed’ in
‘becoming’, is given ‘another form of Being of one and the same divine
world’. This ‘becoming divinity’ is the divine world of Sophia as All-multiplicity
(Vsemnozhestvo) or the created Sophia: ‘The Divine Sophia became also the
creaturely Sophia. God repeated Himself in creation, so to speak; He reflected
Himself in nonbeing.’134 The divine Sophia as the eternal image or Prototype of
creation is then reflected in creation in the creaturely Sophia as an image in
becoming, Prototype to type, divine Being reflected in creaturely Being which is
a sort of becoming. The two are, however, one, with the second Sophia being a
mode/image (obraz) of the first.135 As Angelus Silesius puts it: ‘God’s image I. If
God would gaze at God, God needs/To turn to me or any of our many
breeds.’136 Put in terms of self-revelation, the Father creates the world through
revealing Himself through His two hands in and by Sophia. If the divine Sophia
is the eternal self-revelation of God, then the created Sophia is His temporal
revelation in the world.137
Since Sophia is an ideal intelligible world in God, nothing can be said to be
external to God. One can speak of the eternal ‘God’ as Absolute-Relative
creating a ‘place’ in Himself for the relative into which He plunges to become
God in becoming, ‘creation’ itself in a manner of speaking.138 As the world is
eternally in God through Sophia and since ‘God’ is a relative term implying a
creation, one must say there never was ‘one point of being’ at which the eternal
free act of the Creator was absent from creation or ceased as unneeded, as all
Being would then cease to be. One can then dare to say that ‘the Lord is the
Creator always now and ever unto ages of ages’ and the ‘creature is co-eternal
with [its] Creator’, as time is ‘a face of eternity turned towards the creature as a
kind of creaturely eternity’ and ‘light is co-existent with the sun’.139 Here the
particular form of the problematic in Bulgakov comes to the fore. If God in His
essence is Godmanhood/Divine Sophia, if creation/created Sophia is that same
essence in becoming, and if in this ‘submergence’ God eternally accepts the
world as an internal necessity (N2) for Himself, then He must create it to be
the sort of God He is. Furthermore, it follows that the Incarnation must be the
motivating reason behind creation, which is that who God is in Himself
(Godmanhood) must be manifested in a world where He will take flesh
(N2). The world is both human and divine at its core, made for the Incarna-
tion, as God is divine-human (see ch. 6).140 It would seem that Bulgakov’s
response is to simply assert in faith the primordial unity of God as Absolute
and as Absolute-Relative, which seems to avoid the question of how God can
134
Bulgakov, AB, 149 [LG, 126]; see Gavrilyuk 2015, 462 (Bulgakov drawing on Maximus).
135
NA, 70 [BL, 60].
136
Angelus Silesius, Wanderer, 1.105, 11.
137
See Bulgakov, SS, 43, U, 222ff. [C, 189ff.] and SWG, 67ff.
138 139
SN, 178 [UL, 196]. SN, 189 [see UL, 209–10 (my trans.)].
140
See R. Williams, SB, 166, 169.

be free when creation and Incarnation are internal necessities. Moreover, his
assertion of the latter antinomy as his response to the problematic breaks
down, as there is a pervasive confusion of the two divine self-definitions.
It is not an accident that this account of creation appears prima facie monist
and emanationist. Bulgakov was attempting to marry the Christian doctrine of
creation (emphasizing freedom) with a sort of quasi-emanationism or divine
outpouring/overflowing (izliianie as opposed to strict emanatsiia) (emphasiz-
ing necessity).141 This is a form of the Neoplatonist tradition of the
self-diffusiveness of the Good but Bulgakov was consciously highlighting its
latent pantheism and attempting to Christianize it. The Created Sophia, for
Bulgakov, is sometimes identified with the world soul understood as the divine
foundation of creation or divine energies142 and sometimes with creation as
such.143 Yet this lack of clarity about creation is not crucial for Bulgakov’s
system because, following Solov’ev,144 all Being must be a mode of divine
Being, so that, properly speaking, ‘The world as the creaturely Sophia is
uncreated-created.’145 Creation is not merely implicitly divine but quite expli-
citly so in its foundation. Bulgakov held that only the Absolute God, Holy
Trinity, properly is, having Being (ousia), essence, and existence. God is
Absolute, possessing the All, and nothing can limit Him or He would cease
to be Absolute but merely relative. There can be nothing alongside of, outside
of, or apart from the divine Being of God, Sophia, neither the creature nor the
‘nothing’ out of which it is created, since ‘all belongs to this life and world’ of
God as Trinity.146
The world is not only a thing or object in God’s hands but possesses,
through God’s self-limitation, its own proper Being, nature, and life. For
Bulgakov this ‘created nature does not remain outside God, because onto-
logically extra-divine Being does not exist at all’.147 Creation abides in God,
although it is not God, and God is not bound to it but both transcends it and
(as it were) sweeps it up into the pre-eternal gaze of His absoluteness.148
However, the relationship of God to His creation is not one of ‘unilateral
action of God towards a world lying outside of Him and alien to Him’.
Rather, it is a co-operation (vzaimodeistvie) or synergism of Creator with
His creation.149 The only way that such a synergism, with its ‘mutual con-
nectedness and dependence’, can happen is if not only God has a true ‘reality
and self-existence [samobytnost’]’150 but creation also has such a reality. It is
141
Bulgakov, NA, 78 [BL, 69] and SN, 167 [UL, 183–4].
142 143
NA, 72, 89ff., 188, 192 [BL, 63, 79ff., 172, 176]. NA, 60, 63, 71 [BL, 52, 55, 62].
144 145
Solov’ev, Cht., 6: 85 [LDH, 78]. Bulgakov, NA, 72 [BL, 63].
146
NA, 51 [BL, 43] and see NA 128 [BL, 117], AB, 146–7 [LG, 124–5], and SWG, 148.
147
Literally: ‘there is no Being at all that exists outside God’ (IAP, 239).
148 149
IAP, 240–1. ibid., 239 and see NA, 240ff. [BL, 220ff.].
150
IAP, 239; Samobytnost’=‘autonomy’, ‘uniqueness’, ‘self-sufficiency’, ‘integrality’, and
‘independence’.

for this reason that Bulgakov contends that ‘In order to become self-existent,
the world must be divine in its positive foundation.’ Thus, it is only because it
is first divine in its substratum that ‘the world maintains its self-existence in
the eyes of God, although it is created from nothing.’ Thanks to its creature-
liness, the world also maintains its independence of Being, its ‘unbridgeable
difference’ in God’s eyes. The world ostensibly has a ‘genuine reality’ because it
is both divine in its foundation and creaturely in its temporal becoming. It
is determined by God for Himself unto the ages but only because it exists both
for God, being dependent on His life and Being, and for itself in the tightest
co-operation, seen at its apex in Christ Himself.151 Thus, creaturely realities like
temporality are real because they have their true ‘foundation’, ‘root’, and even
‘content’, in eternity, the life of the Trinity—the divine Sophia.152 This is an
idea we will later see Balthasar (see 11.2) critically adapting and extending in his
correction of Hegel’s application of creaturely modalities to the divine Trini-
tarian drama. More critically, we shall see, however, in chapter 6 that Bulgakov’s
talk of divine-human co-operation seems to be in tension with his own version
of determinism, the determinism of love.
One way of understanding Bulgakov’s doctrine of creation on this point is
in terms of his identification of divine Being with both love-desire and Sophia
vis-à-vis creation. Two modes/images of Sophia apparently ‘exist’. The first is
primary and divine, that is, the divine world, the ousia of the Holy Trinity as a
movement of love. The other mode is secondary and created, that is, the
created Being of creation which is the divine love/Sophia of God poured out in
becoming. Yet these two modes/images of Sophia are one reality as a unity in
difference.153 Bulgakov certainly favours this ‘antinomic’ conception of
Sophia, but he stresses that they are one reality. The Created Sophia is the
Divine Sophia in becoming and so He can express this in unitary language
which emphasizes creation as a mode of God: ‘The one Sophia and the one
divine world exist both in God, and in creation, although in different ways:
preeternally and in time, absolutely and relatively (as a creature).’154 It would
seem that ultimately the antinomic or dialectical approach to ontology, for
Bulgakov, is a time-bound way of speaking and that sub specie aeternitatis all
Being is divine (creaturely Being as a mode of divine Being). There are, then, in
reality not two Sophias but one Sophia.
But if this is the case then this would seem to be at odds (without substantial
qualifications and extra theological work) with sophiology containing within it
a form of the analogy of Being. Creaturely Sophia/Being cannot be said to
correspond with divine Sophia/Being, as such a ‘correspondence’ requires real
151 152
IAP, 239–40; see Gallaher 2012b, 216–17. See Bulgakov, NA, 65ff. [BL, 56ff.].
153
NA, 70 [BL, 60]; cf. AB, 148 [LG, 126].
154
IAP, 239 and I, 262 [see IV, 32–3 (my trans.)]: ‘God in creation, which is the Divine
Sophia’.

difference between the uncreated and the created and these two Sophias are one,
not two. Otherwise, how can we say coherently that the love or beauty charac-
teristic of creation both corresponds and is dissimilar to that of God Himself if
really they are tacitly one reality? However, we need not play antinomism and
analogy off one another but see them as complementary methodologies bring-
ing out, respectively, the difference and continuity and the dissimilarity and
similarity of God and creation. Moreover, we shall see, in the case of
Barth’s dialecticism, a method very similar to Bulgakov’s antinomism, that
a dialectical theological methodology in no way needs to presuppose the
ontological modalism found in Bulgakovian sophiology. (See Part II.)
In creation generally and, as we shall see, in Christ particularly, one has a
certain ‘mutual transparency [vzaimovkhodnost’]’ of God and the world. God
enters the world through His creation and redemption of it in Christ and the
world enters God through its participation in the divine nature of Christ. This
transparency presupposes co-operation between God and creation, the peak of
which is the incarnation: ‘God realizes his goals already not apart from
creation, but together with it, sparing its creaturely freedom and recognizing
its creaturely self-existence . . . This common life of God with the world
receives its ultimate clarity in the events of the incarnation.’155 Each of the
two Sophias is united in one Being (sushchestvo) and one life, but each
preserves, in a certain coincidentia oppositorum, its self-existence/independ-
ence (samostoiatel’nost’) and its ‘metaphysical distance’ (so being without
confusion) at the same time as it preserves its mutual link with the other (so
being without separation), as a result of their ontological identity. Thus,
apparently, the truth that Bulgakov is trying to emphasize with his doctrine
of creation is that in creation itself can be traced imperfectly the hypostatic
union as expressed at Chalcedon. He is developing a sort of Chalcedonian
ontology. This trace of Christ in creation is seen in the following antinomic
truth: God out of an ecstatic self-emptying love has founded creation as
otherness distinct from Himself, so it is both created and temporal, but, in
being based on His own divine nature of love-desire, it is also uncreated and
pre-eternal in its foundation:156
It is necessary to include the world’s creation in God's own life, coposit the
creation with God’s life, correlate God's world-creating act with the act of His
self-determination. One must know how to simultaneously unite, identify, and
distinguish creation and God’s life, which in fact is possible in the doctrine of
Sophia, Divine and creaturely, identical and distinct.157
This sort of metaphysics is not pantheism as an impious pantheistic ‘deifica-
tion of the world’, Bulgakov claims, but ‘an entirely pious’158 pantheism. It is
155 156
IAP, 240–1. NA, 70 [BL, 60]; cf. AB, 148 [LG, 126].
157 158
NA, 52 [BL, 44 (revd)]. U, 232 [C, 199–200]; see Lingua 2000, 144–6.

more precisely called ‘panentheism’, understood as ‘the truth that all is in God
or of God’159 or ‘the world is the not-God [ne-Bog] existing in God, God is the
not-world [ne-mir] existing in the world. God posits the world outside of
Himself, but the world possesses its Being in God.’160 This means quite simply
that the hypostatic union is the pre-eminent instance of a more general
panentheistic reality in the cosmos.161 We shall see another version of this
same insight later in Balthasar.
Bulgakov’s relationship to pantheistic thought is far from a simple one and
even in On Godmanhood one can see a sort of evolution in his thought.
Between Agnets Bozhii (1933) and Nevesta Agntsa (1939; pub. post. 1945),
Bulgakov gradually begins to blur the anteriority of the Absolute over the
Absolute-Relative. Thus, Bulgakov in 1933 follows Athanasius in arguing for a
clear precedence of the immanent Trinity over God’s self-positing as Creator.
The first self-definition is primary, whereas the second is ordered after the first.
Desire in the Holy Trinity (Being in Himself) is the foundation for God’s love
outside Himself (Being-for-Himself), His becoming Creator or God for the
world, which is characterized as ‘His creative kenosis’. Thus, the creation of the
world may involve the self-positing of God as Creator but it remains a ‘certain
work of God’ and not an ‘inner self-positing of the Godhead’ or God’s life of
love as Holy Trinity.162 Six years later, with Nevesta Agntsa, it is no longer clear
how the Absolute remains the foundation of the economic Trinity, God’s self-
manifestation as God-Creator. Bulgakov certainly still argues that God as
Absolute is the ‘ontological premise’ of the fullness of eternal ‘non-kenotic
Being’163 in relation to which the kenosis of the Absolute in creation as
Absolute-Relative ‘is defined and from which it proceeds’. But this kenosis of
God as Absolute-Relative, the coming to be of Himself as God, is now ‘united
and co-posited’ with Himself as Absolute. Bulgakov justifies this move by his
wish to avoid any hint of a change in divinity in this kenosis, so that the
immanent remains self-same in the economic Trinity.164 Now this could
simply mean that he still regards Absolute and Absolute-Relative as both
valid self-definitions of God, as equi-primordial. However, given the imma-
nentizing trajectory of Nevesta Agntsa and that Bulgakov in this work often
elides the two planes of his antinomies, it seems more likely that this talk of the
Absolute and Absolute-Relative being ‘united and co-posited’ is a rational
clarification resulting in making it no longer clear how God can remain
transcendent to Himself in the act of creating, in being Creator. More
159
Bulgakov, IiI, 317 [HH, 27]; cf. SWG, 71–3 and 147.
160
I, 262 [see IV, 32 (my trans.)].
161
On ‘panentheism’ generally, see Cooper 2006 and Peacocke 2004. On panentheism in Bulgakov,
see Gavrilyuk 2015.
162
AB, 150 [LG, 128].
163
i.e. having no kenosis of worldly becoming moving from Absolute to Absolute-Relative.
164
NA, 251 [BL, 230].

troubling still, God’s being Creator becomes wholly identified with His pre-
eternal life of love-desire as Holy Trinity so that it is no longer clear how He
cannot not create the world, since creation is a determinate necessity of self-
completion for God. Bulgakov, in other words, has fallen into the trap of
Boehme, Schelling, Hegel, and Solov’ev.
Bulgakov is continually reducing his antinomies to one of their theses,
thereby undermining his own response to the problematic. Thus the cosmo-
logical antinomy is reduced to its antithesis of God as Absolute-Relative (‘God
in creation’) insofar as God as Absolute (‘God in Himself ’) eternally co-posits
Himself as Absolute and Creator, thus wholly immanentizing Divinity. In
turn, the sophiological antinomy is reduced to the thesis of the Divine Sophia
insofar as creaturely Being (the created Sophia) is simply a different mode/
image of the Divine. Indeed, one might even go so far as to say that the central
difficulty in Bulgakov’s system is not that it is antinomic, or even that he
reduces all of his antinomies to one of its theses, but that he is not antinomic
enough. His cosmological and sophiological antinomies are false antinomies,
as the same reality is simply stated twice but in a different mode. Absolute-
Relative is still the Absolute, only eternally positing itself in becoming, just as
the Created Sophia is simply the Divine Sophia in the ‘stream of becoming’.165
Bulgakov’s antinomism, which attempts to balance the transcendence and
immanence of God, is continually being undermined by the role of Sophia, as
a sort of immanentizing drive in Bulgakov’s thought. Sophia, which is osten-
sibly the idea of the identity and difference of the divine and creaturely, often
seems to degenerate in him into a trope for the divine nature of all Being
insofar as God not only will be but is all in all. Furthermore, as the Divine
Sophia is Godmanhood, and the Created Sophia is this Godmanhood in
becoming, when the Absolute determines itself as God, the world must be
created not only because God requires a world to define Himself as God but
because there must be a world for the Incarnation to take place: that is, the
world’s Being qua Being is Godmanhood and this can and shall be manifested.
The pantheistic ‘slide’ in Bulgakov leads him to sometimes put under erasure
the claim that God need not have created the world (i.e. there is an N2 of the
world for God-as-Absolute). He ends up developing his theology in a one-
sided manner that resolves theological tensions in a rational finalization
expressing only one of the theses of the antinomy (e.g. the world is an internal
necessity of love-desire (N2) for God as Absolute-Relative). One sees, then,
arguably, in Bulgakov’s late theology, a danger of collapsing the Absolute into
the Absolute-Relative, importing an internal necessity of the world (N2) into
not only the Absolute-Relative but the Absolute itself. In this way, he destroys
the antinomy which leads to a pervasive pantheism and determinism in his
165
I, 261 [see IV, 31 (my trans.)]; see Solov’ev, Cht., 11 and 12: 163 [LDH, 155].

theology. However, to be fair, a case might be made that he has resources in his
thought to respond to the pantheistic problems of his own sophiology.166
It would seem that Bulgakov’s theology, which at first we thought might
present us the basis of our own response to our problematic, cannot, with its
incipient determinism and denial of the possibility that God could have acted
otherwise in creation and redemption, allow for a true divine union of F3 with
N3 in creation. Creation cannot be said to be established by God on the same
kenotic foundation as the Trinity, of a dependent freedom (F3) and a free
dependence (N3), because Bulgakov continually overshadows its giftedness,
the fact that God might not have given Himself to it in creation (F3).
More positively, Bulgakov’s emphasis on a dialectic of apophaticism and
kataphaticism has led us to the truth that we can only know the Absolute
Freedom of God as Trinity through His gracious revelation to us in His self-
revelation in Christ. Despite Bulgakov’s failure to establish it properly, Divine
Freedom as a synthesis of F3–N3 is already always the grace of God poured out
for us in dependent freedom (F3) and free dependence (N3) because we only
know the immanent in the economic Trinity. Furthermore, his sophiology,
with its emphasis on creation as a coincidentia oppositorum of the divine and
the creaturely, is a flawed attempt to emphasize the fact that all of reality is
founded on the God-Man, Jesus Christ. We shall build on these ideas later in
the book but first we must enter the heart of the problematic and response in
Bulgakov.
166
See Gallaher 2012b, 218–22.
Divine Freedom and the Need

of God for Creation
Bulgakov’s version of and response to the problematic is found in his anti-

nomism and we shall now deal with both in more detail. We found that the
tensions in Bulgakov’s antinomism seem to work against any simple appro-
priation of his theological response to the problematic to assist us to articulate
our ideal of an F3–N3 relationship of God to the world. We want to say that
God both (a) need not have created and redeemed the world in His ‘dependent
freedom’ (F3) towards the world or ‘could have acted otherwise’, and (b) had to
create and redeem it in Christ in His ‘free dependence’ (N3), since ‘it could not
be otherwise’. The difficulty is in finding some way of speaking about the
immanent Trinity vis-à-vis Christ and creation that balances the freedom of
grace and the eternal definitiveness, the necessity, if you will, of the Incarna-
tion for the life of God as Trinity. Here perhaps Bulgakov may still help us
through resources found in his Christology.
6.1 THE DIVINE NEED FOR CREATION
Bulgakov argues that God as Absolute-Relative does not create the world
according to a whim of omnipotence. Freedom, for God for Himself, is not
the abstract negative notion of ‘a void filled with limitless arbitrary possibilities’1
upon which God has the power to apply or not apply a particular capacity of His
omnipotence. The notion that God’s will is radically indifferent in its freedom,
and can choose to create the world or not based on an infinity of divine
possibilities, Bulgakov sees as sheer ‘occasionalism’. Bulgakov, therefore, rather
uncritically rejects the Scholastic distinction between potentia absoluta and
ordinata as simply an instance of nominalism despite the fact that Aquinas,
who used it, was no nominalist.2 We will later see Balthasar also rejecting it for
1 2
Bulgakov, AB, 251 [LG, 222]. See Bruce 2013, chs. 1–2.

similiar reasons (11.3) but Barth critically adapting it (8.1). A divine will which
can create the world or not is, Bulgakov argues, ‘the absolute causelessness of
indeterminism’ where creation becomes a mere caprice. Such a notion is rooted
in the anthropomorphism of Western theology in general, and in Aquinas in
particular.3 It is indicative of a theology that distinguishes will and intellect in
God and defines them according to completely opposite features.4 In contrast,
the freedom of God for Himself is a pre-eternal positive ‘ontological freedom’
whereby God lives by His own positive pre-eternal content which is His nature
as the Divine Sophia/love.5 Rather, if one must speak of possibilities in the
divine life, then creation and redemption are divine possibilities of love for God
but only insofar as there are no unactualized possibilities in His life as God.
Bulgakov opposes to the idea of ‘manifold possibilities in God, actualized
and unactualized’, the notion of the ‘uniqueness [edinstvenost’] of the ways of
God’ which excludes all other unactualized possibilities.6 This ‘uniqueness’ is a
characteristic of absoluteness7 and absoluteness is coextensive with the divine
life of love-desire which is God’s own ‘ontological self-determination’. He is
not constrained by any givenness-necessity, as with a creature, so that He must
choose between different possibilities.8 Rather, God as Absolute-Relative is
faced only with a ‘single and unique reality’ with creation, which, although
different from God, is not less necessary. When He loves in creating and
redeeming, He does this in the same way as He exists in His own free life of
love. Put in our terminology, God exists as a synthesis of F2 and N2 in which
each hypostasis gives itself to the Other (F3) with definitive abandon (N3),
that is, with ‘the entire force of free necessity or necessity in freedom’.9
Creation is part of the self-determination of God as Absolute-Relative’s own
Being as the Divine Sophia. It has a ‘unique and freely-necessary’ foundation,
God Himself, God-Love.10 In creating and redeeming, God cannot fail to
be simply who He is, which is Love, divine desire. Thus, the expression of
Himself as love in creation necessarily but freely belongs to the fullness of His
self-revelation so that He needs creation because, as love, He ‘cannot leave
unactualized even a single possibility of love’.11 Some of this rather paradoxical
talk—which assumes the ‘belonging-togetherness’ of God and creation—can be
explained by the fact that not only is God love and His creation of the world an
act of love but the world’s Being is included in Him as a moment of His divine
desire.12 In some sense, creation is, without negating its (alleged) infinite
difference, that very love-desire itself—the created Sophia. Put simply, all
3
Bulgakov, NA, 37–8 [BL, 31–2]; see Marshall 2004 and Hughes 2013.
4 5
Bulgakov, NA, 37–8 [BL, 31–2]. AB, 251 [LG, 222].
6 7 8
NA, 38 [BL, 31]. NA, 9 [BL, 5]. NA, 57 [BL, 48].
9
NA, 141 [BL, 130]; or: ‘necessity, the free necessity of love’ (NA, 56 [BL, 48]).
10 11 12
NA, 56 [BL, 48]. NA, 141 [BL, 130]. NA, 57 [BL, 49].
Divine Freedom and the Need of God for Creation 97

creaturely Being (created Sophia) is in its foundation divine love/ousia—the
divine Sophia.
Not surprisingly given our account so far, in God’s act of revelation, for
creation is a form of self-revelation, it cannot be said that God as Absolute-
Relative could have simply refrained from creation, as is the case with God as
the Absolute. Such a position is unbefitting to the divine essence: God could
not have refrained from creating the world, since it flowed from His very life as
love. Indeed, if one can even speak of a divine ‘will’ to creation, then such a will
would be identified with the freedom God has in being for Himself. It is not a
human will that can desire at will, which presupposes arbitrariness, but God’s
divine will, which invariably and absolutely desires to create.13 Bulgakov is
collapsing love, freedom, and creation. Put in terms of our terminology, for
God as Absolute there is no N2 of the world, but for God as Absolute-Relative
there is an N2 for the world, but this is a necessity of love-desire and God as
love is free love (N2=F2).
God, then, creates the world not for Himself but for the love of creation
(F2). Yet creation has meaning for God. God may have no need or requirement
(potrebnost’) of the world to complete Himself as Absolute but this does not
mean ‘that the world is not needed by God in some other sense (besides His
own self-completion)’.14 What is this need of God for the world? Bulgakov
describes this need or necessity as neither an internal necessity of nature
needed for God’s own self-completion (the form of N2 found in Idealism),
nor a coercive necessity (N1) from without, ‘for there does not exist any kind of
out of-outside [iz-vne] for God’. God, for Bulgakov, is All-Unity and includes
all Being.15 Rather, it is a need or necessity not for Himself but for the world
itself as a sort of freely chosen (F2) internal necessity (N2) of the world.16 Such
a need—and in what follows, Bulgakov is adapting a concept found from
Plotinus to Moltmann and Fiddes17—is the need of divine love-desire. Thus,
the necessity he is trying to evoke, echoing Schelling and Solov’ev, is the
‘necessity of love, which cannot not love and which manifests and realizes in
itself the identity and indistinguishability of freedom and necessity’.18 This
divine ‘need’ might be characterized by our axis of F3–N3. God freely chooses
to be dependent on the world (F3), to be in need to it, and this dependence is
an eternal reality that God cannot simply undo (N3).
God is love and ‘it is proper for love to love’ not only in the ‘confines
[predely: bounds, limits, frontiers]’ of the divine life of absoluteness, but ‘to
expand in love’ ‘beyond [za] these confines’ of that absolute life.19 Although, as
13 14
NA, 38 [BL, 31]. AB, 142 [LG, 120].
15 16
AB, 143 [see LG, 121 (my trans.)]. AB, 142 [LG, 120].
17
See Plotinus, enn., 5: V.4.1, 142–5, 7: VI.8.10, 14–15, 258–61, 274–7, Moltmann, TK, 52–60,
105ff., Fiddes, SWKG, 386–7, and CSG, 63–71.
18
Bulgakov, AB, 143 [LG, 120]; see Moltmann, TK, 107.
19

we have seen, these ‘confines’ paradoxically exist in God by divine self-
limitation, so one is left wondering what Bulgakov may mean. If it were not
the case that love was so self-diffusive, then God would be limited by His own
absoluteness in self-love or self-affirmation. He would be wrapped up by His
own eternal desire and God would not be omnipotent, since He would be
trapped by His own limits as absolute. The problem with the notion that ‘love
to love must love beyond itself ’ is that it denies that God ‘cannot not love’ to be
Himself. This makes any divine dependence on the world solely necessitous and
not simultaneously freely gracious with a dependent freedom (F3) according to
which things could have been otherwise. However, it does make (though
perhaps too strong) a case for a key aspect of divine love-desire upon which
we shall draw and which we consider equally and antinomically important as F3
which is free dependence (N3). Divine love-desire for the world is so eternally
‘set’ on its complete self-gift in and to creation (F3) that in some sense it could
not be otherwise (N3).
‘Creation’ and ‘God as love’ seem to be synonymous for Bulgakov. ‘God-
Love’ (in Bulgakov’s typical styling) ‘needs the world, and it could not have
remained uncreated’ not for Himself but for love of the world. He could not
have failed to create the world (actualizing this possibility of love) because He
needs to create it ‘in order to love, no longer only in His own life, but also
outside Himself, in creation’.20 Thus, the presence and relation of creation are
a part of the concept of God as love-desire and one cannot speak of creation
vis-à-vis God as Absolute-Relative ‘as something accidental, “inessential”,
as something that could exist or not exist. It is impossible for it not to
exist.’21 Creation and God as love are part of the concept of God as
Absolute-Relative and, echoing Hegel,22 without creation God would cease
to be God by definition.23
One might argue that this sort of thinking is a tacit reduction on Bulgakov’s
part of God as Absolute to God as Absolute-Relative but this reduction is
understandable given what might be referred to as Bulgakov’s ‘revelational
realism’. By this phrase, we mean that, as we shall see in Barth, he holds that it
is impossible to think of God outside of the relations He has established with
us.24 The Absolute, as Bulgakov puts it, is an ‘abstraction, conventional
abstractness’ in which one examines the essence of God. But concretely such
a reality does not exist, for it is relationless and a relation to the world is needed
for the concept of ‘God.’25 The Absolute in itself is simply inconceivable
without reference to its antithesis, the Absolute-Relative, given that its Trini-
tarian and sophianic character is always mediated to us through revelation.
20 21
AB, 142 [LG, 120]. AB, 143 [LG, 121].
22
See Hegel, PR, I [1824], n. 97, 308.
23
‘God is Love, and therefore He is also the Creator’ (Bulgakov, AB, 152 [LG, 130]).
24 25
R. Williams, SB, 169. Bulgakov, AB, 143 [LG, 121 (my trans.)].

Therefore, a defence of Bulgakov might run thus. It is an unreal case to talk
about what God might have done, who He might have been. God as God is only
what is revealed to us and trusting in His revelation one can assume that His
self-expression to us is surely what He already always is. Therefore, if God
creates and redeems the world in Christ, then this is an expression of who
He eternally is. Who are we to speculate on an ‘abstraction . . . a perpetual
possibility’?26
The trouble with such a response is that it ignores the contingency of
creation, the fact that everything might not have been, could have been
otherwise (F3). Moreover, creation’s contingency is part of God’s own self-
revelation. If we deny that creation need not be, then we obliterate both the
notion of grace as a gift that need not be given and God as a freely gracious gift
giver. We overshadow, as it were, divine F3 towards the world (‘otherwise’) in
our zeal to make the case for a neglected divine N3 towards the world (‘not
otherwise’).27 Nor is it fair to argue that the idea of what might not have been
given is a conventional abstraction. God has given Himself to us in His self-
revelation in Jesus Christ and this assumes a concrete reality which was once
unrevealed and which to give itself had to be first ungiven. Bulgakov at times
makes this point himself when he says that the revelation of the Absolute
(-Relative) in the world presupposes the self-revelation of the Absolute in itself,
as the second is in the first.28
But there is a more structural problem with Bulgakov’s response, which is
that theological antinomism appears to be functionally impossible, since one
always constructs the thesis of theologia from the antithesis of the economia.
One cannot escape the fact that all we can know of God before He is revealed
is through revelation. This leads Bulgakov to constantly collapse the Absolute
into the Absolute-Relative. Since the Absolute-Relative by definition requires
the world, by collapsing the Absolute into the Absolute-Relative, Bulgakov
puts under erasure the contingency of creation and the eternal self-completeness
of the Trinity. Bulgakov, however, does have a crucial point, and we shall return
to it with Barth. If we are to destroy the idolatrous picture of God as Architect
where he—‘A self-contemplating shadow/ In enormous labours occupied’29—
weighs, measures, and determines from an infinite number of possibilities,
worlds or lack of worlds, what he shall cause to be, then we must come to see
creation and redemption in Christ as something not accidental to God.
Without turning God into a world-principle, we must explain what sort of
difference it makes to the Trinity to have the ‘second aureole . . . painted with
26
Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’, I, ll.6–8, 117.
27
Compare Fiddes, CSG, 71, 74ff., 119, 121, 132ff., 142, and 262 and SWKG, 292.
28
Bulgakov, U, 409 [C, 361–2].
29
Blake, ‘Urizen’, Copy G, Object 3, ch. I, 4, ll.24–5.

man’s image’.30 This is a point we shall see Balthasar take up in Part III and
which we shall respond to in our Conclusion.
6 . 2 KE N O S I S A N D E N T H E O S I S IN
CREATION AND REDEMPTION
God’s love as creation is described by Bulgakov hypostatically, as the kenotic

self-giving of the hypostases to creation and each other. In order to understand
Bulgakov’s response to the problematic, we need to understand how he ties
kenosis in creation and redemption in Christ to the Trinity. In this way,
he grounds God’s own life in the economy—being freely bound to the world
(N3)—upon His free life of love-desire in Himself (F3).31 Balthasar, who is
dependent on Bulgakov, makes a similar theological move. The Father, out of
an utterly free self-giving (F3), expands beyond Himself as God for the world. He
becomes, in His desire for the world, the Absolute-Relative by sending, with
a love that will not turn back (N3), His own Son from the depths of the
Godhead into the world. In this way, He repeats in creation, as a free self-
expression, the pre-eternal sacrifice of love of the begetting of His Son. The
Son, in turn, freely and dependently (F3) enters creation as the Word of God
that creates the world. This ‘entry’ is His definitive (N3) humiliation or self-
emptying pre-eternal sacrifice by the Father for the world, which temporally
expresses His own begottenness.32 The Holy Spirit, then, with a dependent
freedom (F3), goes out into creation from the eternity of the Godhead where
He is freely dependent on the Son as the hypostatic love of the Father and the
Son (F3–N3). He gives Himself utterly to creation (N3) and ‘becomes, as it
were, the becoming of the world, the realization of its content’, as the expres-
sion of the Father’s eternal love for His Son in and through creation.33
Finally, the drama attains its denouement in the passion of Christ.34 The
Father gifts His Son to death on the cross for the life of the world, freely giving
up everything to it (F3), and so surrendering His own Word to nothingness,
from which act He cannot turn back (N3). In this fashion, He participates
spiritually in this sacrifice of love-desire by ‘a certain image of spiritual
co-dying’.35 The Son then freely empties Himself of His divinity (F3) to the
point that He becomes in His consciousness de-theized. He addresses His own
Father as God, for ‘He is surrounded by the darkness of death, and the
consciousness of His Divine Sonhood abandons Him.’ The Son cries out as
the God-Man, in the name of creation, to God with whom He is one, ‘to God
30
Dante, Paradiso, XXXIII, ll.127, 131, 364–5.
31 32
Compare Fiddes, SWKG, 289–90, 383. Bulgakov, AB, 151 [LG, 129].
33 34 35
AB, 152 [LG, 130]. AB, 339ff. [LG, 309ff.]. AB, 344 [LG, 313].

who never forsakes Him—that He has forsaken Him’36 into the darkness of
death (N3). Lastly, the Holy Spirit freely withholds His presence from the Son
in His suffering (F3). The Spirit, who is the hypostatic love of the Father with
the Son, no longer rests ceaselessly on the God-Man. He turns decisively away
from the Son (N3), and, in this fashion, the Spirit has His own kenosis, because
‘not manifesting Oneself to the beloved is kenosis for hypostatic Love’.37 This
total kenosis of the Trinity, divine desire expressed in creation and redemp-
tion, endures until the Spirit is fully reunited with the Son and the Father
through the Resurrection, Ascension, and Pentecost.
There is, then, a certain spiritual ‘co-passion or co-crucifixion’ of the
Father and the Spirit with the incarnate Son, the God-Man for the salvation
of the world.38 Bulgakov, however, is explicit that only the Son, Jesus Christ,
suffers in the flesh, was crucified, died, and buried, because only He assumed
human nature. So, Bulgakov contends, ‘in this sense neither the hypostasis of
the Father nor the hypostasis of the Spirit suffers with Him’.39 Yet the
non-participation of the Father and Spirit in Christ’s passion would contradict
the full sense of the dogma of the Incarnation. By ‘co-crucifixion’, he simply
refers to their spiritual participation in the work of redemptive suffering of
the Son on the cross and so of His kenosis as he argues can be seen in Philaret
Drozdov of Moscow (see ch. 3).40 Yet this in no way, he contends, denies the
fact that ‘God in His eternity, as the “immanent Trinity”, is above the world;
but the same Holy Trinity, as the Creator, finds itself in an “economic”
interrelation with the world.’41 As Kallistos Ware observes, ‘Bulgakov clearly
repudiates the Patripassian heresy, which fuses the persons of the Father
and Son, whereas Bulgakov carefully distinguishes them, while insisting also
on their coworking.’42
Although Bulgakov understands kenosis not exclusively Christologically, he
is very clear that it has particular relevance to the hypostasis of the Son. The
Son undergoes a ‘kenotic or Christological subordinationism’ in the economy,
which has its basis in a sort of purely non-subordinationist kenosis of obedi-
ence in the immanent Trinity.43 Indeed, Bulgakov describes Sonhood as being
the ‘hypostatic kenosis in the Holy Trinity, and the Son of God is the kenotic
hypostasis, the pre-eternal Lamb’.44 If the Father is the begetter and the Son is
the begotten, then the Son, in relation to His Father as the perfectly active
subject who reveals Himself, is, through the Spirit as the copula, the perfectly
36 37
AB, 343 [LG, 313]. AB, 345 [LG, 314].
38
AB, 400 and see 345 n. 1, 383, 399ff. [LG, 371 and see 315, n. 56, 353, 370ff.].
39
AB, 401 [LG, 372].
40
AB, 345 n. 1, 383 (Drozdov), 401 [LG, 315, n. 56, 353 (Drozdov), 372].
41
AB, 401 [LG, 372].
42
Ware 2016, n. 54, 228 (summarizing Bulgakov, AB, 400–1 [LG, 371–2]).
43 44
AB, 337 [LG, 307]. AB, 200 [LG, 122]; cf. AB 204 [LG, 181].

passive and obedient predicate, who is revealed by Him.45 Obedience is a key
concept in Bulgakov’s understanding of kenosis.46 Bulgakov speaks about the
Son’s ‘free obedience’47 to the Father both immanently48 and economically
where the human will follows after the divine will of His Father.49
A point of clarification is in order on what precisely Bulgakov meant in this
context as the ‘divine will’. Bulgakov believed, critiquing Maximus,50 that the
will was properly related not solely to nature but also simultaneously and
inseparably to the distinct hypostases which personalized it. He argued, in an
unusual teaching, that one must speak in God simultaneously of the divine will
proper to the trihypostaticity of the common divine nature and three divine
hypostatic wills distinct for each of the three divine hypostases, but these three
hypostatic wills are united as one given the common nature.51 We shall see a
version of this latter teaching later in Balthasar.
In the kenosis of the Incarnation, Bulgakov holds that the Son’s proper
hypostatic will is silenced. By His human will following the divine will, Christ
follows not His own proper hypostatic will, which is tacit, but, as His own, the
hypostatic will of the Father who sent Him. These two divine hypostatic wills
of the Father and the Son are, of course, essentially one will of the one God but
personalized by the distinct persons. Thus, by Christ’s allowing His human
will to follow the Father’s hypostatic will, He is also following His own silenced
hypostatic will which is one with the Father’s and the Spirit’s wills given
their common nature. Christ transforms His divine self-consciousness ‘into
a tabula rasa, as it were, on which the will of the Father who “sent” Him writes
its commands, who out of love for the world, did not spare His Only begotten
Son’.52 The emphasis on will being tied not just to the divine nature but to the
divine persons is Bulgakov’s attempt to more adequately express the salvation
drama where the three persons of the one God as ‘willing-ones’ are both
united and clearly distinct. He means to avoid the extremes of subordination-
ism and tritheism. Later in Barth and Balthasar, we shall see obedience and
kenosis in both the immanent and the economic Trinity.
The divine-human activity of Christ expressed in His obedience, although
certainly free, is not free in the sense of its being occasional or capricious.
If Christ’s human obedience in drinking the cup of suffering offered to Him is
in a perfect divine-human union with his pre-eternal obedience to the Father,
then it can be clearly seen that the way of Christ to the cross was not merely
45
See AB, 121 [LG, 98] and compare U, 407–8 [C, 360], TF, 317–18.
46
See AB, 334–50 [LG, 304–20] (subsection: ‘The Filial Obedience’).
47 48
AB, 273 [LG, 245]. AB, 121 [LG, 98].
49
AB, 382 [LG, 353]; cf. AB, 272ff. [LG, 244ff.].
50
AB, 95ff. [LG, 75ff.]. (See Maximus, Disputation, 19, 7; 21, 9; 55–62, 22–5 [Disput s Pirrom,
292B, 152; 292D, 154; 301C–4D, 168–70].)
51
Bulgakov, AB, 313–14 n. 1 [untranslated by the English translator].
52
AB, 313–14 [LG, 284]; cf. AB, 336–7 [LG, 305–6].

aribitrary. Christ certainly has different human possibilities at his disposal (‘all
things are possible to thee’, ‘if it were possible’ (Mk 14:35–6)).53 His self-
emptying was a dependent freedom (F3) that could have been otherwise.
However, Christ gradually recognized the ‘inevitability [neizbezhnost’]’ of
the way to the cross (N3). A consciousness ‘arose in Him as a consequence
of the entire experience of His life, together with the spiritual act of steadfast-
ness [reshimost’], as an inner sacrifice-offering [zhertvoprinoshenie], as the will
to the cross’. Christ’s will to the cross is grounded in the fact that His sacrifice
was established pre-eternally (as a ‘pre-eternal immolation’), although it was
‘revealed in time, as an event of the divine-human life, in which Christ’s
human essence, non-illusory and authentic, experienced its times and seasons,
and their accomplishments’.54
Creaturely freedom is marked by ‘instability [udoboprevratnost’]’ because it
is founded on nothing, and so it easily, though not necessarily, falls prey to
temptation. The human will of Christ, however, is divinized to such a degree
by His divine will that, although it suffers from creaturely instability and could
be tempted by different possibilities put to Him by the devil, it is impossible
for Him to give in to temptation. Christ has a ‘created stable instability
[tvarnaia neprevratnaia udoboprevratnost’]’ in which we (through Him) can
come to participate.55 It is impossible for Christ to give in to temptation
because His divine-human life, being a synthesis of dependent freedom and
free dependence (F3–N3), as we saw earlier with God as Trinity, ‘is liberated
from freedom as arbitrariness or different possibilities; it knows freedom only
as an ontological path [put’]’.56 And this inner way of freedom is to follow the
ground of all creation, which is sophianic in being obedient sacrificial love.
Therefore, despite Bulgakov’s general essentialism (albeit understood in an
actualist fashion), eschewing talk of the will of God in favour of talk of God’s
nature expanding in love or divine self-positing, in His Christology he clearly
argues that God chooses the way of the cross in Christ’s own divine-human
decision. He contends that the act of Christ unfolds or is accomplished not
only in time as an event, but also above time by being ‘pre-accomplished . . . in
the Divine Counsel’. This ‘pre-accomplishment’ finds its temporal parallel in
Christ’s will to the cross whereby the cross ‘was already pre-accomplished
in His decision’ to go to the cross.57 Arguing in the context of the Ascension,
Bulgakov contends that all the events of the divine economy that Christ effects,
although new in time, exist in unchangeableness in eternity insofar as there is
‘an ontological identity of the supratemporal and the temporal’ localized in the
divine-human activity of Christ.58 Here we are reminded of the retroactive
53 54
AB, 384 [LG, 355]. AB, 368 [LG, 338 (revd)].
55 56
AB, 326 [LG, 295–6 (revd)]. AB, 326 [LG, 327].
57 58
AB, 370 [LG, 340]; cf. AB, 74 [LG, 344]. AB, 429 [LG, 400].

role of the resurrection in Pannenberg’s theology,59 although, in contrast, it is
the Ascension for Bulgakov which is crucial.
We argued above that Bulgakov’s antinomism is functionally impossible, as
the Absolute is always collapsed into the Absolute-Relative. With the notion of
the ‘pre-accomplishment’ of the economy in the Divine Counsel being onto-
logically identical with the temporal reality of the salvific events, one possesses
a possible Christological resource in Bulgakov that might be the seed of a
response to the problematic. If one accepts, as Bulgakov seems at times to
acknowledge, the impossibility of a strict distinction between the Absolute and
the Absolute-Relative, then one may argue that the salvific events exist as
eternal ideas/seeds ‘pre-accomplished’ in the will of the Absolute. God for the
world, as Absolute-Relative, chooses the seeds contained in their eternal
foundation in the Absolute but this enactment can only be accomplished
temporally in Christ. We shall build on these ideas later.
For Bulgakov, the divine economy, being a synthesis of F3–N3, as an
expression of divine love-desire, is not only a divine kenosis but also a general
entheosis, divinization. It is by this entheosis that God, as the Prototype of
creation, the Divine Sophia, becomes all in all in the world as the type of
Created Sophia. Since the nature of God is Godmanhood, this must be
expressed in a world in which God takes flesh. One can, therefore, interpret
entheosis as the gradual accomplishment of Godmanhood in the world neces-
sarily culminating in Christ. Creation, then, is uncreated-created or has a
basis in God Himself and indeed is made to be united with God in Christ:
‘Imprinted in the world is the face of the Logos.’60
Given that God is Godmanhood and this entheotic process culminates in
Christ, one can trace its gestation above all in man, who is a ‘concentrated
world’ or microcosm by being the summit of creation, which itself reflects His
headship as an ‘anthropocosmos’.61 Man bears the image of God or the
sophianic prototype of Godmanhood in his hypostasis, ‘whereby created
Wisdom lies’. He realizes the likeness of this image in his freedom, his divine
co-operation with His Creator, but in his freedom he falls prey to temptation
and falls, so obscuring the image that is only restored by the Incarnation. In
Christ, one has not only the redemption of man but also his deification
through Christ’s perfect divine-human co-operation, synergism of divine
and creaturely freedoms.
Bulgakov elaborated a ‘two-Sophias Christology’.62 Christ’s perfect humanity,
which is the created Sophia as worldly ‘type’, ‘becomes completely transparent’
59
See Pannenberg, SysTh, 2: 303, n. 92, 345, 365, 1968, 135ff., 141, 224, 230, 321–3; compare
Moltmann, TK, 160, Jüngel 1983, 363, and T. F. Torrance 2006, 102 and 1996, 204.
60
61
SS, 43; on anthropology, see Zwahlen 2010, 259–357 and 2012.
62
See Bulgakov, AB, 205–39, 262ff. [LG, 182–211, 235ff.]; see Gallaher 2006a, 170–89, 2009a,
625–6, 633–5, 638–9, 2009b, 544, 546–7.

to His perfect deity or the Divine Prototype, the Divine Sophia which has
‘kenotically adapt[ed] itself to the measure set by the created Sophia’. In other
words, in Christ the created Sophia as type is glorified or deified by being raised
by the Spirit to its Heavenly Prototype, the Divine Sophia, in the hypostatic
union.63 This raising happens through the kenosis of the divinity. God lowers
Himself to the level of humanity and raises it in the exchange of properties
(communicatio idiomatum) with the humanity being given the very life of God
and the divinity entering into suffering and humiliation. Type is raised to
Prototype as man is raised up to God, although God, for Bulgakov, is already
tacitly ‘human’, being Godmanhood, and man is already tacitly ‘divine’, as
creation is the Created Sophia. Bulgakov does not see this divine-human
communication as being ‘asymmetrical’, such that while the human is divinized,
the divine is unaffected by the human, which, a traditional opinion says, would
only result in its ‘carnification’.64 The work of redemption and deification of
creation in Christ is accomplished in co-operation with the Spirit and is
actualized at the birth of the Church at Pentecost through which creation
becomes transfigured. This deifying work by which God becomes all in all is
structured, moreover, by Bulgakov in terms of Christ’s threefold office (munus
triplex Christi) as prophet, priest, and king.65
The Incarnation is possible because the hypostasis of the Logos is
‘co-human’, His nature being Godmanhood (Divine Sophia), and so the
Logos naturally ‘replaces’ the human hypostasis in the union.66 Man is a
triunity of hypostatic spirit/hypostasis/Iness (dukh) with its nature of ration-
al/sensitive soul (dusha)67 and flesh (plot’).68 He is tacitly divine in that he
possesses a nature which is the Created Sophia (Godmanhood in becoming)
and a hypostasis that has a ‘divine, uncreated origin from “God’s breath”. This
spirit is a spark of Divinity.’ There is a certain primordial identity as well as
difference (note the antinomy!) between the divine I of the Logos and the
human I.69 Man is the ‘sophianic hypostasis of the world’.70 Without any
violence to human nature, man can naturally ‘receive’ the hypostasis of the
Logos, in place of his own creaturely hypostasis, as he constitutes a perfect
‘ontological “site”’.71 Sophia as the common element between God and man is
the ‘ontological bridge’ between both.72 Yet in all of this Bulgakov emphasizes
63 64
Bulgakov, SS, 44. See Meyendorff 1987, 170.
65
Bulgakov, AB, 351–468 [LG, 321–441]. (See Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 1.3.8, 48 (FC 19) and
Calvin, Institutes, 1: II.15.1–6, 494–503.)
66
67
‘The soul in man is the fullness of his natural, cosmic life, which also contains the higher
intellectual faculties of man as a natural creature’ (AB, 213; 212–14 is untranslated in the English
and French translations).
68 69
AB, 214. AB, 209 [LG, 186]; cf. AB, 263 [LG, 235].
70
AB, 210 [LG, 186].
71
AB, 209 [LG, 186]; avoiding Nestorianism: AB, 213 and O Sofii, 48.
72
AB, 249 [LG, 220].

the fact that creation is somehow different from God. Bulgakov, therefore,
speaks of both the symmetry and the asymmetry between the divine and the
human in Christ, though he errs on the side of the former, given his desire to
show the positive relation between the two natures.73
Bulgakov’s Christology is, arguably, symmetrical in a yet more technical
sense. Georges Florovsky argued that the classical Byzantine synthesis of
Christology, seen in the pro-Chalcedonian anti-Monophysite Leontius of
Byzantium (c.485–c.543) and Maximus the Confessor (580–662), was a
form of ‘assymetrical dyophysitism’.74 Both Florovsky and Bulgakov used
Leontius75 based on the massively influential but now widely discredited
reading of Friedrich Loofs (1858–1928).76 Leontius, it was said, emphasized
the assymetry of Chalcedonian Christology where, while Christ has two
complete natures, divine and human, He had only one divine hypostasis and
lacked a human hypostasis. In the incarnation, the humanity of Christ along
with the divinity was enhypostasized or subsisted in the divine hypostasis of
Logos and thereby was eternally united to the eternal Son of God. This
assymetrical ‘Orthodox’ Christology, Florovsky alleged, is vastly different
from Bulgakov’s symmetrical vision of Christ. For Bulgakov, arguing against
Leontius, Christ’s human nature (tacitly divine) eternally existed in the eternal
Son of God before the incarnation and the Logos is not just divine but a dual
reality: divine-human.77
Chalcedon, for Bulgakov, is absolutely fundamental, but he saw its negative
expression in the four a-privatives of its horos as preliminary, and so awaiting
its continuation in a truly positive (not simply apophatic) definition that
would show the character of the relationship between the two natures.78
Here, with his quest for symmetry between the uncreated and the created,
Bulgakov arguably breaks with the basic apophatic thrust of the Orthodox
tradition and reverts to Idealism. Bulgakov looks to Sophia as a sort of
necessary glue of all that is and he sees it as the positive truth revealed in
the horos.79 In Christ, the two natures, divine and human, uncreated and
created, are capable of ‘living identification’ in the one life of the hypostatic
union. This is precisely because there is ‘something mediating or common
which serves as the unalterable foundation for their union’ which is the
73
AB, 220–1 [LG, 195–6].
74
See Florovsky 1974–89, 8: 297, 9: 191–203, 1933, 257 (using Loofs), 1953, 13, 16 (see Baker
2015, 308–9) and compare Meyendorff 1987, 156.
75
See Daley 1979, Shults 1996; Leontius’ enhypostasia/anhypostasia distinction was used by
Bulgakov, Florovsky (Baker 2015, 308–9), and Barth (McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically
Realistic Dialectical Theology [=CRDT] [1995], 14–19, 328).
76
See Loofs 1887.
77
See Bulgakov, AB, 81–94 [LG, 63–74] (Leontius); see Gavrilyuk 2013, 152.
78
Bulgakov, AB, 79–80, 220–1 [LG, 61–2, 195–6].
79
AB, 221ff. [LG, 196ff.]; see Valliere 2000a, 296ff. and Tataryn 2005, 205ff.

‘sophianicity of both the Divine world, i.e., of Christ’s Divine nature, and of the
creaturely world, i.e., of His human nature’.80
More positively, if one can say that the world, as the created Sophia, was
created based on the love-desire of God, then it would be just as accurate to say
this also in regard to the Incarnation, as a coincidentia oppositorum, the union
of two loves-desires, divine and created Sophia/Being, which is ‘the second and
concluding act of the creation of the world’.81 (Compare Balthasar in ch. 11.)
Redemption, therefore, is not understood merely forensically, because in and
by it God purposely divinizes the created by supplementing with His own
eternity that which is lacking in creaturely becoming. In a way, however, this
divinization merely makes explicit the tacit divinity of creation, because
Sophia lies on both sides of the uncreated/created divide as united in Christ.
Man is called from all eternity in the divine counsel to be saved in Christ as
the Lamb slain before the creation of the world and this call ‘to become
Godmanhood . . . is the primordial foundation of creation’.82
Vladimir Lossky (following Met. Sergii (Stragorodskii) of Moscow
(1867–1944), who condemned Bulgakov’s teaching)83 claimed that Bulgakov’s
Christology was a ‘new Apollinarianism’.84 Bulgakov rejected the allegation
despite his open but critical sympathy for Apollinarius.85 Of course, the
sophiological talk of God’s Being as ‘Godmanhood’ is more than a little
reminiscent of the Apollinarian notion of an ‘eternal man’.86 But the claim
that Bulgakov, like Apollinarius, held that Christ lacked the ‘reasonable soul
[psyche logike]’ (commonly, nous or spirit) of Chalcedon87 is simply inaccur-
ate. Christ for him lacks a human dukh (spirit/hypostasis/Iness), which is
replaced by the Logos in his otherwise perfect humanity,88 not a human dusha
that is both sensitive and rational soul.89 Moreover, the fact that He lacks
human personality/hypostasis/spirit (dukh) and self-consciousness per se
seems negligible because it is already included in His divine-human person-
ality and self-consciousness as the Logos incarnate.90
The major problem with Bulgakov’s Christology is its sui generis confusion
of the divine and the human. In sophiology, what is wholly man in Christ is at
once divine and what is wholly divine is always already human. This led
Lossky to observe that, for Bulgakov, Christ has, not two natures that are
fully divine and fully human in the unity of one person, but one special new
nature of ‘Godmanhood’.91 This makes it (if one insists on a label) an eccentric
80 81
Bulgakov, AB, 222 [LG, 196–7]; cf. AB, 232 [LG, 206]. AB, 374 [LG, 344].
82
AB, 374 [omitted in English: ‘For humanity is also called to become Godmanhood, which is
also the primordial foundation of creation.’].
83 84
Stragorodskii 1936, 11. Lossky 1936, 64 and see R. Williams 1975, 43–6, 55.
85
Bulgakov, AB, 9–30 [LG, 2–19] and 212–14.
86
Apodeixis, Frag. 32 [Lietzmann 1904, 211] in Behr, NF, 393.
87 88
Denzinger-Schönmetzer, §301, 108. Bulgakov, AB, 263 [LG, 235].
89 90 91
AB, 213. AB, 262 [LG, 234]. Lossky 1936, 64, 66.

form of Monophysitism. Alternatively, it might be argued that Bulgakov is
radically antinomic in his Christology and that he emphasizes both the
identity and the difference of the divine and the human in the union.
The Christology of sophiology, like so much of Bulgakov, risks pantheism.
It verges on the collapse of creation into God and thereby overshadows the
gracious freedom of God in the hypostatic union because the Incarnation
becomes a sort of inevitable expression in creation of His fundamental so-
phianicity. Creation, moreover, as all is in God, has no space to be itself other
than a sort of doll’s house divinity, a ‘god in nature, a god-world or a god-
human’, since it is already always quasi-divine.92 What need then is there for
God to become man if man is already tacitly divine? The hypostatic union
seems wholly inevitable and so irrelevant. Furthermore, if the human nature of
Christ is tacitly divine, then this means that the human will is also divine. Any
type of human exercise of freedom in salvation is always already tacitly an
exercise of divinity. Thus, Christ’s laying aside of His human will for His
divine will seems a sham, as both wills are modes of divinity. Bulgakov is led to
these problems in his positive account of Chalcedon by his ontological mon-
ism, which cannot fathom extra-divine Being, and his rationalistic need to
explain what connects earth to heaven. He is not content with the sheer
facticity, the brazen assertion of the mystery of creation as the miraculous
positing by God’s Absolute Freedom of the ‘and’ of ‘God and creation’. God,
and here we follow Florovsky, creates an Other with the world, an Other which
is a real ‘outside’ for Him who has no outside without (pace Bulgakov) in any
way being a supplement to Himself or making Him relative.93
Yet we need not reject Bulgakov’s Christology outright. One positive aspect
of it, providing the seeds of a Christological response to the problematic, is
that it (at its best) envisions the hypostatic union as a dialectical union of two
forms of love/Being that are in a perfect union in differentiation.94 Such a
conception is a sort of Christoform or concrete analogy of being and it has
much to recommend it. Through it one might argue that divine freedom in
Christ involves a continuity of heaven and earth, a union of divine self-giving
love to creation that could have been otherwise and a human self-giving love
to God that could have not been otherwise, as it only finds its end in the
infinite. As we mentioned earlier, sophiology, given its monism or ontological
modalism, rules out a standard approach to the analogy of being. Any
application of analogy requires a clear, enduring, radical but tension-filled
differentiation between divine and creaturely being. The difference between
92
Bulgakov, K, 26 [BB, 18].
93
Florovsky 1949, 55 (for Bulgakov and Florovsky: Gallaher 2011 and 2013b and Gavrilyuk
2013, 114–58 (Contrast Baker 2014)); compare Bulgakov, K, 269 [BB, 149].
94
See Gallaher 2006a, 183ff.

the uncreated and the created must be ‘tension-filled’, as deification assumes
the possibility of a communication of idioms, a real participation in God.
The Son, as was mentioned earlier, is not alone in accomplishing entheosis.
Sophia as Godmanhood is the Father’s revelation in creation concerning the
Son through the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is the medium of the Incarnation at the
Annunciation, when He overshadowed the Theotokos, and at Pentecost a
‘union between heaven and earth, between God and the creature’ is effected
‘in the hypostasis of the Spirit’. The Spirit brings into the world the life of
Christ, bringing into a real remembrance the teaching of the Lord in His
Church, the Body of Christ, whereby the world is led to the second coming and
its general transfiguration and resurrection.95 The Church is not only the
community of believers in Christ but also the theandric reality of the Divine
Sophia in the Creaturely Sophia. Man is saved, that is, sanctified and deified, in
this Body by participating in the hypostatic union. The image/type of God
which man bears in his hypostasis as the summit of the Created Sophia is
raised to the level of, or identified with, its Prototype in the Divine Sophia ‘in
the same way as the two natures were united in Christ’.96 In this way God
becomes all in all, beginning in the Church as the Body of Christ and spreading
out to embrace the whole created cosmos until the Kingdom comes and there
is only the glory of God and the lamp of the Lamb (Rev. 21:23). Thus, the
Church is the privileged site of the Sophianic world process by which God
becomes all in all or, more technically, the process by which the Created and
Divine Sophia are perfectly united.97
6 . 3 SO PH IA N I C D E T E R M I N I S M
The Incarnation, for Bulgakov, is a predetermined reality lying behind God’s

desire to create, since He is essentially Godmanhood and desires that this is
expressed in the world. But where does the Incarnation’s ‘inexorable prede-
terminedness’ come from?98 Quite simply, despite talk of divine-human co-
operation, it comes from the necessity of divine love. Since love/Sophia is
covalent with Godmanhood, Christ, as the God-Man who calls us to our own
Godmanhood in Him, has become the ‘law of Being for natural humanity’.
Bulgakov refers to the force of this law as a true ‘sophianic determinism’ in
contradistinction from a ‘false’ determinism opposed to human freedom and
95
Bulgakov, SS, 45; For ecclesiology, see Swierkosz 1980, Valliere 2000a, 347–71, Nichols
2005a, 197–211, Gallaher 2013a.
96
Bulgakov, SS, 46.
97
cf. Solov’ev, Cht., 11 and 12: 171ff. [LDH, 163ff.] and Bulgakov, NA, 274ff. [BL, 253ff.].
98
AB, 194 [LG, 171].

creatureliness.99 He denies that this makes Christ’s power become a ‘natural
power’ (creating a Christic ‘naturalism’), since Christ is the Resurrection, ‘a
specially qualified new energy of life’, which realizes itself through the natural
force of humanity in Christ.100 This law of Being, embodied in Christ’s body,
the Church, whose influence extends to the whole cosmos, is divine/sophianic
love. In the light of Christ, all of human history is given a new direction by the
strength of its ‘dynamic pan-Christism’.101
Bulgakov strongly denies that this ‘co-being with Christ’ negates ‘personal
freedom’ and makes ‘man a blind instrument’,102 but the law of love in Christ
does not depend for its existence on the free assent of any particular individ-
ual. Nevertheless, it must be consciously or unconsciously accepted (either as
the person of Christ or as the ‘principle of Christ—in relation to conscience,
goodness, Divinity’) or rejected (as one might blind oneself, as it were) as
reality by the individual.103 One is reminded here of Rahner’s famous notion
of ‘anonymous Christianity’104 and indeed both theologies not only risk
existentializing Jesus Christ but transforming salvation history into the natural
structure of creation. Human freedom, for Bulgakov, is not the content of its
own Being but only a mode of its own Being in relation to its own inner
reality/Being who is Christ. Christic Being, as the nature of humanity, presents
human freedom with a limited number of possibilities beyond which it cannot
go, insofar as it is exhausted by the determinate character of the reality given to
it.105 The content of all Being (as the divine and created Sophia are one) is not
then freedom but the realized love of God in Christ (i.e. Godmanhood). For
human Being to attain its end, it must embrace/be embraced by the love of
Christ who is both its internal and external reality. To choose nothingness is
possible but it is impossible to choose nothingness forever, for human choice
is finite and will finally run out of negative possibilities. Furthermore, noth-
ingness is parasitic of Being and all Being ultimately must find its fulfilment in
nature that is Christ. Thus, God’s love not only can, but also must, overcome
creaturely sin in Christ insofar as that sin is merely a privation of Being and
Being is itself the love of God in Christ. The privation of love cannot endure—
evil is not an eternal alternative to the good which is Manicheanism—if love is
to become ‘all in all’.106 In such a system, hell (if it exists) is a temporary but
universal spiritual state of purgation107 (inspired by Origen and Gregory of
99 100
AB, 462 [LG, 435]; cf. SWG, 146–8. AB, 460 [LG, 432].
101 102 103
AB, 463 [LG, 435]. AB, 459 [LG, 431]. AB, 463 [LG, 435].
104
See Rahner, Theological Investigations, Vol. 6: 30–49, 10: 30–49, 12: 161–78, 14: 280–94,
16: 52–9, and 199–224.
105
Bulgakov, AB, 379, 462 [LG, 349, 435]; cf. SWG, 146–8.
106
AB, 392 [LG, 363], NA, 516ff. [BL, 486ff.], NA, 572–3 [Apocatastasis and Transfiguration,
26–7], Apokalipsis Ioanna [1948], 281–3 and SWG, 148.
107
NA, 534–6 [BL, 501–3], NA, 391 [BL, 361 (revd: ‘universal purgatory with a temporary
stay within it’: see Gavrilyuk 2006, 125)] and Apokalipsis Ioanna, 175–6, 198–200, 206–7, 283.

Nyssa). Hell, as an eternal place of torment, is an ontological impossibility as
universalism is an internal divine necessity (N2) and not merely an impossible
possibility.108 Divine love, in a sense, swamps the world and must necessarily
break through the stoniest of hearts if God as love is indeed to be ‘all in all’.
Bulgakov claimed that his panentheism was a pious pantheism but not pan-
theism understood as ‘an impious deification of the world’ or ‘cosmotheism’.109 So
too his ‘sophianic determinism’ was a ‘true’ not ‘false determinism’ that was
Christocentric and respected human freedom and responsibility.110 Yet it is
hard to see how his pious pantheism and sophianic determinism do not
have the same end result of impious cosmotheism and false determinism,
which is a divine love monism, a free love that must necessarily create
the world to love, swallowing up creation and negating human and divine
freedom.111 Bulgakov’s sophianic determinism is a species of Christomonism
insofar as all Being is a form of love/Sophia—that is, Godmanhood. Creation
and redemption enter the theological picture of Bulgakov as a sort of necessary
addendum or necessary expression of God’s nature as ‘God-Love’.112 God’s
status as Creator (and Redeemer too, insofar as redemption is the completion of
creation) comes from being the God who must love to be God. This is the case
insofar as love is to be in a self-giving and self-receiving relation with the Other,
so that creation is simply a necessary expression (N2) of God’s being as the
Absolute-Relative Trihypostatic unisubstantial Spirit who is love-desire (F2).
There certainly exists in Bulgakov’s theology what we have called a free
dependence (N3), as God cannot but create and redeem the world in Christ.
But N3 appears all too often in the absence of F3, a dependent freedom
that might have done otherwise. Thus, this free dependence (N3) continually
collapses into an internal love determinism (N2) that is devoid of freedom.
It may now seem that I am arguing that sophiology is theologically irre-
deemable but this is not the case at all, for it is crucial in our own constructive
response to the problematic. However, prior to laying out the first portion of
our own response, we must briefly recapitulate the problematic and response
as seen in Bulgakov. Bulgakov attempted to balance God’s freedom with the
necessity of His relationship to the world in Christ. God, in Himself, as
Absolute, is Trinity in Unity, pre-eternally revealing Himself to Himself as
Godmanhood/Sophia/ousia in a pre-eternal movement of self-giving, self-
receiving, and self-emptying hypostatic love whose icon is the cross. In this
eternal perfectly actual life of the immanent Trinity there is a perfect union of
dependent freedom (F3) and free dependence (N3). God is in no way impelled
108
See NA, 493–553 [BL, 466–519], NA, 561–75 [Apocatastasis, 7–30] (on Gregory of Nyssa’s
teaching), Apokalipsis Ioanna, 211–65, 283, and SWG, 147–8; cf. Gavrilyuk 2006 and
Samokishyn 2008.
109
Bulgakov, U, 245 [C, 199–200]; cf. IiI, 317 [HH, 26–7] and NA, 231–2, 249 [BL, 212, 228].
110 111
AB, 462 [LG, 434–5] and see SWG, 147. Contrast Valliere 2000a, 335–6.
112
See Bulgakov, SN, 193 [UL, 217], IiI, 314–15 [HH, 19–21], and AB, 127 [LG, 105].

to create, let alone redeem, the world. It could have been otherwise. This is not
God’s only self-definition. He also is defined antinomically as being for
Himself, as the Absolute-Relative. As the Absolute relative to the world, God
with a dependent freedom and a free dependence (F3–N3) empties Himself
definitively in His self-revelation in creation, redemption, and divinization. It
could not have been otherwise. At least ideally, and this is a crucial intuition of
Bulgakov, time-bound creation has the same foundation as God’s own eternal
life because the Absolute is in the Absolute-Relative, the immanent is in the
economic Trinity. Given this hierarchy, at least from one side of the antinomy,
the self-choice of the Absolute in positing itself as Absolute-Relative (and with
it creation and redemption) could have been ‘otherwise’.
However, in practice the latter intuition and Bulgakov’s response in conse-
quence are obscured due to the collapse of his antinomies. Most crucially, the
sophiological antinomy is no real antinomy at all, as the divine Sophia exists in
different modes on both sides. It is the hidden motor of all the other anti-
nomies in Bulgakov’s system and the source of his theology’s difficulties. The
figure of Sophia, bridging the Absolute and Absolute-Relative as the unity of
the divine and creaturely, disturbs Bulgakov’s paradoxical response to the
problematic. Blurring the line between God and creation, Sophia opens up
an impersonal love determinism where the only God is God as Absolute-
Relative who inevitability and logically becomes a world principle because He
is an impersonal love that simply creates to be itself and then floods that
creation till there is nothing left in it that is creaturely. Everything becomes not
only implicitly but also explicitly divine. We cannot look to sophiology holus-
bolus for the divine unity of F3 with N3 towards the world since the Absolute
is an unacknowledged mask of the Absolute-Relative. It would have been
better for Bulgakov to clearly acknowledge that we can only know the imma-
nent through the economic Trinity.
Nevertheless, at this very point Bulgakov presents us with a salutary
Christological idea mentioned earlier. It may present one way of mediating
between the two extremes of a complete identification of the world with God
and the conventional abstraction of God as Absolute. This is the notion that
what Christ manifests in time through His free divine-human decision to take
up the cross is already ‘pre-accomplished’ in the divine counsel,113 which is a
perfect synthesis of freedom and necessity structured by our axis. We argued
earlier that the Absolute might be viewed as the eternal foundation of the
Absolute-Relative and the divine economy. But how might we characterize it
relating eternally to the economy?
The first constructive blocks of our own response to the problematic involve
speculation, albeit based on God’s self-revelation. In the Absolute there already
113
AB, 370 [LG, 340].

always exists all the eternal images of God in reference to the world that
subsequently are expressed in His life as Absolute-Relative. These images of
God’s economic relationship to the world include all the possibilities of divine
life in Christ from creation to Ascension. God’s turning to creation, His self-
revelation as Absolute-Relative, then, eternally exists as a pleroma of living
images or modes in the divine counsel of the Absolute. These images exist as
free but also absolutely necessary realities (F2–N2), ‘pre-accomplished’ in His
life of love-desire, because they are the themes of God’s own divine world of
loving self-giving as Trinity as both a dependent freedom (F3) and a free
dependence (N3). God as Absolute expresses these images in the world,
actualizing them in becoming Absolute-Relative and in this way becomes
who He is. However, the key point is surely that for the pleroma of
these images to be actualized, expressed in the world, human co-operation is
required and this only happens mysteriously in the midst of history in the free
act of Christ, human will following divine will, to take up His cross.
Here we see the stage on which we can embody God’s choice to create and
redeem the world or not: the drama of Christ taking up His cross. It is this free
choice of Christ to follow the will of the Father in taking up His cross, to freely
become dependent on the world (F3) so that He could not turn back (N3), a
choice, however, which need not have been taken, which gifts creation with a
sort of gracious necessity. It is a ‘gracious necessity’ insofar as by Christ’s
choice that which was a free-yet-necessary image pre-accomplished in the
divine counsel is now also a free-yet-necessary reality by grace as the two
realities meet and are one. So that which is pre-accomplished in God Himself
is accomplished temporally by Christ. In other words, Christ’s divine-human
decision is in unity with the divine counsel insofar as He is the Logos incarnate.
From the perspective of Christ, that which is pre-accomplished in the pre-
eternal divine counsel is actually dependent on His temporal divine-human
decision. God, in other words, kenotically withdraws His omnipotence to
allow man in Christ a role in His own creation and redemption and therefore
creation is shown to be necessary for God as He freely allows Himself in Christ
to be dependent on it for its own creation and redemption.
This kind of drama is, of course, paradoxical, even contradictory, not least
in terms of time. In order for Christ to make His decision in history, He would
need to exist already, and we are claiming that in the Trinity and in creation
He makes a divine-human decision not only for the world to be and to be
redeemed but also for God to be Creator and this, of course, is the condition for
His own constitution as a subject. We earlier suggested (ch. 3) that the notion
of divine self-determination is not incoherent. However, it needs further
clarification, especially as we wish to focus it in the divine-human activity of
Jesus Christ, because any act always already presupposes a subject with a
determinate nature and even God cannot determine Himself to be one who
must create and redeem in Christ, since this already assumes a prior nature

from which such a decision is made. The other problem with this is it seems to
make creation and God co-eternal at least in the reality of the divine counsel,
which seems a sort of tacit pantheism. What is needed is a clearer focus on both
the content of the divine-human decision of Christ and the nature of the act
itself in relation to both the eternity of God as Trinity and the temporality of the
Son of God incarnate, which, as of yet, is most vague.
For some of the answers to these difficulties, let us now turn from
Bulgakov’s theology of God’s essence as love to Barth’s theology of God’s act
as love.
Part II
Divine Self-Determination in Jesus
Christ in Karl Barth
Trinity and the Doctrine of Election

in Karl Barth
The exploration of the problematic and response in Karl Barth (1886–1968)

brings us to more familiar ground. We aim to show that Bulgakov and Barth
have much more in common than is usually believed. Georges Florovsky was
arguing for their commonality as early as the late 1960s. He contends that both
men create a ‘supertemporal continuum’ between God and creation, focused on
the God-Man, in which ‘real time plays very little role’. In Bulgakov’s Agnets
Bozhii (1933), the Son of God is a member of the Holy Trinity and as such ‘is
already the Lamb of God sent from eternity’ such that there is one unified story
of God and man, ‘a story of God through Man, in Man, and in the cosmos’. In
Barth, in turn, in Volume IV of his dogmatics (IV/1 (1953)), we see that the
‘Jesus of history actually has been eternally with the Holy Trinity and the Holy
Trinity never existed without Jesus.’ Florovsky claims, mischievously, that he
sometimes ‘plays tricks’ on people with English translations of both men by
asking them to identify their author and ‘Usually they were wrong.’1 Florovsky
was prescient in seeing that both thinkers project the historical Jesus into the
Trinity. He does not mention, however, the very different context of Barth’s
theology, which is covenantal. In particular, it begins with his famous and
controversial claim that Jesus Christ is both eternally the Subject and Object
of divine election, the electing God and the elected man.
7.1 TRINITY AND E LECTION
In order to understand Barth’s version of the problematic and his response we

must understand how he reimagined divine election.2 Central to Barth’s
1
Florovsky, ‘Renewal’ (1968), 5–6 (see Baker 2015, 315–16) and echoed by Meyendorff 1978,
170; compare R. Williams, SB, 169.
2
See Gockel 2006, Kirkland 2016, 167–79, and Dunn and Davis 2016, 278–9.

systematic theology is his re-envisioning of the doctrine of reconciliation and
central to that re-envisioning is his ambivalent attitude towards the extra
Calvinisticum.3 This was a pejorative term used by the Lutherans against the
teaching of Calvin. In the incarnation, the Logos asarkos or extra carnem, quite
apart from his status as Logos ensarkos, was not confined to His humanity—
finite and not omnipresent by the communication of idioms—and filled the
universe precisely as the Logos asarkos.4 The Lutherans, in contrast, held the
intra Lutheranum (from the phrase totus intra carnem et numquam extra
carnem) which argued, contrary to the Calvinistic position which allowed
(they alleged) a Nestorian splitting of the divine and human natures, that if
Christ could fill the heavens, then, presupposing some version of the commu-
nicatio idiomatum, it could not be apart from the human nature He took upon
Himself as Logos along with His divine nature.5 In 1938 in Church Dogmatics
I/2, we see Barth defending, albeit not without critical nuance,6 the extra
Calvinisticum as ‘the continuation of all earlier Christology’, citing many
passages from the Fathers and Aquinas in defence of Calvin, seeing it as a
Calvinist reversion to tradition to meet the ‘innovation’ introduced by Luther
and the Lutherans. He writes that the extra was not meant as ‘separative’, in
the sense that Christ was separated from His flesh, but ‘distinctive’ in that He
was not identified wholly with His flesh, so that ‘with the extra they [the
Reformed doctors] also asserted the intra with thoroughgoing seriousness’.
There was an important theological point, he argued, which is that they did
not want the reality of the logos asarkos ‘abolished or suppressed’ by collapsing
it into the reality of the logos ensarkos so that there would be no extra or
divinity of the God-Man beyond the intra or humanity. Instead, the logos
asarkos, as the terminus a quo or starting point, was regarded as seriously as
the logos ensarkos, ‘the terminus ad quem of the incarnation’.7 Here we see a
characteristic concern in Barth for the preservation of the incarnation in the
fullness of both its divinity and humanity but also an insistence on the
freedom of God in the divine economy, where the initiative is always taken
first by God and then received by man in Christ.
However, by at least 1953 something had changed. Barth’s theology
was certainly still one where all Christian doctrine has ‘to be exclusively
and conclusively the doctrine of Jesus Christ’ exhibiting a ‘Christological
3
See McCormack 2000, 95–101 and Willis 1966.
4
See McCormack 2000, 95; see Calvin, Institutes, 1: II.13.4, 481 and see 2: IV.17.30, 1402 and
Heidelberg Catechism, q. 48, 65–6 (see at Barth, Church Dogmatics [=CD] [1932, 1938–67], I/2,
168); compare Heppe 1950, 440–1, 447 and Westminster Confession, 8.7, 622.
5
See McCormack 2000, 95; see Formula of Concord, Epitome, Article 8, Antithesis 15, 34,
490–1 [Die Bekenntnisschriften, 811] and Schmid 1961, 315–37 (esp. 329–32) but see intra-
Lutheran debate: 333–4.
6
See Barth, CD, I/2, 170.
7
CD, I/2, 169 (completed summer 1937); despite reservations: CD, I/2, 170.
Trinity and the Doctrine of Election in Karl Barth 119

concentration’.8 If anything, this latter position had been radicalized and with
this making of Christ as the root of all doctrine it had made his continuing
affirmations of divine sovereignty much more complicated to articulate. By
1953, even taking into consideration earlier critical asides, Barth considered, in
contrast to 1938, the Calvinistic teaching ‘unsatisfactory’. It allowed a ‘fatal
speculation’ to arise about the Being of the Logos asarkos (‘trying to reckon
with this “other” god’) apart from the one in whom God has revealed Himself,
Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh.9 Barth appears to argue that one cannot
know God apart (extra carnem) from His revelation of Himself in Jesus Christ.
Although, as we shall see, and somewhat at cross purposes, he still wished to
retain the logos asarkos as the free starting point of the incarnation. Never-
theless, one should never collapse the end point of the incarnation, logos
ensarkos, into its starting point or logos asarkos so that one would end up
holding (erroneously) that the second person of the Godhead in Himself
without His human nature is God the Reconciler.10 The apparent change we
observed on the extra Calvinisticum between 1938 and 1953 has to do with
Barth’s critique of Calvin, which is actually far more wide-ranging than a mere
attack on theological speculation.
Bruce McCormack has argued persuasively in his landmark study, Karl
Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology (1995), that the old paradigm in
Barth studies of a decisive ‘turn’ in Barth is untenable.11 This older position,
stated famously and influentially in Balthasar’s now classic Karl Barth: Dar-
stellung und Deutung Seiner Theologie (19511), held that following Barth’s
abandonment of liberalism (usually symbolized by the first two editions of Der
Römerbrief (19191, 19222)) there was a ‘turn’ or ‘conversion to analogy’12 from
dialectical theology to the analogia fidei. This was said to be marked by his
book on Anselm, Fides quaerens intellectum (1931).13 Rather, McCormack
argues we need a ‘new paradigm’ for Barth studies which speaks less of ‘turns’
or even ‘breaks’ but of four critical ‘shifts’ of Barth after he had begun Der
Römerbrief. The emphasis is put on the methodological continuity of Barth
from the time of his break or turn from liberalism in the summer of 1915 until
a final sudden shift in June of 1936, when Barth first heard a lecture at an
international conference on Calvin in Geneva given by Pierre Maury
(1890–1956) entitled ‘Election and Faith’.14
Maury’s lecture, as Barth related, ‘at once made a profound impression on
me’,15 for it stood out from the other mostly historical papers at the conference
8
How I Changed My Mind [1969], 43 and see McCormack, CRDT, 454.
9 10 11
Barth, CD, IV/1, 181. CD, IV/1, 52. McCormack, CRDT, 1–23.
12
Balthasar, Theology of Karl Barth [=KB] [19511, 19764], 86–113.
13
KB, 93, 137 and based on Barth, CD II/1, 4 and How I Changed My Mind, 43 (see
McCormack, CRDT, n. 1, 1–2).
14
McCormack, CRDT, 20–3 and see Busch 1976, 277–8.
15
Barth, ‘Foreword’ [1957] in Maury, Predestination, 16.

that moved within the traditional formulations of predestination and which
were ‘hopelessly embarrassed by their difficulties’. Maury boldly brought out
the ‘christological meaning and basis of the doctrine of election’ where Jesus
Christ was seen as ‘the original and decisive object of the divine election and
rejection’.16 What Maury showed Barth, and he later wrote that ‘it was he who
contributed decisively to giving my thoughts on this point their fundamental
direction’,17 was that the doctrine of election had to be treated not in abstrac-
tion from but within, as McCormack put it, ‘the concrete reality in which it is
realized and made known, namely Jesus Christ’.18 This led Barth, McCormack
argues, to his reinterpretation of the doctrine of election in Church Dogmatics
II/1 (1940; completed summer 1939). The fruits were first seen in the
September 1936 lectures in Debrecen, Hungary on Gottes Gnadenwahl (‘God’s
Election of Grace’),19 where election is finally given what Maury had called for,
which is ‘a truly Christological grounding’.20 However, in light of Matthias
Gockel’s work,21 McCormack has given a ‘modest correction’ to his paradigm.
The transition to ‘Barth’s mature doctrine of election was not as sudden or
dramatic as I once thought, but took place gradually’ and he now dates this
‘Christological recentring’ of the doctrine of election from the point when Barth
began to lecture on the material later to be contained in II/2 (1942) in the
winter semester of 1939–40.22 But what was this breakthrough of Barth?
Barth argues, going beyond Maury,23 that God determines or elects Himself
as the One that loves in freedom to be God for us in Jesus Christ and that this
elective moment is one with its content, so that Jesus Christ is both the Subject
and Object of the divine election. Barth not only puts divine election at the
heart of the doctrine of God, predestination being one of the eternal decrees of
God,24 but, in a revolutionary move, does this simultaneously in Christ as both
the elector and the elected. ‘Who’ God is, is determined by His eternal self-
determination to be the God of grace by becoming incarnate through electing
both man and Himself in one eternal act.25 It does seem as if there was some
sort of ‘shift’ in Barth’s thought on election, especially if one compares the
Göttingen Dogmatics (1924–5) and CD I/1 and 2, where he still holds to a
(albeit radically actualistic) form of eternal individual double predestination,
with chapter VII (§§32–5) of Church Dogmatics II/2.26 But the question is
16
CD, II/2, 154–5 and see ‘Foreword’, 16.
17
‘Foreword’, 16 and see McCormack 2007, 64. 18
CRDT, 457.
19
See Barth, Gottes Gnadenwahl [1936] in Gockel 2006, 159–62 and McCormack, CRDT,
458–60.
20 21
CRDT, 457. See Gockel 2006, 158–97.
22 23
McCormack 2007, 64 and 2008a, n. 59, 213. See Gockel 2006, n. 14, 162.
24
See Heppe 1950, 133ff., 147, 150–89, and CRDT, 371.
25
See Jüngel 2001, 75ff., Williams 2007c, 131ff (here, see Myers 2011), and Fiddes, CSG,
67ff., 117ff.
26
Here, see McCormack, CRDT, 371–4, McDonald 2007, and Gockel 2006, 134–57.

whether that shift was of the character McCormack alleges. It is precisely here
that we enter controversy.
McCormack has advanced, beginning explicitly with a now famous essay
in The Cambridge Companion to Barth (2000), a highly controversial inter-
pretation of Barth’s theology.27 We do not have the space to enter into a
detailed discussion of the subsequent debate28 but a few words are in order.
McCormack claims that Barth aimed to go beyond classical metaphysics,
becoming a ‘“post-metaphysical” theologian’.29 He does this through a radical
historicizing of his Christology but thought through in Trinitarian terms.
When Barth argues that divine election is the event whereby God chooses to
be God for us in Jesus Christ (Logos ensarkos/incarnatus) what he actually
means, when he is being ‘consistent’ with himself, is that this eternal
self-election is ‘God’s act of determining himself to be God for us in Jesus
Christ which constitutes God as triune’.30 In the ‘primal decision’ of
pre-temporal eternity, God is already always ‘by way of anticipation’ what
He would become in time (Logos incarnandus).31 He is ‘already what He will
become’, since His Being and humanity are one in Jesus history, and that
history ‘constitutes the second person of the Trinity’, not after the fact
but before it in that what happens in history as God suffers and dies in Jesus
Christ—and here we are reminded of sophiology, where God is eternally
divine-human, and this reaches out ecstatically into creation culminating in
Christ—‘represents the outworking of the event in which God gives himself
his Being in eternity. Here God is seen as essentially God-human.’32
If God is God only insofar as He elects to be God for us in Christ, then ‘God
is triune for the sake of his revelation.’33 There is, quite simply, no mode or
existence in God as trinity above and prior to the eternal act of God’s self-
determination in which God constitutes Himself as God for us in Christ.34 The
only way we can properly speak of the Logos asarkos is as the one Word, Jesus
Christ, by anticipation (Logos incarnandus) identified with the incarnate
Word, Jesus Christ, in time that God has eternally willed to become
(Logos incarnatus/ensarkos).35 There is no abstract eternal Word in itself
that exists prior to God’s eternal self-determination. That is a myth. Election
logically (not ontologically) grounds God’s triunity, or triunity is a function of
election,36 so that the eternal act in which God gives Himself His Being as
27
McCormack 2000 (‘Grace and Being: The role of God’s gracious election in Karl Barth’s
theological ontology’) and subsequently 2007 (both reprinted in 2008b, 183–200, 261–77),
2008a, 2009a, 2010a, 2010b, 2011, and 2013.
28
For an overview see Dempsey 2011b, 1–25 and McCormack 2009a.
29
McCormack 2007, 65 and see 2008a, 211.
30 31
McCormack 2007, 67. McCormack 2000, 100.
32 33
McCormack 2009b, 3. McCormack 2000, 101.
34 35
McCormack 2007, 66. McCormack 2007, 63, 67–8, and 2000, 96.
36
McCormack 2007, 67 and see 2000, 103. See clarification at 2013, 119–20.

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is ‘one and the same act’ as the eternal act in which
God chooses to be God ‘in the covenant of grace with human beings’ in
Christ.37 No eternal subject behind the act needs to be or indeed can be
presupposed, since ‘God’s being is a being in the act of electing that constitutes
him as triune—and that is all that can be said.’ To presuppose such an anterior
subject and to pose related questions such as ‘Would God have been the triune
God had he not created the world?’ is nonsense without a tacit metaphysical
turn to speculation and natural theology with it.38
McCormack regards his interpretation of Barth as a ‘reconstruction’ of
Barth’s basic position.39 He advances many passages in its favour but argues
that others, which contradict it, are instances of Barth’s inconsistency with the
post-metaphysical thrust of his work.40 He acknowledges that his reading—in
seeing God’s Being as self-posited in relation to the divine economy—seems to
bring Barth closer to Hegel than is normally thought to be the case but points
to Barth’s statement from the 1950s that he enjoyed a little ‘Hegeling’ as
evidence that Barth was critically building on Hegelian ideas.41 He holds to
there being a difference between the two thinkers,42 but sees his project as
building on a whole variety of German critics,43 especially, the famous ‘He-
gelian’ reading of Barth by Eberhard Jüngel.44 McCormack acknowledges that
there is a degree to which he is developing his own constructive theology
alongside and even through his ‘reconstruction’ of Barth. His position is
continually evolving due to both his Barth research and the writing of his
own systematics.45
Younger theologians have creatively developed McCormack’s thesis: Kevin
Hector, Aaron T. Smith, Kevin Diller, and Matthew Bruce.46 But it has been
sharply attacked by two eminent figures in Barth studies: Paul Molnar and
George Hunsinger. They are particularly disturbed at the Hegelian overtones47
of McCormack’s reading of Barth.48 Many of the widely scattered essays in the
37 38
McCormack 2007, 66. McCormack 2013, 122 and see 2010b, 64.
39
McCormack 2008a, n. 57, 211.
40
McCormack 2007, 77, 2008a, 211–12, 2010a, 220–1, and 2013, 114ff.
41 42
See Busch 1976, 387. McCormack 2007, 69–70.
43
See McCormack 2010a, n. 3, 204 and 2013, n. 57, 120.
44
McCormack 2007, 69–70, 72, 78–9, 2009b, 3, 2010a, 204–5, 207–10, and 2010b, 63, n. 13;
see Jüngel 2001 [19651], but for Barth and Hegel, see Pannenberg 1980, Welker 1983, Klouwen
1998, Shanks 2005, 68–80, and Eitel 2008.
45
e.g. ‘With Barth—and beyond Barth’ (McCormack 2010a, 221–4); compare 2009a, 2010b,
2011, 108ff., and 2013, 119–26 (responding to Levering 2011).
46
See Hector 2005 (reprinted: Dempsey 2011b, 29–46), 2009, 2012, A. Smith 2009 (reprinted:
Dempsey 2011b, 201–25), Diller 2013, and Bruce 2013.
47
See Hunsinger 2015, 29, 40, 169–73 (where he says the Hegelian elements in Barth are
balanced by the Anselmian elements: 163) and compare Driel 2007, 54 (but see McCormack’s
defence at 2007, 69–70).
48
See Molnar 2002, 61–4 (responding to McCormack 1995 and 2000), Molnar 2006 (response
to Hector 2005 and reprinted: Dempsey 2011b, 47–62), Driel 2007 (response: McCormack 2007),

debate have been collected and published along with some new pieces by
different scholars not involved initially in the early discussion in a volume
edited by Michael T. Dempsey.49
These critics, with some justification, claim that just too many passages in
Barth contradict McCormack’s thesis.50 Moreover, if election precedes the
Trinity and grounds it, then it would seem to be impossible to speak of the
freedom of God’s gracious gift in Jesus Christ; that is, the thesis negates God’s
freedom to be otherwise than he is, in fact, for us in Christ because he need not
have redeemed us. Furthermore, such a thesis would reject as irredeemable
statements in Barth that hold that the Son of God is strictly speaking Logos
asarkos and that God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit could exist separately
from God’s self-determination to be God for us in Christ. Election under
McCormack’s thesis becomes necessary for the Trinity to be Trinity. In
addition, creation by extension becomes necessary to God and constitutive
of the Triune Being, which is, of course, a version of our problematic.
McCormack’s interpretation of Barth, it is alleged, throws into question divine
freedom by confusing the ‘right’ ordering of the immanent and the economic
Trinity,51 leading to their collapse, which, it might be added, seems as if it
comes dangerously close to a form of pantheism.
With such a scheme where triunity is constituted by election, then, it is held
only the Father would be the subject of election and not Christ (as Barth held).
The hypostases of the Son and the Spirit would not take place without
the decision of the Father for election—subordinationism results, the Son
and the Spirit being bound up with creation and in this way ultimately
destroying the eternal koinonia.52 McCormack’s critics maintain that election
does not give rise to the Trinity, but the Trinity is ‘election’s essential presup-
position and ground’.53 God is absolutely free as the One who loves (imma-
nent Trinity) and by a ‘free overflow of his love’ He eternally determines
Himself as the God of grace for us (economic Trinity) in Jesus Christ.54
Although McCormack’s critics do well to point out the passages in Barth
that clearly contradict his thesis, their reading of other more troubling pas-
sages that support it arguably (until recently)55 tends to smooth over the
Molnar 2007 (and reprinted: Dempsey 2011b, 63–90), Hunsinger 2008 (response: McCormack
2010a and both reprinted: Dempsey 2011b, 91–114, 115–37), Molnar 2010b (review of
McCormack 2008b with response: McCormack 2010b), Cassidy 2009, Dempsey 2011a, Molnar
2014, and Hunsinger 2015.
49
See Dempsey 2011b.
50
e.g. ‘the fact that Jesus Christ is the Son of God does not rest on the election’ (Barth, CD, II/
2, 107).
51
See Molnar 2006, 299, 2007, 204, 208–9, 218 and Hunsinger 2008, 189, 194–5. But see
McCormack 2010b, 63–4.
52
See Hunsinger 2008, 192ff., 2015, 10–38, 157–62.
53 54
Hunsinger 2008, 179, 2015, 47–72, 157–62. Molnar 2006, 303–4.
55
See Molnar 2014, 59ff.

ambiguities in Barth’s actualism in favour of a clear rationally consistent
orthodox teaching and thereby avoid the problematic in Barth that McCor-
mack attempts to highlight. This chapter and chapter 8 with their dialectical
reading of Barth are my contribution to this debate.
But what was the traditional position on election, which Barth was reacting
against from at least Church Dogmatics II/2 onwards? How precisely did Barth
fundamentally alter this position? Traditionally, following certain tendencies
that can be seen already in Calvin,56 the teaching of God’s double predestin-
ation or the so-called decretum absolutum57 was in practice interpreted in
Calvinism as preceding the fact that that election took place in and by Jesus
Christ.58 God first ordains men to salvation or damnation and then only
subsequently determines that this salvation will take place in the crucified
Son of God.59 In contrast, Barth asserted we must say that the whole content of
divine predestination and indeed the divine being itself is God’s self-
determination60 to be a certain kind of God, an electing God,61 who elects
and covenants Himself with us in Jesus Christ: ‘God does not first elect and
determine man but Himself . . . in such a way that He Himself becomes man.
God elects and determines Himself to be the God of man . . . He elects and
determines Himself for humiliation.’62 God’s election of Christ is an eternal
Gnadenwahl (literally ‘gracious choice’), ‘a primal and basic decision’, in
which within His Triune Being He wills to be and in this willing actually is
God.63 The content of this decision is Jesus Christ, since the decision is made
in Him,64 since God is the One who ‘in His Son or Word elects Himself, and in
and with Himself elects His people’.65 Nor can we see this Word here as
merely the eternal Son, for Barth tells us that God’s Word and decree in the
beginning consist of the fact that He has assumed and bears the name Jesus
Christ, so that ‘this name itself is God’s Word and decree at the beginning’.66
Barth identifies Jesus Christ with the Word of John 1:1–2.67 No longer is the
content of the eternal divine decree unknown insofar as God is a God whose
ways are past finding out, since the decree is revealed, with a definite content,
gracious love, and with a definite name in Jesus Christ.
56
cf. Barth, CD, II/2, 63ff.; on the history in Reform theology of the doctrine of election, see
Muller 2008.
57
Calvin, Institutes, 2: III.21.5, 926; cf. 2: III.21.7, 209–11 and Heppe 1950, 150–6; see
McDonald 2007 for Barth’s earlier (than CD II/1) more traditional position.
58
Calvin, Eternal Predestination of God, 96 and see 102–3 and 127; compare Heppe 1950,
146–7, 163.
59
Calvin, Institutes, 2: III.21.7 940.
60
See Jüngel 2001, 75–123, Colwell 1989, 183–308, Webster 2004a, 83–93, Busch 2004,
106–27.
61 62 63
Gunton 2000, 155. Barth, CD, IV/2, 84. ibid., II/2, 76.
64 65
ibid., II/2, 64. ibid., II/2, 76.
66 67
ibid., II/2, 100. ibid., II/2, 95–9, 101.

But Barth’s revision of Calvinism is even more radical, for if Jesus Christ is
the content of divine election, the divine choice of God in the beginning to be
God for us in His self-offering, then Jesus Christ is both ‘the subject and object
of this choice’.68 He is first the Subject of this election as ‘electing God’ and
then simultaneously the Object of this election as ‘elected man’.69 By Jesus
Christ, as God, electing Himself as man, He thereby elects all men ‘in Him’ so
that ‘His election is the original and all-inclusive election’.70 Thus, God
determines Himself in the election of Jesus Christ, who, as very God, is the
elector, in company with the Father and the Spirit, of Himself (‘Primarily God
elected or predestinated Himself ’), and, as very man, is the elected (‘And the
Other is that God elected man, this man’).71 Christ is God’s manifest grace for
all of us as a man wholly obedient to God even unto death on a cross, calling all
of us His people to faith in Him and revealing to all of us that we are sons of
God, Our Father, in Him.72 In Jesus Christ’s electing to take upon Himself
sinful man, we understand that, in God’s eternal counsel, as the content of
predestination, God ‘has determined upon man’s acquittal at His own cost’,
taking His place so that ‘He Himself should be perishing and abandoned and
rejected—the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.’73 Thus, the
eternal God determines Himself or elects Himself by a specific act in time to
eternally not be God without man but to be a particular man, Jesus Christ,74 as
Lord of Israel and the Church and in this Creator, Reconciler, and Redeemer.75
Christ, as the judge, takes to or upon Himself as the judged76 the ‘rejection of
sinful man with all its consequences and elected this man . . . to participation in
His own holiness and glory—humiliation for Himself and exaltation for
man’.77 Calvinism’s double predestination, in a masterstroke, has been trans-
ferred from individual human beings forming the mass of humanity, some
damned and some elected for salvation, to a specific human being, Jesus Christ,
the Incarnate Son of God.
However, Barth sees this choice of grace of a Subject for its Object not
merely from above (logos incarnandus) to below (logos incarnatus) but also
simultaneously from below to above.78 He sees the whole movement in a
profoundly Christocentric fashion, rejecting Calvinism’s decretum absolutum,
and looking to the divine-human choice made by Christ Himself as the key to
election insofar as ‘There is no such thing as a will of God apart from the will
of Jesus Christ.’ He can say the latter because (see ch. 8) with his doctrine of
election he is tracing a dialectical movement of continuity and difference
between God and creation, a yes and a no, what we have called both a free
68 69
ibid., II/2, 102. ibid., II/2, 103 and see 104.
70 71
ibid., II/2, 117. ibid., II/2, 162.
72
ibid., II/2. 103–6 and see IV/2, 84 and McCormack, CRDT, 459–60.
73 74 75
Barth, CD, II/2, 167. ibid., IV/2, 100. ibid., II/2, 91.
76 77 78
ibid., IV/1, 211ff. ibid., IV/2, 31–2. See Driel 2007, 48–50.

dependence (N3) and a dependent freedom (F3) of God in relation to creation.
But the continuity and difference are always seen together dialectically in and
through Jesus Christ, since, in emphasizing at first the continuity, we can say
that ‘In no depth of the Godhead shall we encounter any other but Him. There
is no such thing as Godhead in itself. Godhead is always the Godhead of the
Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. But the Father is the Father of Jesus Christ
and the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and the Spirit of Jesus Christ.’79
Furthermore, Triune Being ‘does not exist and cannot be known as a Being
which rests or moves purely within itself ’, since He is not ‘in abstracto Father,
Son and Holy Ghost, the triune God’ but He is Trinity insofar as ‘He has
foreordained Himself from and to all eternity’ for us in Christ. If we speak of
divine Being, then we must immediately speak of the internal act of election
and vice versa.80 All concepts from ‘God’ through to ‘atonement’ derive
their significance from Jesus Christ and His history so that (at least methodo-
logically) election precedes and grounds the Trinity rather than the Trinity
founding election.81
Simultaneously, however, in emphasizing the difference, we must say that
both ‘the fact Jesus Christ is the Son of God does not rest on the election’82
and ‘The second “person” of the Godhead in Himself and as such is not God
the Reconciler. In Himself and as such He is not revealed to us. In Himself
and as such He is not Deus pro nobis, either ontologically or epistemologic-
ally.’ Given the latter, it is not surprising that Barth considered that the logos
asarkos is a crucial concept for Trinitarian doctrine when it attempts to
understand divine revelation in light of its ‘free basis’ in the inner Being
and essence of God.83 Furthermore, he is quite clear that God’s eternal willing
of Himself and the divine election are two acts, not one, with the first
necessary to God and the second a contingent free act.84 This dialectic, albeit
shorn of the context of election, is not dissimilar to Bulgakovian antinomism
where God as Absolute, Holy Trinity is wholly discontinuous with creation
but at once He makes Himself relative to the world in becoming its Creator
and Redeemer as Absolute-Relative, economic Trinity which is above all
expressed in Jesus Christ.
But let us now trace this dialectic in Jesus Christ first by directing our eyes
from the eternal Word of the Father above to the incarnate Son below and
then, having acknowledged their personal unity, moving again from the
incarnate Son below to His Father in heaven above. Seen from above, Jesus
Christ as the Son of the Father is the Subject insofar as in free obedience to the
will of His Father He eternally elected Himself to be man, or the Son of Man,
and as man to do the will of God the Father by going into the far country; since
‘opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt’, this decision of His is also the divine
79 80 81
Barth, CD, II/2, 115. ibid., II/2, 79. ibid., IV/1, 16–17.
82 83 84
ibid., II/2, 107. ibid., IV/1, 52. ibid., II/1, 590.

decision of the Father and the Spirit.85 Yet, again from above to below, Jesus
Christ is the Object of divine election as man, the electing God creating man
over against Himself. But now moving from below to above, in electing the Son
of Man, God ‘evokes and awakens faith, and meets and answers that faith as
human decision’, so that the Son of Man responds once again as the Subject of
election by an obedient following after His Father. This human decision is the
decision by the Son of Man to follow obediently the Father God, to choose
Him as His God and Father, so that ‘for his part man can and actually does
elect God thus attesting and activating himself as elected man’.86 The purpose
and meaning of the eternal divine election, we are told, is the fact that man
who is the one elected from all eternity in Christ ‘can and does elect God in
return’.87 Jesus Christ is then the Subject of election also as its Object.
But if Christ elects God as His God and Father, and it is Christ again who
elects Himself as man as the Son of the Father, then we might go well beyond
Barth and conclude that, insofar as the eternal Son is acting for the Father as
Subject, Christ as man is also (through the divine condescension) electing
Himself to be God. This is a creative but troubling idea, as it risks confusing the
created and the uncreated. Clearly, the whole process of election is a free
obedience on both sides, divine and human, for the election of man by God is a
free, sovereign decision and initiative of the divine good pleasure88 where the
eternal Son is obedient to His Father, and the ‘electing of God alone’ in
wholehearted obedience by the Son of Man to His Father in Heaven is likewise
‘wholly free’.
In Jesus Christ, as the revelation of God’s eternal decree, we see not ‘merely
a temporal event, but the eternal will of God temporally actualized and
revealed in that event’.89 God’s eternal decree is the ‘one event’ in the bosom
of God of the living God Himself in the beginning of all His ways and this one
event is the ‘history, encounter and decision between God and man’ in Jesus
Christ where God elects man and this election ‘becomes actual in man’s own
electing of God’, so that He is liberated to do God’s will and thereby has
individuality and autonomy before God His Father. But if man is freed in this
election of God to be autonomous before God, then this incomparable dialogue
of two unequal partners in Christ is one where ‘man can and should elect and
affirm and activate himself ’.90 Although Barth continually emphasizes the
divine sovereignty and initiative in divine election in Christ, one cannot get
around the fact, though Barth never uses this language, that if God is elected
by man, and indeed, His election of man is said to be temporally actualized
and revealed in Jesus Christ, then not only is man the Object of election by
God as the Subject in election but God is the Object of election by man as the
Subject in election. Divine election, then, is not sufficient as a description of
85 86 87
ibid., II/2, 65, 105. ibid., II/2, 177. ibid., II/2, 178.
88 89 90
ibid., II/2, 177. ibid., II/2, 179. ibid., II/2, 180.

God’s gracious choice for us in Christ. To it must be added at least, divine-
human election. Here we arrive at an unusual and radical conclusion.
If divine election is only actualized in time, then for God to be God for us He
would seem to be freely dependent on man (F3), insofar as man’s attesting of
his own election by God in faith, as an election of God, is freely necessary (N3)
for God’s own self-determination as God for us in Jesus Christ. This would
mean that God, although He is absolutely free, becomes freely dependent on
His creation in order to be God for us in Christ, which, following our
problematic, gives creation a certain necessity for God. Barth here resembles
Bulgakov when Bulgakov speaks of the ontological identity of the supratem-
poral and the temporal in the events of the divine economy, so that what is
effected in time as a new event already always exists in pre-accomplishment91
in the divine counsel as certain images/ideas/possibilities. Might we not
then see the content of the act by which Jesus Christ chooses to create and
redeem the world as divine election? ‘Election’, that is, understood as Christ’s
divine-human self-determination to be God for us which is an act already
pre-accomplished in eternity but only manifested in revelation through the
kenosis of God in Himself.
7.2 BEING AND ACT —THE AMBIGUITY

OF BARTHIAN ACTUALISM
The choice of God to be an electing God points to Barth’s ambivalence

towards what he regarded as the traditional notion that God acts based on a
prior essence. In contrast to what he saw as the traditional notion of an
anterior divine essence which is the foundation for all divine activity, Barth
argues that Being and act should be held together ‘instead of tearing them
apart like the idea of “essence [Wesen]”’.92 I use the word ‘ambivalence’ and
not ‘rejection’ for Barth’s relationship to substance/essence language and
thinking because Barth not only grudgingly used this language,93 but even
presupposes it by assuming an eternal divine Being/love which to be itself
necessarily loves. Nevertheless, God’s eternal choice and act of becoming man
in time constitute His Being as God, since ‘precisely as the One He is, He
acts’.94 Of course, Reformed theology, building on tradition,95 did not deny
91
92
Barth, CD, II/1, 262 [Die kirchliche Dogmatik [=KD], II/2, 293].
93
e.g. CD, II/1, 263, 272ff., II/2, 98, 511.
94
ibid., II/1, 26 and see 272; cf. Gunton 1978, 189ff.
95
e.g. Aquinas, ST, 1.25.1co., 1.18.3co (citing Aristotle, Metaphysics 12.7.1072b7) and 2ad;
but see related: Aquinas, ST, 1.2.3co, 1.3.1co, 1.4.1co, 1.4.2co, and SG, 1.72, 161.

that God’s essence is an act.96 Barth, however, is not merely saying that God is
life itself as a pure act of love, which is the source of all things, but also
something quite different. He is, on the one hand, despite himself, echoing
Schelling, who saw God’s life as a pure act of self-determination, and, on the
other, following after Angelus Silesius and Hegel, in seeing the content of this
act as His choice to be with us particularly in Christ. He could say, therefore,
that ‘Actus purus is not sufficient as a description of God. To it there must be
added at least, “et singularis”.’97 When he says that God’s Being is His act,
therefore, he is not making reference to ‘actuality in general’, but stating both
an identity and a distinction between God and creation in Christ: ‘in His
revelation and in eternity it is a specific act with a definite content’, so that this
specific content is ‘personal being’, indeed, the ‘being of a person’, in its divine
‘originality and uniqueness’.98 Here, what God is eternally in eternity and in
His work of revelation is His own singular salvific work,99 His revelation to us
in the person of Jesus Christ: ‘God is who He is in the act of His revelation.’100
By His eternal choice to be God for us in Jesus Christ, God has determined
Himself in fellowship with man,101 although He did not have to so determine
Himself, since He already possesses this fellowship as Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit ‘in Himself without us, and therefore without this [fellowship with
man], He has that which He seeks and creates between Himself and us’.102
Barth here is in a bit of a bind: on the one hand he wishes to say that what
God is in Himself is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the One who eternally lives
and loves103 quite apart from living and loving for us in Jesus Christ. This is
not dissimilar to what we saw in Bulgakov when he described God as Absolute,
Holy Trinity, an eternal self-giving and self-receiving hypostatic movement
generating the eternal Sophia as the love of love, actus purissimus. Unlike
Bulgakov, however, there is little room to interpret love in Barth as any form of
ecstatic divine eros/desire for creation as we wish to do. However, on the other
hand, Barth also wishes to say that, precisely because He is God as a free
eternal act of love, He has in Himself in His essence (understood as an act), in
His own Being as God, the ‘basis and prototype’ of ‘creation, reconciliation,
the whole Being, speech and action in which He wills to be our God’. In the
famous phrase, God being Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is ‘so to speak, ours in
advance [sozusagen im voraus der unsrige]’.104 The sozusagen is important
here because, although Barth wishes to say that God is God for us eternally, so
that all the external works of God are founded on His own Triune life of love,
he nevertheless does not wish to imply in saying this that the works of God are
necessary to God as an eternal reality in God Himself.
96 97
See Heppe 1950, 57ff. and 133ff. and Barth, CD, II/1, 333. ibid., II/1, 264.
98 99 100
ibid., II/1, 272. ibid., II/1, 260. ibid., II/1, 257 and 262.
101 102 103
ibid., II/1, 273. ibid., II/1, 273; cf. II/1, 275. ibid., II/1, 297.
104
ibid., I/1, 383 [KD, I/1, 404] and see CD, IV/2, 345.

There is a discontinuity between the earlier and later Trinitarian theology
precisely on the relationship of God’s ‘work’ to His eternal Being. In his early
Trinitarian theology, Barth erred on the side of saying that God’s essence was
ultimately incomprehensible insofar as hiddenness applied to the Father but
not to the Son. This ultimately made it impossible to get to the immanent
Trinity from the divine economy, although Barth still wished to say that God’s
essence and work were one, not twofold.105 In contrast, in the later theology he
often (but purposely not always) seemed to argue, as McCormack puts it, that
‘the Being of God and humanity are one in the history of Jesus’, leading
McCormack to the startling claim that Barth argued that ‘Jesus’ history
constitutes the second person of the Trinity.’106 In the earlier theology, again,
to the unity of the Father, the Son, and Spirit among themselves corresponds
their unity ad extra, but this unity in se is expressed only insofar as in a free
decision in God’s work He shows Himself to be ‘revealer, revelation and being
revealed, or Creator, Reconciler and Redeemer’. Thus, although the work of
God is the essence of God, and the triunity of God is revealed only in God’s
work, the work is a ‘grace’ which was given to us freely by Him, and He
remains free in this revelation and so ultimately incomprehensible, thereby
showing our knowledge of Him, and especially that of His triunity, to be
inadequate. What is presented to us concerning His triunity in Scripture and
Church doctrine is a creaturely comprehensibility absolutely different from
the comprehensibility with which He knows Himself.107 This leads us to the
conclusion that God’s essence and work are only ever related analogously. One
must say that when we encounter in Scripture the names of Father, Son, and
Spirit as the name of the one God, one can only say that in this one God there
is ‘something like’ fatherhood and sonship and a third reality common to
both.108 Conversely, in the later theology, Barth seems to jettison the analogical
relationship entirely, perhaps as an application to the doctrine of God of his
critique of the analogia entis, so that who God is in Jesus Christ is who He is
in Himself.109 Given the importance of analogy for our own constructive
response to the problematic (see Part III), we will now turn to this theme
in Barth.
Barth, as is well known, rejected the analogy of Being110 as the ‘invention of
Antichrist’.111 In God’s basic hiddenness, man is judged by God as lacking any
power or capacity in himself which might point to some ‘correspondence and
similarity of Being’ with His Creator,112 for we only apprehend what we
resemble, ‘But we do not resemble God.’113 In the background, Barth is aiming
105
See ibid., I/1, 371–5 (following McCormack 2009b, 3 but also see Laats 1997 and 1999).
106 107 108
McCormack 2009b, 3. Barth, CD, I/1, 371. ibid., I/1, 363.
109
See ibid., II/2, 115 and IV/2, 777.
110
See Louth 2016, K. Johnson 2010, 2011, Oh 2006, 3–16, and Pöhlmann 1965.
111 112
Barth, CD, I/I, xiii; cf. II/1, 82, 84. ibid., III/2, 220; cf. II/1, 77ff.
113
ibid., II/1, 188.

his polemic against Erich Przywara (1889–1972),114 who argued that God was
‘in—above humankind’ and that this tension of similarity and dissimilarity of
Being was established by God, so any analogy to Him is in and above us ‘from
God’s side’.115 Przywara, especially his Analogia Entis (19321, 19622), would
come to be an important early influence on Balthasar.116 Both Balthasar and
Przywara are inspired by a famous passage from the Fourth Council of the
Lateran (1215) (‘quia inter creatorem et creaturam non potest [tanta]117
similitudo notari, quin inter eos maior sit dissimilitudo notanda’) and we
shall return to its dialectic of similarity and dissimilarity in chapter 9.118
Given Barth’s hostility to the analogy of Being, it is not surprising that much
of Balthasar’s book on Barth was dedicated to the analogia entis.119
In response to Przywara, Barth argued for an analogy of relation and faith
which is established when God graciously reaches out and meets us in the
God-man Jesus Christ. The similitudo Dei, as Barth argues, must be given to us
in each moment, being thereby not a datum or fulfilment but a dandum or
promise120 of the Creator and Redeemer Spirit of Christ. If this is the case, then
an analogy certainly exists between man and God, but one established by and
for God in Christ. It is only when God reaches out and meets us in the God-man
Jesus Christ that a similarity of relation is created by His grace, being an
analogue to the love God has had for Himself before the ages, which allows
us to apprehend Him fully and completely as He determines (i.e. analogia
relationis).121 Moreover, it is only in faith as an ‘act of human decision’ by
the capacity created by Him in this encounter that we then can be said to know
Him (i.e. analogia fidei). This faithful and obedient ‘act’ on man’s part
corresponds (graciously) to the act of grace of the ‘divine being as the Living
Lord’ and in the correspondence faith is grounded in each moment in God. In
God’s gracious act corresponding to our act of faith, God posits Himself as the
114
See ‘Fate and Idea in Theology’ [1929], 33 and see 46 (see McCormack, CRDT, 386–9) and
Barth, The Holy Spirit and Christian Life [1930], 3–17 (see K. Johnson 2011, esp. chs. 2–5, 2010
and Betz 2014, 83–115).
115
See K. Johnson 2011, 31–50, 83–93, 122–57, and McCormack, CRDT, 319–21, 383–5. But
now see Betz 2014, 53ff.
116
Balthasar, ‘In Retrospect’ [1965], 89; although later distancing himself: Our Task [1984],
37–8; see ‘Die Metaphysik Erich Przywara’ [1933] and ‘Erich Przywara’ [1966]. On Przywara and
Balthasar: Zeitz 1988, Oakes 1994, 15–44 and 56–8, Murphy 1993, 508–21 (esp. 516–19), Krenski
1995, 34–52, and Betz 2014, 101–5. On Przywara: Secretan 1997, Biju-Duval 1999, O’Meara
2002, Betz 2005, 2006, and 2014. Bibliography: Wierciński 2006, 357–8.
117
See Balthasar, TD, III, 220–1 esp. n. 51.
118
‘between the creator and the creature [so great] a similarity cannot be noted without
having to be noted between them a greater dissimilarity’ (Denzinger-Schönmetzer, §806, 262).
(See Betz 2014, 72–4.)
119
Balthasar, KB, 86ff. (earlier stages of work: xviii) and see Balthasar’s earliest discussion of
Barth: Apokalypse, III: 316–91 (on Barth and Balthasar, see Chia 1999, Webster 2004b, Howsare
2005, 77–99, Müller 2006, Bieler 2006a, Wigley 2007, and Long 2014). See Barth and Balthasar,
Dialogue [1968].
120 121
Barth, Holy Spirit, 5. CD, III/2, 220; cf. Table Talk [1953–6], 30.

object of our faith and us as those who know Him in such faith.122 God, then,
lets Himself be known by faith in a created relation which is of ‘His free good-
pleasure’. We can find God’s knowability not in any existing capacity we
have and take for ourselves, an existing analogy of being, but ‘only in an analogy
to be created by God’s grace, the analogy of grace and faith to which we say
“Yes” as to the inaccessible which is made accessible to us in incomprehensible
reality’.123
Barth’s ‘analogy’ was meant to depart from (his perhaps erroneous concep-
tion of) the ‘Catholic’ analogia entis in that it does not aim to speak of a sure,
reliable, and known ontological similarity and dissimilarity, and it in no way
excludes dialectic but precisely presupposes it, as McCormack has argued.124
At the very moment in which God unveils Himself in the analogy wholly
constituted by Him, He then unveils Himself as veiled in and through human
language which is made (despite itself) to conform to Him in His knowability:
‘God not only unveils but also veils himself in his revelation, because it is
revelation and not revealedness.’125 We can only trust in the correspondence
between the knowability of God’s Word as He is for Himself as the self-
grounded divine possibility and the knowability of that same Word for us as a
human possibility of grasping the promise in faith. This possibility promised
to us takes place graciously through faith. Trust is required, as we only can
affirm the divine knowability in its ‘concealment’ in the ‘husk’ of the human
possibility ‘that meets us in darkness’, thus emphasizing the radical dissimi-
larity between the two. The correspondence or similarity is like a stick dipped
in water, which we can only see as broken but, ‘though we cannot see it, it
is invisibly and yet in truth a completely unbroken stick’.126 Thus, the order-
liness and ontological reliability of an analogical approach is continually
disturbed by both the ‘breakthrough’ and veiling and unveiling characteristic
of dialecticism.
One wonders if the aforementioned dialectic of veiling and unveiling (and
the lack of any analogia entis) lies behind the ambiguities of Barth’s later
actualist doctrine of God, just as we saw was arguably the case with Bulgakov’s
late insistence that the Absolute and Absolute-Relative are united and
co-posited. Likewise, Barth vacillates between emphasizing the complete iden-
tification of God and man in Christ and their complete difference. For example,
Barth wishes to say that God is God as Holy Trinity in Himself, but this One
God as Holy Trinity is, as he puts it, ‘revealed to us absolutely’ in Jesus Christ.
He means that it is this same One God in Jesus Christ who God is in Himself.
Thus, he quickly says that ‘He is absolutely the same God in Himself.’127 This is,
of course, problematic, because how can God be exactly the same in His free act
122 123 124

CD, II/1, 26. CD, II/1, 85. McCormack, CRDT, 18, 353.
125
Barth, ‘Fate’, 40 (trans. of McCormack, CRDT, 386–7).
126 127
Barth, CD, I/1, 242–3. ibid., II/1, 297.

of loving fellowship as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and His self-determination
as God for us in Christ without confusing the willing of the free work and the
free Being of God?128 It would seem, if one follows this line of thinking, that
God must by necessity be God as God in Jesus Christ. To be God in Christ is not
other than what God is in His free (but clearly also necessary) act of Himself as
Holy Trinity. But if this is the case, then how might the Incarnation be a
contingent free gift that need not have been enacted? Barth does, in fact,
acknowledge a distinction between God’s necessary willing of Himself and
contingent willing of His works,129 but in practice, in expressing the primor-
diality of divine election, he often seems to blur it.
The blurring of the lines between God and creation in God’s divine Being as
act leads Barth to some fabulously convoluted writing. He says that God is
who He is in His works, but He is the same in Himself before, after, over, and
without these works. They are bound to Him but not He to them. He is who
He is without them but they are nothing without Him.130 So far, so clear. But
Barth does not want to drive a wedge between God’s Being in Himself as act
and His Being as act in His works, above all in election as the first and ultimate
work in Christ. So he then doubles back and says that ‘He is not, therefore,
who He is only in His works. Yet in Himself He is not another than He is in
His works.’131 If God is not only who He is in His works, then there must be
some difference, some otherness that distinguishes one from the other,
between God in Himself, and, what Bulgakov called God for Himself or God
as Absolute-Relative. Yet Barth will have none of this, so he appears to
accidently contradict himself by saying that God is also in Himself not any
other than that which He is in His works.
Yet can we not take this ‘contradiction’ as purposeful? That is, might it not
be seen as a form of dialecticism in the doctrine of God similar to Bulgakov’s
antinomism? Such dialecticism could be seen as Barth’s means of responding
to the problematic of freedom and necessity. Indeed, the similarity to Bulga-
kov here seems quite strong, for Bulgakov wishes to say that the Absolute,
eternally turning towards the world, posits Himself as Absolute-Relative, that
is, Creator and Redeemer. Yet, for Bulgakov, at least ideally, the Absolute is in
the Absolute-Relative, so that God is not other than He is in Himself (imma-
nent Trinity) when He is for Himself (economic Trinity). Yet God is not only
God as He is in His works, since He is God as Absolute, who always freely
exceeds and is infinitely beyond his activity in creation. It might be said that in
this context Barth’s seeming dogmatic drive for consistency obscures the
fundamental dialectical position of his doctrine of God, so Bulgakov is at
least conceptually clearer. The big difference between the two thinkers is
that Barth’s position is focused on the more concrete act of divine election.
128 129
The blurring is typical: ibid., II/2, 76. e.g. ibid., II/1, 590 and see earlier I/1, 434.
130 131
ibid., II/1, 260. ibid., II/1, 260 [KD, II/1, 291].

Barth focuses on the eternal turning towards the world, which is, and which is
not God in His Being as act specified in Jesus Christ.132 This means that Barth’s
whole theology is more honestly a theology in light of the economia than that
of Bulgakov. It is this economic focus (specifically, on election) we shall build
upon in our own response to the problematic.
By an ‘eternal choice’, Barth did not aim to negate temporality. God’s
eternity surrounds time, embracing it, as it were, at all points because it is
pre-temporal (His existence precedes all existents in time), supra-temporal
(His existence is above all existents in time), and post-temporal (His existence
follows all existents when time will be no more).133 He is in His eternity a ‘pure
duration’, not time itself but the ‘absolute basis of time’ and therefore time’s
constant accompaniment as a ‘readiness for time’.134 Thus, when we say that
God eternally chooses to be God for us in Christ, as Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit, since His Being is an eternal particular event, a willed conscious
decision, this must not be understood as an accomplished act in some distant
past. Nor should it be seen as an event occurring through external causes or in
a relationship external to Godself. Nor, finally, can we speak of it as the
‘mechanical outcome of a process the rationality of which . . . will have to be
sought outside itself ’. Rather, it is an event which is true for all times and
places, ‘His executed decision—executed once for all in eternity, and anew in
every second of our time’, since it is constantly being accomplished in the
eternal act which is God’s very personal Being.135
Here again we see the ambiguity of Barthian actualism. Barth wishes to
assert the fact that God’s choice to be God for us in Jesus Christ, which is the
offering of the Father and the self-offering of the Son, is eternal. He writes of
Jesus Christ as being at the beginning as the Word (Jn. 1:1–2), the Subject and
Object of the choice,136 and at the beginning of all things in ‘God’s dealings
with the reality which is distinct from Him’, as all these things begin in Him.
But then Barth immediately corrects himself, as he wishes to maintain the
freedom of God, so he says that Christ ‘was not at the beginning of God, for
God has no beginning’.137 This, of course, at first seems nonsensical, for it
essentially asserts a mysterious distinction between different modes of eternity
as pre-temporality. Going with this reasoning, one might identify a first
anterior eternity in which God is God in Himself and the second posterior
eternity in which He is in Himself in His works in Christ.
Nor is it an isolated incident, for Barth in another place speaks of eternity as
the ‘pre-time’ or ‘pure divine time’ of the Father and Son in the fellowship of
132
See A. Smith 2009, 23ff.
133
Barth, CD, II/1, 621, 623, 629, and 638; cf. Gunton 1978, 177–85, Roberts 1979, Colwell
1989, 13–182, and Hunsinger 2004.
134 135
Barth, CD, II/1, 615, and 618–19. ibid., II/1, 271.
136 137
ibid., II/2, 101. ibid., II/2, 102.

the Holy Spirit, which is a time when we and the world did not exist, for we are
not from eternity. It is in this ‘time’ that all God’s works were decided and
determined, including the determination ‘to send this eternal Word into this
created world to this created man’. This latter is the free display of the divine
grace whose name is Jesus Christ, since everything ‘is determined in Him’ who
is ‘before all time, and therefore eternally the Son and the Word of God, God
Himself in His turning to the world’. Yet we are told rather confusingly that
eternity as pre-time nevertheless ‘bears the name of Jesus Christ’ and that ‘In
this turning to the world, and with it to a time distinct from His eternity, this
God, Yahweh Sabaoth, is identical with Jesus Christ.’138 Moreover, he is crystal
clear that in John 1:1 ‘ho logos is unmistakably substituted for Jesus . . . It is He,
Jesus, who is in the beginning with God. It is He who by nature is God.’139
All of this once again appears to be an ‘inconsistency’ in Barth, or, more
frankly, a contradiction. How can pre-temporal eternity be so complex? It
bears the name of Jesus Christ insofar as God turns to the world and creates a
time distinct from His eternity; this name indeed is said to be identical with
the sacred name of God. But, simultaneously, it is also said to be the ‘pure
divine time’ of the Father and Son in the union of the Spirit when there was no
world whatsoever and no Christ. Either Barth is dialectically understanding
eternity as, alternatively, at once the eternal movement of God turning
towards the world in Christ, and at once the state of satisfied Trinitarian
fellowship which is unrevealed and in which God is not turned to the world.
Or, eternity is simply the fact that God has always been turning towards the
world in Christ.140 Barth is, arguably, and perhaps impossibly, trying to
simultaneously distinguish and identify God’s choice of Godself and His
choice of creation, of which the latter but not the former is contingent. As a
matter of fact, the two acts are simultaneous in Jesus Christ but, in some sense,
they ‘need not have been’ simultaneous if God’s grace is not to become simply
a necessary part of His own self-development in and through the world.
7.3 GOD AS THE ONE WHO L OVES IN FREEDOM
But to say that God eternally chooses to be with us in Christ, that He seeks and
creates fellowship with us, putting Himself in relation to us (because He
chooses not to be, as it were, a reclusive God)141 is to say that He wishes to
seek and create with us what He is in Himself—pure fellowship. God is in
138
ibid., II/1, 622.
139
ibid., II/2, 96 (see Bruce 2013, ch. 4.1 but see Hunsinger 2008, 181–3 and Molnar
2014, 62).
140 141
Barth, CD, II/1, 622. ibid., II/1, 274.

Himself the free act of love, what we have called F2, since ‘He is the One who
loves. That He is God—the Godhead of God—consists in the fact that
He loves, and it is the expression of His loving that He seeks and creates
fellowship with us.’142 In Himself as Trinity, God includes both an eternal
prius, a superiority of the Father to His Son and Spirit, and an eternal posterius
or obedient subordination of the Son and Spirit to their Father (see 8.1).143
Such a movement of love can be characterized, in our terms, as both a
dependent freedom that totally gives itself over to the Other (F3) and an
eternal acceptance and commitment of this free self-giving or free dependence
(N3). Therefore, the love at work in Christ is not a divine mechanism that falls
from above but God’s act only insofar as it is a free choice, since ‘God is in
Himself free event, free act and free life’.144 If God determines Himself in
Christ and He does this as the One who loves, then we must emphasize that
this love is free, since He is the ‘One who loves, in freedom’.145 God, and this is
a constant refrain in Barth despite all the tensions, could have chosen other-
wise. His free self-giving is contingent, a dependent freedom (F3), and if God
did so choose otherwise, He would still have been the God who loves. Free love
is always free love: ‘it does not have to do what it does’ and its freedom consists
‘in the fact that it could choose between the being and not being of the world
without being any the less love’. Therefore, it did not have to happen that God
chose to be God with us in Christ (F3). He is under no external (N1) or
internal necessity (N2) to love us in Christ as if ‘in His essence He is under the
necessity of having the world as well, outside Himself ’.146
A frequent metaphor of Barth, echoing Bulgakov, is that of the goodness,
glory, grace, and love, which is the divine Being (often, ‘a free’) ‘overflowing’
(überfließend) into creation. We cannot say anything higher, he argues, of the
‘inwardness of God’ than that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, love in
Himself ‘without and before loving us, and without being forced to love us’.
The divine love for us is ‘an overwhelming, overflowing, free love’, the
‘outwardness’ of God to us in revelation by which we learn of the nature of
this love of God for us as it is in His inwardness.147 Here there is room to take
Barth further and see this excessive love for creation as a divine desire spilling
out beyond God’s Triune life. In our terminology, the free self-giving love-
desire of God, which is contingent, could have been otherwise (F3). But it is so
utterly committed that, in some sense, it could not be otherwise and must
express itself in creation as a free dependence (N3).
Of course, this language of ‘overflow’ has a rather emanationist tinge to it.
One is reminded of Bulgakov saying that the Ousia-Sophia of God as
Absolute-Relative is love, and love to be love must love beyond itself in
creation and redemption. Barth is once again forced to balance the pull of
142 143 144

ibid., II/1, 275; cf. II/2, 79. ibid., IV/1, 201–2. ibid., II/1, 264.
145 146 147
ibid., II/1, 257. ibid., II/1, 499. ibid., I/2, 377.

different forces, freedom and necessity, by arguing that God’s turning to us is
‘an overflowing of His essence’. It both ‘matches’ and ‘belongs to’ the essence, a
version of our N3. Realizing this sounds too necessitarian, he quickly clarifies
it by saying that the overflow is ‘rooted in Himself alone’ so it ‘is not demanded
or presupposed by any necessity, constraint, or obligation, least of all from
outside, from our side, or by any law by which God Himself is bound and
obligated’.148 Again, we are left with a conceptual mixing of metaphors where
Barth is able to emphasize the sheer force of a love, which is itself simply in
loving (N3), but, that this love need not be expressed to us, although in fact it is
(F3). Yet man is by no means superfluous in this movement, since the ‘hinge’,
as it were, in this free overflow of love is the decision of the historic Jesus in
receiving this love and affirming it with His own election of God (see 7.1).
This key idea of Barth is arguably his most important contribution to a Christo-
logical response to a problematic created for Trinitarian theology by Christology
itself and one on which we shall build our own constructive response.
Like Bulgakov, who identifies Sophia/Ousia with love, and later with Balthasar,
for whom uncreated (and created) Being=love, for Barth, the statements ‘God is’
and ‘God loves’ are synonymous: ‘this identity of Being and love’. God would be
the One who loves and is loved regardless of whether there were a creature for
Him to love or love Him in return. Likewise, in Bulgakov, we are told that for
God as Absolute, as a movement of Trinitarian love, the world need not exist.
Barth goes further, once more paralleling Bulgakov, and says that it is the
‘purpose’ of God’s Being to love. This seems a rather logically necessitarian
thing to say which assumes a prior essence that lies behind all actions. As God
loves, He fulfils His purpose, so that all His ‘intentions regarding a being distinct
from His own’ can be ‘actualized’ only as ‘purposes of love’. However, once
again Barth must withdraw before the abyss of necessity, and he argues that God
loves and He does not need, as in Hegel and Schelling, any being distinct from
His own to be the object of His love, which is to us, the oxymoronic, ‘free and
non-obligatory overflowing’.149 Still, God ‘can and may and must and will love
us’, where our Being, our existence, is taken into an internal and essential
fellowship with Him, where it is no longer ‘alien to His [existence] but may
become and be analogous’.150
But what is such love? God might well be satisfied with Himself, as He is love
necessarily in Himself, F2 with N2. Yet precisely as such divine love, out of a free
self-giving (F3), He ‘wills Himself together with us. He wills Himself in fellow-
ship with us.’151 Thus, Barth, echoing late Bulgakov,152 purposely blurs the lines
between God’s willing of Himself and willing His works. Once again there needs
to be a rebalancing. Barth tells us that this willing is a sort of creation out of
nothing because it presupposes nothing on our part but creates love in us by
148 149 150

ibid., II/1, 273. ibid., IV/2, 755. ibid., IV/2, 757.
151 152
ibid., IV/2, 777. Bulgakov, NA, 251 [BL, 230].

being a ‘creative love’.153 The event of God’s free love in Christ is, therefore,
radically groundless (F1). It has no necessary ties to this creation or any other
(N1). One cannot bind God by asserting that He must be consistent with His
essential constancy and faithfulness (N2). God would still be consistent in the
fidelity characteristic of His loving, Barth argues, even if He had decided to
determine it in another fashion: ‘God could have been true to Himself without
giving His faithfulness the determination of faithfulness to us.’154
Yet this collapse of love and Being risks pantheism by Barth’s blurring of the
line between the two distinct divine willings of Godself and creation. The
divine freedom and necessity of love then would require creation as an
internal divine reality for God to be God (as in Origen). In our terms, by
Barth’s ‘blurring’ of the two ‘willings’ there comes to be a synthesis of F2–N2
in God that would lead to creation becoming N1 and then N2 for God. But this
type of theology also risks its opposite extreme by turning the divine love into
a sort of abstract force alien to creation that will be love regardless of its
particular determination. If love is divine Being and need not be expressed in
faithfulness towards us, then love might just as well be anything one may posit
of God from a tsunami to the pain of a child torn apart by hunting dogs.155 In
our terms, under this blurring of the divine ‘willings’, the divine Being as love
understood as F2–N2 becomes F1–N2, as love is emptied of its particular
content and becomes a sheer loving force (the triumph of grace) directed at the
world, not unlike Bulgakov’s love determinism. In short, if divine love is
radically free indeterminate Being—though Barth always stops at the abyss
in returning to Jesus Christ—then it is a blank slate on which one can write
whatever one wishes.
Barth’s actualism, therefore, is shot through with ambiguities and, arguably,
this was perhaps a conscious choice in favour of a dialectical approach to
Trinitarian theology. Alternatively, it could be that these ambiguities are
inconsistencies (McCormack) or merely apparent and cleared up easily on
closer analysis (Molnar and Hunsinger).156 Whatever the case may be, Barth
wants to avoid arid speculation about the immanent Trinity157 in order to
emphasize both that ‘we cannot elsewhere understand God and who God is’
than in revelation and that ‘He is the same even in Himself, even before and
after and over his works, and without them.’158 Yet if God is an act, then what
distinguishes the ‘economic act’ of His being with us in Christ from the
‘immanent act’ of the Father’s begetting of the Son? Barth’s (early) response
is that the freedom and the love of the immanent act have a ‘superiority
[Eminenz]’ over their economic counterpart.159 This seems a rather abstract
153 154
Barth, CD, IV/2, 777. ibid., II/1, 401.
155
Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 242–3 and see Hart 2005, 36–44.
156 157
But see Molnar 2014. Barth, CD, II/1, 261.
158 159
ibid., II/1, 260. KD, I/1, 456 [CD, I/1, 431].

and somewhat vague distinction at best. Indeed, Barth never fully clarifies in
what this ‘superiority’ consists. We are told that the immanent act cannot be
otherwise, since God cannot not be the One who loves in freedom. The
economic act, in contrast, could be—although it is not in fact—otherwise,
since it is grace and one cannot describe God’s begetting of His Son as
grace. These ambiguities might be clarified not only through approaching
Barth’s Trinitarian theology dialectically but also through understanding
this dialecticism in the context of the tension between divine freedom and
necessity.
Barth quite traditionally, and like Bulgakov’s understanding of God as
the Absolute, argues that the eternal divine movement of love which is the
Holy Trinity is one where God wills freely to be God in Himself—F2 in our
terminology. But this free life of love is a necessary reality. God is the ‘One who
properly and necessarily exists’ and cannot cease to be such—N2 in our
terminology. 160 However, in contrast, he does not stop at the traditional
position in which it is ‘natural or necessary for God to will Himself ’ and in
willing Himself being the ‘basis and standard of everything else’. In identifying
the act of election with the inner life of God as Trinity, Barth ends up arguing
that God’s willing of all things ad extra in willing to be God for us in Christ is
also necessary. But it is necessary in presupposing freedom: ‘But He wills freely
the possibility and reality of everything else . . . the will of God is free even in
His necessity to will Himself, and necessary even in His freedom to will
everything else.’161 Now this could mean that God necessarily has the freedom
to will in all His activity. Given that for Barth election and self-will coincide, it
seems more likely that he also is saying that God’s freedom and necessity
coincide162 in willing creation in Christ. God then wills Himself and creation
in a synthesis of freedom and necessity (F2–N2). But the second willing, which
we might call a de facto necessity of divine loving Lordship,163 is ostensibly
contingent, although it is unclear why this is the case and what separates it
from the first non-contingent willing.
This whole scenario, however, is even more complicated. If there is a
necessity, albeit a free one, to God’s self-determination to be God for us in
Christ and in His willing of everything in Him, then in order for Christ to be
incarnate, God must necessarily be Creator (echoing Bulgakov). The necessity
for God to be Creator, for Barth, seems to give creation an external necessity
(N1) which is internalized in the eternal loving decision (F2) to be God in
Christ (N2) (see ch. 8).164 Here we have a Barthian way of expressing the fact
that God freely gives Himself to us in dependence in Christ (F3) and this
dependence is irrevocable, as God has bound Himself to us for eternity (N3).
160
CD, II/1, 305 and see I/1, 434, II/1, 280, 283, and IV/2, 40.
161 162
CD, II/1, 591. e.g. CD, IV/1, 239, II/1, 547–8.
163 164
See CD, II/1, 301. See CD, III/1, 51.

Thus, in Barth’s theology, we can characterize God in Himself by our axis
(F3–N3). Furthermore, God’s free self-expression in creation in Christ can
also be so characterized as a simultaneous dependent freedom (F3) and a free
dependence (N3).
We have suggested that the thought of Bulgakov and Barth has a certain
similarity despite their manifest great differences. Both men proposed a vision
of God in relation to the world which consciously incorporates discontinuity
and continuity (antinomism or dialecticism) into the relationship of God as
Holy Trinity over against the world in Christ. Furthermore, in both theolo-
gians, creation and redemption in the event of Jesus Christ is eternally ‘pre-
accomplished’ as images/ideas/possibilities (see Bulgakov: 6.3, Barth: 8.1) in
the will of the Holy Trinity and temporally actualized and revealed in the
salvation drama. With this tentative alignment of Bulgakov and Barth, we can
now begin to see a possibility for specifying the content and character of
Christ’s divine-human decision for His own creation and redemption (6.3).
This act is not vaguely a choice for the creation and redemption of the world.
More precisely, it is the eternal-temporal divine-human decision of God to be
God for us in Jesus Christ (7.1). In this decision, God is elected by man insofar
as Christ as man obediently follows after His heavenly Father who has evoked
faith, love, and even a desire for union with and in Him. This faith, love, and
desire are in response to God’s eternal election of Himself as a man through
the eternal following after His Father by the Son of God. Moreover, this
election by Christ of God as His Father is, we suggested, the election of
Himself as God, since as the eternal Son of the Father He is the obedient
Subject who elects Himself as man and so ‘God for us’.
This divine-human dialectical activity is one divine-human event, both
freely and sovereignly pre-accomplished in the divine counsel of the Holy
Trinity, and also, through a withdrawing of the divine omnipotence, neces-
sarily temporally actualized in the revelation of Jesus Christ. Thus, Christ as
the God-man participates in His own constitution as a Subject by eternally
electing Himself as the Object of the love-desire of God, and faithfully and
necessarily confirming this prior act of God by electing God to be His God.
God would not have acted first creating and redeeming the world in Christ
unless He already always knew that His Son would as God and man faithfully
follow Him by entering into the far country. God in Christ is freely dependent
(F3) on man in Christ to confirm the eternal divine election in order that it
might be actualized and in this dependence He cannot act otherwise (N3).
This proposal gives us a slightly better idea of how a response to the
problematic of divine freedom and necessity might be expressed Christocen-
trically. The content of the act of Christ is election and its character is explicitly
divine-human, that is, a decision by God and man at once. But this only
responds to part of the question. Given the ambiguities of Barth’s actualism,
the relationship of the divine-human act to its ground in the life of the Trinity

and the relationship of God in Himself to the divine images/ideas/possibilities
(Bulgakov: 6.3) are both still unclear. Can the divine-human act of Christ be
freely necessary (F3) while there is also a true dependence of God on creation
(N3) if we cannot understand how we can say coherently that God as Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit both could (F3) and could not (N3) have ‘done other-
wise’, and both at once? In answering this question, we shall now explore
Barth’s dialecticism as the best explanation for the ambiguities of his
actualism.
Trinity, Freedom, and Necessity in

Karl Barth—A Dialectical Approach
There is an option which accounts for the ambiguities of Barthian actualism.

Barth purposely allowed logical inconsistency in his theology through his
dialecticism. He asserts, on the one hand, an eternal logos asarkos, implying
a Trinity existing in love in itself, with divine election as a sort of lesser
contingent eternity in which God is freely dependent on His creation in
suffering judgement for man (F3). On the other hand, he asserts that there
is no God in Himself, no depth of the Trinity in which one will not face Jesus,
since God subsists wholly in His electing act of being God for us in Jesus
Christ, an event which is characterized by its irrevocableness or free depend-
ence (N3). In this dialectic, Barth is arguably akin to Bulgakovian antinomism
in his response to the problematic, but, differently from Bulgakov, he focuses
on the free decision of Jesus of Nazareth.
8 . 1 DI A L E C T IC IS M AN D D I V IN E P O S S I B IL I T I E S
As is well known, Barth argued early on that theology must be dialectical. In a

lecture from late 1922, he describes three ways of attempting the impossible
possibility of speaking about God—dogmatism, self-criticism, and dialectic.
They are distinguishable only in theory, as in any theologian they are all
actively applied. He identifies, however, dialectic, which he calls the way of
Paul and the Reformers, as ‘intrinsically’ the best.1 In dialectic one has both
human affirmations and negations, and between them lies the unnameable
living truth that God becomes man. These affirmations and negations con-
stantly look away towards—but never independently—this living truth as their
common presupposition that gives them their proper meaning and signifi-
cance. However, man is still unable to speak about God, as the living centre is
1
Barth, ‘Word of God’ [1925], 200, 206 (see McCormack, CRDT, 307–14).
Trinity, Freedom, and Necessity in Karl Barth 143

inconceivable and unintuitable, not under human control, as all direct com-
munication concerning it—whether negative or positive—is not about it but
either dogma or self-criticism. Therefore, theology is called to make a virtue of
its helplessness. It must foreground the fact that it has no control over God’s
self-revelation in Jesus Christ, for only God can speak of God. Theology, in
short, must begin with its defeat. It can never properly speak about God.
Being in such a circumstance, Barth writes, is like being on a ‘narrow
ridge of rock’ where one can only keep walking but can never stand still or
one will certainly fall to the right or left.2 One must then keep walking, looking
from one side to the other in theology, from affirmations concerning the
mystery of God’s revelation in Christ to negations concerning that same
mystery and vice versa. We must relate the Yes and the No to one another
for clarification: ‘to relate both affirmation and negation to one another, to
clarify the yes by the no and the no by the yes, without persisting for longer
than a moment in a rigid yes or no’.3 In practice this means, as McCormack
put it, ‘the continuous negation of every theological statement through the
immediate affirmation of its opposite’.4 We can only right one error of
expression by another through what John Henry Newman called a ‘method
of antagonism’ in which we steady our minds not so to reach the object but to
‘point them in the right direction; as in an algebraical process we might add
and subtract in series, approximating little by little, by saying and unsaying, to
a positive result’.5
Barth gives a variety of examples of his method, including that when we
speak of God’s glory in creation, then we must immediately speak of His
hiddenness, and that when we speak of sin, it is only to point out that we
should not know it if it were not forgiven us. Dialectical method in theology,
he writes, believes that the question is the answer and the answer is the
question.6 Neither the affirmation nor the negation lays claim to being
God’s truth as such, but it is the best one can do, which is to witness ‘that
truth, which stands in the centre, between every Yes and No. And therefore
I have never affirmed without denying and never denied without affirming, for
neither affirmation nor denial can be final.’ Barth recognized that many would
bewail such thinking, calling it any number of things, including, interestingly,
given its importance for Bulgakov, the identity philosophy of Schelling. Such a
person, Barth says, will rebel against the positive position, then against the
negative, ‘and now against the “irreconcilable contradiction” between the
two’.7 One is reminded of Bulgakov’s antinomism, although Barth’s dialectic
is focused on the Word’s divine self-revelation.
2
Barth, ‘Word’, 207 and McCormack, CRDT, 311.
3
Barth, ‘Word’ in McCormack, CRDT, 311 (207 older trans.).
4 5
ibid., 311. Newman 1976, 102 and see Ware 1999, 11–25.
6
Barth, ‘Word’, 206–7. 7
ibid., 208–9.

Not only is Barth dialectical in the 1920s, for Church Dogmatics is also
deeply dialectical and we have discussed this theme earlier in the context of
analogy (see 7.2).8 Barth argues, for example in I/1 (1932), that because both
the divine content and secular form belong to the Word of God, it is impos-
sible to identify the Word of God—the living centre of his theology of the
1920s—by either the secular form in which the divine content veils itself or the
divine content without its secular form.9 Here the affirmation and negation of
the earlier dialectic are rearticulated in terms of an often intensely dizzying
veiling and unveiling of the Word of God in Christ. When the Word of God is
spoken to us, it, as the divine content, is at once only heard, that is, unveiled, in
its secularity or secular form in which it was said to us or veiled. But this is but
the first moment of the dialectic, for then at once it can also mean that we hear
it in its secular form as veiled but really hear it thus as unveiled. The Word’s
veiling can change for us into an unveiling, and its unveiling into a veiling, but
it is the same Word in itself. However, it is for us two distinct realities unless
we receive it as the one reality it is for God Himself by faith. One cannot ‘see’
the form and content at the same time so that one might compare them since
there is a fundamental ‘antithesis of form and content’, a distinction which
cannot be erased by us without losing the Word itself. How form and content
coincide is known only to God but not to us, since we can only see form
without content and content without form. No rational synthesis is possible of
the two, since faith ‘means recognizing that synthesis cannot be attained and
committing it to God and seeking and finding it in Him’.10 This means, quite
simply, that there never can be a wholly rationally consistent expression of the
mystery of God’s self-revelation. We only perceive this revelation under
different aspects, although by faith we know that these aspects are one reality
of the incarnate Word.
We are reminded here of Bulgakov’s ‘podvig of faith’ that holds the anti-
nomies together despite their conceptual contradiction.11 Methodologically,
Bulgakovian ‘antinomism’ and Barthian ‘dialecticism’ are little different. They
both aim to hold together in faith theological affirmations that appear on the
surface to contradict one another. Furthermore, their fundamental inspiration
is Jesus Christ understood as the One who, as the God-Man or God for us
become a fellow man, unites, without confusion or separation, divine and
human essences. Where their methodologies do differ is in their respective
theological presuppositions. The major differences here are: (a) Bulgakov’s
embrace of a form of metaphysics (sophiology) understood as a pondering of
the difference between God and the world in light of the union of uncreated
and created in the person of Christ, and Barth’s conscious rejection of all
8
See McCormack, CRDT, 312, 464–5, 2008b, 109–80, Cross 2001, and Oh 2006, 17–67.
9 10
McCormack, CRDT, 464–5. Barth, CD, I/1, 175.
11

forms of metaphysical thinking; (b) the nexus of Bulgakovian antinomism is in
the Patristic discourse on apophaticism and kataphaticism, whereas, with
Barth, it is within a discourse on Christ and eternal election; and (c) Bulgakov
assumes an ultimate ontological modalism or monism in his antinomism,
whereas, for Barth, there is a radical and eternal distinction between the
uncreated and the created. Both methods, despite these differences, arguably
share a central common difficulty when applied to our problematic of freedom
and necessity, which is their tendency to simply reiterate the problematic itself.
Both thinkers say in different ways that God is and is not bound to His
creation in Christ, and that creation and redemption both could and could
not have been otherwise. It is for this reason that perhaps (see 8.3, Part III)
dialectic/antinomy needs the methodological complement of analogy that we
hope can avoid the pitfall of a vicious circularity.
Returning to dialectic in Barth, one can now say that revelation, for Barth,
cannot mean in the slightest the loss of God’s mystery, because revelation is a
revelation of a mystery in which we apprehend God.12 Barth applied this
dialectic of veiling and unveiling, as a version of his earlier dialectic of
affirmation and negation, to his actualism. There is a ‘very special dialectic
of the revelation and Being of God’, he writes, where only in revealing Himself
does God conceal Himself. When God speaks and acts, then, His unutterable
omnipotence and eternity become real for us and ‘Only as He gives Himself
to us as the One who loves does He withdraw from us also in His holy
freedom.’13 God unveils Himself in revelation at once (affirmation) as being
in His essence ‘the One who loves us and who loves in Himself ’. He is the God
who eternally wills to be God for us in Jesus Christ, so that there is no depth of
the Godhead in which one does not find Christ, having given Himself with a
definitiveness that cannot be undone and so cannot be otherwise (N3). But
then at once in this unveiling He veils Himself (negation), for He is likewise
‘free, in His freedom, and therefore as the self-existent One, unconditioned by
anything else’.14 Being so free as Holy Trinity, He is free to will or not to
be God for us in Christ and so His free loving dependence (F3) could have
been otherwise.
The distinction, Barth argues, between God in Himself and God in relation
to the world cannot have an essential ‘but only a heuristic significance’. The
fact that God is known as unveiled to us and unknown as veiled to us,
affirmation and negation, at once the One who loves and at once the One
who is free, becomes clear to us in the distinction.15 However, neither of
the two ‘aspects’ by which we speak of God is ‘self-explanatory’. This is
reminiscent of the 1920s when Barth argued that the affirmation and negation
could not be independently referred to their centre in the incarnate Word.
12 13
See Barth, CD, I/1, 324 and II/1, 55, 194, 349. ibid., II/1, 348–9.
14 15
ibid., II/1, 349. ibid., II/1, 345.

Therefore, by the late 1930s, Barth holds that neither aspect by which we
speak of God can be simply assumed by itself, since both need to become clear
to us. This clarity only happens in the revelation in Christ by which God
moves from being in Himself as wholly free to His being in fellowship with us
as the One who has eternally willed to be God for us, ‘thus disclosing the truth
of both these aspects, not in the form of a separation but of a distinction, as the
same thing in distinguishable forms’.16 In other words, the two forms obtain
their meaning through their self-correcting reference to one another in refer-
ring to Christ in distinct forms: God in Himself as wholly free and God for
creation as the One who loves in His divine self-determination of election.
God’s definitive self-determination to be God for us in Christ, His Yes to us, is
a determination in which He has always willed Himself together with man.
Like Bulgakov, one can say that God would not be God without this relation
and that it cannot be otherwise (N3), and, adapting Barth, we can call it a
divine de facto necessity.17 Yet it is impossible to understand this ‘Yes’ to
creation in Christ without immediately turning dialectically to the ‘No’, the
veiling to the unveiling. Here the veiling is that this eternal self-giving in Christ
was wholly free and as a choice need not have been chosen (F3). God as Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit is love and a love which could well be satisfied with itself
alone or could have been otherwise. God does not need to become incarnate
and He would remain Trinity even without any divine election. In other
words, the dialectic of election and Trinity in Barth’s theology is a version of
the dialectic of divine freedom and necessity.
We have been arguing that if we approach the question of the interrela-
tionship of election and the Trinity dialectically, then when we say that God
eternally determines Himself to be God for us in Jesus Christ, and that in some
sense this could not have been otherwise (N3), we must immediately find
some way of seeing the free ground of this action. It was a real choice for God
and one that He need not have made and so could have been otherwise (F3).
Barth was able to express this side of the dialectic, that which emphasizes most
strongly divine freedom, through an analysis of the concrete character of
grace. Grace is a gift, a gift ‘in so far as the Giver, i.e., God Himself, makes
Himself the gift’,18 whose graciousness depends on the fact that it need not
have been given, because God’s gracious turning does not correspond to
anything performed by the partner to whom He turns and whom He gifts
with Himself.19 God need not give us Himself in Christ. If this fundamental
contingency did not exist, then our being loved by Him would be a product of
His essence and not grace as a gift that need not have been given.20 But if God
need not gift us with Himself, if He could have chosen otherwise than He has
in fact chosen in Christ, then this presumes that God indeed has other
16
ibid., II/1, 346. 17
See ibid., II/2, 7; compare I/1, 140: ‘factual necessity’.
18 19 20

‘options’. There exist other divine possibilities before Him other than His
being God for us in Christ. Here we wish, in a Barthian context, to build on the
Bulgakovian notion that certain images/ideas/possibilities of the economia
exist pre-accomplished in the divine life and then are actualized in creation
and redemption in Christ (see 6.3).
Barth presupposes throughout His work and explicitly but critically adapts
(rejecting nominalism)21 the traditional scholastic distinction, subsequently
appropriated in Lutheran and Reform theology,22 between potentia absoluta
and potentia ordinata.23 (This distinction is rejected by Bulgakov (6.1) and
Balthasar (11.3) because they identified it with nominalism.) Commenting on
Aquinas (ST, 1.25.5.1ad), Barth describes God’s potentia absoluta as the
infinite power or capacity of God when faced with ‘an infinity of very different
inward or even outward possibilities’ to do that which He can choose and do,
but does not have to choose and do, and might not actually so choose and do
because He does not want to choose and do it. The divine potentia ordinata is
the chosen power or capacity which God ‘does actually use and exercise in a
definite ordinatio’. Barth says explicitly that this distinction simply describes
the freedom of the divine omnipotence.24 The distinction emphasizes both
that God always freely chooses a particular capacity of power He applies to a
particular internal or external possibility and that this chosen power contrasts
with a different capacity (which could have been applied to a different
possibility) which He does not use but could use if He so wanted to choose it.
Barth adapts this distinction when He speaks of the difference between
God’s ‘omnipotence’ (Allmacht) and His ‘omnicausality’ or ‘all-embracing
activity’ (Allwirksamkeit).25 God in Himself possesses all power, or, is om-
nipotent being absolutely free. When, in His infinite love, He takes and binds
the other reality which is distinct from Him to Himself in His divine activity,
then is manifested that omnipotence in His work—in creation, reconciliation,
and redemption—as His omnicausality.26 Omnicausality, like potentia ordi-
nata, is a determinate application of God’s omnipotence or potentia absoluta.
Yet God does not cease to be God and omnipotent in Himself by this
application. Nor did God need to apply His omnipotence in sheer grace to
us as His omnicausality and so He does not lose anything by the application.
21
ibid., II/1, 539-42 (esp. 542).
22
See Oakley 2002, Heppe 1950, 103–4, and Schmid 1961, 127–9.
23
Barth, CD, II/1, 539 and see II/1, 532ff., 551–2, II/2, 606, and IV/1, 194. (See Bruce 2013,
ch. 5.)
24
Barth, CD, II/1, 539 [KD, II/1, 606]; Bruce (2013, 314) retranslates this passage. Barth
describes potentia absoluta as ‘the power of God to do what he in himself wants and can do
(wollen und tun kann), but also what he on the other hand does not want and have to do and
what he actually neither wants nor does’ and the potentia ordinata he describes thus: ‘God’s
actual power and therefore in a definite ordinatio used and exercised’ (KD, II/1, 606, following
Bruce 2013, 314); cf. Davaney 1986, 6–100, Case-Winters 1990, 97–126 (esp. 105–6).
25 26
Barth, CD, II/1, 528–9 [KD, II/1, 593–4]. CD, II/1, 528.

It could indeed have been otherwise. It is imperative that one does not make
the mistake of thinking that God’s omnipotence is ‘only as He actually does
what He does’, so that God is only God as He elects us in Christ. We need to
recognize the omnipotence in the omnicausality, the freedom of His love, so
that ‘Absolutely everything depends on whether we distinguish His omnipo-
tence from His omnicausality.’
Yet, and here is Barth’s dialectical turn back to what I have called de facto
necessity, in looking at the omnipotence in the omnicausality we must not look
to some unknown omnipotent Being beyond the work. God is present wholly
in that work as divine love and known to us by His self-revelation,27 so we can
say that ‘He is wholly our God, but He is so in the fact that He is not our
God only.’28 Thus, when viewed from the side of the dialectic emphasizing
freedom, the choice of God to be for us in Christ, as a determinate form of His
omnipotence, that is, His omnicausality in creation, redemption, and recon-
ciliation, is gracious (F3) or could have been otherwise. It is gracious precisely
because God’s lordship and the divine possibilities ‘before Him’ are anterior to
the actual choice of a chosen capacity of lordship applied to a particular internal
divine possibility involving created powers.29 Yet, turning to the other side of
the dialectic emphasizing necessity, God is wholly and eternally our God in this
determinate choice. One cannot go beyond it to some other power, as He has
chosen to be God for us and not Himself. Once made, the choice cannot have
been otherwise (N3). But, turning back again to the other side as one must, He
is so as not our God only, since He could have been otherwise (F3).
But how precisely is God the One who loves in freedom in Christ? Obedi-
ence. We have seen that man in Christ elects God in perfect obedience but we
also saw that this mirrored the Son of God’s perfect obedience to the Father in
electing man. What does this look like more precisely? Here Barth’s thought is
reminiscent of the intratrinitarian kenosis of Bulgakov evoked as the life of
God as Absolute, Holy Trinity, and we have argued that both forms of
kenoticism (in God and towards the world) can be characterized by the axis
F3–N3. Barth argues (7.3) that God in Himself as Trinity, the One who loves
in freedom, the perfectly united and co-equal Godhead, includes, ‘without any
cleft or differentiation’, a form of eternal humility enacted in obedience.30 In
this eternal act of obedience, the Father commands as the First (prius, super-
iority, the One, etc.) and the Son obeys in humility as the Second (posterius,
subordination, the Other, etc.), with the Spirit as the Third ‘who affirms the
one and equal Godhead through and by and in the two modes of being’.31 This
27 28 29
30
‘it belongs to the inner life of God that there should take place within it obedience’ (ibid.,
IV/1, 201).
31
ibid., IV/1, 201–2 and see 192ff.; here we see Christology, Trinity, and Election converging:
McCormack 2008b, 201–33 (tacit response to Hunsinger 2000 and responded to by Molnar

natural divine lowliness,32 which is the eternal free love of God beyond all
‘subordinationism’, what we have called a synthesis of dependent freedom
(F3) and free dependence (N3), is the foundation for ‘the self-emptying and
self-humbling of Jesus Christ as an act of obedience’.33 It can be expressed in
terms of our axis. Here Barth echoes Bulgakov where the intratrinitarian
kenosis, structured by our axis, is the foundation of the exinanitio of the
whole Trinity in creation and redemption and, above all, Christ Himself, a
supreme self-emptying that is characterized by F3–N3.
Christ, for Barth, obeys His Father by going into the far country as the
omnipotent divine judge, God in the flesh, the divine bearer of our sins, the
one suffering the consequences of man’s just judgement (‘the judged’). By
entering into our contradiction with God, He bore our sins away, so elimin-
ating our liability to be judged.34 This specific obedience is not a capricious or
accidental choice for self-humiliation but ‘a free choice made in recognition of
an appointed order’ or divine taxis of following after the authoritatively
imposed will of His Father.35 Put in terms of our terminology, the life of
God in the economy, as F3–N3, is the perfect expression of the life of God in
Himself as Trinity, which is structured by the same axis.
We can now understand how Christ’s act of obedience in suffering and
dying for us, the act of atonement accomplished in Him, is not only a natural
human act but also a natural divine act. In Christ’s act of obedience there is a
common actualization of the two natures (communicatio operationum) where
‘The divine expresses and reveals itself wholly in the sphere of the human, and
the human serves and attests the divine.’36 Thus, every act in the work of
Christ is ‘at one and the same time, but distinctly, both divine and human’.37
Given this divine-human character of the free loving obedience of Christ in
doing the work of His Father, we cannot see the free act of suffering and dying
effected by Christ, the atonement made in Him, as an accidental event of
nature or destiny. This echoes Bulgakov with his account of the ‘inevitability’
of the way of the cross as an expression of the eternal ‘cruciform’ life of the
Trinity.38 Christ’s self-sacrifice, for Barth, has a certain necessity that derives
from the ‘inner necessity of the freedom of God’:39 ‘Jesus cannot go any
other way than this way into the depths, into the far country.’40 Jesus,
therefore, is free as God Himself is free insofar as He is the one who ‘executes
the resolve and will of the free love of God’, which is to covenant Himself to
man in Christ.41
2010a and 2014: now critiquing Barth: esp. 59–64), McCormack 2006, 2011, Jones 2011, Tolliday
2011, and Swain and Allen 2013.
32 33 34
Barth, CD, IV/1, 192. ibid., IV/1, 193. ibid., II/2, 156 and IV/1, 235.
35 36 37
ibid., IV/1, 193. ibid., IV/2, 115. ibid., IV/2, 116.
38 39
Bulgakov, AB, 368 [LG, 338]. Barth, CD, IV/1, 195; cf. ibid., 213 and 239.
40 41
ibid., IV/1, 194. ibid., II/2, 605 and see 606.

Once the Father orders something (e.g. the Passion), it is executed in
obedience by His Son, as the divine fulfilment of a divine decree, which
must take place. It must take place because the freedom of God is at one
with His necessity and this is manifested in His acts so that the fulfilment of
the divine decree will and must take place, and ‘There is no possibility of
something quite different happening.’42 Barth tells us that once God chooses
His chosen capacity of power, the particular divine possibility of being God for
us in Christ, it is a relation ad extra to creation, which is ‘irrevocable, so that
once God has willed to enter into it, and has in fact entered into it, He could
not be God without it’. We cannot know and have God in any other way but in
Jesus Christ, so that apart from Him, God would be an ‘alien God’, since
‘according to the Christian perception’ God is God ‘only in this movement, in
the movement towards this man, and in Him and through Him towards other
men in their unity as His people’. God is God necessarily but freely only as
Jesus Christ, since ‘Without the Son sitting at the right hand of the Father, God
would not be God. But the Son is not only very God. He is also called Jesus of
Nazareth.’43
It will be clear by now that if the act of Christ in choosing the way of the
cross is a divine-human act, then it must be identified with God’s eternal
determination of Himself as the covenanting God in Christ. Christ goes into
the far country and God determines Himself in Him through the application
of a definite capacity of power (potentia ordinata) in the choice of a definite
divine possibility amongst ‘an infinity of very different inward or even out-
ward possibilities’.44 Thus, we are told that in Christ obediently entering into
His passion, there is no chance of His being controlled by caprice or chance,
since His freedom corresponds ‘to the potentia ordinata which is the real
freedom and omnipotence of God’45 and because by this ordered power ‘He
acts in the freedom of God making use of a possibility grounded in the being of
God’ which is to be the covenanting God.46 In short, God’s determination of
Himself in free love as God for us is enacted in the divine-human freedom of
Jesus Christ crucified and risen, since ‘There is no such thing as a will of God
apart from the will of Jesus Christ.’47 The divine-human act is certainly a free
act of love, and so we must say it could have been otherwise (F3), but it has a
retrospective or de facto necessity by the eternal act of God, and so, dialect-
ically, we must say that it could not have been otherwise (N3). In looking at
what God has done in, by, and with the will of Christ, we must say ‘it had to be
so’,48 it is certain, assured, and without question,49 but only on the basis of the
accomplishment of God’s decision, which affirms ‘It is finished’ (Jn. 19:32).
This is Barth’s version of the basic evangelical cry of gratitude: ‘Blessed
42 43 44
ibid., IV/1, 195 and see II/1, 527. ibid., II/2, 7. ibid., II/1, 539.
45 46 47
48 49
ibid., II/1, 401–2; cf. IV/1, 213. See ibid., II/2, 115–116.

assurance, Jesus is mine!’50 This whole book, in a way, is simply a contem-
porary Orthodox restatement of this hymn.
Yet there still remains a difficulty. God has chosen His Being and we are told
that with respect to the world God need not have chosen in the way that He
did in fact choose. We know, of course, He has the absolute divine power
(potentia absoluta) to so choose and will still remain true to Himself as the
One who loves in freedom.51 It then appears that there exists and may yet be
revealed some unrevealed, wholly unknown, and even contradictory aspect of
God other than that given to us in Christ. In other words, despite his protests
to the contrary, Barth’s dialecticism, when combined with the notion of divine
self-determination, opens up the possibility that God may not be just Deus
revelatus but also an essentially different or contradictory Deus absconditus.
8.2 D E FACT O NECESSITY AND DIVINE FREEDOM
The ‘Christological concentration’52 of Barth’s theology required him to

rethink what theology generally means by necessity and freedom. He did
this in light of a Trinitarian dialectic where God is at once the God who
primarily wills Himself, then graciously wills to be God for us in Christ and at
once is God as Holy Trinity only as the God who is for us in Christ. Following
Molnar, in Barth there are at least two senses of divine freedom.53 First, God is
free in the ‘negative’ sense that he lacks any constraints other than those He
chooses in the freedom of His love. Thus, God is free to create the world
because He is under no external or internal constraint or necessity to create it.
This is, as it were, a version of F2 that affirms itself by negating the N1 exerted
by the world. Barth, however, was also concerned with articulating the ‘posi-
tive’ relation of creation to God’s being as the One who loves in freedom. He
therefore envisioned a second ‘positive’ understanding of freedom. Barth did
not want God to be trapped in Himself, unable to take flesh as Jesus Christ.
God must be ‘free also with regard to His freedom’.54 He argues, accordingly, that
God is love, containing true otherness in Himself,55 the freedom as Trinity to
differentiate himself from Himself, and that this His freedom is in being a God of
love (F2).56 However, these two understandings of freedom work together, as
Barth emphasizes that God is free both to take flesh and to be God for
us, although He need not have done this act (F3). Yet Barth, as we also have
50
Crosby, ‘Blessed Assurance’, #24.
51
See Barth CD, II/1, 401, I/1, 434, II/1, 280, 283, 306, and IV/2, 40.
52 53
How I Changed My Mind, 43. Molnar 2007, 214.
54 55
Barth, CD, II/1, 303. See ibid., III/1, 196 and II/1, 462, 470, and 473.
56
ibid., I/1, 319–20.

seen, does not thereby exclude divine necessity but sees it in a dialectical
relationship with divine freedom.
Barth also has at least two senses of divine necessity. God, above all, is God
immutably in that He has a suberabundant loving life as Holy Trinity and He
cannot cease to be such. This is what we have referred to as inner necessity
(N2) and it coincides with God’s life of loving freedom (F2). God is not the
slave of His own immutable life, the bondservant of His necessary existence,
which is the ‘inscrutable concrete element in His essence, inscrutable because
it never ceases or is exhausted’. He controls this life and is bound to the objects
He chooses to know and love insofar as He binds Himself, and in binding He
binds irrevocably.57 This means that we cannot ascribe only necessity to the
being and essence of God and exclude a radical freedom, a divine contingency,
since ‘There is in God both supreme necessity and supreme contingency’ or a
synthesis of F2 with N2. This latter element is the divine will which is ‘not
limited by any necessity’ of the divine essence, since what God is and does must
be understood as His will.58 But since, as we have seen, what God is and does is
His will, then when He acts in election with a supremely dependent freedom
(F3), He acts simultaneously with a supremely free dependence/necessity,
binding Himself in the act (N3) which is our second sense of necessity.
We are given a sense of this tension in a characteristically dialectical
passage: ‘God is not bound to the world. He binds Himself! The covenant is
His eternal will, but His free will.’59 Of course, as we have been at great pains to
show, this must be understood dialectically, since if God eternally binds
Himself, then He is in some sense always already bound, but we still want to
say, to maintain the dialectic, that He is freely bound. God loves us, then, from
one side of the dialectic, as one who would still be ‘the One who loves in
freedom’ without us and without the world. We are, therefore, taken up into
God’s eternal love for Himself. God does not need creation as an object
different from Himself to love Himself because He is sufficient to Himself as
an object to be loved. God has decided from sheer grace to consider us lovable
because He could have just as well decided that we were unlovable. God’s
Being is His own and since His Being is His act of loving Himself, we say that
He is free in Himself both in not being conditioned by what He creates
(transcendence) and in revealing Himself in love as one conditioned—‘He
can and will also be conditioned’60—as God with us, Jesus Christ (immanence).
This is reminiscent of Bulgakov, where God is said to be both ‘transcendentally
immanent or immanently transcendent’.61 The theological picture we have been
drawing is, therefore, one where God’s immutability, because it is His act of
Being, cannot be thought of as a static essence. It is something like a divine
57 58
ibid., II/1, 547–8. ibid., II/1, 548.
59 60
Table Talk, 14 and compare CD, II/1, 260. ibid., II/1, 303.
61

eternal becoming or, as Jüngel famously put it, a Being which is in becoming.62
We shall later see that this notion is appropriated by Balthasar, who writes of a
divine ‘Super Becoming’.63 Likewise, Barth’s idea is not dissimilar to Bulgakov’s
Sophia/ousia as ipostasnost’ which is an actus purissimus, an eternal active-
passive capacity for ceaseless self-giving and personification without danger of
God ceasing to be Himself or a Hegelian notion that God had to come to
Himself in history as there was an eternal divine ‘lack’. Barth refers to this idea
as the ‘holy mutability’ of God, where His constancy consists in the fact that ‘He
is always the same in every change.’64 This means that He remains the same
even when He takes flesh because He is ‘eternally new’ in Himself possessing an
‘immutable vitality’.65 It is against this background that the divine possibilities
from which God chooses need to be thought or God will end up looking
capricious, and such theology, as Bulgakov noted, is in danger of anthropocen-
tric ‘occasionalism’.66
However, Barth also has another second understanding of divine necessity
which is what we have called de facto, and is something like our N3. De facto
necessity differs from what Barth knew as coercive necessity (necessitas coac-
tionis), which is a necessity where one is externally impelled to do a particular
action (N1). This cannot be applied to the fact that God determines Himself in
Christ ‘because it was His free good-pleasure to do so’.67 Barth continually
talks about God’s freedom as not capricious or arbitrary, but as having an
‘inner necessity’.68 God’s lordship or freedom is God’s own and is not dictated
from the outside and is ‘conditioned by no higher necessity than that of His
own choosing and deciding, willing and doing’.69 He means by God’s freedom
having an ‘inner necessity’70 that once God chooses (or more precisely:
continually is choosing) the divine capacity we know in Christ, everything in
reality has a retrospective or de facto divine necessity.71
The force of the de facto necessity of which we write is directly traceable to
the fact of the act of God’s eternal free choice in love to faithfully covenant
Himself with us in Christ through His own divine self-election. One cannot get
behind, at least from the side of the dialectic emphasizing necessity, this
eternal choice of God to reveal Himself in Jesus Christ, to some naked Logos
asarkos.72 Thus, if one wants to take this necessity entirely seriously, then one
must say that God as a God of love had to create the world in Christ in a free
dependence (N3), echoing Bulgakov. However, one cannot say this factual or
62
See Jüngel 2001, 75–123, esp. 114–16.
63 64
Balthasar, Presence and Thought [1942], 153. Barth, CD, II/1, 496.
65 66
ibid., II/1, 500, 512. Bulgakov, NA, 37–8 [BL, 31–2].
67 68
Barth, CD, II/1, 518; cf. I/1, 434. ibid., IV/1, 195; cf. ibid., 213 and 239.
69
ibid., II/1, 301.
70
See Bruce 2013, ch. 5, McCormack, 2010b, 64, 2013, 123–4, Hector 2005, 261, 2009, 3–4,
2012, and Diller 2013.
71 72
Compare T. F. Torrance 2000, 21–2, 57, 103 and 1978, 66. Barth, CD, II/1, 321.

de facto necessity could not have been otherwise without at once returning to
the other part of our dialectic, dependent freedom (F3), where God could have
done otherwise. God, therefore, wills before all times to become, in time, Jesus
of Nazareth, God for us. God in Himself is then defined eternally as the Father
of Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and the Spirit of
Jesus Christ.73 Therefore, from one side of the dialectic, one cannot think of
God who wills Himself apart from man whom He has chosen in Jesus Christ.74
Barth critically identifies what I have called de facto necessity75 with the
traditional Protestant notion of an immutable divine necessity (necessitas
immutabilitatis) of the freedom of God’s love, which Barth sees as the free,
gracious, and revealed will of God in Christ.76 God’s immutable necessity is
the necessity that accrues to the divine economy in Christ after the fact of its
‘decree’ by God as His eternal internal act. Of course, as was said earlier, from
the side of the dialectic emphasizing necessity, if the act is eternal and
absolutely effected, then there never was a ‘time’ when God was not enacting
His decree of election. Taken consistently, it is a mistake to speak of an after in
after the fact, as this implies a point before the fact. The eternal internal act of
divine election is identical to the revealed divine will of grace but distinct ‘in
the concreteness which it has by its relation with the created world’ from the
nature of God itself. Since everything that happens in reality happens in
accordance with or corresponds to the ‘one unalterable divine will’, we are
‘bound . . . and cannot ignore it or live without it’.77 God freely wills to be with
us in Christ and so we must acknowledge in Him ‘unalterably the grace of
God, but it is also unalterably His will and command and ordinance’.78 To
underline the unity of the two acts from the side of the dialectic which
emphasizes necessity, Barth is actually using here the very same term (neces-
sitas immutabilitatis) he had earlier used for the immanent act of the Father
begetting the Son in order to distinguish it from the economic act of His
creation of the world.79 As we have argued earlier, when Barth does attempt to
express the difference between the two acts, returning to the other side of the
dialectic emphasizing freedom, he speaks of an abstract ‘superiority’ of God’s
freedom and love in the immanent act as distinguished from the ‘grace’ of the
economic act.80 It is abstract because we are saying nothing concrete when we
say that, although we only have God in Christ, this need not have been the
case, when it is in fact the case! Yet in order to retain some vestige of freedom
the assertion must stand. The matter is further complicated, dialectically, by
saying that both acts have an ‘immutable’ necessity when the first immanent
act cannot but be the case (i.e. God cannot not be God), whereas the second
73
ibid., II/2, 115. 74
ibid., II/2, 169. 75
ibid., I/1, 140: ‘factual necessity’.
76
ibid., II/1, 518 and see 522; see Schmid 1961, 181–4 and Heppe 1950, 137ff, 144–5.
77 78 79
Barth, CD, II/1, 518–19. ibid., II/1, 519. ibid., I/1, 434.
80
ibid., I/1, 433.

economic act is the case, but need not be the case, although we can say
retrospectively that ‘it had to be so’.81 Clearly, if Barth was aiming
for terminological consistency, as McCormack and his critics both seem to
believe, necessitas immutabilitatis can only be properly applied to the first
immanent rather than to the second economic act, since only the first act can
never in fact change or be otherwise.
8.3 E LECTION AND DIALECTIC I N

TRINITARIAN THEOLOGY
Barth argues, from the side of the dialectic which emphasizes necessity, that if
God’s willing of Himself is bound up with His choice of man in Jesus Christ,
then this requires creation to exist as Calvin’s ‘theatre of God’s glory’:82 ‘God’s
glory is what he does in the world, but in order to do what he does, he must
have this theatre, this place and realm—heaven and earth, creation, the
creature, man himself.’83 Indeed, creation is said to be in the will of God the
‘External Basis of the Covenant’, this covenant with man in Christ being
determinative of God’s Being, but more importantly in the divine decree the
‘Covenant is the Internal Basis of Creation’.84 In other words, creation does
not exist independently of God’s reconciliation of man with Himself, but it is,
as it were, spiritually instrumental by providing the means by which God
might redeem us: ‘Creation is the natural ground for redemption, and
redemption is the spiritual ground of creation.’85 Therefore, since Jesus Christ,
the Word made flesh, is in ‘God’s eternal counsel [Ratschluß: decree, decision,
resolution] in the freedom of His love’, it becomes divinely necessary for God
to be Creator, although ‘To be sure, there was no other necessity than that of
His own love.’86 God simply must be the Creator of the world if He is to love
that creation eternally in Jesus Christ: ‘If by the Son or the Word of God we
understand concretely Jesus, the Christ, and therefore very God and very man,
as He existed in the counsel [Ratschluß] of God from all eternity and before
creation, we can see how far it was not only appropriate and worthy but
necessary that God should be Creator.’87 Creation, in Jesus Christ as the
elector and the elect, would then seem to have a necessary (de facto) relation
to the will and being of God. God has determined Himself to be God for us in
81 82
ibid., II/1, 401. Calvin 1997, 97.
83
Barth, ‘Theological Dialogue’ [1962], 172.
84
CD, III/1, 94ff. and 228ff.; cf. Balthasar, KB, 121ff. and Webster 2004a, 94–112.
85
Barth, ‘Dialogue’, 172 and see Gunton 2000, 156.
86
Barth, CD, III/1, 51—revd: translator has qualified ‘love’ by ‘free’ contrary to KD, III/1, 54;
see Bruce 2013, 366 for a new translation.
87
Barth, CD, III/1, 51 [KD, III/1, 54].

Christ but to be such He must be the Creator of the world, for if there is no
world, then there can be no Christ (N3).
Yet as Creator He exists, Barth writes, only together ‘with this One who also
exists as a man’ whose ‘life-action is identical with that of God Himself, His
history with the divine history’ but each and every thing in creation likewise
exists together with Christ. This leads us to the unavoidable consequence that
God, to be God as He determines Himself, must be the Creator. As Creator, He
must be eternally in Christ with us, since He exists with the world ‘in an
inviolable and indissoluble co-existence and conjunction’.88 This means quite
simply that, like Bulgakov before him, Barth argues that the world is an external
necessity for God (N1), which then becomes an internal necessity (N2), on one
side of the dialectic, but, on the other side, it is not a necessity at all.
God’s self-determination for us in Christ allows for no independent doc-
trines of creation and providence and of anthropology outside a creation
grounded in the covenant and a humanity that is restored in Christ as the
second Adam.89 The one doctrine remaining dialectically free of this form of
Christocentrism is the doctrine of God, specifically in regard to the teaching
concerning the immanent Trinity. Barth appears to have felt that he had at
once to bind the doctrine of God to the doctrine of election and, at once, in
contrast, to release the immanent Trinity from this Christological concentra-
tion. He did this in order that God’s own self-determination in Christ would
be free grace rather than His self-completion in creation. God is not tied to us
as His object90 and God freely loves us as He loves Himself as an object even if
we did not exist as an object different from Him to love.91 Barth, therefore,
refuses to wholly identify the Logos ensarkos and the Logos asarkos. More
precisely, he refuses to deny that God is Logos asarkos and that there is not
some (although abstract) internal divine possibility that He could be not the
Word incarnate.92 If Barth had simply, without a dialectical assertion to the
contrary, identified the immanent and economic Trinity, then that would
mean that the ontological possibility that God need not have been with us in
Christ would be eliminated and with it, he believed, the freedom of God as
Trinity and the character of grace as a gift which need not have been given.93
The Being of God would have been turned from free love into a ‘world-
principle’.94 God in Christ, as free grace, is, to borrow a line from T. S. Eliot,
‘more distant than stars and nearer than the eye’.95
McCormack claims an ‘inconsistency’ in Barth’s actualism in regard to the
relationship between the immanent Trinity and divine election (see 7.1).96
88 89 90
CD, IV/3, 39–40. See McCormack, CRDT, 454. Barth, CD, II/2, 6.
91 92 93
94
ibid., II/1, 321; cf. IV/1, 187 and see Alan Torrance 2000, 87.
95
Eliot, ‘Marina’, l.19, 72.
96
See McCormack 2007, 77, 2008a, 211–12, 2010a, 220–1, and 2013, 114ff.

McCormack’s judgement is certainly prima facie accurate insofar as Barth
simultaneously asserts the necessity and the contingency of the economic
Trinity. However, it is arguable that Barth’s ‘inconsistency’ was born neither
of ignorance nor of timidity but of an attempt to articulate what he saw as the
nature of grace. Grace is both a free gift that need not have been given and the
divine givenness of love, which has a de facto necessity, as it is God Himself
(F3–N3). Barth retained, therefore, even at the cost of dogmatic coherence, as
one moment of his dialectic, some notion of the immanent Trinity. Without
such a notion, even if largely abstract, one cannot say, as Molnar has shown,
that God is free to choose or not to choose to be our gracious Redeemer.97
Barth argues simultaneously and dialectically that one must not refer to the
Logos asarkos, the Word of God in the abstract (i.e. one must not attempt to
know God apart from Jesus Christ), and that the Logos asarkos and Logos
ensarkos are not one and the same.98 God is God in His act of choosing to be
God with us but we cannot claim that this act needed to happen. He could
have chosen another divine possibility based on another divine capacity of
omnipotence or indeed any of the ‘infinity of very different inward or even
outward possibilities’.99 Yet He did not and, returning to the other side of the
dialectic, we cannot know God other than the God who gives Himself to us in
His love in Jesus Christ and we need not fear that He can be otherwise. He has
eternally determined that He will be no other God than the God who loves
us freely but necessarily in Christ. Barth’s response to the problematic, there-
fore, is very similar to Bulgakov’s antinomy between the Absolute and the
Absolute-Relative with the Absolute being in the Absolute-Relative, immanent
in the economic Trinity. It is to affirm in faith a unity between the different
sides of the Trinitarian dialectic that God could and could not have acted
otherwise in divine election.
But where do we now stand in our quest to construct a contemporary
response to the dialectic of divine freedom and necessity? And where do we
still have to go? In chapters 6 and 7, we came to see that any response to the
problematic must begin with God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. However,
we only receive this divine content in its secular form, not in its naked divine
objectivity, so we must begin with the event in which Christ obediently but
freely follows His Father into the far country. This event is the action in which
He elects, chooses, and decides that God shall be His God. But in contemplat-
ing this movement we then come to see that it is not only a human movement
but also a divine one. Christ would not have followed His Father and chosen
Him as His own God and Father unless He had always already been called by
the Father to elect Himself as man, and, in electing, specifying Himself to be
this particular man, Jesus of Nazareth. Christ’s following after the Father in
97
cf. Molnar 2002, 62–4, 150ff., 274–7, 312ff., and 2003, 59–66.
98 99
Barth, CD, IV/1, 52. ibid., II/1, 539.

choosing Him as His God and in electing Himself as a man was a freely
obedient action both temporally and eternally—following Barth and here
echoing Bulgakov’s notion of intratrinitarian kenosis—and such an action is
one divine-human action as there is one person of Christ. Moreover, it is a
freely obedient action because Christ totally depends on the Father in a
dependent freedom (F3) in giving Himself totally to Him. Yet Christ cannot
turn back from His way into the far country, so the action has a certain
necessity or free dependence (N3). Thus, these two actions, involving two
wills and two energies, are (in faith) unified as one divine-human activity of
God electing man (anterior) and man electing God (posterior) in Jesus Christ,
both of which are structured by our axis. We must avoid at all costs any hint of
Nestorianism, for there is a union in this divine-human activity of the one
person of Christ of the supratemporal and temporal.
It is here that we need to take a certain conceptual leap that at first may
seem as if we are confusing the uncreated and the created. If it is Christ Himself
who elects God to be His God and Father and it is Christ again who for the
Father elects Himself to be man as God for us, and this one divine-human
election is done in dependent freedom and free dependence (F3–N3), then in
some sense, as was suggested earlier, Christ as man also elects Himself as God.
This means that (a) election would seem to be a Trinitarian reality; (b) election
must involve some sort of divine kenosis in relationship to creation; and
(c) that somehow creation comes to participate graciously in this Triune reality
while still remaining created and God still remaining uncreated.
Let us examine divine kenosis in relationship to creation. If it is Christ
Himself who has elected Himself as man and Christ Himself who has elected
Himself as God, as the Son of the Father, then we see as in an antinomy/
dialectic that the anterior action, since it is God’s eternal self-determination to
be God for us in Christ, is necessarily eternally but freely dependent on the
posterior action (F3–N3). This posterior action is that man in Christ receives
the anterior action in joy and faithfulness and obediently elects Himself as His
God. Building on a point made earlier (7.3), God, from all eternity in a divine
kenosis of His Triune being, looks to see if man in Christ will receive His own
divine election. Therefore, God’s anterior initiation is freely dependent (F3) on
the fact of man’s creation and free posterior response to God. This is a ‘risk’, as
man in Christ may refuse to follow the will of the Father, to which God is
utterly committed (N3). Thus, God will only create and redeem the world
based on the free assent of man in Christ.
This means, echoing Bulgakov and Barth, that in anticipation of the act of
Christ all the acts of the divine economy are pre-accomplished in the Holy
Trinity as images/ideas/possibilities but necessarily temporally actualized and
revealed in the event of Jesus Christ, God for us. Furthermore, if God is to be
God as Jesus Christ, then once God chooses to be God for us in Christ, then,
following Barth, it is de facto necessary that creation exist as the theatre of His

glory, and if it is necessary that creation exist so that Christ might be born of
the Theotokos, then how much more necessary after the fact is it that God is
Creator. Christ’s divine-human activity is an obedient action not only
humanly but also divinely. The Son eternally and freely, with a love-desire
that is both freely dependent and irrevocable (F3–N3), follows the Father in
complete self-giving. But this action, understood from its divine initiation, is
an action where God out of a radical free ecstatic love has thrown Himself at
the mercy of His own creation and awaits its response. Here there are clearly
various conceptual problems to which we shall return in subsequent chapters.
The most significant of these is how there can be any ‘risk’ or ‘awaiting’ if God
knows the result of the act before it is committed.
If the Son is responding to His Father eternally in electing Himself as man,
then how are we to conceptualize this in a Trinitarian way? One possibility is
to say that this movement of the Son electing Himself as man is in response to
His own eternal begetting by the Father who has called Him forth for self-
giving obedience through the Father’s own complete donation of Being in
begetting Him. This whole movement of a begetting which is a calling forth of
obedient love and a loving obedience in response is bound together through
the Father’s Spirit who proceeds from Him and rests on the Son. What we are
moving towards, building on both Bulgakov and Barth, is that if Christ as a
human being in electing God as His God embodies the axis F3–N3 and this
axis is also plausibly found expressed in the eternal Son’s election of Himself as
a man, we can surely see election itself as something distinctive about God in
Himself that is then expressed economically.
One can, therefore, make a case that the F3–N3 axis seen in Christ’s election
of God as a man, and of the Son’s election of Himself as a man is, going way
beyond Barth, founded on the life of the immanent Trinity as Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit in dependent freedom (F3) and free dependence (N3) understood
as a ‘primordial divine election’. In such an eternal election of the immanent
Trinity, each of the hypostases in free self-giving love elects the Other as its
very own and receives its own election by the Other. The life of God in Himself
as a primordial divine election, structured by our axis, is then expressed in the
‘divine-human (world-oriented) election’ where God, with a dependent free-
dom and a free dependence (F3–N3), elects Himself as a man in Christ and
man elects God in Christ. Divine-human election in Christ, embodying the
F3–N3 axis, is an ‘external’ expression of the primordial ‘internal’ relations of
the Holy Trinity where self-election takes the form of a free loving self-
bestowal of personhood. Put differently, just as Athanasius says that the Son
is what is proper or of its own (idios)100 to the Father’s essence and that then
graciously God in taking flesh made what is not His own proper to Himself
100
e.g. Athanasius, AA, 1.16.1, l.2, 2.2, 125, 178–9, and 3.6.2, ll.5–6, 312; see Louth 1989.

(idiopoioumenou),101 so too we can speak of a primordial self-election which is
proper to God in His essence and a gracious divine-human election which is
not proper to Him but which is made proper to Him, thereby making creation
His own. This divine ‘enownment’ of creation, to adapt Heidegger’s notion of
Ereignis (see ch. 3), happens through God in Christ eternally electing Himself
as a man and man in Christ electing God as His God, which divine-human
election, the enowning of God and the enowning of creation in Christ, is then
retrospectively identified with the primordial election proper to God. This
enowning makes creation God’s own, while remaining wholly itself. Divine-
human election comes to have a retroactive power102 over all of creation and
God Himself but only because God eternally condescends to allow it to have
power over Him. How we can conceive of this retroactivity of divine-human
election will be discussed in the Conclusion.
Thus, we begin to see how Christology, while undoubtedly intensifying the
problematic of divine freedom and necessity, actually might hint at a context
in which F3 and N3 can be held together both in the life of the Trinity and in
the life of the world. God’s divine self-determination via election is a freely
gracious act at once dialectically utterly definitive and wholly contingent, and
so in no way is an arbitrary or ‘Pickwickian’ act,103 but yet a wholly natural
expression of who God is as an eternally self-electing Trinity. If we ask what
‘nature’ lies behind God’s self-choice to be for us in Christ, we can reply that it
consists in His eternally choosing Himself as Father, Son, and Spirit, so that
divine election is simply an expression of the divine Being as love-desire.
Furthermore, since divine-human election is a free gracious self-expression of
a primordial divine election necessary for God to be God and divine-human
election participates in the reality of this initial act, then we can speak
dialectically at once of God being able to choose otherwise in His self-
determination and not being able to choose otherwise. Our proposal, in
short, is that the antinomy (Bulgakov) or dialectic (Barth) of freedom and
necessity is a problematic which cannot be rationally explained, but which
might be made more cogent by the identification of election in eternity with
election in the history of Jesus of Nazareth. We shall return to the interrela-
tionship of these two elections below.
The clear danger of what we are suggesting is that we have too closely
aligned the eternal processions with the act of God’s eternal self-determination
for us in Christ, thereby risking collapsing the immanent and the economic
Trinity, and jeopardizing the divine freedom! Bulgakov and Barth have shown
us that one way to extricate ourselves from this dilemma is to speak of this
101
Athanasius, AA, 3.33.3, l.12, 344, and Incarnation, 8.24–5.
102
See Pannenberg, SysTh, 2: 303, n. 92, 345, 365, 1968, 135ff., 141, 224, 230, 321–3,
Moltmann, TK, 160, Jüngel 1983, 363, and T. F. Torrance 2006, 102 and 1996, 204.
103
K. Ward 1996, 177–9.

whole movement dialectically or antinomically and, following Barth, to speak
of God’s divine self-election, what we have called His divine-human election,
as one of the infinite possibilities/images/ideas of the divine life. Indeed,
divine-human election might be regarded as a divine possibility which is
itself the quintessence of the whole salvation drama of the cross, tomb, the
resurrection on the third day, the ascension into heaven, the sitting at the
right hand, and the second and glorious coming again. Thus, God in Christ
takes up and actualizes possibilities that are already always ‘pre-accomplished’
(see 6.3) in the Trinity, one of which is divine self-election. What this ‘pre-
accomplishment’ might mean will be unpacked in later chapters. However, as
we mentioned earlier, constant recourse to dialectic or antinomy seems to
simply reiterate the problematic. At the extreme, it appears one must say at
one and the same time that God and world are mutually self-defining, a tacit
pantheism characteristic of the worst excesses of sophiology, and that God is
an abstract reality in Himself. We then anthropomorphize this abstraction by
conceiving of God having various options, almost as costumes, which He can
or cannot try on for size, one of which is to be God for the world in Christ.
This seems to transform God as Trinity into the apotheosis of capriciousness.
Is there a way out of this dilemma?
Perhaps the very problem with our argument up till now is (ironically) its
methodological one-sidedness. We have focused exclusively on a dialectical
response to our problematic which simply magnifies the mystery of God’s
simultaneous identification with us and difference from us in Christ. What,
then, may be needed is some form of theological methodology that acknow-
ledges a simultaneous and enduring similarity and dissimilarity. This will
include an identity-in-difference between the uncreated and the created
which is not the same as a vacillation between sheer identity and stark
difference between God and creation. Such a method can be seen perhaps in
analogy. To follow through on this suggestion, let us turn to our last dialogue
partner, Hans Urs von Balthasar, with his notion of Christ as the concrete
analogy of Being.
Part III
Jesus Christ and the Trinitarian
Appropriation of the Dialectic of
Freedom and Necessity in Hans
Urs von Balthasar
The Metaphysics of Love—Four Steps
In the last two sections of our work, we came up against a methodological

‘wall’ of sorts in articulating a contemporary response to our problematic. We
have understood our problematic as the simultaneous need to uphold both (a)
God’s freedom to create and redeem the world in Christ or not and (b) the fact
that God has eternally committed Himself to be just such a Creator and
Redeemer in Christ. He must create the world if He is to be the sort of God
He has chosen to be, thereby giving the world a sort of necessity for Him. The
‘wall’ was that our problematic and the response formulated to it in conjunc-
tion with our writers were both dialectical, so that our response seemed to beg
the question. We also had found a clue to a proper response to the problematic
in the identifying of a Christic decision in history with an eternal decision in
God. We suggested that one way out of the methodological conundrum might
be to vary our methodology, using not only dialectic but also analogy.
In turning to analogy, we wish to articulate a notion of identity that includes
within it real difference, that is, similarities and dissimilarities between God
and the world can exist only because there is between them simultaneously
both an enduring difference and a non-negotiable identity. In this perspective,
it would be impossible to say God is dissimilar to the world unless He shared
with His creation a continuous similarity, even reaching the point of identity,
though being still utterly different. Through the application of analogy, in
tandem with dialectic, we might be able to articulate how our axis of F3–N3
can be applied variously, according to its distinct character, to the uncreated
and the created without collapsing one into the other but keeping them within
a perpetual ‘tension’.
Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–88) at this very point provides yet further
Christological resources for a response to the problematic. He held that it is
only in Christ as the ‘concrete analogy of being’ that we see a summary of the
continuities and discontinuities of God and the world. Yet such a move
presupposes the need in theology for both analogical and dialectical language,
an observation made famous by David Tracy.
Tracy claims there are two major conceptual languages in theology, which
are inextricably intertwined: the analogical and the dialectical. Analogical

language or analogy (he uses them interchangeably) is a language of ordered
relationships articulating both similarities, via affirmations, and dissimilar-
ities, via negations, evoking a totality of ‘real-similarities-in-real-differences’.
Order in these relationships is created by the ‘distinct but similar’ relationship
of each analogue ‘to some primary focal meaning, some prime analogue’. In
Christian systematics, Tracy claims, reality is constituted as an ordered whole
by explicating the analogous relationships, between self, others, world, and
God, and relating them all to the event of Jesus Christ as the primary focus for
interpreting the whole of reality. In any ordered system there is needed, then,
not only a positive but also a negative moment, so that similarities remain
similarities-in-difference related in an ordered manner to their primary focus
as an ‘uncontrollable event’. Without negations the order and harmony would
degenerate into a flattened affirmation, which claims full adequacy, such as
when an analogue claims to have an exhaustive, univocal meaning.1 Negations
allow for intensification of the relationship of the analogues to their focal
meaning of the event in that they negate any ‘slackening’ of the sense of the
radical mystery, the uncontrollable character of both the event and the
similarities-in-difference of the realities focused on and interpreted by said
event.2 Analogy incarnates the intellectual ideal of Scholasticism, itself founded
on the Chalcedonian definition, of ‘unity-in-difference, not uniformity’, ‘to
distinguish without separation in order to unite without confusion’.3 Thus,
within analogy, dialectical language is woven through the necessary recourse to
negations in evoking the primary focus—Jesus Christ.
However, dialectical language can be separated from its analogical coun-
terpart, as is the case with the negative dialectics of Kierkegaard followed by
figures as diverse as Barth, Bultmann, Tillich, and Niebuhr, which emphasizes
the fact that the Word of Jesus Christ discloses the infinite qualitative
distinction between God and ‘this flawed, guilty, sinful, presumptuous, self-
justifying self ’.4 Here Tracy identifies dialectics with a resounding NO to all
attempts to identify the present order, creation with God’s Word. It unmasks,
like Bonhoeffer, all ‘cheap grace’, the ‘all-too-easy continuities and differences
and relaxed similarities between Christianity and culture, between God and
the human, God and world’.5 Yet the very same theologians who revel in
the ‘purging fire’ of dialectics, while remaining rooted in the power of its
‘proclamatory negation’, rearticulate the similarities-in-difference, affirming
continuities between God and creation using new analogical languages. Here
Tracy points us to Barth’s ‘analogy of grace’ language, the YES of the gracious
and merciful God revealed in the event of Jesus Christ. However, with every
YES there follows a NO, as Barth denies any ‘point of contact’ between the
1 2 3
Tracy 1981, 408–9. ibid., 409. ibid., 414.
4 5
ibid., 415. ibid., 417.
The Metaphysics of Love 167

uncreated and the created, thereby setting dialectic at the heart of his ana-
logical form.6
What we are led to by our contemplation of these two languages, Tracy
alleges, is the awareness that, without the negative, the seam of dialectical
language sewn into the analogical, all analogical conceptions ‘eventually collapse
into the false harmony, the brittle sterility, the cheap grace of an all-too-canny
univocity’. Analogy needs and even presupposes dialectics. Likewise, without
the similarities produced by differences and negations, the continuities or
emergent harmonies produced by a demand for some new form of analogical
language, negative dialectics ‘left to itself, eventually explodes its energies into
rage or dissipates them in despair’, leading into the ‘uncanny whirlpool of the
chaos of pure equivocity’.7 Although Tracy’s account of dialectics and analogy
seems at times to be simply a playing off of the negative to the positive, the No to
the Yes, failing to examine how one can have (as in Bulgakov and Barth) a
dialectical movement between absolute identification and difference between
God and the world in Christ, still his argument is instructive. It shows the need
in theology to apply a variety of methodologies according to need. Balthasar, as
we shall see Part III,8 was precisely the sort of theologian sensitive to the need to
apply both dialectics and analogy to God’s relationship to the world by focusing
on the continuities and discontinuities between the uncreated and the created
summarized in the living analogy of being who is the person of Jesus Christ.
9.1 BEING AS LOVE — STEP 1
Balthasar’s theology presupposes metaphysics understood as a reflection on

the world as it concretely exists,9 because Being is ‘the most noble, the first and
most proper effect of God’.10 For a Christian, then, metaphysics is a part of the
doctrine of creation but creation always refers to its Creator, just as worldly or
creaturely Being cannot be conceived without its reference to its groundless
ground in divine infinite Being and finite freedom cannot be fulfilled except in
the infinite freedom of God (see ch. 10).11 Balthasar’s metaphysics or account
of creaturely Being over against divine Being plays the same crucial role in his
thought that sophiology and the doctrine of election played respectively
in Bulgakov and Barth. Thus, to understand Balthasar’s response to the
6 7
ibid., 417. ibid., 421.
8
Bibliography: Capol and Müller 2005; secondary literature: Hans Urs von Balthasar—
Sekundärliteratur 2016.
9
Balthasar, Glory of the Lord [=GL], IV [1961–9], 28; on Balthasar’s metaphysics: Schrijver
1983, Davies 1998, Bieler 1993, 1999b, 2005a, 2005b, 2011, Healy 2005, 19–90, D. C. Schindler
2004 (see survey: 6–7), 2009, J. Johnson 2013, and O’Regan 2014.
10 11
Balthasar, GL, IV, 404. Theo-Drama [=TD] [1973–83], II, 200ff.

problematic of freedom and necessity we must begin with the contemplation
of Being, just as to understand Bulgakov’s thought we must turn to ‘Sophia’
and for Barth to ‘election’.
As we shall see, infinite uncreated self-subsistent Being, which is reflected in
created non-subsistent Being, and here Balthasar builds on Bulgakov,12 is an
eternal self-giving, self-emptying, and self-receiving dance, or rather a drama
of concrete relations which are the persons of the Trinity, and this mystery is
expressed in God’s kenosis in Christ. Metaphysics serves, therefore, as the
basis for a Christocentric reinterpretation of the analogia entis13 where created
Being/esse ‘subsists in no other way than in the “refusal-to-cling-to-itself ”, in
the emptying of itself into a finite concretion’ in the essents in which it
subsists. Reflecting the pure, uncreated Being of God, created Being is ‘that
which does not hold onto itself ’,14 which leads Balthasar to speak of Christ as
the ‘concrete analogy of being’.15 In Him is synthesized perfectly the reality of
both created and divine Being as self-giving, self-receiving, and outward-
reaching love that is desirous of the Other. Balthasar saw the analogy of
Being as a declaratory kenotic trace in nature (the ‘watermark of divine
love’) of the mystery of the self-giving and self-receiving Trinity. This ‘water-
mark’ on created Being only comes to light with the cross of Christ as ‘the sign
of absolute love’, since ‘the light of the Cross makes worldly being intelligible’.
It shows how the forms and ways of love that otherwise get lost in ‘trackless
thickets’ actually find their foundation in their ‘true transcendent ground’ of
the Divine Being/Love-Desire of the Trinity.16 By contemplating Christ,
Balthasar aimed to show both the similarity and the dissimilarity of divine
and creaturely Being and ultimately the difference and identity between God
and the world.
Furthermore, metaphysics, for Balthasar, aims to hold fast to the wondrous-
ness of created Being by meditating on Being’s rootedness in beauty, truth, and
goodness, the three ‘transcendentals’.17 The means by which Balthasar elab-
orates this rootedness of creaturely Being in the transcendentals is through the
tension between existence and essence. Here, One freely gives itself to the
12
On Bulgakov: Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy [=CL] [1988], 190 and see 345–6, Mysterium
Paschale [1984], 35, 46, GL, VII, 213–14, 347, TD, II, 264, III, 313, IV, 278, 313–14, 323, 338,
Theo-Logic [=TL] [1985–7], II, 177–8 and III, 27, 34, 53, 169, 213, and 215; cf. Balthasar and
Bulgakov: Hallensleben 1999, Nichols 2005b, Baumer 2006, 249–56, J. Martin 2015a, 2015b, and
O’Regan 2014, 303–21.
13
See, generally, Hart 2003 and Przywara, Analogia Entis (2014 [19622]).
14
Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible, 144 (revd) [Glaubhaft ist nur Liebe [1963], 95]. See GL,
IV, 38 and ibid., V, 626–7 [Herrlichkeit [=H], III.1.2, 956–7].
15
A Theology of History [=TH] [1959], n. 5, 69 and see TD, II, 267, III, 220–9, V, 385ff., 509ff.
and Epilogue, 89; here influenced (see KB, 328, 387) by Przywara (e.g. Analogia Entis, 304–5) (see
Betz 2005–6, 9, 28, 36–40).
16
Balthasar, Love, 142 and see Bieler 2006b, 308.
17
See Saint-Pierre 1998 and D. C. Schindler 2004, 350–421.

Other, yet depends, in a relation of necessity, on the Other to subsist, which is
itself grounded on the groundless ground of God’s free love where freedom
(F1–F2) and necessity (N2) coincide.18 This creative tension leads us to one of
the key contributions of Balthasar to our study. The fundamental structure of
both divine and creaturely giftedness or Being (since Being is love-desire/self-
giving) is the dialectic of freedom and necessity. It will be argued in this section
that (a) necessity in Balthasar’s thought is identified with dependence (see ch. 2)
and (b) that this structure of ontological giftedness is precisely our axis of
dependent freedom (F3) and free dependence (N3). In divine Being and in the
hypostatic union, the dialectic of freedom and necessity is a perfectly unified
tension in unity, which is itself an identity. In created Being, the dialectic of
freedom and necessity is a ceaseless creative but ultimately unresolved tension
and it can be seen in the polarity of existence and essence (see ch. 3). ‘Polarity’, it
should be noted, differs from Bulgakov’s antinomism and Barth’s dialectics in
that there is here no conceptual contradiction. There is a creative tension in which
both poles depend on one another and even interpenetrate. Balthasar is unique in
beginning with the F3–N3 dialectic in the world and then exploring it by analogy
in God rather than, as is the case with Bulgakov and Barth, the other way around.
The polarity and consequent tension of existence and essence is given to
us as the experience of wonder as to the contingency/giftedness of creation:
‘Why is there anything at all and not simply nothing?’19 It is approached in four
‘steps’ which manifest a ‘four-fold difference’ that together reveals divine
‘glory’.20 These steps are as follows: (1) the difference between an ‘I’ and a
‘Thou’,21 then (2) between Being and beings,22 then (3) between beings and
Being,23 and (4) finally between God and the world.24 This four fold difference
itself is a complex elaboration by Balthasar of the Thomistic distinctio realis
between esse and essentia.25 The ‘real distinction’, which from early on was
central to his work,26 is read in light of a whole variety of sources which we have
no space to elaborate, including Erich Przywara (1889–1972), Gustav Siewerth
(1903–63), and Ferdinand Ulrich (b. 1931), but especially the Heideggerean ‘die
ontologische Differenz, d.h. als die Scheidung zwischen Sein und Seiendem’.27
Aquinas teaches that there exists in a creature a real ‘distinction’ (distinctio
realis) or ‘difference (diversitas)’28 (alternatively, a ‘real composition [realis
composito]’)29 between ‘whereby he is [ex quo est]’ or the creature’s ‘Being/
18
Balthasar, TL, I, 240–2.
19
GL, V, 613 (from Heidegger 2000, 8 but see Leibniz, ‘Principles of Nature’, 7, 210).
20 21
Balthasar, GL, V, 615 (revd) [H, III.1.2, 945]. GL, V, 615–18.
22 23 24
ibid., 618–19. ibid., 619–24. ibid., 624–7.
25
See Bieler 1993, 1999b, 2005a, 2005b, 2011, and Buckley 1995.
26
e.g. Balthasar, Apokalypse, III: 436.
27
Heidegger 1975a, 22 and see Balthasar, GL, V, 434.
28
Aquinas, On Hebodomads, c.2, l.200, 24–5; see Wippel 2000, 101–3 and 1999, 99, 122 n. 60
and Cunningham 1988.
29
Aquinas, De Ver., 3: 27.1.8ad, 311.

existence [esse]’ and ‘what is [quod est]’ the creature as such, namely, its
essence (essentia).30 The essentia as the receptive principle or the receiver in
the distinction (that which acquires esse)31 is given a whole variety of names
including ‘ens’, ‘id quod est’, ‘substantia’, ‘forma’, ‘natura’, and ‘res’.32 Esse, as
the received principle,33 is not a thing (res), nor is it a being (ens), and so one
might wrongly say that esse exists. Yet, further, esse is not a type of essence or
even an accident superadded to an essence. Rather, it has no content as such
other than that of the essence it actualizes. One may say that esse is something
that is of or belongs to a being or thing. And, by belonging to it, it makes it
actual.34 Esse is described by Aquinas as ‘the effect common to all agents’,
since every secondary agent actualizes a nature or form in its potentiality (i.e.
making a thing to be). In this way, the secondary agent perfects that form or
being. But it only produces this effect insofar as it is subordinate to and indeed
dependent upon the first agent, God, as divine infinite Being, acting by His
power: ‘whatever gives being, does so in so far as it acts by the power of God’.35
Balthasar, therefore, argued that for Aquinas esse as the actus essendi, follow-
ing Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite ( fl. late fifth–early sixth century),36
was ‘a primary, immediate and comprehensive cosmic operation of God’.
Being proceeds or emanates from God into all existents so that, when
speaking of the processus essendi, we mean the ‘procession of act-uality
[Wirk-lichkeit] (it is not, as it were, just a naked being “there”)’.37 Created
‘finite Being’38 in itself (esse commune), as opposed to divine infinite Being
upon which it depends, ‘denotes something complete and simple, yet non-
subsistent’, since Being only subsists in essents.39 In contrast, the uncreated
Being of God is esse that denotes ‘something’ complete and simple and also
subsistent, since God’s existence is His essence (forming an identity) and He
needs no essents to subsist.
As was said earlier, Balthasar’s elaboration of the Thomistic real distinction
above all critically engages with Heidegger’s ‘ontological difference between
being and beings’. As Balthasar puts it, ‘Thomas Aquinas is in harmony
with Heidegger, with whom he shares the insight into the transcendence of
Being and into the fundamental distinction between Being and existent
[grundlegende Differenz zwischen Sein und Seiendem], which is fundamental
30
ST, 1.50.2.3ad; compare Hebodomads, c.2, l.200 and On Being and Essence, 4.9 [c.3 in some
editions], 58. See Wippel 1979.
31 32
See Aquinas, ST, 1.4.1.3ad. Wippel 1999, 99–100 and n. 61, 122.
33 34
See Aquinas, ST, 1.4.1.3ad. Wippel 1992, 394–5.
35
Aquinas, SG, 3.66, 159; cf. De Pot., 1: 3.7co., 130–3.
36
See Dionysius, DN, 5 [PTS 33, 180–90], 96–103.
37
Balthasar, GL, IV, 401–2 [H, III.1.1, 361].
38
e.g. GL, V, 626–7, TL, I, 229, Epilogue, 89 and see 48–50 and GL, I, 62, 119, 157–8.
39
‘esse significat aliquid completum et simplex sed non subsistens’ (Aquinas, De Pot., 1: 1.1co,
4 and see Hebodomads, 2, 18–19). See Balthasar, Epilogue, 47ff.

for all thought, even though their respective understandings of the nature of
this distinction diverge from the first point on.’40 We cannot enter into the
complexities of Balthasar’s appropriation and correction of Heidegger for
lack of space.41 This engagement with Heidegger is itself mediated through
his dialogue with Siewerth and Ulrich on the relation of philosophy and
theology.42 However, a brief note is now in order.
Heidegger points to the fact that everywhere we look we encounter beings.
An example would be a school building which is with its hallways, stairs,
classrooms, and their contents like chalk and teachers which also are. Yet we
cannot say that we can ‘find this Being within the being’,43 as if Being was a
being alongside other beings. Therefore, one must hold to an ontological
difference between Being and the beings to which it grants Being. Being
seems impossible to conceptualize because, in the moment one tries to lay
hold of it, it is as if one were reaching into a ‘void’. It is almost as if it were like
nothing if it were not for the fact that it might lead one to say the school and all
its contents are not. Alternatively, Being seems just an ‘empty word’,44 that is,
the flatus vocis of medieval nominalism. However, such conceptualization,
Heidegger argues, reifies Being. It assumes that for something to be (true),
something must be out there which corresponds to the word and meaning
or essence of Being. This is manifestly not the case with Being. Surely, it
would be absurd to hold that the Being of the being of the school is
the whole meaning of the word ‘Being’. Rather, by the word ‘Being’, in its
meaning and ‘passing through this meaning’, Heidegger points to ‘Being
itself—but it is simultaneously not a thing, if by thing we understand any
sort of thing’.45
The four fold difference of Balthasar, which attempts to express the Thomist
heritage within a Catholic appropriation of Heidegger, aims to be a propae-
deutic in four steps/stages (Stufen) for reflection on Being as fundamental
giftedness. ‘Reflection’ here is understood as a holding fast to the primal
wonder at Being,46 that is, the sense that ‘Being overarches everything sublime
and serene; nothing of all this had to be as it is.’47 However, this holding fast
to wonder in the contemplation of Being is not an end in itself. Rather, the end
40
GL, V, 434 [H, III.1.2, 773]; for Balthasar Seiendes=Wesen=essentia: H, III.1.2, 951 [see GL,
V, 621].
41
Balthasar and Heidegger: Daigler 1995, O’Regan 1998, 2010 (and the forthcoming second
volume of his The Anatomy of Misremembering), Sciglitano 2007, 539–44, and Casale 2009;
Heidegger and Aquinas: Caputo 1982, Hemming 2003, McGrath 2006; Heidegger and theology:
Hemming 2002, Pattison 2013, Wolfe 2014.
42
See Balthasar, Our Task [1984], 38 and ‘In Retrospect’ [1965], 90–1 and see TL, II, 173–86,
GL, IV, 38, 400–7, V, 613–56 (see Bieler 1993, 1999b, 2005a, 2005b, 2011), Wierciński 2006,
351–9, and D. C. Schindler 2004, 7ff.); Siewerth: Tourpe 1998, Schulz 2002, 2005, Wierciński
2003; Ulrich: Bieler 1999a, 2011, Sara 2001, Oster 2004, and Walker 2004.
43 44 45
Heidegger 2000, 36. ibid., 38. ibid., 92.
46 47
Balthasar, GL, V, 615 [H, III.1.2, 945]. ibid., 635; cf. 613.

of such contemplation is wonder at the beauty of Being which leads to a vision
of the ‘totality of beauty’48 or the ‘lighting-bolt of eternal beauty’49 which is the
divine glory blazing out from the form of revelation—Christ. He is the ‘most
sublime of beauties—a beauty crowned with thorns and crucified’. The four-
fold difference helps to unveil the divine beauty of the Crucified by clearing
away the underbrush of our vision, so to speak, in order that ‘the ray of the
Unconditional breaks through, casting a person down to adoration and
transforming him into a believer and a follower’.50
Balthasar argues that the four ‘phases’ were only ever the ‘ever greater
extension’ of the same thing present in the initial encounter of the I and the
Thou, namely, ‘the first act of consciousness of the awakening child’ which is
love.51 Balthasar takes as his example of this first difference of Being the unity
in free diversity of love in the dialogue between the mother as ‘Thou’ and the
child as ‘I’. The child receives its Being as a gift through the coming to
consciousness of its ‘I’ in the loving embrace of its mother’s ‘Thou’.52 If love
is the gift of Being, for Balthasar, then it is not surprising that he, echoing
Bulgakov and even in some ways Barth, argued that ‘Sein und Liebe sind
koextensiv’.53 However, Balthasar holds, unlike Bulgakov, that uncreated
Being is totally beyond created Being.54 Unlike Barth, he argues that created
Being as an analogy of the divine Being is the ‘creative medium’ through which
God revealed Himself to us in Christ crucified.55
One might argue, developing Balthasar constructively, that the dialectic of
freedom and necessity can be seen as a ceaseless imperfect tension (see ch. 3)
in the mother–child relationship in which each pole gifts the other with Being/
love. This echoes distantly God as Trinity in whom there is a perfect synthetic
tension of free self-giving and self-receiving (F3) that is irrevocable in its
determination as sacrifice for the Other (N3).56 This ‘ellipse of love’57 includes
within it the free self-giving of the mother to her child and the child’s free
reception of that love and embrace of the mother (F3). In addition, we can see
the mother’s utter dependence (as a form of necessity) on that child in her
need to love and care for it as a mother (N3). The infant, in response, is
48 49
ibid., 614. GL, I, 32.
50
ibid., 33; see ‘Earthly beauty and divine glory’ [1983] and GL, I, 124 and 431–2.
51
GL, V, 635.
52
‘Movement toward God’ [1967], 15–17; see GL, V, 615–18, Love, 76 and Unless You Become
Like This Child [1988], 17ff.; a concept drawn from Siewerth (e.g. Siewerth 1957, 30–2 and see
Balthasar, TL, II, 177, ‘Balthasar to Siewerth, 2 November 1956’, 8 and ‘Abschied von Gustav
Siewerth’ [1964], 162 (see Potworowski 1995)) but compare to Ulrich 1970 (see Pitschl 1995).
53
Balthasar, ‘Der Zugang zur Wirklichkeit Gottes’ [1967], 17; compare Blondel, Action
[1893], 405 [443] and Ulrich 1970, 47–111, esp. 29 (see Balthasar, TL, II, 178); Ulrich 1970,
n. 9, 29–30 and Balthasar, TL, II, 44, quoting Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §158A, 110, 261–2.
54
e.g. Balthasar, GL, I, 62, 119, 157–8, 459, IV, 393ff., and V, 624–6.
55
GL, V, 631–2. 56
See TL, I, 240–2. 57
‘Movement’, 15.

helpless and clings to his mother as the source of his life (N3). Thus, the child
gifts Being to his mother in loving her, for she cannot properly be a mother
without him. She, in turn, gives Being to him in loving him, for he cannot live
without her unique maternal care and attention. Both the I and the Thou in
this dialogue find their ground in the free infinite love of God in giving Being
to His world. One recalls John Milbank’s words: ‘gift of a gift to a gift’.58 This
God chooses to only be God for us as a vulnerable human being in the world.
In light of this dialectic, we cannot but affirm that love-desire/Being is both an
act (‘It [love] is the meaning of the disclosure of Being as well as its disclosed-
ness.’)59 and a grace/gift: ‘For what is more incomprehensible than the fact
that the core of Being consists in love and that its emergence as essence and
existence has no ground other than groundless grace?’60
It is hoped that through this constructive interpretation of Balthasar’s
thought the structure of both Being as giftedness and what we call ‘freedom’
can begin to become apparent as a tension between freedom and necessity.
This will prove important later when we look to the ‘perfect tension’ of
freedom and necessity in the divine Being. It will also be crucial in our
developing of an analogical complement to dialectic to help us in our con-
structive response to the problematic. Gift, and by extension, grace itself,
will have to be rethought in this scheme so that it is no longer just ‘what
need not be given’ (F3). It also ‘had to be given’ (N3) because of a free choice
to be dependent or dependent freedom (F3). Dependence is understood as a
form of freely willed necessity (see ch. 2). I choose to have my life determined
and even impelled by an Other, existing in a free dependence, such that only
in and through Him can I properly be (N3). This is a (broadly understood)
phenomenological account of our axis F3–N3. It is paramount that we nei-
ther arbitrarily separate the identity of both moments nor confuse them and
obliterate their difference. One must reach towards a new reality where
both moments retain their identity in difference (‘belonging-togetherness’),
following Heidegger, in a sort of interpenetration (see ch. 3).
9.2 THE REAL DISTINCTION — STEPS 2– 4
The next step in our four fold ascent is the second difference of (created)
Being from beings. Being, for Balthasar, following Aquinas, is perfect fullness.
It is the ‘actuality of all acts, and therefore the perfection of all perfections’.61
All existents partake in Being but ‘they never exhaust it nor even, as it were,
58
Milbank 2005, 90 and see 43ff.
59
Balthasar, Theologik [=ThL], I, 131 [see TL, I, 122] (my trans.).
60 61
TL, I, 225. Aquinas, De Pot., 3: 7.2.9ad, 12.

“broach” [anbrechen] it.’62 Creaturely Being is per se ‘finite’ in comparison to
divine infinite Being but we can speak of it graciously having a ‘creaturely, free
infinity and perfection’.63 Created Being, in its sheer loving freedom (F2),
shines out in existents, overarching them in the pure serenity, sublimity, high
untouched self-giving of its letting existents be. The existents need not be;
indeed, they are accidental to Being. We cannot explicate Being and, despite
being created, it is free to manifest itself to us in an infinite number of ways
and to actualize an infinite number of entities.64 God’s own infinite Being is
not this common or natural finite Being (esse commune) but He mysteriously
causes all things in and through created Being.65 The scope and efficacy of His
cause is infinite and thereby penetrates into an effect most profoundly.66
Indeed, God, for Balthasar, is not merely totaliter aliter, but, in a favourite
appellation67 borrowed from Nicholas of Cusa, Non-Aliud (Non- or Not-
Other). Cusa’s treatise ‘On God as Not-Other’ is dedicated to the exposition
that, while not denying that God is Other to Himself,68 it is impossible to make
God as Trinity (‘Not-Other and Not-Other and Not-Other’)69 into ‘other than
another’.70 He is not graspable by human understanding, is not other than (=over
against) anything and transcends all objects (hence the neuter form: aliud not
alius). God is the simple, prior, inexpressible, and unutterable Being of all beings
and form of all forms. He bestows all Being as the most infinite, simple, and perfect
Form of Being in such a way that He is not any of these beings or any one form.71
Created esse, understood as esse commune, is not exhausted by the essences
participating in it. It is ‘the most common first effect and more intimate than
all other effects’72 and ‘the proper effect of the first agent’.73 Esse actualizes, by
the will of God, what is merely potential by being ‘most perfect of all effects’74
and indeed therefore ‘the highest perfection of all: and the proof is that act is
always more perfect than potentiality’.75 In being the actuality of all acts, the
most perfect of all effects willed by God Himself, created Being is the ‘highest
act [actus ultimus]’ that all essences can participate in and thus subsist but
62 63
Balthasar, GL, V, 618 [H, III.1.2, 948] and see IV, 402. GL, IV, 406.
64 65
GL, V, 635; cf. TL, II, 179. cf. Aquinas, ST, 1.45.5co and 45.5.1ad.
66
cf. De Pot., 1: 3.7co., 131–2.
67
See Balthasar, Love, 150, GL, V, 626 and TD, II, 193–4, 230, V, 435 and TL, II, 212, 214–15.
68
e.g. ‘ecce enim dico alium esse patrum et alium filium et alium spiritum’ (Tertullian,
Adversus Praxean, 9.1, ll.26–7, 97).
69
Cusa, De Li Non Aliud, 2: 5.19, 1117; see Balthasar, GL, V, 205–46, TL, II, 209–18 and ‘Why
We Need Nicholas of Cusa’ (2001) (see Hubert 2009).
70
Cusa, De Li Non Aliud, 2: Prop. 18.123, 1165.
71
Apologia Doctae Ignorantiae, 1: 8, 464–5, 17, 471 and see De Li Non Aliud, 2: 4.11, 1113; see
Balthasar, GL, V, 227–8.
72
Aquinas, De Pot., 1: 3.7co., 130; compare Compendium of Theology, 1.68, 63, and see ST
1.8.1co, 8.1.1ad, 1.45.5co., De Pot., 1: 3.4 co., 101, 3: 7.2co., 10 and 3: 7.2.10ad., 13.
73 74
SG, 3.66, 160. ibid., 3.66, 159.
75
De Pot., 3: 7.2.9ad, 12; compare ST, 1.4.1.3ad.

which ‘does not itself participate in anything’.76 God too does not participate
in anything but this is because His existence is His essence and vice versa. As
Aquinas puts it (following Boethius (c.480–524)), ‘if there be something which
is a subsistent act of existing [ipsum esse subsistens], as we say God is, we assert
that it participates in nothing’.77 Created Being in its perfection is an analogy
of divine Being.78 It images forth the goodness of the divine Being as ‘the
likeness of God’79 (imago dei). Essents, in opening themselves up to Being,
furthermore, show forth an implicit desire to be like God: ‘Created existence is
itself a likeness to the divine goodness. So in desiring to be, things implicitly
desire a likeness to God and God Himself.’80
For Balthasar, Esse has no content other than that essence that it actualizes.
It must obtain its ‘explication [Auslegung]’ in beings or a human being aware
of it. Therefore, it is impossible to say that Being exists except in the essences
that participate in it. The freedom of esse, which is one grounded on love (F2),
needs to be understood in relation to its ‘dependence [Angewiesenheit]’ on the
essents in which it is actualized.81 Since esse is dependent on essences to
actualize itself, one can say, returning to our earlier identification of depend-
ence with necessity, that essences act as a certain necessity upon the free
expression of Being. If this is the case, then, in our terminology, the essents
are a sort of external necessity (N1) acting upon Being in its loving (as it were)
‘expression’ of itself (F2). This creates an internal ‘need’ or necessity of Being
to express itself externally (N2). Thus, in order that Being might be itself, it
must give itself away to essents and ultimately to God Himself, to whom it is
totally disponible, fully awaiting what comes to it in pure receptivity. Yet we
might just as well express this difference at the heart of the act of Being in
terms of our axis F3–N3. Being gives itself away to essents in a free contingent
love-desire that might not have been given, although it has chosen to be
dependent on them (F3). Yet this self-giving of Being is bound to the essents,
for it cleaves to the essents in order to subsist in a free dependence (N3).
Being, then, does not bring the essents into existence from itself. It cannot
release natures from itself as its possibilities like God. Only God, whose
existence is His essence, can generate entities, the forms to be actualized,
from Himself, as He is a self-subsistent, conscious, free Spirit.82 Being, in
contrast, is only the ‘actualising support of natures. It only realises natures
insofar as it realises itself in natures. In itself it has no subsistence but inheres
in natures.’83 Here, inspired by Heidegger,84 we have moved from pole to pole,
76
De Anima, 6.2ad, 96; see Hebodomads, 2, 18–19 and ST, 1.45.5co and 45.5.1ad.
77 78
De Ani., 6.2ad, 96. De Pot., 1: 3.4.9ad, 106.
79
Siewerth 2005, 50ff.; cf. Balthasar, GL, IV, 400–7.
80 81
Aquinas, De Ver., 3: 22.2.2ad, 42. Balthasar, GL, V, 619 [H, III.1.2, 949].
82 83 84
ibid., V, 624 and 636. ibid., IV, 402–3. Heidegger, OM, 62.

Being to beings and back again, that is, from the second to a third difference,
between beings and Being.
For Heidegger, it would seem at first as if Being might prevail in its essence
without beings, but, in fact, each never prevails without the other.85 Being not
only grounds beings but beings ground Being,86 given their fundamental
‘being-togetherness’.87 They ‘circle’88 one another, making themselves present
to man in the tension-filled perdurance (Austrag)89 of the event of appropri-
ation/enownment (Ereignis) of Dasein. In this circling, they are, as it were, like
wrestlers held apart and facing each another.90 Alternatively, using another
metaphor, Being and beings are like Heraclitus’ ‘counter-stretched harmony’
of the strings of the bow and the lyre, which is both a bringing apart and a
bringing together.91 Appropriating this theologically we might say that God
and creation, without deifying the ontological difference,92 exist in a tension.
God graciously never prevails in His essence in creation and redemption
without beings/creation. Beings, in turn, are never without God, as both
prevail only in their gracious mutual enownment in Christ (see ch. 3).
Developing the Heideggerean insight that Being and beings exist in a
mutual self-grounding, Balthasar argued that in creation there exist various
‘intra-worldly antitheses’. These antitheses are all mutually self-dependent,
including ‘species and individual, essence and existence, norm and facticity,
ground and appearance, inner-worldly necessity and inner-worldly contingency’.93
However, all these antitheses are contingent. Balthasar here echoes both
Barth and Bulgakov, who saw a unity of F2–N2 as well as F3–N3 in God
expressed in creation and redemption. The antitheses only exist in light of a
non-necessary free act of God in creation that expresses the ‘self-grounding
divine unity of freedom and necessity’.94 Perhaps the most basic of these
antitheses is that of Being and beings (existence and essence). Being and
beings exist in a ‘polarity’95 which cannot be closed without dissolving one
of the realities into the other. To adapt the language of Heidegger, we may say
that for Balthasar the poles exist in dynamic relationship where they belong
together, both ‘held toward one another’ but simultaneously ‘borne away from
and toward each other’.96 The poles, therefore, are in ‘tension’, being both
borne away from each other and held toward each other in created Being and
85
Heidegger 1976, 306 [233]; see Balthasar, GL, V, 447 (following Löwith 1995, 66 and see
Steiner 1989, xx, 44, Inwood 1999, 73).
86 87 88
Heidegger, OM, 69. Heidegger 2002a, 30–3. OM, 69.
89 90
ibid., 65ff. See OM, 68–9 [137] and Heidegger 1999, §215, 239, §143, 185–6.
91
Heraclitus, §209 [Fr. 51], Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 1993, 192–3.
92 93
Balthasar, GL, V, 447–8 (following Löwith 1995, 67). Balthasar, TL, I, 240.
94
ibid., 241.
95
See Przywara, Analogia Entis [19622] and Polarity [1925] (see D. C. Schindler 2004, 66–95,
167–78 and Betz 2014, 58–61).
96
Heidegger, OM, 65.

so ‘exist strictly through each other’. They remain always in a ‘reciprocal
relation of dependence’.97 Existence freely gives itself away to essents but
needs those essents to subsist. Essents, in turn, freely open themselves up
to the existence without which they would not be. A movement within Being
occurs between these two poles. One cannot give a univocal account of any of the
poles, as one is immediately thrown back to the other.98 This state of permanent
creative ‘tension’ or ‘oscillation’ (Schwebung or Schwebe and cognates) between
Being/existence and essence/beings is arguably most fundamentally a tension
between freedom and necessity.
The tension of freedom and dependence/necessity between Being/existence
and beings/essence is a sort of dialogue of self-giving moving between fullness
and emptiness. Esse, despite its richness, can only freely constitute itself or
subsist through necessarily inhering in the essences on whom it depends (‘esse
non est subsistens, sed inhaerens’).99 It empties itself ‘as letting-be and letting
stream [Seinlassen und als Strömenlassen], handing on further’ into finite and
concrete essentia to the point of annihilation. The essent ‘responds’ in turn by
constituting itself in an ecstatic movement out of itself and ‘therefore through
dispossession and poverty becomes capable of salvaging in recognition and
affirmation the infinite poverty of the fullness of Being and, within it, that of
the God who does not hold on to Himself ’. The dependent freedom of Being
(F3), then, which is also a freedom in dependence (N3), is mirrored by the very
same ecstatic self-giving of the essents (F3) who need Being to be (N3).
However, even more fundamentally, the ‘dialogue’ we are describing in
terms of F3–N3 simply reflects who God is in and for Himself as a Triune
movement of dependent freedom (F3) and free dependence (N3). Created
Being as free self-giving love is fathomless and is ultimately envelopped
(‘within it . . . God’) by ‘radiant and universal love . . . the mantle of the divine
Being which encompasses all things’.100
When one gazes at created Being in itself apart from its subsistence in things,
one is faced with not only its freedom in giving itself to essents but the necessity
of the essents for Being and so Being’s ultimate non-subsistence, its own self-
nihilation.101 One must turn to the world where things participate and exist in
Being whereby it comes to sub-stand and subsist in them as its subjects102 in
order to ‘appease’ the primal wonder at the fact that something is rather than
nothing at all. Wonder, therefore, is directed at both sides of the ontological
difference and this means the following: ‘the fact that an existent can only become
actual through participation in the act of Being points to the complementary
antithesis that the fullness of Being attains actuality only in the existent’.103
97 98
Balthasar, TL, I, 105, 150. See ibid., 194–5.
99 100
Aquinas, De Pot., 3: 7.2.7ad, 12. Balthasar, GL, V, 627 [H, III.1.2, 956].
101 102
ibid., 619. GL, IV, 403, glossing Aquinas, De Pot., 1: 1.1co., 4 and 3: 7.2.7ad., 12.
103
Balthasar, GL, V, 619.

The dependence described shows that esse is not only perfect fullness, ‘wealth’,
but simultaneously it is in itself nothing104 or emptiness, utter ‘poverty’, in
pouring out itself into essents. Created entities as (the Heideggerean) ‘shepherds
of being’ are given the power by God ‘to shelter and tend’ the fullness of the gift of
Being in themselves, however poor as limited vessels of infinite Being they
may be. Being’s ultimate fullness/wealth and its emptiness/nothingness/poverty
(‘the infinite poverty of the fullness of Being’) are different aspects of its derived
or creaturely infinity.105 However, at base, worldly Being is profoundly finite,
being ‘a “being in nothingness”, a being in movement and becoming’ tending
towards the very nihil from which God created it.106 It is only saved from
completely falling into nothingness and an endless contradiction between its
fullness and emptiness ‘at each instant precisely by the hand of God’. He
actualizes it in its subsistence in different essents or creative possibilities.107
Here Balthasar marries the Thomist notion of Being in its activity as perfect
fullness and in its non-subsistence as perfect emptiness with the Hegelian notion
of Being as indeterminate immediacy and nothing or non-being.108
Being is an analogy or image/likeness of the divine Being due to its perfec-
tion, its great wealth, and its poverty: ‘God-like is poverty.’109 In Being’s non-
subsistent need to pour out itself into beings, it images God Himself, who, in the
fullness of His subsistent Being, out of a dependent freedom (F3) which is
utterly committed to creation (N3), lets everything be as sheer gift because He
‘knows no holding on to Himself ’.110 We must then rise beyond the second and
third differences and discern a fourth difference, that is, between God and
the world.
In the very similarity of Being to God is revealed a greater dissimilarity. God
qua Divine Being does not need the world in order to subsist, since His
hypostases are one with their shared Being. God would still have been Himself
without having created and redeemed the world in Christ. Although, for
Balthasar, as for Bulgakov and Barth, this ‘dissimilarity’ does not rule out
the fact that God is free to choose (and did in fact choose) to not be God
without creation. In this way, He radically identifies Himself with His creation
104
ibid., IV, 404.
105
ibid., V, 627 and see 439, 446–9; see Heidegger 1975b, 184, 1977, 42 and 1998b, 239,
252, 260.
106
Balthasar, TL, I, 251 and see 245.
107
ibid., 251; here Balthasar follows Ulrich: D. C. Schindler 2004, 52–3. On Being as
nothingness and fullness, see Meis 2009.
108
Following Siewerth (Balthasar, GL, I, 60, n. 8, TD, II, 266, n. 36, and Siewerth 2005, 62ff.
and see Wierciński 2003, 119–23 and 178ff.) and Ulrich (Balthasar, GL, V, 625, n. 2, TD, II,
256–7, and TL, II, 178 and Ulrich 1999, 15–19 and 26ff., 1970, 47–111 (esp. 49) and see Sara
2001, 508ff., Bieler 1999a, xxv–xxxiv and 2011, 322ff.). See Hegel, Science of Logic, Bk. I, ch. I,
82ff. and Encyclopaedia Logic, §§86–7, 136–41 and compare Heidegger 1998a, 94–5, 1998c, 318.
109 110
Angelus Silesius, Wanderer, 1.65, 8. Balthasar, GL, V, 626–7; cf. TD, II, 261.

(see ch. 10). In other words, Balthasar utilizes not only analogy in his response
to the problematic but also dialectic.
Building on an idea of Ulrich,111 Balthasar sees created Being as both
reflecting Christ’s own total free self-giving in emptying himself 112 on the cross
and mediating that glory to us.113 This is not surprising, since Christ, as the
‘concrete analogy of Being’, synthesizes in Himself both created and uncreated
Being. Created Being reflects God as Trinity in Christ, as all things are made
and founded in, through, and by Him (John. 1:3, 10, Col. 1: 15–17 and
Heb. 1:2) (see ch. 11). As one of the rabbis put it, ‘The world was created . . . for
the sake of the Messiah.’114 Creation, Being itself, serves the gracious mystery
of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. The real distinction or ontological differ-
ence, therefore, serves revelation by acting in creation as a sort of ‘shadow
Gospel’. It is a cruciform ontological preparatio evangelica whereby God in
Christ may directly effect His creation through being written into the Being of
creatures.115 Being is not, then, merely a proclamatory trace of the cross but,
following Ulrich, a ‘pure mediation’ of grace.116 Balthasar described it as the
‘creative medium’ by which God’s grace in Christ reaches creation.117 Ulrich
understood this ‘pure mediation’ of Being as a direct pouring forth of God’s
grace to His creation whose ontological center is always Christ crucified and
risen from the foundation of the world (Rev. 13:8). There is between God and
creation no existent serving as a metaxu or medium. Created Being, as the
highest act (actus ultimus) of God, is here understood as ‘Nothing’ and God
Himself literally participates in this nothing.118 Revelation itself could not
have happened in creation if God Himself did not use, given Christ’s headship
over all things, the very structures of creatureliness given to us in the act of
Being. Or as Ulrich puts it: ‘Grace must always indeed arrive along the path of
Being.’119 Thus, there is ‘no “neutral” metaphysics’120 or metaphysics apart
from God’s revelation in Jesus Christ.
Yet there is an even greater mystery which is hinted at in Being (see ch. 10)
but only disclosed on the cross. This is that God as Holy Trinity subsists in His
Being; indeed, God possesses Himself, is free and necessary as infinite self-
subsisting Being (F2–N2), through each hypostasis emptying itself into the
111
See Ulrich 1999, 68ff., 2001, 99ff. (see Schulz 2002, 407–11).
112
On kenosis in Balthasar: Krenski 1990, O’Hanlon 1990, G. Ward 1999, Lösel 2001,
Papanikolaou 2003, Tonstad 2010, J. Martin 2015b, and O’Regan 2014, 165ff., 221–44, 303–21,
and 357ff.
113 114
Balthasar, GL, IV, 38. Sanhedrin 98b, 668.
115 116
Balthasar, GL, V, 631; see Davies 1998, 14. Ulrich 1999, 15.
117
Balthasar, GL, V, 631–2.
118
See Ulrich 1999, 15–16, creatively exegeting Aquinas, De Ani., 6.2ad, 96, but compare De
Pot., 1: 1.1co., 4 and 3: 7.2.7ad., 12 (see Walker 2004, 470–1, D. C. Schindler 2004, 53, and Bieler
2011, 322ff.).
119 120
Ulrich 1999, 111 and see Schulz 2002, 400–1. Balthasar, GL, V, 655.

other and the other receiving it in love.121 Each hypostasis freely lets the Other
be in a ceaseless movement of self-giving and self-receiving gift. In this
movement, the One is freely dependent on the Other (F3) and cannot be
unless the Other responds, letting itself be in love (N3).122 The Father in
begetting the Son is by His giving of Himself, His free letting be of the Son. The
Son in turn is Himself by letting Himself be generated, and hence the Father is
dependent on His Son’s response. Finally, the Spirit is Himself by letting
Himself be the mutuality of the Father and the Son (their ‘we’).123 Within
these divine relations (or even distinctions) of self-giving and self-receiving
love-desire is nestled creation in Christ (see ch. 11). It is a gift given from each
hypostasis to the other.124 Therefore, the real distinction is described by
Balthasar as ‘imago trinitatis, since in God each Hypostasis can only be itself
insofar as it “lets” the others “be” in equal concreteness’.125
Difference and otherness in divine and created Being, against what Balthasar
saw as a tendency in Hegel,126 are not negative but wholly positive.127 I am
myself only in my letting the Other be different, as ‘being is love given away’.128
Balthasar affirms the similarity of divine and creaturely Being in the analogia
entis. Both divine and creaturely Being subsist by letting-be, affirming differ-
ence. Furthermore, both beings and the divine hypostases are one, obtain their
oneness of identity, in Being and the divine ousia, respectively.129 In short, the
analogia entis is an analogia Trinitatis.130 Nevertheless, one cannot note the
similarity of God and Being without immediately noting the ‘ever greater
difference between him [God] and creatures’.131 God as Holy Trinity, unlike
creaturely Being and beings which are a ‘non-identity’,132 is a true identity
in difference. He subsists in Himself as three co-equal hypostases and this is
co-extensive with His Being as perfect love.133 Unlike creaturely Being that
needs essents in order to subsist, God qua divine Being does not need to go out
of Himself to subsist. He has no need to create the world, as His existence is
His essence.
Divine Being, however, must never be thought of as ‘static’, a complete state
of rest. It is ‘a constant vitality, implying that everything is always new’,134 since
121 122
ibid., VII, 211–28 (following Bulgakov). See TD, II, 256–9 and V, 75ff.
123 124
ibid., II, 256, 259 and V, 87. ibid., V, 507, 521 and see 76.
125
ibid., V, 75.
126
TL, II, 48 and see Hegel, Science of Logic, 118ff., 417–18 (see R. Williams 2007a, 37); see
early Hegel discussion: Balthasar, Apokalypse, I: 562–619 (on Balthasar and Hegel: Krenski 1990,
196–205, Dalzell 2000, 171–9, Quash 2005, Schulz 1997, 686–821, 2002, 412ff., 2006 (with
bibliography: n. 2, 111), and especially O’Regan 2014).
127 128
See R. Williams 2007b, 79ff. and 2004, 40ff. Ulrich 2001, 107.
129
Balthasar, TL, II, 183; cf. TD, V, 76.
130
See Franks 1998 and Krenski 1990, 129–223 and 345–70.
131
Balthasar, GL, I, 421; cf Denzinger-Schönmetzer, §806, 262 (Lateran IV).
132 133
Balthasar, TL, II, 183. See ibid., 185.
134
TD, V, 511 and see Speyr 1997, 112 at Balthasar, TD, V, 511.

God in his eternal hypostatic generation is ‘“ever-more” even to himself ’.135
The eternal essence or divine Being is a ‘trinitarian happening [trinitarische
Geschehen]’.136 Such hypostatic pure activity is a ‘Super Becoming’137 but ‘not
‘becoming [Werden] in an intraworldly sense’. Its excess always surpasses
creaturely becoming even as it includes it. It is the ‘inner possibility and reality
of becoming’,138 just as the real distinction finds its similar but infinitely
dissimilar archetype in the divine life.
But how might all of this be applied to our own constructive response to the
problematic? Let us now try to see if Balthasar’s analogical approach can assist
us in thinking through the dialectic between freedom and necessity.
9.3 THE SIMILARITY/DISSIMILARITY

AND I DENTITY/DIFFERENCE OF GOD
A N D TH E W O R L D I N CH R I S T
There is, as Balthasar has argued, both a similarity and dissimilarity between
infinite and finite Being, God and the world.139 We can use this analogical
approach in our own response to the problematic of freedom and necessity as
a way of making comprehensible, without blunting its paradox, the identity
and difference, the dialectic, between the two. The F3–N3 axis can be traced in
both God and the world, each according to its kind. This tends to support
applying the F3–N3 axis to God’s relationship to the world, as we can thereby
trace an identity in the latter relation while maintaining the fundamental
difference between the uncreated and the created. We need to return to our
earlier distinction between primordial divine election and divine-human election
(see 8.3) and see how this distinction can be articulated both analogically and
dialectically in Christology.
If one responds analogically to our problematic, emphasizing similarity, one
can point to the likeness of divine and creaturely Being. Creaturely Being
fulfils itself in its freedom by ceaselessly giving itself away and in this way
becomes utterly dependent on the infinite free Being of God, thereby being
similar to divine everlasting love. This everlasting love of the Trinity, eternal
divine self-desire, the uncreated Being of God continually personalized by the
divine hypostases in its eternal freedom, is where each of the hypostases gives
itself away to the Other in mutual self-election, depending and living utterly
135 136
ThD, 68 [see TD, V, 78 (revd)]. ThD, IV, 58.
137
Presence and Thought [1942], 153.
138
ThD, IV, 59 [see TD, V, 67 (revd)] and see TD, V, 512.
139
I am indebted to Betz 2005, 2006 and compare Gallaher 2006a, 183–7.

through and for the Other. Creation exists within this movement of free self-
electing love-desire, as a gift of the Father to His Son and the Son with Him to
their Spirit. It is set apart eternally for union with God in Christ from before
the ages. Yet creaturely Being is dissimilar from divine Being in that it is
dependent on essents to subsist, whereas divine Being is at one with its
hypostases forming an identity. Furthermore, whereas creation must give itself
away to God to be itself, God need not give Himself away to creation. He need
not have elected Himself as a man. Nor need He—to be Himself—have
enowned divine-human election and with it creation by identifying it with
His primordial election.
If we respond to the problematic dialectically from that side which empha-
sizes identity, then we can say that God as God eternally decides to become,
and in always deciding always is becoming, a God in and for creation in Christ.
Creation is in a sense here implicit in God. Not only, then, is it not surprising
but it was even necessary that God had to create the world with whom He
might become one, as He is essentially such a divine-human Creator and
Redeemer. Yet one must also look at the problematic from the side of
difference. Here we see that God might not have become God for us in Christ
but could have just self-elected Himself in an ecstatic divine desire as Trinity
eternally. Graciously, unfathomably, then, out of a love that is full beyond full
He gave Himself to us as a free gift in Christ. He allows us a participation in
His own everlasting life of love by enowning us in divine-human election but
only as a confirmation of our own enownment of Him.
But might one attempt to harmonize these two approaches? More precisely,
could not we draw on analogy, the similarity and dissimilarity of God and
creation in Christ, as a way of making comprehensible, without blunting its
paradoxical power, the identity and difference of God and creation as ex-
pressed in the F3–N3 axis? In order to attempt such a harmonization we need,
following Barth, to return to the decision of Christ to follow after the
Father. This is simultaneously an eternal decision seen in the Son’s electing
of Himself as man and the temporal act of Jesus’ electing God to be His God.
In divine-human election, we are dealing with not two acts—all traces of
Nestorianism must be avoided—but one unified divine-human activity of
love-desire, involving both the identity of creation with God and its utter
difference from Him. However, as we are finite, this one divine-human act of
Christ can only be apprehended discretely as two activities, two movements of
love. Christ, following Bulgakov, is the perfect union of these two loves. These
two loves can be viewed as two forms of Being, uncreated and created Sophia,
if you will, each with its own distinct freedom, infinite and finite. Moreover,
each Being is itself, is free as love in perfect personal harmony, in giving itself
away to others in the Person of Christ. Let us first examine these two loves
separately then together in Christ, showing the similarity and the dissimilarity
of God and creation as a way of comprehending their being-togetherness in

the paradoxical dialectic of sheer identity and difference of the uncreated and
created in Christ.
First, there is the love or desire of creation (F2) for its Creator, which attains
its peak in man. Man, as a necessity of his nature (N2), must find fulfilment of
his finite love-desire in the infinite by freely surrendering (F3) his whole being
to God and in this surrender becoming utterly dependent (N3) on every word
that comes from the mouth of God. This is similar to God Himself, who lives
not by bread but by the power of His Word uttered eternally with His Spirit
resting on Him in glory. Second, there is the love of the Creator for His
creation, His ecstatic outreach to it that reaches its peak in Christ. God
becomes love-desire in a new surprising incarnate form, which evokes awe
and worship. In this fashion, He images His own eternal Triune life of love
where each of the hypostases lives in a free complete self-giving and self-
receiving (F3) by the others that is utterly committed (N3) in mutual
self-election. This is a primordial Trinitarian self-election that is a synthesis
of freedom and necessity (F2–N2). Such a God is ‘a love which like fire dares
all things’ as He possesses an eros manikos for His creation.140 He reaches out
of Himself ecstatically in and through an eternal divine erotic-agapeistic love
for union with His creation.141 This ‘crazy love’ of God for the creature is
revealed in His free surrender of His own life for creation on the cross for us
(F3). In this surrender, we see how the infinite Creator has become bound to
the creation He forms (N3). This involves a paradox of freedom and necessity
that is at the centre of both liturgy and the exegesis of the Fathers.
In this dialectic of two loves-desires, uncreated and created, we see both
God’s difference from creation being expressed in His identity with it, His
dissimilarity from us in His similarity to us. We also see His identity or, more
precisely, ‘continuity’142 with creation being expressed in His difference from
it, similarity with creation in and through His dissimilarity from it.
On the one hand, in Christ we see the identity of God with His creation, that
is, how the Creator through His grace likens Himself to His creatures, although
He is, as Balthasar insists, Non-Aliud. Christ loves and desires His Father just
as His Father loves and desires Him through the Spirit. His one desire as the
God-Man is to dwell in perfect unity with His Father. As man, Christ
necessarily finds the end of His finite freedom in loving the infinite God
(F2–N2). As God, Christ, in His infinite freedom, which is at one with His
necessity (F2–N2), is not impelled by creation (N1). Just as creation loves
Him, God in Christ unfathomably loves it and longs to be united with creation
through man (Jn. 17:20–6). Though in the form of God, He empties Himself
of His infinite power and glory (F3) and takes on Himself the finite freedom of
140
Cabasilas, Life in Christ, 6.8, 172 and 6.3, 164 [PG 150/SC 361, 2: 6:39, 657A, l.8, 74–5 and
6.16, 648A, l.4, 52–3].
141 142
Dionysius, DN, 4.12ff. [PTS 33; 157ff.], 81ff. See R. Williams 2005.

the form of a slave (N3) (Phil. 2:5–7). Thus, the two natures, created and
uncreated love-desire, finite and infinite, are perfectly one in Christ in their
erotic desire for divine-human unity. Under the rubric of identity, we can even
dare say, weaving together Bulgakov with Barth’s notion of de facto necessity,
that since God has eternally freely determined Himself as a God of love for us
in Christ in His self-election (F3), divine love is divine-human love. This leads
us to argue that just like the love of the creature, God necessarily must
ecstatically love beyond Himself to be Himself as love (N3) and so He loves
divine-humanely by creating and redeeming us in Christ.
Yet this sacrificial love (F3) is an entirely free expression—indeed, is even
identified with or divinely enowned—of His pre-eternal activity (actus purissi-
mus) where each of the hypostases eternally elects the Other in love. Each of the
persons lives in this primordial self-election in and through the others by
denying Himself (F3). Bulgakov called this ‘mutual self-renouncement’, where-
as Balthasar referred to it as ‘letting the Other be’ and ‘letting the Other go’.
Every hypostasis gives itself totally to the Other so that it has no other life
(N3). The self-emptying divine dependent freedom seen in divine-human
election and then in creation and redemption (F3) that is so utterly committed
to the creature that its future is creation’s future (N3) is the perfect free
expression of God’s eternal self-electing life of love-desire in, by, and for the
Other (F3–N3).
On the other hand, in Christ we see God’s difference from His creation. In
Gethsemane (Mk 14:32–6), Christ naturally desires as a man to preserve His
life (N1). Yet, unlike other men, so that He might follow the end of His divine
Being (N2), out of love (F2) He lays aside His human will with its finite
freedom to follow the divine will with its infinite freedom. In this way, He
shares with His Father in a more radical divine self-sacrificing love expressed
in the cross (F3), which is a love that will not turn back in its commitment
(N3). Under this same rubric, we must say that in the unchangeable bliss,
where there is neither ‘more’ nor ‘less’, as Bulgakov insisted, God’s freedom is
perfectly at one with His necessity (F2–N2). For creation, unlike God, its
freedom is only at one with its necessity when it finds the end of that freedom
outside itself in God. As all our writers argue, to be God is to be free, but this
freedom is a necessary reality for God. He is the pure act of love as self-
positing, understood as primordial self-election, so once God freely gives
Himself to Himself or to the world, it cannot be otherwise (F3–N3). Yet if
God cannot but love Himself, for to be related to Himself is to love Himself, as
Bulgakov and Balthasar have argued, this is not the case for the world. God can
elect the world in love in Christ, posit a relation with creation in Himself in
divine-human election, or not. The divine life is a perfect self-realization in
love-desire and so God does not have to create or redeem the world to
complete Himself, as Bulgakov argued against Idealism.

Moving back and forth from the created to the uncreated in an unceasing
oscillation or tension, we see God’s identification with us in Christ, His
freely willed similarity, and His radical difference from us, His ever-greater
dissimilarity. In Christ, we have, as it were, a new form of the analogia entis
through a coincidentia oppositorum of two loves-desires structured by the axis
F3–N3 where analogy is married with antinomy/dialectic: identity of love and
difference of love or, alternatively, similarity and dissimilarity of finite and
infinite Being, are in a perfect similarity-in-difference in the God-Man. He is
most boundless in His being bound in a free dependence (F3) and most bound
in His being boundless in His self-giving dependently free love (N3).
But there is still more to be said about the fourth and last step in Balthasar’s
metaphysics, the difference between God and the world.
10
The Trinity, Creation, and Freedom—More

on the Fourth Step
Having discerned the dialectic of freedom and necessity in created Being in its
similarity and dissimilarity from divine Trinitarian Being, let us now go deeper
into the Trinitarian logic that undergirds Balthasar’s metaphysics. We shall
first examine the infinite freedom of the Trinity and see how it is both similar
and dissimilar to the finite freedom of man. But then, turning abruptly from
analogy, we shall explore what appears to be a dialectical ‘turn’ in Balthasar’s
Trinitarian theology through which the beginning of a form of the problematic
and his response shall come to light.
10.1 I NFINITE F REEDOM— FREE DEPENDENT

LOVE IN THE TRINITY
God as Trinity in His ‘unconditioned freedom’ as ‘actus purus’ grounds the

tension-filled difference of Being from beings (second difference) and beings
from Being (third difference) out of which glory radiates. He grounds this
difference by creating out of a pure act of free love as ‘the guardian and
shepherd of this glory’.1 Unlike non-subsistent Being and essents which
depend on each other for subsistence,2 God is the sole sufficient groundless
ground for ‘both Being and the existent in its possession of form’. He is this
ground as absolute subsistent Being, whose existence is His essence, and
possesses a radical freedom that is not naturally dependent on some reality
apart from Himself.3 God is ‘the highest synthesis, in which all differences are
both formed and dissolved’.4 We need, therefore, to gaze further through all
1 2 3
Balthasar, GL, V, 636 and see 621. ibid., 624. ibid., 624–5.
4
CL, 68; On Balthasar’s Trinitarian theology: O’Hanlon 1990, 110–44, Schulz 1997, 737–817,
2009, Krenski 1990, Pesarchick 2000, Dalzell 2000, 161–93, Lösel 2001, Birot 2003, R. Williams
The Trinity, Creation, and Freedom 187

intra-worldly differences (first–third steps), rising still higher to the fourth
step and foundational difference of all reality—God and the world.
There exists, as we saw earlier, a certain analogy between created and
uncreated Being (analogia entis) insofar as in creation there exists a real
distinction between existence and essence, and in God, there exists a unity-
in-difference of His hypostases and His Being.5 Furthermore, created Being,
like God in Himself and for creation, pours out itself without measure to the
essent it informs in a dependent freedom (F3) and a free dependence (N3).
However, created Being, as it is non-subsistent, is a ‘non-identity’ in compari-
son to the perfect identity of subsistent divine ousia with its hypostases since it
is cleaved in two between itself and the essents.6 It needs an essent, which ‘is’
apart from itself, to subsist. Its freedom—like that of God—may be a freedom
in dependence (F3–N3), but this freedom is ontologically cleft: an unresolved
and imperfect tension of becoming between freedom and necessity. In com-
parison, Absolute Freedom is a perfect synthesis or tension of these moments.
Despite this latter crucial proviso, we can affirm that by contemplating the real
distinction as a movement of love as sheer gratuity, there is unveiled Being’s
‘final countenance, which for us receives the name of trinitarian love’.7
God as Trinity gives to the world a touch of His Absolute Freedom and
‘sovereign power of gift’. He is a ‘gifting freedom’8 understood as a ‘freely self-
giving’9 or ‘groundless love’.10 Divine love is said to be ‘groundless’ because the
Father’s self-donating begetting of the Logos, as the locus of all truth, is utterly
unfathomable.11 In our terminology, Balthasar, like Bulgakov, marries un-
grounded freedom (F1) with a free movement of love-desire (F2). All the acts
of God are equally the product of this ‘whyless’ love.12 They are an expression
of His personal profligate gratuity, liberality, fruitfulness understood as the
‘superabundance of love’13 expressed as the Spirit14 who is spilled out as the
mutual gift of the Father and the Son.15 This love is, Balthasar opines, adapting
Schelling,16 absolutely unprethinkable.17 One cannot ‘get behind’ or ‘above’
whyless divine love as a free gratuitous self-giving revealed in Christ. Search as
one might, one will not find some more primordial ‘reason’ than divine desire
itself. So too one cannot get behind God’s act of self-election in Barth or one
cannot climb up beyond the Absolute-Relative to the Absolute in Bulgakov.
2004, 2007b, Sciglitano 2007, 545–50, Hanby 2008, Lopez 2008, Oliver 2008, Schenk 2008, Sain
2009, Friesenhahn 2011, 79–174, and Tonstad 2009, 65–135, 2010.
5 6 7
Balthasar, TD, V, 68 and 75. TL, II, 183. GL, I, 158.
8 9
H, III.1.2, 965 [see GL, V, 636 (revd)]. TD, II, 233 and see TL, III, 240.
10
ibid., II, 177; see GL, V, 31ff., TD, II, 260, 272–3, V, 508–9, TL, I, 126 and II, 135–49.
11 12 13
TL, II, 155. GL, V, 31–2. TL, II, 163.
14 15
ibid., 140, 163–4, and 176. ibid., 155–6.
16
See Schelling, PO, SW, XIV: 337ff. (esp. 341).
17
‘Die Unvordenklichkeit der Liebe’ (Balthasar, ThL, II, 126 [see TL, II, 135]) and see
Balthasar’s discussion of Schelling in Apokalypse, I: 204–51.

God being love is, in His groundlessness (Ungrund), also the primordial ground
(Urgrund) of all that is. But as such an ecstatic love, He is beyond anything
explicable by finality (e.g. the end of goodness) and propositions (truth).
The same danger we saw in Bulgakov and Barth reoccurs: the turning of
divine love-desire into a relentless suprarational fiat that is self-defining,
swamping reality and in this way transvaluating human standards of goodness
and fidelity. It is unclear in this picture how we can trust God’s self-revelation
in Christ as a faithful and definitive gift. Balthasar responds (unconvincingly)
that God’s truth is based upon the unfathomable groundless ground of love of
the Father’s generation of the Son (F1 and F2 together) and the spirating with
the Son of the Spirit. However, he baldly asserts that divine generation is not
thereby an ‘irrational’ ground where theological truth is conceived as a ‘self-
enclosed sphere’.18 This ‘groundless, all-grounding love’ is not ‘blind’ but
‘supremely wise and is thus the ultimate sense of all knowing and all reason’
and in this way can guide all those looking for direction.19 One wonders
whether Balthasar has simply avoided the challenge by defining divine Being
so broadly that it covers all ontological cases. It ends up being everything and
thereby nothing in particular (not even being sui generis), like Bulgakov’s
divine Sophia.
Balthasar attempts to avoid the temptation of voluntarism, the turning of
God’s free love into an irrational exertion of power, a wild voluntaristic divine
desire, by conceiving the free love of the hypostases as an ungroundable
grounding necessity (N2). This necessity is conceived as being in a perfect
synthesis with divine freedom (F1 and F2)—a move we saw earlier with
Bulgakov and Barth. Balthasar, reminding us of Bulgakov, frequently will
say in his work that divine freedom is beyond all conditions, even those of
freedom and necessity. This is because all such conditions are taken up into the
divine life where God is perfectly at one with His properties.20 God’s Being is
free gratuitous love understood precisely as the unprethinkable act of self-
giving, self-receiving love which always already includes within it its own
necessity both in the divine life and in creation and redemption: ‘the absolute
freedom of Divine Being, a freedom that, even in God, has no “why”. Both in
the trinitarian self-communication and again in the decision to create the
world, it is its own necessity [Notwendigkeit]. The decision to create is purely
gratuitous, and we cannot get “behind” or “above” it to find some external
necessity [liegende Nezessität].’21 But how did Balthasar characterize this
whyless unprethinkable life of love of the Trinity?
Divine Being, as we saw earlier, is a supra-Becoming, a dynamic ‘trinitarian
happening’.22 In it there exists a distinction, reflected in creaturely Being,
between the common Being (ousia) shared by all the divine hypostases and
18 19 20
TL, II, 155. ibid., 140–1. ibid., 147.
21 22
TD, V, 508 [ThD, IV, 465]. TD, V, 67.

the different qualities that distinguish them. The hypostases share in their
common being but remain united in their uniqueness and particularity. Each
hypostasis ‘lets’ the Other ‘be’ or ‘happen’ (or ‘go’) (i.e. Seinlassen, Geschehen-
lassen)23 in coequal concreteness through a ceaseless self-giving, self-receiving,
and self-emptying (F3) that can only be/subsist through its complete reliance
on the grace of the Other (N3).24 This movement in God is a state of
acceptance and affirmation of the Being by one hypostasis of the other as
wholly and positively different (‘letting-be’) through the release of that other
hypostasis into Being (‘letting-go’ (Ziehenlassen)).25 Freedom in this Trinitar-
ian vision is found through loving dependence on the Other, and dependence,
it will be remembered, is a form of necessity. Balthasar seems to understand
freedom and necessity/dependence as poles that live in and through one
another just as is the case with our dependent freedom (F3) and free
dependence (N3).
The Father begets the Son with a complete self-giving or dependent free-
dom (F3) by letting Him be to go free. It might be asked whether the
dependent freedom of this begetting has the sense of ‘otherwise’ but we shall
leave this question until section 10.2. This complete self-giving of the Father is
an ‘active actio’ insofar as ‘the Father causes the Son to be, to “go”; but this also
means that the Father “lets go” of him, lets him go free’.26 However, this
paternal begetting is dependent on the Son. He consents/lets Himself be
begotten with complete free self-abandonment (F3) by ‘holding himself in
readiness to be begotten’.27 In this way, He truly lets Himself be—in a ‘passive
actio’—through the act of an Other other than Himself, that is, His Father
(N3).28 The filial passive actio is a ‘condition’ of the paternal active actio.29 The
Father, then, cannot do otherwise than wait for the Son to acknowledge Him
as Father, making the Father’s act a free dependence (N3).
The same movement of a passive actio, which is necessary for an active
actio, can be seen in the generation of the Spirit. The Spirit is breathed forth
mutually by the Father and Son, who ‘let Him go’. However, this spiration is
only on the basis of the Spirit letting Himself be in this procession so that
the Son’s and the Father’s free self-giving and self-receiving (F3) can only
be such by their waiting on the response of the Spirit (N3).30 The Father’s
begetting of the Son and co-breathing with the Son of the Spirit is free, as it is
a gifting of Himself, and necessary, as He is only Father through these
relations. The Father’s free generation of the Son and Spirit (with the Son)
(F3), because it involves a necessary awaiting on the Other in its release of
23
TD, V, 85 [ThD, 75]; developing “Gelassenheit” (see GL, V, 29ff.; see Quash 2005, 52–84)
via Marian (Lk. 1:38) self-surrender and receptivity (Balthasar, GL, V, 38; Mariology: Leahy
2000).
24 25
TD, V, 68 and 75. TD, V, 85–6 [ThD, IV, 75].
26 27
TD, V, 86. Speyr, WP, 65, cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 87.
28 29 30
ibid., 86 and see 85. ibid., 86. ibid., 86.

that Other, can be seen in its active actio as containing a ‘certain passivity
qualified by the “passive actio” of Son and Spirit’31 (N3). The Father to be
Father must surrender to the freedom and independence of the Other. He
cannot do otherwise, so His free gifting of His Being is totally definitive and
eternally bound.
This free dependence of the Father on the Son, F3 married with N3, is not
just seen in the Trinitarian self-communication. It is also expressed, just as is
the case with Bulgakov and Barth, in the divine economy. The Son, in being
the perfect image of the Father who has expressed His whole love in Him, is
said to be ‘apt to represent the Father’s self-giving in his creation in every
respect’. The Father, however, cannot represent His self-giving in creation by
Himself because He has given everything (His ‘All’) in and to His Son and so
‘He cannot do more than “pitilessly” hand over this All to the world.’32 Yet in
this self-giving of the hypostases, none of them loses itself. They are who they
always are by giving themselves away—self-giving is the self-preservation of
identity; ekstasis is enstasis.33 This is also the case because in God free loving
self-giving assumes free loving reciprocation or self-receiving love. They ‘know
and interpenetrate one another’ to the same degree as ‘each of them opens up
to the other in absolute freedom’, so there is no overwhelming in this mutual
self-knowledge, ‘since each subsists by being let-be’.34
We do not have the space here to enter in to the complex and controversial
debate surrounding Balthasar’s use in Trinitarian theology (heavily influenced
by Bulgakovean kenoticism)35 of Romantic gender theories, with their emphasis
on the interrelation of the male (active) with the female (passive).36 Balthasar
sees the Father as dependent on the Son for His manifestation in both the
immanent and economic Trinity. He is, then, by no means understood as
the possessor of some sort of self-confident assertive rational male authority
as unitary source that holds and then gives the Logos His Being.37 Balthasar
is far from being naively ‘phallogocentric’ (Derrida). He does not privilege
the dominating and initiating patriarchal subject, presence, and unity over
the feminine object, ‘lack’ or absence, difference and otherness. Difference/
femininity, for Balthasar, is not merely instrumental to the masculine. Indeed,
Balthasar’s discussion in this regard upsets the very gender binarism it initially
presupposes and is to the end of emphasizing difference-in-unity (against
Hegel) and a destabilizing conception of origin. Moreover, the very person
who best embodies the free dependence (N3) and dependent freedom (F3) of
31
ibid., 87; see ibid., 91 for “super-femininity” and “super-masculinity” but contrast CL,
87, 119.
32 33 34
TD, III, 519. TD, II, 256 and V, 74. TD, II, 259.
35
See J. Martin 2015b, 222.
36
See Gardner and Moss 1999, Pesarchick 2000, R. Williams 2004, 44–7, 2007b, 82–5, Beattie
2005, Coakley 2006, 150ff., Sain 2009, Tonstad 2009, 65–135, 2010, and (esp.) J. Martin 2015b.
37
Compare Coakley 2013, 253–9.

the Trinity, its active-passive receptivity (i.e. Gelassenheit), is the Mother of
God with her ‘Yes’ at the Annunciation.38 It is for this reason that any
application by him of the gender dialectic of his Trinitarian theology to
justifying the Roman Catholic prohibition on woman’s ordination would
seem to go counter to his own theo-logic.39
In this context, Balthasar above all resembles Bulgakov, whose understand-
ing of the play of love in the divine hypostases is similarly kenotic but by no
means sexist.40 He argues that Sophia-Ousia as God-love is ipostasnost’ or the
active-passive capacity to be hypostastized and to hypostasize, to be loved and
to respond in love, a perichoretic dance of divine desire. Behind both thinkers
perhaps lies a critical appropriation of Schelling41 with his rethinking of the
subject-object relationship. Schelling saw this relationship as an interpersonal
spiritual encounter unifying the indeterminate and the determinate, infinite
and finite, and subjectivity and objectivity. He understood it as the ‘third
potency’ (A3) which is ‘being-with-itself ’ and the ‘subject-object’. This third
potency is the fulfilment and balance of the first two potencies only insofar as
it is always already dependent on their continuing co-operation.42
Balthasar’s kenoticism—his theology of free eternal dependent love—is
pushing towards a new vision of divine freedom. The free self-giving and
self-receiving of absolute Trinitarian love is a self-constitutive Absolute Free-
dom that includes within it moments of freedom and moments of necessity/
dependence. Balthasar, drawing on Barth and Bulgakov, is adapting kenoti-
cism to elaborate a vision of Absolute Freedom that, while naturally diffusive,
cannot be reduced to a necessitarian emanationism and, while fully self-
possessed, does not end with the nominalist worship of unbridled (and there-
fore arbitrary) divine power. He wished, as did his predecessors, to develop a
form of divine activity/creativity or Absolute Freedom that, while able to be
novel (freedom), remained ever self-identical in that each part is dependent on
the Other for the generation of the whole (necessity). The freedom of divine
love is its own necessity as a perfect union of life in dependence or activity in
passivity: ‘This self-giving cannot be motivated by anything other than itself,
hence it is boundless love where freedom and necessity coincide and where
identity and otherness are one.’43 Thus, Balthasar goes so far as to refer to the
real distinction that obtains in Being in the world, where, as we saw earlier,
38
e.g. Balthasar, TD, V, 441 (on ‘Marian principle’), ‘Who is the Church?’ [1961], 157–66,
Threefold Garland [1978], 32–3 and on mariology, see Mary: The Church at the Source [1997],
97–176.
39
‘Women Priests?’ [1979], 187–98 and ‘Uninterrupted Tradition of the Church’ [1977],
99–106 (see Coakley 2006, 150ff.).
40
See J. Martin 2015b.
41
See Balthasar, Apokalypse, I: 205–46 and GL, V, 557–72 (see O’Regan 2014, 236 and
J. Martin 2015a).
42 43
See Beach 1994, 125ff. Balthasar, TD, V, 83.

there is a dialectic of self-giving and reception, as the ‘structural reflection of
triune being’,44 because there exists in this creaturely distinction ‘a remote
reflection of the mystery of the Trinity’.45 But what of human freedom in
relation to the Absolute Freedom we have just detailed?46
10.2 F IN ITE F REEDOM— F R EE D EP E N D EN T

LOVE IN MAN
Man has a ‘core of freedom’ which has a form of absoluteness in that it cannot
be ‘split open’ or compelled, a sort of human F1, but which is ‘an indivisibly
intellectual and volitive light . . . an understanding and an affirming’.47 It is
because man is free that he is ‘termed the “image and likeness of God”—and
this likewise is the concrete thrust of the “analogia entis”’.48 God, and we shall
return to this idea below, has bound Himself out of love to man and creation,
leaving a space for man to operate by giving him a ‘portion’ of His own
Absolute Freedom.49 This is the ‘first pole’ of finite freedom as ‘autoexousion’
or the power to act from within oneself (‘Being-from-within-oneself ’) gov-
erning oneself as a king governs his own land (autokratos).50
There is, however, a complementary relativity to this absoluteness of the
free will. If freedom is to desire what is right, then it needs not only good
counsel, but, in order to grasp and possess the true and good, it needs ‘a joyful
and loving consent of the will (complacentia)’.51 Just as God is free in the
opening up and going out of the different hypostases to the Other, in the
letting be, self-giving, and self-receiving of love (F3–N3), so too man cannot be
free merely through securely holding on to himself in the power of his will and
uniqueness. He is only himself by going beyond himself in self-surrender.52
I am myself by acknowledging (i.e. consenting to and receiving) in a
dependent freedom (F3) that the Other has Being and that it too possesses
itself and is unique.53 Thus, I must, indeed, I cannot do otherwise (if I am to be)
(N3) than to let the Other be. I must, in a sense, consent to its Being, being
dependent on it for my own Being so that without absorbing it into me it
complements my particularity: ‘the soul, precisely because it possesses itself in
freedom, necessarily lets all beings be on account of a concern for their
freedom (as true and real); and only on this basis does it seek a letting of
them to be’.54 The Other, then, exercises a sort of external necessity on me
44 45
ibid., 75; see TD, II, 209–10. TD, V, p.103.
46 47
See Dalzell 2000 and Cirelli 2007. Balthasar, TD, II, 210; cf. 223–4.
48 49
ibid., 123. GL, VII, 214 and TD, IV, 331.
50 51 52
TD, II, 214–15. TD, 224 and see 242. TD, V, 76.
53 54
TD, II, 209. ThD, II.1, 217 [see TD, II, 240 (revd)].

(N1), for I can only be free (F1) and live, love, and desire (F2) insofar as
I acknowledge him in all his otherness. He becomes an internal fact of my life
(N2). Of course, this sort of anthropology immediately reminds one of
Bulgakov, where finite freedom only seizes itself through the existence of an
external givenness (=necessity) that must be internalized.
This encounter with the Other is the opening to the ‘second pole’ of finite
freedom which is the ‘necessary immanence of divine freedom in created
freedom’.55 We have been arguing that finite being, like infinite Being, only
realizes its freedom in its acknowledgement of dependence on others (F3–N3)
who have Being. This dependence consists of being open and consenting to
the Being of the Other and participating in their life as one’s own life. Their
Being is my Being which is the common Being of all and this common Being is
a participating gift of God’s free Infinite Being. One has an opportunity to fulfil
oneself in one’s ground by consenting to ‘Being-in-its-totality’ which reveals
its true face ‘as that which freely grounds all things, as that which, in infinite
freedom, creates finite freedom’.56 Therefore, finite freedom fulfils itself in the
(nevertheless) vastly different infinite freedom. This fulfilment is realized
through a free and definitive self-giving and self-receiving which cannot be
otherwise (F3–N3) by finite freedom’s handing ‘itself over to infinite free
Being, to the Being who is the Giver of this free openness’ in the acceptance
that others might be.57 I realize myself in God by realizing myself in the
neighbour. For infinite Being in its Absolute Freedom gives itself to everything
in and through created Being.58 A finite being, therefore, in being self-ruling
(F1), is always moving towards its own origin in God to whom it must
surrender itself to be (F3–N3), since ‘finite freedom (qua finite) only fulfils
itself within infinite freedom [in der unendlichen]’.59 The operative word here
is ‘in’, since God’s infinite freedom is not created or finite freedom’s opposite
‘other’ over against it (God is Non-Aliud).60 Man’s created freedom, through
the Spirit with His grace, is perfected within the context of Absolute Freedom
(which is love-desire) by ‘consenting to that freedom of that divine love that
indwells him’61 but which is ‘immanent in it and transcendent beyond it’.62
Yet here we have a great mystery, which is that, in Christ, in His embrace of us
in the Holy Trinity, our finite freedom is affirmed as distinct. Our creaturely
freedom is ‘Other’ in God’s infinite freedom whose unfathomability, non-
otherness, does not become less.63 Balthasar holds that, while God is not
‘Other’ to us, we can graciously be ‘Other’ to Him precisely because He undergirds
that otherness.
55 56 57
TD, II, n. 64, 232. ibid., 242. ibid., 228; compare TL, I, 242.
58
Aquinas, De Pot., 1: 3.7 co., 130; see Balthasar, GL, IV, 401–2.
59 60
TD, II, 236 [ThD, II.1, 214]. ibid., 230.
61 62
TL, III, 240 and see TD, II, 233. ibid., 272 and see 236–7.
63
See ibid., 193–4.

The relationship of infinite and finite freedom is asymmetric. Infinite
freedom qua freedom does not naturally need to fulfil itself in finite freedom,
although the finite must naturally fulfil itself in the infinite. It is imperative
(see 9.3) that one holds on tightly to both divine and creaturely freedoms. On
the one hand, one has God’s transcendent freedom in itself as a perfect
synthesis of freedom and necessity/dependence where dependent freedom
(F3) is in union with a free dependence (N3). On the other hand, one has a
real finite freedom which is an imperfect creative tension between F3–N3
which, though analogically similar to divine freedom, is also radically dissimilar
and cannot (lest we fall into pantheism) be collapsed into the infinite, although
it finds its ground and cause in it.64 In short, salvation history should be
conceived as a theo-drama which requires an ‘interplay of divine and created
freedoms’.65 Balthasar repeatedly emphasizes in this line that it is only through
the difference and tension between a finite freedom fallen into sin and a holy
infinite freedom that there can be any theo-drama whatsoever.66 However,
having carefully analogically distinguished divine from creaturely Being,
infinite from finite freedom, Balthasar’s argument opens itself up to a dialectical
identification of God with His creation through God’s Trinitarian self-binding to
the possibility of creation and redemption. It is on this ‘dialectical turn’ from
analogy that we shall now focus, for in it comes to the fore the problematic of
freedom and necessity and Balthasar’s unique response. Balthasar’s balancing of
dialectic and analogy (see chs. 11–12) will be the basis of our own constructive
response to the problematic.
10.3 THE ABSOLUTE FREEDOM OF THE TRINITY

F O R CRE A T I O N—A D IALECTICAL TURN?
In developing his Trinitarian theology, Balthasar drew heavily on the writing

of his theological and spiritual ‘partner’, the Swiss mystical writer Adrienne
von Speyr (1902–67). Sections of Balthasar’s later writings are catenae of
quotations from her works.67 Of particular importance for him was a portion
of her Die Welt des Gebetes [The World of Prayer] (1951) entitled ‘Prayer in
the Trinity’. Here we find further Christological resources in responding to
64 65
See ibid., 118, 126 and TD, V, 507. ibid., II, 118.
66
ibid., 178; cf. 35–6, 118–19, 126–7, 185, 216.
67
See ‘Short Guide’ [1955], 19, ‘In Retrospect’ [1965], 89, First Glance [1968], 13–14,
‘Another Ten Years’ [1975], 105–7, and Our Task [1984], 13, 73ff., 95ff.; on Balthasar and
Speyr: Henrici 1991, 18–28, Roten 1991, Kerr 1998, Krenski 1995, 123–57 and 2006; on Balthasar
and Speyr’s religious community, the Johannesgemeinschaft: Task, 117–79 and Greiner 1991; on
Speyr: Sindoni 1996 and Sutton 2014 (bibliography: Glance, 102–11 and “Speyr-Werke-Johannes
Verlag” (2010)).

the problematic insofar as intratrinitarian kenoticism is developed on the basis
of the dialectic of freedom and necessity echoing many sources including
Schelling.68 Following Speyr, Balthasar appropriates this dialectic as the internal
structure or order (taxis) of the Trinitarian relations.69 Contrary to a Hegelian
transcendental logic, the content of the dialectic is wholly constituted and
generated by the character of the hypostatic relations. Its significance is quite
different from the creaturely forms of the dialectic. The mystery discerned in
God draws our creaturely terminology (e.g. ‘freedom’, ‘necessity’, ‘dialectic’, etc.)
as well as philosophical systems (e.g. Schelling) to it and transforms it.70
The Father freely but necessarily wills the Son’s generation, with a ‘divine
necessity which expresses his spiritual nature . . . lying beyond all creaturely
freedom and necessity’.71 Balthasar argues, summarizing Bulgakov, that the
Father’s begetting of the Son is an initial kenosis that underpins all subsequent
kenoses.72 He gives everything of His Being to the Son (Jn. 17:10) because He
refuses to be God for Himself.73 He strips Himself ‘without remainder, of His
Godhead and hands it over to the Son’74 as a free but necessary gift. In the free
gift to the Son of consubstantial divinity given in His generation, the Son
becomes infinitely Other to the Father. His response to His othering by the
Father is His own identical responsive ‘self-dispossession’75 by giving Himself
back to Him in gratitude76 with a ‘Yes to the primal kenosis of the Father’.77
Building on Bulgakov, the Father’s generation of the Son and the Son’s own
self-renunciation in turn create an ‘infinite distance’ between the Father and
the Son. This distance is maintained, sealed, and bridged by the subsistent
‘We’ of the Father and Son whom they both breathe out in common as the
‘essence of love’: the Holy Spirit.78
The free but necessary gift of the divine Being of God from God to God is
not, in a sense, compulsory. Although it includes the Father’s own ‘necessary
will’, a will which is beyond all creaturely notions of freedom and necessity,79
the Father passes on to the Son His will as free and not bound.80 The Son freely
adopts this necessary will as His own free will.81 The Son’s own will ‘consists of
divine necessity and freedom’.82 In our terminology, the Father’s begetting is
68
Speyr, WP, 28–74 [Welt des Gebetes [1951], 21–66]; see Balthasar, TD, II, 257, V, 87–91,
passim, TL, II, 162–3, 288–9, III, 58–9, 163, 226–7, and 236–7; see Glance, 62.
69
See TL, III, 58–9, 163 and TD, V, 88.
70
See Athanasius, AA, 2.3.2–3, 179 [Anatolios 2004, 112]; compare Hilary of Poitiers, De
Trin. 4.14 (SC 448, ll.40–41, ll.27–28) (cited at Barth, CD, I/1, 354 and see Busch 2004, 76).
71
Speyr, WP, 58 cited at Balthasar, TL, III, 236 and see 163.
72
TD, IV, 323 and Mysterium, 35; see also GL, VII, 213–14 (generally: 202–35 and compare
TD, IV, 319–32). Compare Fiddes, SWKG, 289–90, 383 (see J. Martin 2015a, 2015b).
73 74 75
Balthasar, TD, IV, 324. ibid., 323. ibid., 331.
76 77 78
ibid., 324. ibid., 326. ibid., 324.
79 80
Speyr, WP, 60–1, cited at Balthasar, TL, III, 237. Speyr, WP, 59.
81
ibid., 58–9, cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 88.
82
TL, III, 237, summarizing Speyr, WP, 60–1; cf. Balthasar, TD, V, 88.

primarily a free dependence (N3) whose self-giving cannot be otherwise. This
sense of ‘not otherwise’ applies likewise to the Son. He is only the Son as the
only-begotten in reference to His unbegotten Father who begot Him. Never-
theless, the paternal will’s necessary quality hides within it a tacit freedom (it is
a free dependence (N3)).
In the reception of the paternal will, the Son enowns it by freely making His
necessary begottenness His own. It is as if, from the point of view of this
paternal will, which is ‘filialized’, both the begetting and the begottenness
acquire the quality of free self-donation or what we have called a dependent
freedom (F3): ‘[it is] as if in their freedom Father and Son recapitulate their
natural relationship in order freely to be what they are of necessity’.83 The Son
freely binds Himself to the necessary will of His Father and makes it His own
necessity. The Son’s free binding of Himself to the necessity of His nature is the
means by which He and His Father are no longer bound by it. There exists one
freedom of the divine essence, but it is possessed by each hypostasis uniquely84
and in an eternal reciprocity. Balthasar often speaks, in a way that is reminiscent
of Bulgakov (see 6.2),85 as if there were an essential will and three hypostatic
wills. Each of these hypostatic wills—while not contradicting one another and
indeed being essentially one divine will—has its own acting ‘area’ or ‘realm’ of
freedom in the Godhead where each hypostasis lets the other be free.86
The divine will, as we shall shortly see, obtains its unity as a result of the
‘integration of the intentions of the Hypostases’ by the Holy Spirit. He definitively
recapitulates the will(s) of the Father and the Son in an Absolute Freedom.87
In light of the Son’s eternal self-binding to the Father, we can even say,
going beyond Balthasar and Speyr, that in a sense the Father need not have
generated the Son. This is the case because the Son need not have accepted this
generation and so the generating (Balthasar holds) is in a sense dependent on
the generation.88 There is a certain divine sense of ‘otherwise’ in God’s own
self-generation89 but it is infinitely dissimilar to the sense of ‘otherwise’ of
God’s creation and redemption of the world. As we saw earlier, God’s self-
generation assumes the pole of a prior non-negotiable necessity (N3) of the
Father’s begetting of the Son, which then is balanced by the pole of a filial free
act of assent that might not have been (F3). In this act, the Son freely binds
Himself to his own necessary begottenness. Only then and retrospectively in
light of this latter filial act can we call the Father’s begetting a dependent
freedom (F3) since it is dependent on its free reception by the Son (N3)F3). It
is for this reason that we described the Father’s self-donation of the Son as
initially a dependent freedom (F3), although, strictly speaking, this is a
83
Speyr, WP, 58 and cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 88 and TL, III, 163.
84 85
TD, V, 485 and see 88. Bulgakov, AB, n. 1, 313–14.
86 87
Balthasar, TD, II, 257 and 262ff. TD, V, 485.
88 89
See TD, 87. pace K. Ward 1996, 177–9.

retrospective filial characterization. In contrast, creation and redemption
reverse this relationship (F3)N3). God decides freely to be God for the
world, and this might have been otherwise (F3), but only then can we say
that His self-giving is not otherwise and had to be so (N3). These issues are
crucial to our own constructive response to the problematic and we shall
return to them below.
The Son, as was just mentioned, beholds the Father’s perpetual begetting of
Him and discovers that hidden and veiled within the Father’s necessary will
there ‘lies a unique, more personal and active free will which he can use as he
sees fit’. By this will He enowns His own divinity. Within this same paternal
necessary but tacitly free will, the Son discovers the Father’s ‘active possibilities
and possible intentions’, ‘plans’ that concern Him and require His effecting.90
These possibilities are everything ‘which has the nature of purpose’ in the
Father that He commits to His Son in His begetting of Him. They are tacit
unformed requests, ‘like preludes, beginnings taken up by the Son to be
realized’.91 They are the paternal free possibilities and intentions for creation,
which Balthasar identifies with Maximus the Confessor’s divine ideas/proto-
types/logoi/wills/archetypes.92 We are reminded in this context of Barth’s
appeal to divine possibilities (building on the potentia absoluta/ordinata
distinction) and Bulgakov’s rejection of the latter tradition. Bulgakov held
that all the divine possibilities/images/ideas of love are pre-accomplished in
God and realized in creation.
As the Son commends His spirit to the Father on the cross (Lk. 23:46) with a
dependent freedom (F3) that will not turn back from its self-giving (N3), so
too the Father in begetting the Son gives ‘his spirit (his purposes, his work, his
creation)’, that is, His ‘plans’, into His Son’s hands with a free dependence
that cannot do otherwise (N3). The Son freely receives these plans in His
enownment of His begottenness, and along with the Father’s begetting they
retrospectively take on the quality of a free self-giving (F3). These Paternal
plans envisioned by the Father and taken up and effected by the Son are the
realization of the New Covenant through the preparation out of love for the
Son by the Old Covenant.93 Thus, these plans are the Father’s entrusting to His
Son of ‘the task of saving the world through his Cross’94, which he describes
(see ch. 11) as a ‘freely willed “necessity” [frei gewollte “Notwendigkeit”]’.95 It is
not only these free possibilities/archetypes of the Father given to His Son in
the divine generation that are embraced within the eternal happening of the
life of the Trinity but creation itself. Here it is understood as the realization of
90 91
Speyr, WP, 60, 63. ibid., 63–4.
92
Balthasar, TD, V, 509 and see ibid., II, 268–70; see Maximus, Amb. 7, PG 91.1077C–1088A
(Constas 2014, 1: 94–111).
93
Speyr, WP, 63–4 [Welt des Gebetes, 55–6].
94
Balthasar, TD, V, 88–9, commenting on Speyr, WP, 60–5.
95
Balthasar, TD, V, 509 [ThD, IV, 465].

the possibilities/archetypes and has no other ‘place’ than within the life of God
Himself,96 since ‘The world’s becoming has its origin in the sublime transac-
tions between the Persons of the Trinity.’97 The world is ‘sheltered within’ the
Trinity in the ‘realm of freedom’ of the Son98 (see ch. 11).
The existence of creation in God (in its archetype and its realization) is
entirely apt if we remember that the Father’s self-giving in His begetting of His
Son is an Ur-kenosis that underpins all subsequent self-emptying both in the
Trinity and in creation and redemption. Creation is a ‘new kenosis on God’s
part’99 in that the ‘creator’ out of a free self-giving and out-reaching desire (F3)
binds Himself to the creature and ‘gives up a part of his freedom to the
creature, in the act of creating’,100 so that He cannot turn back (N3). God in
Himself is ‘life, love, an eternal fullness of communion’ and He ‘does not need
the world in order to have another to love’, as is the case for German Idealism.
In creating the world, without any compulsion, He acts ‘in utter freedom,
binding himself freely . . . to the work he has begun and will follow through to
its conclusion’. God cannot and will not turn back (N3) in creating the world
out of free love (F3) but He does this ‘without becoming entangled in its
confusion’.101
He becomes freely dependent upon His creation (F3–N3), just as He is
freely dependent in His own eternal life of love (F3–N3), both implicitly by
creaturely freedom as His first ‘self-limitation’ and explicitly in His ‘second,
deeper, limitation’ in making a covenant with Israel (Noah, Abraham, Moses,
etc.). This covenant is ‘indissoluble’ whatever may befall His people. Most
profoundly, in a third kenosis which is the Incarnation, not just the Son, but
the whole Trinity pours forth its Being into the world. Here is manifested the
eternal ‘Eucharistic attitude’ of the Son in receiving His Being from the Father
through their Spirit ‘in the pro nobis of the Cross and Resurrection for the sake
of the world’.102 Therefore, God’s binding of Himself in creation and redemp-
tion, His becoming dependent on His creatures out of free love that will not
turn back from its self-binding (F3–N3), is a new internal form of His own
primordial self-emptying love where each of the hypostases is free in being
dependent on the Other (F3–N3). This is despite the fact that creation is a
unique reality unto itself apart from God (i.e. ‘external’ to God) and in no way
(simply speaking) a ‘piece’ of God, that is, God in creaturely guise. Creation is
in God in Christ because God’s own self-communication, as Trinity, is kenotic
love just as we saw in earlier forms in Bulgakov and even in Barth.
Balthasar has made here a startling move from analogy to dialectic. He
began by emphasizing analogically, in his philosophy of Being or metaphysics,
the dissimilarity of created from divine Being in that created but not divine
96 97 98
TD, V, 61ff. ibid., 80. ibid., 373ff. and TD, II, 262ff.
99 100 101
TD, IV, 328. GL, VII, 214. TD, III, 529.
102
TD, IV, 331 and see GL, VII, 214.

Being is dependent on existents apart from itself to subsist. But he then turns
to the dialectical movement of God’s kenotic identity with the world in His
sheer difference from it as immanent Trinity. Here we see the problematic
come to the fore in Balthasar. God, having eternally bound Himself to the
possibility of creation and redemption, now must create and redeem the world
in Christ. He writes that it is part of the ‘notion’ of God, as philosophy tells us,
that God ‘be free to create a world or not create it’. When God creates man, He
is in no way impelled to give him a share of His life. However, the plane of
philosophy is transcended ‘without losing its validity’ when God reveals that
out of self-limiting divine love He has chosen not to be a God without the
world (F3). His revealed ‘inner intention’ is that He ‘willed creation from
all eternity’, designing and predestining man ‘as the brother of his eternal
Son become man’, so that ‘now’, since He is ‘bound up with the world in the
indissoluble bond of the hypostatic union, he will never again be without the
world’ (N3).103 God to be God has chosen eternally to not be God without
the world (F3) to which He has bound Himself in the Incarnation with a
decisiveness that cannot be undone (N3). God must create the world in Christ,
but, and on this turns Balthasar’s response to the problematic, only because
He has freely chosen (F3) its creation and redemption as a freely willed
necessity (N3). As we shall see, this divine self-binding of God to creation is
enacted in Absolute Freedom by the Spirit (F3–N3).
We see in our exegesis that, as was the case in Bulgakov and Barth, God has
an F3–N3 relationship to the world. This economic relationship is simply an
expression of God’s own nature as Trinity where each hypostasis gives itself to
the Other and lives totally dependent on the Other with a dependent freedom
(F3) and a free dependence (N3). Thus, when God decides to be God only as
God for the world (F3–N3), there does exist a nature which lies behind this
self-choice. This nature is God’s eternal hypostatic life of dependent self-giving
(F3–N3). As we argued earlier, this divine life includes a non-Pickwickian
notion of self-choice, a sense of ‘otherwise’, which we have called ‘dependent
freedom’ (F3) (see ch. 3). However, as we indicated earlier, the sense of
‘otherwise’ differs in God’s self-generation and His self-determination. In
God’s self-generation, we presuppose the fact that God could not but be
who He is (as it were) initially in generating Himself except with a free
dependence (N3). But since God freely chooses to be such a God, we can
say retrospectively in a highly qualified sense that He need not have been who
He is with a dependent freedom (F3) (N3)F3). Conversely, in God’s self-
determination as Creator and Redeemer, we presuppose that God might not
have been God for the world with a dependent freedom (F3). But, given the
irrevocableness of His eternal decision, we can say now that He is such
103
TH, n. 5, 70.

definitively with a free dependence (N3) (F3)N3). (We shall return con-
structively to these ideas in our Conclusion.) But where is the Spirit in this
‘divine drama’?
The Spirit, as the quintessence and fruit of divine love, divine liberality,104 is
the recapitulation105 as an absolute free will of love of the necessary (but tacitly
free) will of the Father and the free but necessary will of the Son. In being such
a recapitulation, He is the Absolute Freedom of love in which there can be no
necessity: ‘This “third” is the quintessence of divine love, its ultimate fruit,
which represents the result of the Father’s “necessary” will and the Son’s will
(which consists of divine necessity and freedom): the concept of “necessity”
cannot be applied in the case of this “third”.’106 In our terminology, if the
Father begets the Son with a free dependence (N3) and the Son receives His
begottenness with a dependent freedom (F3) which then can be applied
retrospectively to the Father, then the Spirit recapitulates both moments of
the axis as Absolute Freedom (F3–N3). What we are calling N3 does not fall
under Balthasar’s objection to necessity in the Spirit because N3 is included
within Absolute Freedom. In being breathed out by the Father and Son, the
Spirit not only receives the free possibilities/archetypes of the Father but also
enacts them in the Absolute Freedom of love, the ecstatic liberality of divine
desire. The Spirit, in recapitulating the will of the Father and the Son, exhibits
a ‘complete divine freedom’ that manifests ‘something of the Father’s pre-
dominant will and something of the Son’s subordinate will in an original and
unified way’. Here superordination (necessity) and subordination (freedom
and necessity) are no longer visible, since they are synthesized by an excessive
Absolute Freedom of love that both depends on their co-operation and
integrates them into a new whole.107 The Spirit owes its Being to the Father
and Son and is ready to carry out their ‘plans’ in creation and redemption.
They depend on His assistance just as the Father depends on His Son.
The Spirit freely does whatever He can devise to ‘promote the love of Father
and Son’.108
But here we have something unexpected. Since the Spirit is absolute free
love-desire, the fruitful gratuity of the Father and Son’s conjoint love, the
expectation of the Father and Son is not only fulfilled, just as the Father
counted on the Son and had His ‘experience . . . fulfilled’ in Him, but even
‘over-fulfilled’. God’s love in His Spirit is an excessive, even divinely surprising
love (see ch. 11). The Spirit, therefore, as absolute divine free love, an out-
reaching divine desire, a synthesis of freedom and necessity, F3 with N3,
carries out the plans (i.e. the free possibilities/archetypes) of God:
104 105
TL, II, 163 and 176. ibid., III, 58 and 163 (citing Speyr, WP, 58).
106
Balthasar, TL, III, 237 (summarizing Speyr, WP, 60–1) and see Balthasar, TL, III, 58.
107
Speyr, Welt, 53–4 [see WP, 61 (revd)], cited at Balthasar, ThL, III, 51 [see TL, III, 58].
108
Speyr, WP, 63 cited at Balthasar, TL, III, 59.

as a love that is free. It is free to choose, within the vast horizons of the divine
imagination, the ways in which God’s purposes are to be implemented; this is a
new and, as it were, original synthesis. The Spirit blows where he will, even
though he can and will blow only within God’s infinite expanses.109
The divine processions may not be subject to any internal (pace Hegel and,
arguably, Eckhart)110 or external necessity but they are nevertheless ‘not free
in any arbitrary sense’ but ‘arise from a natural or necessary will of God [einem
Natur- oder Nezessitätswillen in Gott], which, proceeding from Father to Son
and from Father and Son to the Spirit, grounds an irreversible order’ (N3).
Where this necessary will is ‘recapitulated’ to its ground in Absolute Freedom
there is present ‘a valid “hierarchy” in the absolute freedom of the persons’,
since ‘freedom’s primal shape’ is that ‘in order for a will to be free, it must be
part of a hierarchy’.111
We see in this position an attempt by Balthasar to think through the
dialectic of divine freedom and necessity within the very difference of the
divine hypostases viewed kenotically. Since God is absolute free love precisely
through these hypostatic differences, one can then conclude that for Balthasar
this dialectic, as expressed in the relations, is eternally constitutive of God’s
own self-generation of Himself as Absolute Freedom. This Trinitarian
approach to our dialectic, its ‘divinization’ as it were, does not give ontological
priority to one or the other of freedom and necessity but each presupposes the
other like our axis of F3–N3. The philosophy of Being we traced in chapter 9
has shown through analogy that, despite the similarity of created to divine
Being, there exists a yet greater dissimilarity. While created Being must subsist
in essents ‘external’ to itself, divine Being can create, subsist in the world or
not. However, as we have just seen, revelation permits theology to take a
dialectical turn. This theological ‘turn’ in Balthasar opens up a form of our
problematic, transcending the plane of philosophy without negating its use of
analogy. Despite God’s difference from creation as Holy Trinity, He freely
becomes identified with it. Being, as we have argued, must fulfil itself in an
essent apart from itself, and finite freedom is only fulfilled in infinite freedom.
But Balthasar holds that God is free to be akin to His creation in regards to His
Being and His freedom as He is free in regards to His freedom being the One
who loves in freedom. Thus, Infinite Free Being, God as Trinity, must create
and redeem the world in Christ for God to be Himself precisely because, and
on this turns Balthasar’s response to the problematic, God has eternally freely
chosen to do so.112 However, God in freely but necessarily creating the world
109
TL, III, 237, summarizing Speyr, WP, 61–2 and see Balthasar, TD, V, 89, citing Speyr, WP,
60–5.
110
See Balthasar, TD, V, 439.
111
ThD, IV, 77 [see TD, V, 88 (revd)], citing Speyr, Welt, 50 [see WP, 57–8].
112
See Balthasar, TH, n. 5, 70.

becomes not only Himself in creation, infinite freedom being fulfilled in finite
freedom, but more than Himself in the radically free love-desire which is the
Absolute Freedom of the Spirit (see ch. 11).
If God binds Himself to the world so that it becomes a necessity for Him,
albeit freely willed, then does this not mean God ‘needs’ creation? Is this not a
tacit pantheism? In chapter 11, we shall see how Balthasar attempted to hold
together the world and God, divine freedom and necessity, in and through
Christ as the concrete analogy of Being without falling into pantheism.
11
Christ, Creation, and Divine

Possibilities—‘Sheltered within’
the Trinity
In the last chapter, Balthasar’s form of the problematic and his unique response
to it came into the foreground. God freely accepts the creation and redemption
of the world as an eternal necessity for Himself by eternally binding Himself to
this possibility in the Father’s generation of the Son and then binding Himself to
its reality in creation, covenant, and the Incarnation. God has chosen to be God
not without the world He has created and redeemed. But how does one avoid in
this theology a tacit collapse of God and creation? Balthasar’s response is found
within Christology. Christ is the ‘concrete analogy of Being’, the ultimate
mediation between the uncreated and the created, in whom creation exists in
all its particularity in the Trinity without ultimately being identical with Him.
11.1 CHRIST AS THE CONCRETE

ANA LOGY OF BEING
We have argued that an analogy of Being exists between created Being and
uncreated Being, God as Trinity. Esse pours itself out into essents on which it
freely depends (F3) with no thought for its own self-containment and preser-
vation (N3) just as the divine hypostases give themselves to one another,
letting the Other be and go (F3) with such love that they exist only in and
for the Other (N3). Both of these realities find their concretion1 in Christ, who
as the only Son of the Father gave himself up freely for us (F3), going to the
uttermost in His self-giving (N3) by becoming ‘obedient unto death, even
death on a cross’ (Phil. 2:6–8). Worldly and Divine Being, in the light of the
knowledge of a loving faith in Christ in God, is revealed as quite simply
1
Balthasar, TD, II, 271 and KB, 384; see TH, 17–18.

kenotic. What we are speaking about is the form of Christ as the ‘central form of
revelation’.2 He is the unity or synthesis of an infinitely free divine Being of love
and finitely free human or worldly Being/Love3 made in the image of the
Trinity. So understood, Christ is the ‘form of all forms’ and so ‘God’s greatest
work of art’4 by whose cross we see no longer just beauty, but divine glory itself.5
Christ is the only one who can keep the tensions between heaven and earth
together in a unity. He does this by acknowledging that He owes His created
Being to another. In this acknowledgement, He transcends the finite freedom
of His human will through perfectly submitting it—in the taking up of His
cross—to the supremely uncompelled infinite freedom of His divine will and
Being: ‘the entire theo-drama has its center in the two wills of Christ, the infinite,
divine will and the finite, human will’.6 We must return to a key concept—the
simultaneity of a choice in history and eternity. Christ is, uniquely, the perfect
synthesis of infinite and finite freedom, divine and human wills, insofar as He
is—despite the ‘essential abyss’ between the divine and created natures7—the
perfect union of divine and created Being where ‘his finite freedom is so deeply
rooted in his infinite freedom that it continually transcends itself toward
infinity . . . to receive his mission’.8 Christ’s infinite freedom paradoxically,
therefore, indwells finite freedom whereby the finite is perfected in the infinite
‘without the infinite losing itself in the finite or the finite in the infinite’.9 The
freedoms, following Chalcedon, are united in Him without confusion and
without change but yet indivisibly and inseparably.10 Moreover, in Christ, the
healing balm of God’s holy infinite uncompelled freedom redeems the finite
freedom that had fallen into sin through His ‘free graciousness’ ‘bind[ing]
himself to his creature in the hypostatic union forever and indissolubly’.11 God
forsakes Himself because of man’s godlessness without God becoming carnal-
ized and without man becoming lost in a divine agon.12
The free revelation that takes place in the self-emptying of God in the
sacrifice on the cross of Jesus Christ (F3), a self-gift that being given cannot
return unscathed to the giver (N3), is a Trinitarian one. Christ does not show
us ‘divinity’ in the abstract. He manifests the concrete love of the Father and
the gift of love of the Holy Spirit, which divine giftedness is a life of free self-
sacrifice (F3) that will not turn back in its determination to let the other be and
go (N3). In contemplating the revelation of Christ, in cleaving to His life in
giving ourselves away, we come to realize that He is an historical event that
2
GL, I, 154; cf. 435–62; on Christology: MacKinnon 1986, O’Hanlon 1990, 9–49, McIntosh
2004, Healy 2005, 91–158, and Schumacher 2007, 137–343.
3
Balthasar, ‘Movement’, 17. 4
‘Revelation and the Beautiful’ [1960], 117 and 118.
5
GL, I, 124 and ‘Revelation’, 113–14; see Nichols 2005b, 14.
6
Balthasar, TD, II, 201 (exegeting Maximus; compare CL, 260–71; on Maximus’ Christology:
Bathrellos 2004, 99–174).
7 8 9
Balthasar, TD, III, 220. ibid., 199; cf. TD, II, 185, 194, 201–2. ibid., 201.
10 11 12
Denzinger-Schönmetzer, §302, 108. Balthasar, GL, I, 154. TD, II, 194.
Christ, Creation, and Divine Possibilities 205

breaks through every established form of the age. He is in history the ‘eternal
happening’ of love,13 divine Being as a ‘Super-Becoming’. This eternal hap-
pening in time in Christ is identical with God’s Trinitarian Being understood
as a ceaseless self-emptying, self-giving, and self-receiving ‘immense move-
ment of love inside of God’ (F3–N3).14 Here Balthasar is reminiscent of
Bulgakov’s idea of the Divine Sophia as the purest act of Trihypostatic love,
the living substance of the Absolute (Sophia-Ousia). The Divine Sophia is
expressed in creation as the Created Sophia in the Absolute’s being ‘born’ into
becoming as ‘God’ (Absolute-Relative) for that creation.15 It also echoes
Barth’s notion of God’s ‘holy mutability’ where, since He is ever new, He
remains constant in all changes.16
This eternal happening of divine love as expressed in Christ is quite simply
Absolute Freedom itself as generated by a dialectic of freedom and necessity, a
perfect synthesis of F3–N3. The person of Christ, therefore, is a freely
dependent (F3) but utterly necessary (N3) eternal happening of the Triune
Being of God in history. In the perfect personal unity of his divine and the
human natures, one has ‘the proportion of every interval between God and
man’.17 If Christ is the proportion of every interval between God and man,
then the most basic of these intervals is that of Being. God gives Being
personally to all that He creates in Christ, since ‘in him all things hold
together’ (Col. 1:17). In the generation of His Son, God the Father, who with
His Son and Spirit is complete, simple, and self-subsistent Being, decides to
create the world in Christ. He expresses Himself personally through creation
whose Being in itself is complete, simple, but non-subsistent.18
One cannot, however, speak of Christ being a ‘mixture’ of divine and
creaturely Being. Rather, the divine Person of the Redeemer effects by an
unlimited free act of Being19 a perfect ‘preservative synthesis’ (sunthesis
sostike) or ‘unity without confusion’ (henosis asugchutos)20 of His divine
nature with human nature. In this fashion, the two natures of Christ are
‘indivisibly’ and ‘unconfusedly’ united in and through the divine hypostasis
by a ‘reciprocal indwelling of two distinct poles’ where this mutual ontological
presence (perichoresis) ‘not only preserves the Being particular to each element,
to the divine and the human natures, but also brings each of them to its
perfection in their very difference, even enhancing their difference’.21 Both
created Being and divine Being as Non-Aliud are different forms of free self-
giving and self-receiving love-desire, which are structured by our axis F3–N3
(see chs 9–10). This leads us, if we read Balthasar constructively, to something
13 14 15
ibid., V, 67. Presence, 153. See Bulgakov, SN, 104 [UL, 110].
16 17
See Barth, CD, II/1, 496. Balthasar, TH, n. 5, 69.
18 19 20
Aquinas, De Pot., 1: 1.1co, 5. Balthasar, CL, 254. ibid., 233.
21
ibid., 63–4.

like Bulgakov’s ‘two-Sophias’ Christology, although with the natures retaining
their infinite difference (See 9.3).
The end of such a union of divine and creaturely Being/Love-desire is that
‘as much as man, enabled by love, has divinized himself for God, to that same
extent God is humanized for man by His love for mankind’.22 Yet the very
nearness the hypostatic union creates between the two poles of Being/love-
desire—God being for creation with its pinnacle of man and creation through
man being for God—could only exist in light of a corresponding increasing
in(ter)dependence. The union as a synthesis of loves, where each distinct pole
lives in and through the other, reveals ‘the ever-greater difference between
created Being and the essentially incomparable God’.23 Christ, therefore, and
here Balthasar echoes Bulgakov, is a perfect synthesis in unified tension or
coincidentia oppositorum24 of God and the world, created and uncreated
Being, the divine and human, the eternal and the temporal, the infinite and
the finite, identity and non-identity, the existential and the essential, the
universal and concrete particular, and freedom and necessity.25 He is the
‘one synthesis’ in which God has established His relationship to the world
and is thereby the ‘measure of and distance from God’. Christ ‘happens’ in
history once for all time and ‘is the norm for all that is in the world’, including—
in having taken human nature—acting as the ‘standard’ by which God
judges each individual man in his worth.26 In this light, Balthasar calls Christ
the ‘concrete analogy of being’,27 since only Christ crucified and risen is
the ‘adequate sign, surrender, and expression of God within finite Being’.28
1 1 . 2 TH E W O R LD ‘S H E L T E R E D WI T H I N ’
CHRIST AND THE TRINITY
But if all that is created relates to God in Christ because, as the concrete
analogy of Being, all things hold together in Him, then He must in some sense
be eternally related to creation. What is Christ’s eternal relationship to cre-
ation? The eternal Son is the perfect image of the Father. He contains the
perfection of the divine nature most fully and all the free possibilities/
22
Maximus, Amb. 10.3, PG 91.1113B (Constas 2014, 1:164–5) (cited at CL, 280 and TD,
201–2). See Gregory of Nazianzus, Ep. 101.5, 157 [SC 208, 101.21, 180A, 44–5] and Athanasius,
AA, 1.39.1, ll.1–2, 149 [NPNF, 329]; on the exchange of properties: Balthasar, CL, 256–60.
23 24
ibid., 64. ibid., 259 and see 66 and 209.
25
See ibid., 235–75 (esp. 272–4) and TD, II, 201–2; see Olsen 2008, 17–19.
26
Balthasar, ‘Characteristics of Christianity’ [1960], 177–8.
27
TH, n. 5, 70 and ‘he is the analogia entis in concrete form’ (‘Characteristics’, 177); cf. TD, II,
267 and ibid., III, 220–9 and KB, 328ff., 382 and esp. 387.
28
Epilogue, 89.

archetypes of the Father in His being begotten Son (see 10.3). The Son is ‘He
who is’ or the ‘Existing One’ (ho on (Ex. 3:14 (LXX)),29 the inscription found
on the halo in most Byzantine icons of Christ, and so it is not surprising that
we can trace back to Him the procession of creation—that is, the ideas or
prototypes that constitute the world—as an imperfect imitation of the perfec-
tion of the divine nature.30 He who is is the ‘perfect image’, ‘exemplar’,31
‘principium’ and ‘ratio’32 of creation.33 He is the primal Idea (Uridee) of the
world as it will really be created in the Father’s generation of Him.34 But He is
not this only but also the ‘exemplary cause of all possible worlds’ that could freely
be created in that same generative act,35 as ‘the whole Trinity is “spoken” in the
Word; and likewise also all creatures’.36 Aquinas, accordingly, held that, when
considering the substance of the divine processions within the Godhead (gen-
erative power) and the creative procession (creative power)—that is, the free
possibilities/archetypes of the Father—one must argue that they ‘do not merely
admit of a same common predication, but they are one and the same thing’.37
Balthasar argues, expanding on Aquinas, that, when pondering the divine
power in relationship to two different acts, a hierarchy appears where the
divine processions are the ‘account and cause of the creature’s procession’.38 It
will be remembered that the Father generates the Son with a necessary but
tacitly free will (N3) (see 10.3). This will includes His intention that His Son
create and redeem the world in Christ. In His generation, the Son freely
accepts this will with its intention as a necessity for Himself. This free filial
appropriation of the paternal will retrospectively transforms the necessary
begetting and begottenness into a free self-giving and self-receiving (F3)
and thereby turns the free possibilities into freely willed necessities. The
Son in accepting His own begottenness enacts these possibilities/archetypes
29
See Aquinas, In Io. 8, lect. 3, 1179–84, Vol. 2: 118–20, lect. 8, n. 1290, 2: 154 and compare
ST, 1.13.11.
30
I Sent., d.10, q. 1, a.1co, quoted at Balthasar, TD, V, 62–3 [ThD, IV, 54–5].
31
i.e. ‘das Urbild’, ‘die Uridee’, and ‘die exemplarische Idee der Welt’ (ThD, IV, 54 [see TD, V,
62–3] and ThD, II.1, 252 and 245 [see TD, II, 278 and 270]).
32
‘Grund’ (ThD IV, 54 [see TD, V, 62–3]).
33
Aquinas, I Sent., 10.1.1co, quoted at Balthasar, TD, V, 62–3 [ThD, IV, 54–5]. More broadly:
TD, V, 61–5 and TL, III, 222.
34
TL, III, n. 2, 222 (citing Augustine’s Jo. Ev. tr. 21.4.4, 183 (FC 79: this translation mutes the
sense: facere) [PL 35.1566/CCSL 36, 214]).
35
Balthasar, TL, III, 222.
36
Aquinas, ST, 1.34.1.3ad (cited at Balthasar, ThL, III, n. 3, 204 [TL, III, n. 3, 222] with
interpretative note: ‘auch die möglichen Geschöpfe’). Compare Aquinas, ST, 1.34.3co and
1.45.6.1ad.
37
Aquinas, De Pot., 1: 2.6co, 76 (cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 62); though the divine power is one
in the different acts of generation and creation, the effects are wholly different whether of the Son
(as an eternal term) or created Being (as a temporal term): De Pot., 1: 2.6.4ad, 76 and ST
1.43.2.3ad.
38
I Sent., 10.1.1co (cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 62–3 [ThD, IV, 54–5]. See also Aquinas, I Sent,
2.1 proem., cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 62).

contained in the Father’s will with Absolute Freedom through the procession
from the Father and Son of their common Spirit (F3–N3). Thus, the taxis of
the Trinity is our F3–N3. Now the substance of the power of the Father’s
generation of the Son and the substance of the power of His creation and
redemption of the world in Christ (through the procession from them both of
the Spirit) are a unity. Although they are a unity, they still remain distinct
when viewed in relation to the specific act whether of creation or generation.
As the substance of the generative and creative power is always already eternal,
not temporal (since divine Being is eternal and essential), the substance of the
temporal act of creation is one and the same as the substance of the divine
procession, as Balthasar writes: ‘once we presuppose the creation, processio
within the Godhead and missio outside it are one and the same as far as the
Divine Persons are concerned, even at the point where the Son and the Spirit
enter the visible realm of creation’.39
God the Father, therefore, does not create the world ‘by “turning outward”
but by turning to the Son within the divine life’. The Son is the manifold of all
the possibilities/archetypes of creation and the Father’s eternal turning to the
Son is His begetting of Him.40 The same Absolute Freedom by which God
wills to be eternally what He is, and we have argued that our axis (F3–N3) is its
taxis, is the very Absolute Freedom by which He wills that the world shall exist
since the missions are founded on the processions. Nevertheless, creation is
not God ‘and hence not necessary’. God does not pour Himself out by nature
in creation as if God (as in Hegel) was under, what Bulgakov called, a
‘determinate necessity’.41 One must necessarily ‘put a caesura between the
eternal Yes uttered by God’s will to himself and his eternal life’ whose ground
of freedom is in itself and ‘the Yes which seals the decision to create’ whose
ground of freedom is not in itself but God.42
The dependent freedom (F3) and free dependence (N3) of God in binding
Himself to creation in Christ is at first and at a root founded on the immanent
Trinity. We begin with the dependent freedom (F3) of the Father, and His free
dependence (N3) on His eternal Son, together with the Son’s freely obedient
(F3) and grateful but unswerving turning back to Him (N3). Finally, we have
the Spirit’s procession from them both as the fruit of their love who as
Absolute Freedom (F3–N3) will carry out their will with an ever surprising
novelty. The Son’s eternal freedom, His ‘hypostatic mode of readiness’43 for
self-surrender to the Father (F3), which is His freedom that needs and cleaves
to the Other as the basis of its life (N3), is the same movement of love. It is
the self-same free love, whether it be at the beginning with His begetting
(processio) or at the end (creatio as divine missio) where He is ready to go on
the most extreme path of self-giving in ‘the Eucharist, Cross, the descent
39 40
TD, V, 63 and see 80–1; see Aquinas, I Sent., 16.1.1co. Balthasar, TD, V, 247.
41 42 43
Bulgakov, AB, 142 [LG, 120]. Balthasar, TD, II, 261. ibid., 278.

to hell’.44 Thus, despite the chasm between divine and created Being, being
created is not foreign to being begotten for God in His grace. Both realities are
structured and lie within the perfect life of Absolute Freedom characterized by
our axis (F3–N3).
We see this fundamental affinity-in-difference in the hypostatic union,
since ‘in the Person of the incarnate Son, his being begotten and his being
created form a unity, so too the created world is, as it were, drawn into the
beginning’.45 Jesus’ consciousness is experienced entirely in terms of His
mission.46 The mission of which He is aware, in His eternally free ‘readiness’
to spontaneously ‘offer’ Himself up,47 is the mission of the only Son48 precisely
because He is that Son, and ‘his being sent (missio) by the Father is a modality
of his proceeding (processio) from the Father’.49 The personal freedom of
Christ, therefore, is identical with His mission. However, this mission ‘has
no conceivable beginning’ and ‘there can be no suggestion . . . of Jesus’ carrying
out some alien decision made prior to the world’s existence’,50 so, although the
mission is absolutely free (F3), nevertheless, as a necessity, it ‘must take
place’51 (N3).
Being created, as we have seen in Balthasar, is not alien to being begotten in
God but in fact is founded on the divine relations or processions. When the
Son embraces the world ‘definitively’ in His Incarnation, in Christ, by entering
into the sphere of time, He does not leave his eternal life behind him52 because
‘The Presence of the Son is the presence of eternity in time.’53 Jesus Christ is
‘the same yesterday and today and for ever’ (Heb. 13:8) and so it is not
surprising that not only the eternal Son is said to be the ‘concrete idea’54 or
Uridee of creation but Jesus Christ crucified, the incarnate Logos.55 Because of
Christ, all the ages and beings within those ages ‘have received their beginning
and end in Christ’. Christ is the union between limit and limitlessness,
measure and immeasurability, finitude and infinity, creation and its Creator,
motion and rest which ‘was conceived before the ages’.56 He is the ‘precon-
ceived goal [telos] for which everything exists, but which itself exists
on account of nothing’.57 Balthasar argues that by contemplating Christ’s
humanity we shall see how God reveals Himself to man. By contemplating
His divinity, we see the idea of man58 and what is the intention of God for His
creation.59 And the intention of God for His creation is to unite Himself with
44
ibid., 88 and see Speyr 1993, 199, cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 81.
45 46
Speyr 1972, 11, cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 80–1. ibid., III, 224.
47 48 49 50
ibid., IV, 330. ibid., III, 227. TD, III, 226. ibid., 225–6.
51 52 53 54
ibid., 225. TD, V, 247. TD, V, 250. TH, 92–3.
55
See CL, 269ff. and TD, V, 99–109 and 385–94.
56
Maximus, Ad Thalassium 60, CCSG 22:75 (Blowers and Wilken 2003, 125) (see Balthasar,
CL, 272).
57
Maximus, Ad Thalassium 60, CCSG 22:75 (Blowers and Wilken 2003, 125).
58 59
See Balthasar, TD, V, 391. ibid., 392, citing Speyr 1970, 565.

man in Christ and this intention is eternally foreknown, although only
manifested at the end of the ages.60
Christ is the archetype of archetypes and, Balthasar tells us, the divine
archetype of what is mutable ‘en-shelters’ (in sich bergen) the change of
Being in itself.61 In this way, it is related to becoming not as a ‘sphere of
supratemporal values’62 but as the truth of becoming which is sheltered within
the arms of its Creator and Redeemer.63 The world in both its idea/archetype
(Urbild) and its realization (Nachbild/Abbild)64 is therefore said to subsist by
an ‘ensheltering’ or ‘sheltering within’ God (Einbergung)65 in Christ. As the
‘primal Idea’ of all creation, Christ is, as Eliot famously put it, the ‘still point of
the turning world’66 at and around which the dance of creation takes place.
He is (in a sense) ‘unmoving / Only the cause and end of movement’.67 He
includes in Himself creation in both the form of its free possibilities/ideas/
archetypes (logoi) and the mutable variations of these ideas (tropoi). Thus,
Christ embraces the form of all worldly motion, change, and time without
negating the particular’s freedom.68 God is ‘latent’69 in creation in Christ.
Creation, headed by man, is ‘allotted its space where the Son is’ through
Christ’s dialogue with His Father in the unity of love of their common Spirit
because ‘he is its prototype, fashioner and goal’.70
But if indeed all things in heaven and on earth are created in, through, and
for Christ (Col. 1:16), then how do we articulate this in terms of Trinitarian
theology? We saw earlier (see 10.1) that infinite freedom for Balthasar is
constituted by each hypostasis letting the Other be and go, sharing in the
common nature with a dependent freedom (F3) and a free dependence (N3).
But Balthasar goes further by arguing that if divine freedom is relational, then
in what takes place between the hypostases there ‘must be areas of infinite
freedom that are already there and do not allow everything to be compressed
into an airless unity and identity’. The Father’s act of surrender in begetting
the Son has its own area of freedom just as the Son’s act of receiving His
begottenness, with all the Father’s free possibilities, has its own area. Finally,
the Spirit in proceeding and ‘illuminating the most intimate love’ of the Father
60
Maximus, Ad Thalassium 60, CCSG 22:75 and 79–80 (Blowers and Wilken 2003, 124–5
and 127–8).
61
Balthasar, ThL, I, 286 [See TL, I, 251] (in sich bergen=‘to contain’ or ‘to entail’ but Balthasar
is adapting Heidegger (e.g. 1956, 48–9) so it is ‘to shelter in’, ‘to be kept safe within’, ‘to gather in’,
or even ‘to conceal’) and see TL, I, 264–7.
62 63 64
ibid., 251. ibid., 267. ThL, I, 303, 305 [see TL, I, 265, 267].
65
ThD, IV, 341ff. (glossed ‘Embedded in God’ (TD, V, 373ff.)). Einbergung (=‘bergen’ + ‘in’
with movement) is untranslatable. Perhaps a ‘gathering in’, a ‘bringing into safety’, an ‘incorp-
oration’, a ‘sheltering ingathering’ (Nichols 2000, 224–5), or even a ‘concealing within’.
66
Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’, II, l.16, 119. 67
ibid., V, ll. 25–6, 122.
68
Balthasar, TD, II, 278; cf. CL, 122, 131–6, Maximus, Ad Thalassium 60, CCSG 22:75
(Blowers and Wilken 2003, 125) and Amb. 7, PG 91.1073C (Constas 2014, 1:86–7).
69 70
Balthasar, TD, II, 271ff. ibid., 87–8.

and Son has its area too.71 Difference in God is both real and positive. If
difference is positive for divine Being, then Absolute Freedom must not be
thought of just as an essential divine ‘quality’ appropriated without remainder
(and any real distinction) by each hypostasis in turn. Instead, divine freedom,
and here Balthasar (see 10.3) echoes Bulgakov (see 6.2),72 must be viewed
hypostatically as generated eternally by the relations of the hypostases, so that
one may speak (even if God had not created and redeemed the world) of
‘realms of freedom within the Godhead’.73 Creation is ensheltered in the
Trinity, where it has a certain ‘acting area’74 in the realm of infinite freedom
of the Son. In this filial ‘space which is not a space’,75 creation can exercise its
finite freedom. The motion of this ‘area’ is governed by ‘the infinite “idea” of
the Son, which, as the prototype of creation, uniformly permeates it and,
insofar as the creation is in dramatic motion, accompanies it’.76
God’s overarching plan in Christ as the Uridee, His choice to bind Himself
freely to creation (F3) and be omnipotently dependent upon it (N3) as an
expression of His self same life of dependent freedom (F3) and free depend-
ence (N3), is grounded in the Trinitarian happening of love. This Triune
happening is the mystery of suffering love and it always already takes into
positive (salvific) account the change of the creature, its movement into
negativity, so that ‘if negativity does arise from the world itself, it can be
effectively countered by all the essentially positive features of the life of the
Trinity’.77 This Triune mystery is, building on Bulgakov, the ‘fire of suffering
love’ in which man’s sin is burned up on the cross. It has burned eternally in
God as a blazing passion for the eternal good expressed in the total commit-
ment of the divine persons for one another. This is a cruciform eternal mystery
into which God calls us to participate: ‘The mystery of the Cross is the
supreme revelation of the Trinity.’78 Therefore, the cross, as the suffering
love-desire of God, is prefigured in the life of God as a wholly positive reality.
It is then expressed in creation as its dominant form. Whatever extreme
movement the particular may make or, to use another metaphor, overgrown
paths it may follow, they will be within the rhythm or on the highway of the
Trinitarian life expressed in God’s ‘total Idea’, which is the ‘Son’s Cross’.79
This leads us to Balthasar’s controversial attempt, according to the diagnosis
of Cyril O’Regan, to correct the systematic ‘misremembering’ by Hegel of the
divine drama of the Trinity through its re-envisioning. It is a move arguably
that directly builds on Bulgakov (see 5.3). Moreover, it is part of a broader
Balthasarian project of the retrieval and reappropriation of the Christian
71 72
ibid., 257. See Bulgakov, AB, n. 1, 313–14.
73 74
Balthasar, TD, II, 262ff. ibid., 273.
75
See Fiddes 2001b, 35–60, SWKG, 218–65 (esp. 249ff.), 320–1, 325–6.
76
Balthasar, TD, II, 276–7; compare Fiddes, SWKG, 249–65 and 368–9.
77 78
Balthasar, TD, V, 99. Threefold Garland, 99 and see TD, V, 268–9.
79
ibid., II, 278.

tradition that he felt was first decisively distorted by Romanticism.80 Finally, it
is—to use reflexively his own words on Solov’ev—meant to be an activity of
distillation, for the ‘muddy stream’ of modernity runs through Balthasar’s
theology ‘as if through a purifying agent and is distilled in crystal-clear,
disinfected waters, answering the needs of his own philosophical spirit’.81
Balthasar argues that all the elements82 that exist in creation which are
permeated by potentiality and bear the ‘negativities that result from sin’83
exist in God in a supra-essential, wholly positive, and active fashion. This
means that apparent ‘negativities’ such as difference, poverty, distance/space,
worship, temporality, possibility, faith, hope, and even, in a highly qualified
sense, suffering, abandonment, death, and Godlessness are reflections of
purely positive archetypes sheltered within the Trinity,84 since ‘all apparently
negative things in the oikonomia can be traced back to, and explained by,
positive things in the theologia’.85 As Yeats put it: ‘All things remain in God.’86
Put in terms of analogy, the realities of creation, which presuppose becoming,
are both similar to realities in God’s Being as a supra-Becoming but also
infinitely dissimilar because in Him there is no potentiality and negativity as
such. Thus, the constituent elements of earthly becoming are distant images of
the free possibilities/archetypes that constitute the ‘eternal “happening” in
God’ which is ‘per se identical with the eternal Being or essence’.87
A few examples are in order. When the Father generates His Son, He holds
nothing back and lets go of His divinity to the Son, for He will not be God for
Himself alone, and this creates an infinite distance, which is only bridged by
the Spirit (see 10.3).88 This ‘infinite distance’ embraces within it ‘all the other
distances that are possible within the world of finitude, including the distance
of sin’.89 The same distance is likewise described as a sort of ‘(divine)
God-lessness (of love, of course)’, which undergirds but is not identical with
worldly godlessness.90 Furthermore, the Father’s generation of the Son is said to
be a ‘kind of “death”. It is a first, radical “kenosis”’ or a ‘super-death’ that
undergirds all subsequent self-emptying in the immanent and economic Trinity
as well as all instances of ‘good death’ in creation, above all that of Christ.91
A greater mystery reveals itself through this thinking through creaturely
becoming in reference to God. The creature’s ‘No’ to God, its refusal to
acknowledge that it owes its freedom to free divine love-desire, is a ‘twisted
80
See O’Regan 2014, Part 2 and compare J. Martin 2015a.
81
Balthasar, GL, III, 292 (see Gallaher 2009a, 638–40); Cyril O’Regan 2014, 313–14 applies
this passage to Bulgakov and with Jennifer Martin (2015a, 2015b, 221–3) sees Bulgakov as one of
Balthasar’s modern ‘Fathers’.
82 83
Except evil which is nothingness: Balthasar, TD, V, 502–3. ibid., 173.
84
ibid., 173, 394, 506, and see 66–98; compare Bulgakov, NA, 65ff. [BL, 56ff.].
85
Balthasar, TD, V, 516. 86
Yeats, ‘Crazy Jane on God’, l.6, 293–4.
87 88 89
Balthasar, TD, V, 67 and see 512. TD, IV, 323–4. ibid., 323.
90 91
ibid., 324. TD, V, 84 and see 246.

knot’ within the Trinity. This negation is located within the torrent of the all-
embracing Eucharistic obedient ‘Yes’ of the Son to the Father through the
Spirit. So the knot is not merely situated but ultimately surpassed, as the
affirmation of divine Being, ecstatic desire is excessive, and the ‘No’ is ‘left
behind by the current of love’.92 The eternal generation of the Son by the
Father in its ‘supra-godforsakenness’ (or whatever one wishes to call it)
embraces within it ‘the day of the Son’s night on the Cross, just as it embraces
every day that has been or is yet to come’.93 To adapt a poem of Yeats, ‘“Fair
and foul are near of kin,/ And foul needs fair,” I cried.’94 Much of what we
have been exegeting is strongly dependent on Bulgakov’s kenotic form of
panentheism. However, there exists a major difference. Balthasar puts a
greater emphasis on the difference of Uncreated and Created Being than
Bulgakov, where (following Schelling) the essential identity of God and the
world, the subject and the object, is the point of departure.
Somehow the fact that creation is sheltered within God, presumably because
God’s Being is a supra-Becoming, never results in any change in God.95
Balthasar, like Bulgakov upon whom he depends,96 is scathing of all notions
of divine development from Hegel to Process thought97 as well as the (then)
fashionable talk of ‘the pain of God’ (e.g. Kazoh Kitamori (1916–98), Moltmann).98
Here he is attacking the sort of sentiment stated famously by A. N. Whitehead
(1861–1947): ‘God is the great companion—the fellow-sufferer, who under-
stands.’99 Instead, all worldly drama occurs in, by, and through the divine
drama but the two are not identified as in Hegel.100 Given Balthasar’s depend-
ence on this tradition, one feels that, like Bulgakov, he often protests too much
and fears its undue influence.101 He argues (pace Idealism) that one must
begin with God’s kenosis in the cross—the world drama—then work back-
wards apophatically to the ‘mystery of the absolute’. One excludes from God
‘all intramundane experience and suffering’ and especially the mythological
notion that ‘God has to be involved in the world process’ while simultaneously
presupposing the free possibilities/archetypes for such experience are ground-
ed in the Trinity.102 As much of his theology is easily critiqued as falling
into a Feuerbachian projection of the aforementioned ‘experience’ into God
which then claims the human all too human reality as somehow divine, his
92
TD, IV, 329–30; see Fiddes, 2000a, 184–6 and SWKG, 368–9.
93
Speyr 1957, 50, cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 263 and see 310, 255, and GL, VII, 215.
94
Yeats, ‘Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop’, ll.7–8, 294.
95 96
Balthasar, TD, V, 513. See J. Martin 2015a, 2015b and O’Regan 2014, 303–21.
97
Balthasar, TD, IV, 322ff. and see O’Regan 2014, 357ff.
98
See Balthasar, TD, V, 212–46 (see Goetz 1985, 1986, Kitamori 1966, Moltmann 1995). But
see Balthasar, TD, V, 246.
99
Whitehead 1969, 413.
100
e.g. Hegel, Phenomenology, §19, 10, and see Balthasar, TD, IV, 327.
101 102
But see O’Regan 2014, 13ff. Balthasar, TD, IV, 324 and 327.

methodology seems disingenuous at best, impossible at worst. But how might
we see this move more positively?
One can certainly speak of the immanent Trinity in kenotic terms, as this is
part of our experience of God’s self-revelation in Christ, and revelation is
always already mediated through human experience and language. Neverthe-
less, we must constantly confess that in such cases we are using found
metaphors that are inextricable from our ‘intramundane experience and
suffering’.103 Although these tropes are wholly inadequate to the task, they
are being theologically redefined to attempt to express realities that ultimately
lie beyond our ken.104 Furthermore, Balthasar, despite his well-known atten-
tion to (high) culture, does not always clearly acknowledge the constitutive
role of history and human experience in the articulation of revelation.105 In
consequence, his theology runs the risk of swallowing up the self-transforming
action of the world with its tragedy, ambiguity and human ‘messiness’. One is
left with a risk-free divine drama with a clear and definite resolution which is
then simply unfolded in becoming but always as a remote and unsatisfactory
image of the true activity in God.106
Despite these reservations, Balthasar seems to be getting at the heart of the
matter when he argues for the soteriological need to find a Trinitarian ground
for God’s self-revelation of Himself as freely dependent (F3) suffering love-
desire that does not turn back in its self-giving (N3). Something, he contends,
happens in God—call it the ‘divine Godlessness of love’ if you will—and what
matters is founding the posterior on the anterior in a way that not only justifies
the ‘possibility and actual occurrence of all suffering in the world, but also
justifies God’s sharing in the latter, in which He goes to the length of
vicariously taking on man’s God-lessness’.107 Suffering does not exist in God
as such but ‘there is something in God that can develop into suffering’,108 a
readiness, a pre-sacrificial love that has ever practised in itself all its modalities,
tunes, archetypes, or free possibilities. To be sure, perhaps it is Balthasar’s
attempt to articulate a renewed understanding of divine possibility as more
than merely an abstract potentiality but less than a fully actualized reality
that finally justifies the excesses of his thought. It constructively moves
the whole enterprise beyond an unconfessed and unbridled elaboration
of the Hegelian intuition that God has a theo-drama, and also beyond
an Eriugenian-Cusan double-speak that asserts that the world ‘is and is not
God’, to a pastoral response to suffering and a contemplation of the free
graciousness of God.
103 104
ibid., 324. See Newman 1976, 102.
105
See O’Hanlon 1990, 101ff., 170 but see Dalzell 2000, 253–63.
106
See Quash 163–4, 187–95 but contrast O’Regan 2014, 388ff., 616–17, n. 11 and see
Balthasar, TD, IV, 327.
107 108
TD, IV, 324; see Friesenhahn 2011. Balthasar, TD, IV, 328.
11.3 D IVINE P OSSIBILITIES IN THE TRINITY AND

T H E ‘SURPRISE ’ OF THE S PIRIT
Balthasar wished to avoid two extremes in regard to divine possibilities/

archetypes. On the one hand, he rejects the idea that God chooses arbitrarily
from an infinity of worlds one world ‘for good or ill, so to speak’ over
another.109 He rules out completely as ‘fruitless’ all Leibnizian speculation
concerning possible worlds110 and whether God might have created an even
better world.111 For Balthasar, the potentia absoluta/ordinata distinction,
which is used by Barth and rejected by Bulgakov, is a disgraceful example of
Nominalist speculation where God’s decrees are elevated as ‘absolute’ beyond
their sense in themselves and their coherence with all the other decrees.112 On
the other hand, he cannot abide the notion that God, wishing to choose some
world from amongst different possibilities and being faced with sin and death,
had to commit himself to a world in which there was ‘redemption through his
blood’ (Eph. 1:7), so that the world order ‘exercised some compulsion on
[God’s] freedom’. Nor can it be that God to attain His fullness somehow
‘needs’ the world.113
In contrast to these two extremes, he contends that the only world with
which we should be concerned is that of the real world. Revelation, in its
concreteness, is exclusively concerned with this ‘real world’, and that world
presupposes Christ as the concrete idea of the world (Uridee). There can be no
ideas, free possibilities independent from Christ and which contradict Him.114
Everything must cohere with and, in some sense, exist ‘within’ Christ (our
‘acting area’ of freedom being in Him)115 since, as Maximus the Confessor
affirms, ‘the one Logos is many logoi and the many are One’.116 Thus, the
world God actually chose is the best because He freely chose it in His Absolute
Freedom as ‘the adequately clear embodiment of the “idea” of the freely
obedient Son’.117 The perfectly free obedience of the Son to His Father (F3)
even unto death on a cross (N3) is the ‘concrete universal idea’ of the
relationship ‘between heaven and earth in the form of crucified love’.118
However, it is only in our real world that the eternal Son obediently took
flesh and died on the Cross and in this way has shown forth ‘the Father’s
perfect love for the world’.119 The eternal possibility of that world with its
accompanying Cross and Godforsakenness is no mere barren plan of action
109 110
ibid., II, 268. TD, II, 269.
111 112
ibid., n. 40, 268, citing Aquinas, ST, 1.25.6.3ad. Balthasar, TL, II, 147.
113 114 115
TD, V, 507. ibid., II, 270. ibid., II, 273.
116
Maximus, Amb. 7, PG 91.1081B–C and see 1077C–1080A (Constas 2014, 1:100–1 and see
94–5) cited at Balthasar, CL, 133.
117 118 119
TD, II, 269. ibid., 271. ibid., 270.

for God but a ‘freely willed “necessity”’.120 It finds its ultimate home within
the obedient self-giving and self-receiving love of the hypostases.
This Trinitarian love, as the nexus of the eternal possibility of the world, can
be seen in God the Father’s complete self-giving in generating the Son by His
necessary will (N3) with all its possibilities and the Son’s free acceptance or
reception of His generation and these possibilities as His own necessity (F3).
In this way, the Son accomplishes His Father’s intentions with Absolute
Freedom through their Spirit (F3–N3) by freely taking flesh, putting aside
His human will for His divine will (F3), and dying for our sake on a cross (N3).
This interconnective centre of freely necessary love understood as a theo-
drama of two wills defines the bounds of the ‘possible’ for Balthasar. The
‘possible’ only has positive theological value insofar as it keeps open, in not
contradicting, the real freedoms, both divine and human, in their interrelated-
ness.121 These preliminary thoughts bring two issues to the foreground. If the
world actually chosen by God is the adequate embodiment of the idea of the
freely obedient Son, then the divine possibilities concerning that world which
cohere around Him must have a twofold character. First, they must (a) be
concretely related to the world as it is in fact without being wholly identified
with it; and second, as an extension of the first, they must (b) have some sort of
‘substantial’ reality in God beyond an abstract plan of action but which does
not result in collapsing God and the world.
(a) The divine possibilities are not simple unrealized possibilities for the
world which God can or cannot enact as He sees fit, as in at least one stream of
the potentia absoluta/ordinata tradition. They are restricted to the things in
the world that actually exist and are thence (following Maximus the Confes-
sor) ‘divine willings’ or ‘predispositions’ which have been expressed in the
divine economy.122 In this sense, Balthasar is akin to Bulgakov, who argued
that all the divine possibilities of love are realized. The world conceived by
God as the pleroma of divine possibilities is at no point different from that
which is actually created as an expression of the latter. His act of creation was
complete already in the eternal contemplation of His will with its Fatherly
‘intentions’.123 Of course, in the perspective of the world, its creation is
‘entirely new, unexpected, unreducible’124 and according to the ‘naked view’
of ‘pure justice’, the possibilities cannot be identified with their expression in
the world. But God views the world as it is in light of what He has eternally
called it to be in its possibility by a love that includes justice as justice’s
wholeness,125 so he sees the world as only the perfect response to what ‘sprang
120 121
TD, V, 509. TD, II, 270.
122
CL, 120 (see Maximus, Amb. 7, PG 91.1085A–C (Constas 2014, 1:106–9 and see n. 30,
481–2) and Dionysius, DN, 5.8 [PTS 33, 188, ll.8–9], 102).
123 124 125
Speyr, WP, 43–4. ibid., 44. Balthasar, TL, I, 266–7.

to life in his eternal contemplation’.126 The possibility concerning the world
and its expression as the world are sheltered within God in Christ who takes
into account the mutability of all things (see 11.2).
Another way of viewing this mystery of the identity-in-difference of the divine
possibilities of the world and their realization is to take up Speyr’s description of
the divine intentions that ‘are like preludes, beginnings taken up by the Son to be
realized’.127 Developing the musical metaphor, one can compare the divine
theologia and economia to J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 846–93)
or Dmitri Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues (Op. 87). The Son eternally
takes up the preludes stated by His Father and elaborates them in the world into
a fugue through the Spirit. The essence of the subsequent composition, however,
can still be traced back to the grounding prelude in God, so the identity and the
difference of the prelude and the fugue are maintained.
(b) Turning to the next issue, we can argue that in the divine economy we
see ‘things with a higher degree of reality’ which ‘initially’ seem to correspond
to mere possibilities ‘in a negative sense’ within God Himself. However,
although these possibilities are ideas in God, they are not simply bare negative
abstractions, since what is realized economically is ‘rooted in an all-embracing
divine freedom that for all eternity has been actually performing these “pos-
sible” things’.128 Here we are reminded of Bulgakov’s idea that all the images
of the divine economy, which God will enact as the Absolute-Relative, already
always exist in His divine counsel as pre-accomplished realities129 that are
then expressed in creation and redemption. For Balthasar, the possibilities of
creation and redemption, which are realized in creation, exist in God’s own
eternal life of love, His outreaching desire in a supereminent, even substantial
sense, which is related but not identical to their realization. Balthasar called
these free quasi-substantial possibilities ‘all the modalities of love . . . which
may manifest themselves in the course of a history of salvation involving sinful
mankind’.130 As argued earlier (see 10.3 and 11.2), the Son receives these
possibilities or modalities of love freely as His own necessity (F3) by binding
Himself to the Father’s necessary will (N3), which includes them within it, and
the Spirit enacts them with Absolute Freedom (F3–N3). We must, therefore,
argue that in Christ, as the incarnate Son of God, we see the ‘infinite possibil-
ities of divine freedom’ of which the creation and redemption of the world in
Him form a part. The possibilities, therefore, are ensheltered in Christ within
‘the trinitarian distinctions and are thus free possibilities within the eternal
life of love in God that has always been realized’. If these possibilities lie within
the divine life, which is always already realized, then God does not need (pace
126 127
Speyr, WP, 44. ibid., 63, cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 88 and TL, III, 226.
128 129
TD, V, 509. Bulgakov, AB, 370 [LG, 340].
130
Balthasar, Mysterium, viii–ix.

Hegel) to posit these possibilities to realize Himself. Yet if the eternal Son
always already chooses freely to make these possibilities His own by saying
the ‘perfect Yes of thanks to the Father’ in His begetting, then they would
seem to be in some sense freely chosen necessities (see 10.3 and 11.2). Indeed,
Balthasar, drawing on Maximus the Confessor, argues that this eternal
choice of the Son to bind Himself to the possibilities as His own necessities
leaves behind the possibility of a gnomic free will (which can act on a possi-
bility or not).131 In other words, despite the great dissimilarity between
divine and created Being and the contingency of creation, God has so bound
Himself to creation in Christ crucified that, returning to dialectic, one can-
not now speak of God without the world to which He is bound in the hypostatic
union.
Balthasar argues that from all eternity the divine conversation of the Trinity
envisages the possibility in Christ as the Uridee of involving a non-divine
world in its love.132 It does this precisely through the cross. And the cross
presupposes the alienation and refusal of the creature of God and the opening
up of a path whereby men can go beyond this refusal and be drawn into God,
rooting the world more deeply in God than sin could alienate it from Him.
The divine love-desire, as a perfect synthesis of dependent freedom (F3) and
free dependence (N3), includes within it ‘a certain quality of “renunciation” in
the eternal trinitarian life’. This can be seen in the eternal self-giving of God
the Father, His voluntary but necessary self-renouncement of His own unique-
ness in the generation of His Son (N3 and retrospectively F3). In response, the
Son eternally and obediently receives His own begottenness (F3) from His
Father through their common Spirit as Absolute Freedom (F3–N3). Balthasar
refers, following Speyr, to this eternal quasi-renunciation, which he refers to as
the idea of the freely obedient Son,133 as a ‘pre-sacrifice’. This ‘pre-sacrifice’
with the emergence of sin turns into the ‘actual redemption’ or ‘sacrifice’
proper of the Cross which is expressed as the same dependent freedom (F3)
and free dependence (N3).134 There is nothing hypothetical about this
‘pre-sacrifice’. It is utterly real. Indeed, it was ‘implicit from all eternity in
the Son’s decision’ to obey His Father to the uttermost, ‘even if it is only
completed historically on the Cross’.135 Here we are reminded of the very
same nexus in Bulgakov’s and Barth’s Trinitarian theologies, which both
include an eternal obedience of the Son which is expressed in creation.
It would seem at first that the actualization of a divine possibility would
result in a change in God. However, as we argued earlier (see 9.2, 10.1, and
131
TD, V, 508 and for the gnomic will: CL, 263–71 (see Bathrellos 2004, 148–62).
132
Balthasar, TD, V, 509–10, citing Speyr 1970, 90–2, 1961, 24, 1999, 428, 1956, 345–6, 1948,
229, and 1958, 99.
133 134
Balthasar, TD, II, 269. Speyr 1956, 345, cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 510.
135
Speyr 1956, 346, cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 511.

11.1), God’s Being is a Super-Becoming.136 The changes in the life of the Son
in time are simply a reflection of God’s dynamic ever-changing but changeless
eternal life (‘eternal change’) as an ‘eternal capacity for transformation’.137
Divine unity is not rigid, but an ever expanding circle that ‘comes together
ever anew in love’.138 This love has a personal name: the Holy Spirit. The
Spirit, as the Absolute Freedom of God (F3–N3), His surpassing love,139 is the
pneumatic face of the excessive Being/Love-desire of the Holy Trinity. It is
not only ‘ever-greater [Je-Größere]’ than man can grasp but also ‘“ever-more
[je-mehr]” even to [God] himself ’.140 This divine ‘excess [Überschwang]’ (or
‘exuberance’), the eternal ‘surplus [Überschuß]’ or abundance of the divine life
of love, is supremely and vividly alive.141 Hence, God is always three steps
beyond the novelties of creation.142 Creation, therefore, can, in a sense, affect
Him, even if it never ultimately changes Him. God can always reveal a new
face to the world in relation to each movement of its life.
Yet God is ever new to creation precisely because He is new even to Himself.
God is ahead of creation because He surpasses (without leaving) Himself. He is
three steps beyond His creatures since He is always leaping over Himself. The
Son never tires of looking at the face of the Father and seeing ever-new aspects
of Him ( je-neue).143 From whatever side the Son sees His Father, He sees the
whole of Him and ‘by continually finding him . . . continually seeking him’.144
The Son is the primordial expectation and fulfilment of the Father in His
generation of Him, for although His expectation of Him is unsurpassable
(unübertreffbar), it is being continually surpassed by the fulfilment.145 Like-
wise, when the Spirit proceeds from the Father and Son, as their mutual love or
common ecstatic desire for one another, the dyad sees its love surpassed in
becoming a triad ‘as it issues forth from them as a third Person, standing
bodily before them and expressing their innermost being’.146 The Spirit
personally makes the Father and the Son known as the ever-greater divine
free love-desire and so He is both fruitfulness and the divine surplus as a
hypostasis.147
But if God is a divine ever-more and this self-surpassing outstrips His own
expectation in its fulfilment, then we can even dare to say that ‘In his
trinitarian life he is continually being surprised by the ever-greater that he
136 137
See Balthasar, Presence, 153. Speyr 1987, 92, cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 515.
138 139
Speyr 1993, 292, cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 514. See TL, III, 58, 236–7.
140
ThD, IV, 68 [see TD, V, 78 (revd), citing Speyr 1994, 308, 1970, 80, 569, 575, 1976b, 39–42,
1991, 291, 298, and 1976a, 68] and see Balthasar, TL, III, 237, citing Speyr, WP, 30 (see also WP,
35) and Balthasar, TD, V, 78–91 and 516–21.
141 142 143
ThD, IV, 68 [TD, V, 78–9]. TD, V, 509. ThD, IV, 69 [TD, V, 79].
144
TD, V, 78, citing Speyr, WP, 248.
145
Balthasar, ThD, IV, 69 [TD, V, 79], citing Speyr, Welt, 23 [see WP, 30] and see Balthasar,
TL, III, 237, citing Speyr, WP, 30.
146 147
ibid, 30. TL, III, 30.

is.’148 God surprises Himself. Being free in regard to His freedom, a freedom
that is love, He is free in regards to His eternal self-seizure, His knowledge of
who He is. And this divine capacity for the joy of surprise not only applies to
the immanent Trinity but to God’s activity in the divine economy. The Spirit,
knowing the depths of God, all of the divine possibilities willed by the Father
and freely accepted by His Son, can provide a ‘surprise’ (Überraschung)149 to
even God Himself with his enactment of them in free love in creation and
redemption.150 He is the author of the ‘eternal inundation of love’, a union in
difference that in its Absolute Freedom, recapitulating the necessary and
free will of the Father and the Son, can include even broken creation because
it is an ever-greater ‘miracle that fulfills itself beyond all expectations’.151
Through the Spirit, God allows Himself to be surprised and allows Himself
to wonder at the world as a gift eternally given and received in gratitude
in Jesus Christ. Rowan Williams puts this Balthasarian point well when he
evokes the spirit of his great doctoral supervisor, the Anglican theologian and
ecumenist A. M. (‘Donald’) Allchin (1930–2010). Allchin loved to repeat a
famous line from the Welsh poet and hymn-writer Ann Griffiths (1776–1805),
‘Wonderful, wonderful in the sight of the angels’ (Rhyfedd, rhyfedd gan
angylion)152: ‘Perhaps it allows us to say (with conscious boldness) that God
‘wonders’ even over the world he made; that he in and through the incarnate
Christ allows himself the joy of surprise as again and again new things are
generated by that one word, that one image; a wisdom that lives by welcome
and by wonder.’153
The world, the cross, and the Incarnation, therefore, and here we are at the
heart of Balthasar’s response to our problematic, are free possibilities existing
actually in the divine life. These divine realized possibilities are willed neces-
sarily by the Father (N3) in His begetting of His Son and freely and necessarily
accepted by the Son (F3) in His very sacrificial disposition (‘in the hypostatic
mode of readiness’).154 They are expressed historically in creation, incarna-
tion, and the cross where Christ follows the Father’s will not His own (Lk.
22:42). Finally, the possibilities are willed through the absolute free love-desire
of the Spirit (F3–N3) who brings the divine surprise of the resurrection out of
them. The uncreated is dissimilar to the created in that the economia does
not change God because of the dynamism of the divine life concretized in
the Spirit. However, given God’s free self-binding, one can no more speak
of a pure nature than one can of a God who remains wholly untouched by
the Incarnation. But this need not lead to a collapse of the immanent and
148
ibid., and see Speyr, WP, 28–32 and 50; cf. Balthasar, TD, V, 79–80, 400–1 and TL, III, 227.
149
ThL, III, 218 [TL, III, 237]; cf. TL, III, 227 and see TD, V, 79. See Speyr, WP, 50.
150
Balthasar, TL, III, 236–8, summarizing WP, 30, 58, and 61–3.
151 152
Speyr 1993, 292, cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 515. Allchin 1987, 25.
153 154
R. Williams 2011. Balthasar, TD, II, 278.

economic Trinity, for both realities exist in a unity in difference. The economy
unfolds sacrificially in the world the enfolded Trinitarian reality of divine love-
desire, specifically, the Son’s eternal pre-sacrificial generation that contains
His eternal heavenly will to give up Himself for the life of the world. Put
otherwise, suffering, the cross, and death are only a ‘reflection’ or ‘manifest-
ations’ of ‘tremendous realities in the Father, in heaven, in eternal life . . . the
love of God that goes to the ultimate’.155 Therefore, the Lamb slain from the
foundation of the world (Rev. 13:8) corresponds to two realities. Firstly, it
corresponds to the eternal theological reality of the procession of the Spirit
from the Father and the Son in the begetting of the Son by the Father and the
Son’s letting be of Himself to be begotten, which is a ‘pre-sacrifice’ (a sort of
renunciation in the Trinity). Secondly, it corresponds to an economic reality.
With the emergence of sin, this Trinitarian love as pre-sacrifice becomes a true
renunciation or sacrifice which is fully included in God in the parousia/
Ascension (see our Conclusion). Both realities, as we have been at pains to
show, are structured by our axis with the second being an expression of
the first.
The divine possibilities are foundational variations which are developed
into creation and redemption. They form the tissue of the divine relations
understood as an obedient sacrificial life of love, so, while the world simpliciter
is not necessary, it is much more than merely accidental. To be sure, Balthasar
is explicit that the creature is ensheltered in God insofar as it participates in the
begetting of God’s own Son, which is a necessity that subsequently is enowned
as a free reality.156 Nor does God hold anything back in participation, includ-
ing a share of God’s paternity.157 Thus, although we are now stepping beyond
Balthasar, we might build on Balthasar’s theology by arguing that creation and
redemption can be said to be necessary internal realities for God as God (N3)
because God in His Absolute Freedom has bound Himself to them as free
possibilities (F3). In consequence, in creation and the Incarnation and decisively
through the Ascension, the world has becomes ensheltered in God in Christ as
the Uridee. In this ensheltering, creation comes to share in the very necessity
(N3) of God’s own self-generation as a free gift (F3).
But ‘What does God get from the world?’158 Balthasar, it will be remem-
bered, wants to avoid what he understands to be the extremes of God having to
create the world out of some primordial need to develop as God and creation
simply being created as God wished to effect His own accidental glorification.
Creation is an ‘internal gift from each Divine Person to the Other’. It is gifted
with a dependent freedom (F3) and a free dependence (N3) from the Father to
155
Speyr 1948, 229, cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 511.
156 157
ibid., 131, citing Speyr 1961, 227. Balthasar, TL, II, 148–9.
158
‘Was hat Gott von der Welt?’ (ThD, IV, 463), glossed: ‘What does God gain from the
world?’ (TD, V, 506).

the Son and from the Son in Eucharistic gratitude in bringing it back to Him in
the Ascension and by the Spirit to them both. Nor because it is a gift should it
be seen as a ‘superfluous work’, since both creation and God are ‘gift’.159
The Father in His supreme condescension is in a sense enriched by the Son’s
bringing of creation back to Him—the economy is not nothing to God. It is as
if when the Father hands all judgement to His Son in the parousia through
their Spirit that something new occurs in Him with a new love being set free
and a new joy of surprise arising. Heaven is glorified by Christ’s saving deeds
and the love of God; His grace is yet more perfected because the love of the
Cross supersedes and ultimately absorbs judgement. The law of God becomes
no longer death but life itself through the Spirit of Sonship (Rom. 8).160 This
enrichment can be understood as a new current in the flow of divine desire, so
that creaturely love can be drawn into it, as it were, by a supremely merciful
‘incision’ being made in the divine love to make ‘room’ for the love of the
creature.161 Creation is a gift which ‘enriches’ God—albeit an ‘additional gift’.
When creatures participate in the joy and glorification of the three hypostases,
they obtain thereby an ‘inward share’ of the divine self-exchange. Mirroring
this self-exchange, they are able with loving gratitude to take the divine things
they have received as an inward ‘share’ together with their creatureliness (‘the
gift of being created’) and freely offer (F3) themselves and one another, and
their whole life as a divine gift in Christ to God. Their life is only insofar as it is
in, by, and for Jesus Christ (N3).162
But if God out of His condescension allows creation to enrich Him as an
additional gift and if creation with the cross and Godforsakeness is a divine
freely willed necessity, then (going beyond Balthasar) it would seem reason-
able to argue that God can be said to need the world to be God (N3) as He has
freely chosen this possibility (F3). This need, however, is not for God Himself
(his self-development) but for love of the world. However, Balthasar (unlike
Bulgakov) is unwilling to take this theological leap, presumably out of fear of
jeopardizing God’s Absolute Freedom by (as he saw it) fully jettisoning the
doctrine of divine apatheia. However, one feels that in his avoiding of need
language but in using other language that implies it, he simply talks around the
issue and baulks at the full implications of the fact that God has eternally
bound Himself to creation in Christ with a free dependence (N3).
Balthasar’s distinctive contribution to the clarifying of the problematic is
twofold. First, he has given us a Trinitarian theology in which the Son freely
accepts the free possibilities of creation and redemption laid on him by the
Father as free necessities and a vision in which the Spirit enacts these possi-
bilities in Absolute Freedom. Second, he has shown how the outworking of the
latter Trinitarian theology must be in the placing of the two wills or two
159 160
ibid., 507. ibid., 514–16, citing Speyr 1993, 292, 211–12, 161.
161 162
Speyr 1961, 164, cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 515. ibid., 521.

decisions of Christ—in history and eternity—in the context of an analogy of
Being. We shall elaborate these ideas in the Conclusion.
A crucial question remains. Is there some way we might speak of God’s need
for the world while retaining an o/Orthodox doctrine of God? In our Conclu-
sion, we shall explore this possibility in a sort of unsystematic systematic
postscript to this book following a recapitulation and evaluation of our three
writers’ responses to the problematic.
Conclusion
The Absolute Freedom of God and the Mystery
of Divine Election
12
Concluding Unsystematic
Systematic Postscript
12.1 THE DIALECTIC OF F REEDOM AND NECESSITY:

MYSTERY, PROBLEMATIC AND RESPONSE
We have arrived at the end of our exploration of the problematic of the

dialectic of divine freedom and necessity. We began our work with the mystery
of the Father’s ‘everlasting love’ for us (Ps. 103:17, Isa. 54:8, Jer. 31:3) in His
Son Jesus Christ through the bond of their common Spirit resting upon Him
crucified and risen according to the Scriptures. It was argued that this is a
mystery of both divine desire and freedom and necessity and that it could be
articulated in the form of a question—‘How can God as Trinity be free in
creation and redemption if in His everlasting love for creation He has eternally
bound Himself to the world in Christ?’ Furthermore, this question presented
us with our theme, as a theological path or way forward, in the form of what
we called a problematic. A ‘problematic’ has been understood as an intellectual
mystery to which one can respond conceptually. Unlike a problem, it has no
ultimate rational resolution and any response simply clarifies the mystery,
allowing one to go deeper on the path of the question. By this problematic, we
refer to the fact that Christian theology is faced with the simultaneous demand
that it affirm the radical ungrounded free love of God as Spirit (2. Cor. 3:17)
who ‘alone has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light’ (1 Tim 6:16)
and the fact that this same God has emptied Himself and taken the form of a
slave (Phil. 2:5ff.), since out of an everlasting love for humanity He has
eternally chosen His only-begotten Son to be Jesus of Nazareth (1 Pet. 1:20),
the ‘Lamb slain from the foundation of the world’ (Rev. 13:8 [KJV]). Because
God as God has eternally determined Himself to be God for us as Jesus Christ,
the world is given a certain necessity for God because, if there were no world,
there would be no Christ.
We have used a whole variety of senses of ‘freedom’ and ‘necessity’ depend-
ing on the situation and writer, which were codified in chapters 2–3. The
meaning of ‘dialectic’, in turn, changes according to the context. It can be

understood broadly as the interplay of two distinct but mutually defining
realities, roughly similar to Balthasar’s polarity, or, as a contradiction between
mutually opposed realities, as in Bulgakov’s antinomism and Barth’s own
dialecticism. We have held up throughout the study a synthesis or union of
dependent freedom (F3) with free dependence (N3), the ‘F3–N3 axis’ or simply
‘axis’, as a means of conceptualizing the inexpressible dynamism of Absolute
Freedom understood as the divine life of love-desire both in itself and in
reference to the world. This axis has served as a sort of working theological
ideal of the conceptual balance that must be struck by the theologian between
freedom and necessity in any contemporary response to the problematic. It is to
be hoped that, by attempting to respond to our problematic through a critically
constructive exposition of the different positions of our writers and our own
tentative synthesis of their ideas, we have at least entered more deeply onto the
path of our initial question. In this way, we can slowly see the question’s ‘total
and original meaning,1 arriving thereby back at the place from which we
started, which is the mystery of God’s everlasting love for us in Christ, ‘And
know the place for the first time’.2 In knowing this place anew, by having
entered so deeply onto the path of the question that we are now attuned to it,
and have started on the way to corresponding to the mystery we seek, we are
ready to complete the admittedly tentative synthesis we have been attempting
to formulate. What we have aimed at is less a wholly new theological position
on God and the world than a sort of unsystematic systematic theological
response to our problematic, drawing on a selection of ideas from Bulgakov,
Barth, and Balthasar. Having summarized the problematic, let us turn to a
summary, comparison, and evaluation of the different responses of our writers
with particular attention as to how well they accommodate the F3–N3 axis that
has guided us throughout our book. On this basis, we will then turn in
conclusion to an exploration of the relationship of the two forms of divine
election we have proposed as the core of our own constructive response.
12.2 SUMMARY, COMPARISON AND E VALUATION

OF THREE THEOLOGIANS
12.2.1 Sergii Bulgakov
The tension or dogmatic dialectic of divine freedom and necessity has been
traced quite differently in all three of our writers. In the case of Bulgakov, the
notion of ‘antinomy’ is central. He proposes such an antinomy between God
1
Heidegger 1956, 40–1. 2
Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, V, l.29, 145.
Concluding Unsystematic Systematic Postscript 229

as Absolute and Absolute-Relative whose theses must be held together in faith.
On the one hand, ‘God’, to the extent that one can speak of Him at all, is
Absolute self-relation in Himself, the immanent Trinity, in relation to whom
the world need not have been. He is in His Absolute Freedom a movement of
self-enclosed eternal divine love-desire, in a synthesis of freedom and necessity
(F2–N2), and creation exerts no necessity whatsoever upon Him either exter-
nal or internal (N1–N2), since it need not have been created. As Holy Trinity,
each of the hypostases lives through loving the Other by mutual self-
abandonment (F3). Each divine Person’s life is constituted wholly in, for,
and according to the Other. This self-emptying sacrificial love is such a radical
self-renunciation to the Other that the Person cannot turn back once it has
given itself. Indeed, in some sense, it has eternally bound itself, since its self-
giving is a sort of eternal voluntary self-depletion, almost akin to death (N3).
However, on the other hand, God as Absolute Holy Trinity, a synthesis of
freedom and necessity (F2–N2), freely posits Himself as relative to an Other, a
world, becoming Absolute-Relative or the economic Trinity, the Creator and
Redeemer of the world for whom He is their ‘God’. Here God in His Absolute
Freedom has freely put Himself in need to the world (F3). The world, as an
Other, exerts at first an external necessity (N1) upon Him which then becomes
an internal necessity (N2). The Absolute has become God as love for the world
and love to love must ecstatically love (N3) beyond itself to be love, namely,
create and redeem.
The greatest strength of Bulgakov’s system is that, at least ideally, it holds to
the fact that even when God is most identified with creation, in the economic
Trinity, to the point that He must love it to be Himself, He is at once
paradoxically and supra-rationally, as apprehended by faith, utterly free and
different from the world. It need not have been created since the immanent
(Absolute) is in the economic Trinity (Absolute-Relative). Quite simply,
Bulgakov’s system in the abstract holds a great deal of promise for embodying
our axis, F3–N3. However, such a vision of a sort of ‘hierarchy’ of divine self-
determinations or the groundedness of God’s self-revelation in the world upon
God’s self-revelation to and in Himself never regrettably goes beyond simple
assertion, perhaps because such a unity is beyond human reason. Moreover, in
practice, due to the identification of the divine and the creaturely Sophias, and
this is the greatest weakness of Bulgakov’s theology, the antinomy between the
immanent and the economic Trinity, God in Himself and for Himself, tends to
become collapsed into one monistic divine reality that subsumes creation in a
form of a love determinism.3
As we have noted, Bulgakov’s ontological modalism or monism makes any
sort of embrace of analogy impossible. The Divine Sophia simply is another
3
See Bulgakov, AB, 462 [LG, 435] and SWG, 146–8.

mode of the Created Sophia making it nonsense to talk about real similarity or
dissimilarity as is necessary for an analogy to obtain purchase. In order for an
analogia entis to cohere with sophiology, one would need a fundamental
rethinking of his doctrine of creation which would allow for a clear and
absolute distinction between the uncreated and the created. Bulgakov’s the-
ology has an acute awareness of the necessity of creation for God in Christ, but
that this necessity is freely given and could have been ‘otherwise’, as God
remains Absolute while being Absolute-Relative, is obscured due to his creep-
ing pantheism. Thus, it is Bulgakov’s poor execution of his own antinomy,
undermined by his sophiology, that neuters otherwise quite daring ideas, such
as the fact that, since God as Absolute has posited Himself as Absolute-
Relative (F3) in order to be love, He must love beyond Himself (N3).
Sadly, the antinomy of the Absolute and the Absolute-Relative in practice is
reduced to the latter so that we have no clear sense of God’s dependent
freedom (F3) in His self-giving but only His need of creation to be Himself
or free dependence (N3). Bulgakov’s theology, then, provides only in the
abstract an excellent execution of the F3–N3 axis. In practice, his antinomies
are theologically unworkable. God’s dependent freedom (F3) in Bulgakov—
which needs to be anchored in some version of God as Absolute—is constantly
being assimilated into N3, with God as Absolute-Relative wholly identified
with the world and the world-process. This collapse of F3 into N3 creates a
divine love monism or what he himself calls a ‘pan-Christism’.4
Despite these difficulties, we observe in Bulgakov’s thought a pattern that
can also be traced in Barth and Balthasar. It is that a world-oriented F3–N3
axis, as expressive of Absolute Freedom in relationship to the world, is
founded on an eternal enactment in love of the same axis, which takes the
form of intratrinitarian kenosis. This rooting of the axis in the Trinitarian
relations makes it more persuasive when applied to creation insofar as God’s
relationship to the world in dependent freedom (F3) and free dependence
(N3) is simply a free self-revelation of who God already always is. The
relationship of love, then, established in Christ between the uncreated and
created, far from being arbitrary, is a self-revelation of the trinitarian life,
which means that the life of the world is established on the same foundation as
God.5 Furthermore, Bulgakov’s thought has been particularly helpful to us in
attempting to articulate (9.3) in the context of Balthasar’s thought a new form
of the analogia entis viewed in light of the coincidentia oppositorum of God
and the world. There is a continuity and discontinuity of the life of God and of
creation in the form of two loves-desires, created and uncreated Being, which
Bulgakov refers to as two Sophias, infinite and finite in a perfect hypostatic
union in Christ where we see at work the F3–N3 axis. Here he arguably is
4 5
AB, 463 [LG, 435]. See R. Williams, SB, 168–9.

echoed by Balthasar’s Christology (see 11.1). The other idea of Bulgakov which
has great wisdom is the notion that all the divine seeds/ideas of the divine
economy are pre-accomplished in the divine counsel where God has already
always determined Himself for the world in Christ but that God is freely
dependent (F3) on creation in Christ to express them in temporality, in the
world. God eternally freely needs creation in order to actualize, accomplish
His divine plan (F3), and so He is always already bound to creation in Christ.
In order to be love, He must love beyond Himself (N3).
12.2.2 Karl Barth
One observes a similar pattern to the problematic in Barth, but here, according
to our reading of him, it takes the form of a ‘dialectic’. Barth’s dialecticism and
Bulgakov’s antinomism, as we argued, are little different as methodologies in
the abstract, but are very different in practice given the quite different sub-
stantive positions of the thinkers. Barth famously rejects the analogia entis.
His own replacement for it (analogia relationis and fidei) is radically dialectical
so he does not here provide us with any new methodological variation in
responding to the problematic. On one side of the dialectic emphasizing
freedom, God as Trinity is a perfect but necessarily free divine love (F2–N2).
In this eternal life of love, there is a natural divine lowliness, an eternal
obedience of the Son to the Father with the Spirit affirming them both
(F3–N3) (here reminiscent of Bulgakov and Balthasar). On this basis, God
has chosen irrevocably—elected—to be God for us in Jesus Christ, self-
emptying and self-humbling Himself by binding Himself in Christ to creation
in a dependent freedom (F3). This is one of an infinite number of free
possibilities available to Him. God, however, could have been satisfied with
loving Himself alone, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, so He in no way had to
create and redeem the world in Christ and it exerts no necessity upon Him,
even a de facto necessity (N1–3). God could have acted otherwise.
On the other side of the dialectic emphasizing necessity, God as Trinity,
who is in Himself a loving synthesis of freedom and necessity (F2–N2)
involving both a dependent freedom (F3) and a free dependence (N3), has
eternally freely chosen to be God for us in Christ (F3). This eternal choice to be
a particular man, Jesus Christ, is His election of Himself and us in Christ and
since it is an eternal choice, made at every moment, He always already is God
for humanity. Thus, there exists a freely chosen de facto necessity of the world
for God. There must be a world for God to be God for us in Christ and He
must be its Creator since He has become freely dependent on creation and
cannot act otherwise (N3). In light of de facto necessity, the free act of God’s
self-determination of and for us as Christ loses its sense of ‘otherwise’. It is
impossible to speak of God other than the Father of Jesus Christ and the Spirit

as the Spirit of the Father and Jesus Christ. In our terminology and in a way
that is reminiscent of Bulgakov, F3 effectively becomes collapsed into N3,
since God’s existence as the Logos asarkos is a pure abstraction. Yet this reality
nevertheless must be retained in a bald assertion if we are to maintain the
sheer graciousness of God’s self-giving.
The greatest strength of Barth’s response is his (broadly speaking) ‘coven-
antal’ focus on the problematic with his account of God’s eternal election of
Himself as a man in Christ, and man’s own choice in Christ’s election of God
as his God. It is on this basis that our own constructive theology begins. In
focusing so closely on divine election in his later doctrine of God, he sets the
issue of Christology at the heart of Trinitarian theology, thereby establishing,
despite himself, a tension between God and the world at the heart of his
theology, leading to the historicization of his doctrine of God. Nevertheless,
Barth, in a way that is often obscured in Bulgakov’s antinomism by his
sophiology, manages to balance the emphasis on dependent freedom (F3)
with an equally primordial free dependence (N3). In the first aspect, Barth
argues that God could have acted otherwise, based on the potentia absoluta/
ordinata distinction. In the second aspect, Barth holds that God has always
already been for us in Christ and so could not have acted otherwise. Further-
more, in Barth, we can see N3 of our axis at work with especial clarity. Here his
Christological specificity is a great advancement on Bulgakov’s more general
approach. God’s self-election of Himself in Christ needs, in order that it might
be actualized in revelation, man’s election of God in Christ.
The other great achievement of Barth’s response, which we have also
adapted, is his idea of the de facto necessity of the world for God in Christ.
Once God has chosen to be a certain sort of God, God for us in Christ, and this
choice is an eternal choice, one cannot climb up behind Him to another sort of
God who is not irrevocably for us in Christ. One must say, therefore, the world
had to be created and that God had to be the Creator or there would be no
Christ. This idea, which is similar to our notion of free dependence (N3), is
akin to Bulgakov’s less Christocentrically focused notion that God to be God
as love must love beyond Himself in creation and redemption. However, it
more carefully retains the connection of God’s free self-binding of Himself
(F3) to the fact that God is bound (N3).
All things considered, in Barth’s dialecticism, one is sometimes left with the
sense that since God has bound Himself to the world, He is in some sense also
simultaneously unbound. If this is the case, then He could very well unbind
Himself altogether from creation if He so desired (although He does not so
desire). In other words, there exists in Barth’s retention of the logos asarkos, a
whisper of a deus absconditus (a tacit voluntarism) that threatens to unravel
the deus revelatus in some new yet unrevealed form. The major problem with
Barth’s response, if problem it is, is that, like Bulgakov’s antinomism, there is
an unsurpassable abyss between God’s free binding of Himself to creation

(F3), which presupposes that He could have existed otherwise than He in fact
does exist, and the fact that once this free self-binding is presupposed, one
immediately has to say that one cannot imagine God without creation in
Christ, as His self-binding makes the world part of the divine identity (N3). In
short, Barth’s response simply begs the question and reinstates the problem-
atic in a more radically Christocentric form. This critique, of course, could
apply to a naively dialectical application of our own F3–N3 axis and so we
needed to turn to Balthasar for a sort of corrective to, or clarification of, the
dialectic of F3–N3 using analogy.
12.2.3 Hans Urs von Balthasar
Analogy, in contrast to dialectic, does not simply beg the question of our
problematic by emphasizing the need to assert simultaneously God’s complete
difference from creation and His identification with it. Rather, it speaks of
similarity between two realities and for two realities to be able to be similar
there must be an enduring non-negotiable difference that underpins it, which
in an analogical mode we speak of as their dissimilarity. God, therefore, is
closely akin to His creation in eternally determining Himself for us in Christ,
but there also exists an underlying greater dissimilarity between Him who is
uncreated and the world which He has formed out of love. We suggested,
therefore, drawing on David Tracy, that using analogy to understand our
problematic might serve as a complement to antinomy/dialectic.
Here we turned to the witness of Balthasar, in whom our problematic
involves not only dialectic but also analogy. Balthasar begins with the con-
templation of the self-giving of Christ as the ‘concrete analogy of Being’,6 the
similarity-in-difference of God and the world in one divine Person, in whom
one sees our dialectic in the form of both creaturely Being and the uncreated
Being of God as Trinity. Within the field of creation we see, first in the
difference between the I and Thou of the mother and her child and then,
following that, in the difference between Being and beings and beings and
Being, that the dialectic of freedom and necessity can be traced in creation as a
polarity. This intra-worldly polarity takes the form of ceaseless tension
between two poles where the poles imply one another, are dependent upon,
and exist through one another or interpenetrate. The tension is between a self-
possessing integrity that ceaselessly gives itself away in a dependent freedom
(F3) and a ceaseless acceptance of this Other in a free dependence (N3) who
then gives itself away in turn in dependent freedom, and so on ad infinitum.
Here necessity comes to be characterized broadly speaking as dependence. The
6
Balthasar, TH, n. 5, 69.

axis F3–N3, in a way not found previously in Bulgakov and Barth, is not
simply an expression of Absolute Freedom but has a creaturely analogue,
thereby being well established in the world. This intra-worldly polarity pro-
vides a form of propaedeutic lifting the mind up to the mystery of Christ and
from Him to the similar but dissimilar form of the polarity in the Trinity.
Taken as a whole, the existence of intra-worldly polarity in creation shows that
creaturely Being is kenotic and thereby bears within itself a trace of Christ’s own
self-surrender on the cross which is the fundamental event of creation and
recreation. Yet we can go yet further here in turning to the similar but yet
dissimilar form of the polarity in the divine hypostases. Like creaturely Being,
the divine Being of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as a synthesis of freedom
and necessity (F2–N2), is a ceaseless movement of loving self-giving where each
of the hypostases depends on the others in letting the Other go and letting the
Other be, and where in turn the Other accepts or receives itself and gives itself
away as a free gift. Here, like Bulgakov and Barth, there is an eternal union in love
of a self-giving and self-receiving dependent freedom (F3) and irrevocable free
dependence of the One on the Other (N3). Yet quite unlike creaturely Being, this
polarity involves a perfect tension, for in God not only existence and essence
coinhere in a dynamic unity but freedom and necessity itself.
Unlike Bulgakov, in Balthasar there is no collapse of F3 into N3 making for
the complete identity of divine and creaturely Being. Nor does the great
difference between the uncreated and the created make it blasphemous even
to compare the one to the other from some neutral ‘point of contact’, as is the
case in Barth. Paradoxically in Barth’s theology, this same difference opens up a
strange abyss. We observe the creation of a sort of ontological crevasse between
the divine F3 towards the world, which assumes the sheer difference of God
from the world, and the divine N3 towards the world, which appears to create a
total eternal identity of God and creation in Christ. Barth, through his fear of
the analogy of Being, ends up losing much of what he had positively gained in
his balance of F3–N3 in God’s freedom towards the world through the carefully
distinguished but unified divine-human decision/election of Jesus Christ. By
contrast, for Balthasar in his account of divine and creaturely Being, it is the
unity of the person of Christ Himself as the concrete analogy of Being who
serves as the mean of all continuities and discontinuities between God and
creation. This allows for God’s establishment in Christ of a gracious similarity
and dissimilarity between God, who still remains Non-Aliud, and the world.
How do freedom and dependence work out in the relation between God
and the world? It is here that Balthasar’s thought is, in the mode of analogy,
similar to Bulgakov’s understanding of the person of Christ as a dialectic of
two Sophias, two loves-desires. Here we need to turn back to Christ as the
concrete analogy of Being. As human, Christ fulfils His finite freedom (F2)
only through completely surrendering it in love to God, and becoming utterly
dependent upon Him (F3–N3), whereby God, who once was an external

necessity (N1) for Christ, becomes a freely chosen internal necessity (N2). This
divine infinite freedom in which finite freedom is fulfilled is one with necessity
(F2–N2) and it is eternally both a dependent freedom and a free dependence
(F3–N3). As divine, Christ, in His infinite freedom, as a synthesis of freedom
and necessity (F2–N2) which is self-giving, self-receiving love (F3–N3), freely
gives Himself up in complete self-surrender to and dependence upon (F3) the
movement of finite freedom. Once so given, in a free dependence (N3), He will
never again be without the world He created and redeemed and can be said to
be even more Himself. Christ, as a divine-human unity, thus perfectly em-
bodies the synthesis of F3–N3, absolute divine Freedom, which can be traced
in tension in intra-worldly polarity and in perfect union in the Holy Trinity.
Yet there is a major dissimilarity between the infinite and the finite in this
movement, which is that, following a major strand of Christian theology, God,
for Balthasar, like Barth, need not have so given Himself away to be Himself.
God’s self-giving only emphasizes what He always already is, whereas creation
must do so to be itself.
It is here that our problematic proper comes to the foreground in Balthasar
and we move in his thought from analogy to a mysterious dialectic. In one
sense, God in Christ is similar to creation in Christ in giving Himself away and
is dissimilar to creation in that He need not have given Himself away to it to be
Himself. But in another sense entirely, He is, despite His difference from it in
being uncreated and free in Himself, identified with creation. God is identified
with creation insofar as He must give Himself away to it (N3) because He is
eternally choosing to do so out of an everlasting desire for creation (F3). We
have argued that this mystery has a structure for Balthasar, which is the
intratrinitarian dialectic of freedom and necessity, and we have built on this
insight in our response. This intratrinitarian dialectic involves: (a) the Father’s
necessary generation of the Son in which He gives to Him all His free
possibilities concerning creation and redemption, which the Son binds Him-
self to as freely willed necessities which are then realized in Absolute Freedom
by their common Spirit; and (b) the ensheltering of creation in both its
possibility and its realization in the realm of freedom of the Son.
God the Father from His everlasting love for His Son begets Him with a
necessary but tacitly free will (N3) and the Son receives His own begottenness
with an obedient joy where He freely enowns it as His own (F3) so that the
Father’s act is retrospectively a free self-giving. In the necessary will of the
Father are contained His free intentions, including His plans for creation and
redemption of the world in Christ. In His being begotten by His Father, the
intention to create and redeem the world in Christ is received freely and
obediently by His Son (F3) as a freely willed necessity (N3).7 The Son, through
7
Balthasar, TD, V, 509.

His Spirit, eternally freely chooses to be dependent on the world by being not
only its Creator but its Redeemer (F3). Since the relation of dependence on the
world is an eternal one, we must say that God has bound Himself to it
irrevocably and its future becomes the future of God and so God freely but
necessarily must create and redeem it (N3). In eternally and obediently freely
binding Himself to His Father’s necessary will, making it His own necessity, all
of the Father’s intentions as free possibilities form around Him as the exem-
plary idea of the world to which all must cohere. This Uridee of the world is
described as the idea of the ‘freely obedient Son’,8 Jesus Christ, and God
chooses the world in which He becomes incarnate and dies on the cross
because it most closely reflects this supraeternal reality. He also describes it
as a ‘pre-sacrifice’ which in light of sin and death becomes the actual ‘sacrifice’
of Jesus Christ on the cross.9
Not only the idea of the world is included in God in Christ but its concrete
realization. The world is said to be eternally ‘ensheltered’ in the Son’s own
divine realm of freedom as an eternal ‘additional gift’ of each of the hypostases
to the other.10 This would seem to mean, then, that creation and redemption
are both wholly free, as the Son need not have followed this particular
intention of His Father in His enownment of His own begottenness, although
He does in fact do so (F3), and wholly necessary, since the Son has eternally
bound Himself to be incarnate and so He is eternally a God who is to be
incarnate (N3). The additional gift of creation in no way changes God, as God
through His Spirit, as an impossible synthesis of dependent freedom (F3) and
free dependence (N3), is an excessive Being of love who is ever more even
to Himself. The events of the divine economy are fulfilled with such joy for
God through the Absolute Freedom of the Spirit that God actually surprises
even Himself.
Balthasar’s theology is a major advancement on our past models precisely
because he critically synthesizes and builds upon the theologies of Bulgakov
and Barth. He shows how each of the hypostases uniquely appropriates the
dialectic to itself. The Son is characterized by a freely chosen necessity toward
the world, whereas the Father is characterized by the necessity of His will
which includes His free intentions, and the Spirit, synthesizing both freedom
and necessity, is characterized by an absolute freedom beyond both. This move
dramatizes in eternity, as it were, the eternal act of the Son in freely taking the
world upon himself as a self-imposed burden so that Gethsemane is envi-
sioned as a temporal expression of an eternal drama in God. In this way, one is
given a concrete sense of how salvation history is grounded in a transcendent
reality and revelation is seen as both a true expression of God’s life at the same
time as it avoids collapsing God into history where God cannot determine His
8 9 10
ibid., II, 269. TD, V, 510. ibid., 521.

own life in concretion without becoming incarnate, in the manner of a crude
Hegelianism.
Balthasar, in this fashion, brilliantly marries two forms of the axis F3–N3 in
his account of the Trinity—that of God’s perfect existence in love towards
Himself as a dependent freedom (F3) and free dependence (N3), and, within
the very same eternal nexus of the hypostases, God’s F3–N3 relationship
towards the world. Furthermore, Balthasar appears to use both dialectic and
analogy. There is dialectic in that He emphasizes that God, in being the
uncreated Non-Aliud, is utterly different from the world which He creates
and redeems in Christ, but is simultaneously identified with it, in that since He
binds Himself to it eternally, one must say that He cannot be a God without it.
There is also analogy in that Balthasar carefully shows through his focus on
Christ as the concrete analogy of Being how the dialectic of freedom and
necessity is similar and dissimilar in God and in creation and with respect to
God-in-reference-to-creation and creation-in-reference-to-God.
However, there still remain major problems with Balthasar’s account. We
point first to his kenotic account of the immanent Trinity that seems, like
Bulgakov before him on whom he is strongly dependent, to be an unacknow-
ledged eternalization of the economic Trinity. He is in danger of projecting
the Incarnation (along with suffering, history, and temporality) into God
Himself,11 leading to the immanent Trinity being subsumed in the economic12
and ultimately the collapse of the uncreated–created distinction.13 In this way,
Balthasar’s God risks swallowing up history, as it were, for in Him all the
events of history are already always accomplished in a sort of divine agon and
merely need to be unfolded in time. At his most extreme, this sort of theology
empties history and creation of any true efficacy in the divine economy so that
all that creation can give to God is to be an additional gift of one hypostasis to
the Other. This is not unlike Bulgakov, following after Solov’ev, who argues
that creation is a repetition in becoming of what God eternally is. Nevertheless,
Balthasar so desires to maintain God’s freedom and creation’s contingency
that, though his theology does speak of God’s free entry into a necessary
relationship with creation in Christ (i.e. the F3–N3 axis) and it climaxes in
creation’s being embedded in the realm of freedom of the Son, he generally
avoids saying outright (unlike Bulgakov and Barth) that God must create and
redeem the world in Christ to be the certain sort of God He has chosen
eternally to be (N3). Or, more audaciously, he is fearful of asserting that
God freely needs the world to be God for the world. Balthasar, therefore,
mutes the full power of N3 as divine free dependence and one loses the full
11
See Zizioulas 2010, 9 and 2012, 204ff., T. F. Torrance 1996, 97, 99, 108–9, 198 and 1994, 85,
but see 101–2.
12
See Zizioulas 2010, 9 and Kasper 2012, 275–6.
13
See Zizioulas, CO, 201–2, drawing on Congar [1980]1983, 16.

sense that God has irrevocably given Himself over to creation in Christ. In
short, Balthasar’s theology is perhaps overly cautious and does not fully
explore some of the profound paradoxes of the relationship of the uncreated
and created he himself brings up. Overall, however, Balthasar’s theology,
despite its problems, offers the most convincing embodiment of the F3–N3
axis of all our writers but only because he is standing upon the shoulders of
Bulgakov and Barth.
12.3 AN UNSYSTEMATIC SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY

OF FREEDOM AND NECESSITY
We have already attempted, in parallel to our exegesis of our writers, to begin

the process of constructively recapitulating Bulgakov, Barth, and Balthasar in
an unsystematic systematic response to our problematic. Our aim has been to
make the attribution of a world-oriented F3–N3 to God more persuasive by
giving an account that gives an overall more cohesive theological picture of
Absolute Freedom in itself. To this end, we have argued that there exist two
divine elections. This is an idea that is just hinted at in Bulgakov’s identifying
of Christ’s decisions in history and eternity. It is more strongly expressed in
our reading of Barth’s covenantal theology and it is confirmed in Balthasar’s
concept of the two wills of Christ.
The first election is divine-human world-oriented election in which God
eternally and freely gives Himself to man (F3) by electing Himself as man in
Christ. Christ, in turn, elects Himself in eternal response to the Father and this
whole Triune self-sacrifice cannot be undone (N3). Correspondingly, man in
Christ obediently and freely receives with joy the gift of God (F3) by electing
God as His own God and Father in response in history, such that He picks up
His cross and goes deep into the far country (N3). This divine-human election
in which God determines Himself as God for the world in Christ is neither
arbitrary nor compelled. It is a gracious expression of who God primordially
is, that is, His nature as Holy Trinity. He is an eternal life of love-desire where
each of the hypostases in free self-giving love elects the Other as its very own
and receives its own election by the Other. This is our second election, which
we have called primordial intra-hypostatic election, and it is absolutely free
insofar as it is a perfect union of dependent freedom (F3) and free dependence
(N3). Our axis can be traced quite differently in the two elections, God in
reference to the world in the economic Trinity and God in reference to Himself
in the immanent Trinity, since there is a similarity and dissimilarity between
God and creation. In summary, the problematic of freedom and necessity is
made more comprehensible, though not soluble, in the fact that the choice made

by Christ in history is identifiable with the choice made by the Son in the
eternal life of the Trinity. I aim to explicate this claim in the remainder of
this Conclusion.
Up until now in our constructive response to the problematic, what has been
missing is a concrete illustration of just how the poles of the axis F3–N3 are
interrelated in the relationship of God and the world in Christ. Such an
illustration would show yet further that the axis is an accurate expression of
Absolute divine Freedom in reference to the world. To help us accomplish the
latter we might argue that if man is elected in Christ by God, then God has to
‘wait’ on man’s election of God in Christ. This is a ‘waiting’ which requires a
divine ‘self-blinding’ by God to the response of creation. It is a sort of divine
version of ‘faith’ involving ‘risk’ and freely willed ‘need’ for creation.14 The
waiting is a creaturely analogue of the Father’s waiting on His Son’s response
after He has begotten Him. This ‘waiting’ in divine-human election dramatizes,
as it were, the axis F3–N3 and shows how Christology both intensifies the
problematic of freedom and necessity for Trinitarian theology and provides a
reasonable response, though not a rational solution, to the very ambiguity it
creates. It shows how F3 is connected to N3 insofar as God, in electing Himself
in Christ, freely but blindly gives Himself to creation in a dependent freedom
(F3). But this self-binding which is a self-blinding is at once an irrevocable leap
on the part of God, a free dependence (N3), with no guarantee of a positive
response on the part of man (we will return to this idea shortly). God puts
Himself in ‘need’ to His creation for the completion of the divine plan. This
marriage of divine kenoticism in regard to knowledge of future events and
divine election makes the application of the F3–N3 to God’s relationship to the
world more concrete through showing the interconnection of F3 to N3.
We see in thinking on the divine-humanity of Christ that God has deemed
to reveal Himself to us, to actualize His own world-oriented self-election, as
the ultimately anterior action, only through a free waiting upon man’s free
election of Him in Christ, as the posterior action. Thus, in Christ, we see that
the impetus of election is from God and that God need not have determined
Himself for us, as He would have been Himself regardless of whether He loved
us in Christ or not. God’s free self-determination in Christ could have been
otherwise as God is Absolute Freedom. God in Himself is the perfect synthesis
of freedom and necessity (F2–N2). He is, without reference to creation, a self-
electing life eternally giving itself away (F3) in a definitive self-gift that jumps
into the abyss of love with no expectation of return (N3). However, God has
chosen to love us, deeply and eternally desires us, has given Himself to us in
Christ. He is eternally giving Himself away to creation in a world-oriented
election. He has become dependent on it in His infinite freedom (F3) and, in
14
Compare Fiddes 2000b, 171ff., Vanstone 1982, 89–94, and Berdyaev 2009, 100, 159.

so doing, He puts Himself in free need to man, becoming bound to creation in
a free dependence (N3). God’s free gracious love has bound itself to another
and, so that there is a world created and redeemed in Christ, could not have
been otherwise.
In this free dependence (N3), God’s manifestation and actualization of His
own world-oriented self-election is at the mercy of His creation. To be
Himself, as He has so chosen, He must wait on the response of man in electing
Him as His God and Father. Here we see that the anterior supratemporal
activity of the Creator (F3) is necessarily dependent (N3) on the posterior
temporal activity of the creation: the eternal world-oriented self-election of
God as man is necessarily dependent for its temporal actualization and
revelation on the historic event of Jesus Christ, God for us electing God to
be His God. In this anterior activity, the posterior activity is already always
pre-accomplished in anticipation. But its actualization and accomplishment
are not a divine decision but a divine-human one, because God will only create
and redeem His creation if man in Christ first freely assents to His desire for it
to be one with Him. For God to be the sort of God He has chosen to be, which
is God for us in Christ, He needs the world but this ‘need’ is not for Himself
but for love of the world. As Rilke audaciously observed, human beings are so
bound up with God as their Creator and Redeemer that God loses his meaning
in losing them.15
Through speaking of God’s self-imposed waiting on man’s response for the
accomplishment of His divine-human economy we can see how F3 is linked
together inextricably with N3. As soon as we say that God’s plans are
dependent on humanity in Christ, then we immediately must say this free
dependence (N3) is free (F3) and could have existed otherwise. However, this
should not be taken to mean that God’s N3 relationship to the world, although
it presupposes F3 towards the world, is somehow not eternal and decisive for
God as God as F3, since God has bound Himself and all that is could not
be otherwise. On the contrary, despite the taxis or order of the poles, F3 and
N3, ‘otherwise’ and ‘not otherwise’ are inextricably bound together in a
belonging-togetherness. God has chosen that the necessity of the world should
be a part of the actualization of divine freedom, both together constituting
Absolute Freedom or the divine life of love-desire. He has chosen that any
divine action eternally exists within the compass of Christ Himself and,
therefore, to be free, it must of necessity be not merely a divine action but a
divine-human action. One can no longer climb back up to some modality of a
divine act that is purely divine—and not divine-human—as the limits of divine
revelation in Christ are the limits of theological articulation, as all our writers
have insisted.
15
See Rilke, ‘What will you do, God, when I die?’ ll. 1–9, 31.

Nevertheless, this does not mean it is nonsensical to say that God could
have done otherwise. Grace presupposes in its concretion the sense that as a
gift it is freely given by a Giver who could have not given it, since no gift to be a
gift is impelled. Moreover, it presupposes the fact that it is a gift from one who
is a Gift-giver and to be a Gift-giver is to shower the Other with love and
mercy, since no Gift-giver arbitrarily gifts but the gift is an organic expression
of his or her gracious Being. The very order of divine self-determination or
world-directed divine-human election, in contradistinction from divine self-
generation or divine Trinitarian election per se, is one where the contingency
of God’s activity, the fact that He might not have so acted (F3), is primary and
is the foundation of any positing of an act’s divine-human necessity (N3)
(F3)N3). This taxis is reversed in the case of primordial divine election where
one presupposes that election had to be the case (N3) and then only retro-
spectively posits its freedom as an act (F3) that could have been otherwise
(N3)F3) (see 10.3). We shall shortly return to this point.
But here we must correct ourselves. We argued earlier that from all eternity
God, in a divine kenosis of His Being, looks to the outcome of man’s decision
in receiving His own divine election in faith, obedience, and love by following
after the Father. This waiting on man by God makes God’s anterior initiation
dependent on the fact of man’s creation and free posterior response to God
(see 8.3). On the contrary, it could be replied to this position that there is no
need for the kenosis of the divine Being as so described if God always already
knows the outcome of man’s choice in Christ in His foreknowledge. How
could man’s act be free if God, with His ever-watchful eye,16 always already
knows what it is and acts accordingly? One way of responding to this trad-
itional question is kenotic. It is our theological object that the divine world-
oriented election of God of Himself as man might be a true kenosis, a waiting
on man that is a genuine self-emptying of all His eternal kingdom, power, and
glory. If we wish to articulate this idea of God risking what He is in Himself
eternally as a free but necessary self-electing God of love-desire, then we must
hypothesize that God draws a veil over the ultimate decision of man in Christ
to follow His Father God by electing Him as God. God chooses to create and
redeem the world in Christ with no ultimate knowledge that this decision will
be actualized in creation, that is, He limits His own foresight as to what man
will do in his creative freedom. Only in this way can there be both a true divine
kenosis and the preservation of human freedom. Put otherwise, God eternally
binds Himself to creation in Christ through His own self-blinding—the self-
binding is a self-blinding.
If we hold that in God’s initiation of divine-human election He blinds
Himself as to whether the world will positively affirm its own election by
16
See Boethius, Consolation, 5.6, 168 [5.6.38–9, 126].

electing God (F3–N3), then we can quite naturally see this kenotic act as
simply an expression of God’s life as Trinity. We have understood this Triune
life as a primordial self-election where each hypostasis lets the other be and
lets the other go (F3–N3) in ceaseless self-emptying. However, to have a fully
kenotic account of divine-human election as an expression of God’s Trinitar-
ian election we then need to hypothesize, in regard to the divine foreknow-
ledge of creation a ‘space’ which is not a space created by God in God’s own
knowledge of Himself. God knows all things in His essence in knowing
Himself and wills all things in His essence in willing Himself.17 He wills in
His knowledge of Himself a ‘space’ in reference to the union between the
human action of Christ in history in electing God as His God with its own
human will and activity and the divine decision in eternity to elect man as God
with its own divine will and energy—the one divine-human election of the
God-Man. The space of which we speak is like a sort of creaturely holy of
holies for God in God’s eternal self-knowledge. Behind its curtain, as it were,
He refuses to look.
The creation of this space is the creation of human freedom. God, out of His
all-powerfulness, has gifted it graciously to man who is created and redeemed
in Christ and this finite freedom is a portion of the infinite Absolute Freedom.
Were God to look behind this curtain of creatureliness, thereby violating
human freedom, He would go against His own omnipotence of which this
space, as a gift, is a ‘share of being’18 insofar as man is and is called a ‘portion of
God’.19 In creating this space of creatureliness in Himself, which is human
freedom, and in taking flesh in Christ, out of free love He eternally freely binds
Himself (F3). He must respect the freedom of His own humanity in election
because this binding is a self-blinding to man-in-Christ’s ultimate decision for
or against Him (N3). The peak of God’s own all-powerfulness can be seen in
His own all-powerlessness20 in gifting man with a portion of His Absolute
Freedom. God as Trinity, as Sarah Coakley writes, possesses ‘a defencelessness
which is supremely powerful’.21 This divine gift is a ‘space’ for man to freely
act as he wills in Christ, which action is the quintessence and pinnacle of all
human activity. The divine all-powerlessness is the taking by God of a sort of
‘divine risk’. God risks by giving His creation in man the possibility of love that
it will refuse that love and cause the ruin of itself and God’s plan.22 Such
heedless crazy free love is the highest divine gift there is where God puts
17
Aquinas, SG, 1.75, 164–5.
18
See Origen, First Principles, 1.3.6, 35 [SC 252, 154–5, l.161], Dionysius, DN, 5.6 [PTS 33;
184, ll.17–21], 99, and Aquinas, SG, 3a.20, 38.
19
Maximus, Amb. 7, PG 91.1068D and see 1080Bff. (Constas 2014, 1:74–5 and see 96ff.)
(exegeting Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 14.7, PG 35.865C).
20 21
Lossky 2001, 73 and see Balthasar, TD, IV, 326. Coakley 2013, 258.
22
Lossky 2001, 73 and see Balthasar, TD, IV, 327 and Pannenberg, SysTh, 2: 48, 166–7, 172, 3:
642–3.

Himself out on a limb for His creation. He trusts it. He has faith in it.
Moreover, God’s blinding Himself through creating a lacuna in His own
self-knowledge for human freedom in divine-human election is the highest
possible self-emptying. It means that God’s own self-election of Himself as
man is accomplished with no expectation of return from His beloved creature.
This divine self-blinding which is a self-binding results in a divine objective
uncertainty which God Himself holds fast to, but He holds fast to it as a divine
risk, a sort of divine version of faith, which contradicts the uncertainty.23 If
faith, requiring risk, is a sort of infinitely trusting love in which, in a passionate
inwardness, we become vulnerable in waiting on the love of the Other with no
assurance they will assent to our gift of ourselves, then can we not also speak of
the divine passion of Christ, of which His election of God is the culmination,
as involving a sort of ‘divine faith’? This ‘divine faith’ of God in man in Christ
is the highest truth that there is for an existing person. It is so lofty a truth
because through this act of divine faith God risks His own Being by declaring
Himself as man to be guilty, in contradiction to Himself as God and therefore
subject to loss and destruction as the object of the wrath and judgement of
Himself, tasting damnation, death, and hell which should have been the lot of
fallen man, not God.24 In this great risk of God in electing Himself to be God
for us in Christ, with no provision that His election might not come to naught,
we see more concretely the connection of F3 to N3 and how this axis might
conceivably constitute Absolute Freedom, in relation to the world. As was said,
God eternally and freely binds Himself to creation (F3) by His own world-
oriented self-election, a binding which is a self-blinding to His creature’s
ultimate response, and in this way creation is shown as de facto necessary to
God (N3). Creation is necessary to God, firstly, because God needs a theatre of
His glory, a space in which man in Christ may choose or not to have Him as
His God. Secondly, it is likewise necessary for God be the Creator, since
without a Creator there can be no union by Him with the created. Lastly,
God is under a necessity to man in Christ’s election of Him as His God, for
without this election God’s own world-oriented self-election cannot be ex-
pressed and actualized within creation.
But what of the interrelationship of our two elections? Can the two elections
dwell together in an identity-in-difference? One possibility is that we might view
divine-human election retrospectively or in light of the saving events consequent
upon the hypostatic union (i.e. the cross, the tomb, etc.). This divine-human
election is the summary of Christ’s mission, the reason for His taking flesh, a
necessity He freely takes up, seen diversely, as Balthasar observed,25 in the ‘must’
(dei) of the 12-year-old boy (Lk. 2:49), the healing of the man born blind
(Jn. 9:4), and His trajectory towards His passion (Matt. 16:21). What I am
23
See Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 203–4.
24 25
See Barth, CD, II/2, 164. Balthasar, TD, III, 225.

suggesting is that the events which would seem to be the final result of His
coming, summarized in His divine-human election, actually pre-exist that elec-
tion and are its presupposition, though temporally they follow it.
More precisely, these events, finding their centre in divine-human election,
have existed eternally as divine ideas/possibilities/images and become eternal
events pre-accomplished retroactively in God through the Ascension of
Christ. In the glorification of Christ in majesty in the Ascension, the Incarna-
tion is firstly supratemporally extended to all time so that all of history is in
light of Christ. Secondly, it is graciously extended to the life of God in Himself,
His own self-generation as Holy Trinity, in begetting and spiration, since the
glorified humanity of Christ enters the abyss of love of God as Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit.26 The divine-human election and its expression in all the saving
events of Christ’s life in history are taken up in the Ascension into the life of
God and applied to God’s own life in Himself. We, therefore, can say retro-
actively that God decides to be God in and for creation, that creation comes to
be in this divine-human activity of Christ—above all in His divine-human
election—who is written cross wise into the universe,27 and that the two
elections (divine-human and primordial Trinitarian election) dwell together
in a unity in difference in God. God decides to be God for us and even, we dare
to say, God for Himself in the very fiat of man in Christ electing Him as God
in divine-human election. Of course, for such a position to be established
would require a detailed elaboration of time’s relationship to eternity in
Christ, which we do not have the space to discuss.28 Suffice it to say that our
position assumes that all of time is lifted up, restored, and recapitulated in
Christ. Although Christ stands at the middle of history, He is its source and
beginning—all things eternally dwelling in Him who stands both in history
and in eternity—and in the Ascension He allows creation and history to
partake of the everlasting life of God.29
Through the Ascension, creation, in the form of its ‘epitome’ in the humanity
of Christ, becomes sheltered within God. Thus, we can no longer speak of God
without the world, since there is no longer a world ‘outside’ God, but the world
is in God in Christ. Christ came down from heaven to earth and raised up
‘Adam’s nature which lay below in Hades’ prison’ and by His Ascension He
raises it to heaven so that it now sits with Him on the ‘Father’s throne’.30 The
26
Bulgakov, AB, 377–8, 421–2 [LG, 348, 393].
27
See Irenaeus, Contre les hérésies, 5.18.3 (SC, 153), Apostolic Preaching, 34, 62, and Justin
Martyr, 1. Apol., 60 (PTS 38; 116–17) (citing Plato, Timaeus, 36b, 49).
28
See Gallaher 2013d, esp. 20ff.; compare Pannenberg 1968, 133–58, 321–3, SysTh, 3:
580–607, Fiddes 2000b, 110–218, Moltmann 1993b, 104–39, 1996, 279–95, and Farrow 1999,
281–98.
29
Compare Moltmann 1995, 246–7, 2007, 80–96, Pannenberg, SysTh, 1: 327–36 and 3:
586–607.
30
‘Kathisma/Sessional Hymn in Tone 5, Thursday Matins of the Assumption’ (Lash 2008).

‘place’ of this embedding of the world is the realm of freedom of the Son but
wondrously, as the life of God is to be ever more, there is no ‘addition’ to God,
even though creation has been united with its Creator and then taken up into
Him, for God is without beginning and Christ has never been parted from the
Father’s bosom ‘which is uncircumscribed; and the heavenly powers accepted
no addition to the thrice-holy hymn of praise, but acknowledged you, Lord, as
one Son, only-begotten of the Father, even after the incarnation’.31
The Son freely receives His own eternal election by His Father in love and
gratitude and affirms His primordial Trinitarian election by electing the
Father as His Father. He graciously reaffirms this reception by His own eternal
world-oriented self-election as God for us in Christ. And then, by the most
extreme act of divine condescension in light of the Ascension, God eternally
and graciously identifies His primordial affirmation of Himself in the Trinity
with man in Christ’s electing Himself as God. Not only is God’s eternal self-
election as man considered to be a reaffirmation of His own primordial
election but likewise man in Christ’s election of God as His God is miracu-
lously acknowledged as if it was His own self-election of Himself as God. In
other words, divine-human election, which is a contingent free act that could
have been otherwise (F3), participates in the eternal election of the Trinity
which is a necessary act which could not be otherwise (N3) and the first comes
to receive as a gift the quality of necessity of the second.
Such a participative union, by divine condescension, of the eternal election
of the Son by the Father with the divine-human election of Christ, is the pre-
eminent instance of divine-human co-operative or synergetic activity of an
anterior uncreated power in union and communion with its posterior created
power. Human freedom, creatureliness itself, is thereby given a sure reality by
being founded eschatologically on the reality of God in Christ. In such a
synergy, God freely binds Himself to creation irrevocably (F3–N3) in man
in Christ by waiting on man’s election of God, and this latter election—by
condescension, in light of the Ascension—is considered one with God’s
eternal self-election in the Father’s begetting of His Son. God works with
man in Christ not only in the accomplishment of salvation but also in His own
self-generation, and so creation in this fashion acts as a sort of additional gift
to God. Our axis, therefore, is able to meet the challenge of pantheism by
contextualizing absolute divine Freedom within God’s free condescension in
allowing divine-human synergy. But how can we hold together the fact that
creation and redemption both could and could not be otherwise?
We argued that there is a sense in which we may say that God’s self-
determination in both primordial and divine-human elections could have
been ‘otherwise’, showing thereby that as a ‘choice’ our understanding of it
31
‘Sticheron at the Aposticha, Tone 1, Wednesday Small Matins of the Assumption’
(Lash 2008).

is continuous with what we normally mean by a ‘decision’ (see ch. 3 and 10.3).
In the case of primordial election, God the Father eternally and necessarily
(N3) chooses His Son in begetting Him and the Son in obedient Eucharistic
thanksgiving elects Him in turn by freely receiving (F3) His own begottenness
as a necessity. This is an act which could have been ‘otherwise’, since He need
not so affirm His natural Being. The Spirit in the same instance of this free self-
reception of God’s own self-generation by the Son then is breathed by the
Father and rests on His Son in the Absolute Freedom of love-desire (F3–N3).
The Son’s free self-reception (F3) which is overshadowed by the Spirit in
this way recapitulates the initial natural and necessitous act of the Father as
a free self-donation, and the Father, the Son, and the Spirit become freely
what they are of necessity (N3). God’s self-determination as God in His
primordial election then can retrospectively be said to be open to being
‘otherwise’ and therefore God in a sense freely ‘chooses’ to be God but only
insofar as His election is firstly a natural and necessary expression of who
He is (N3)F3).
As a free gracious moment of the begetting of the Son by the Father and the
acceptance of the Son of His begottenness, the Spirit resting on the Son as the
crown of their mutual self-election, we find divine-human election in Christ.
The Father, when He begets the Son with a necessary (but tacitly free) will,
gives Him all that He is, His divine Being. This includes, as a part of His
necessary will, all His free intentions, all His determined purposes and plans,
above all, His free intention that His Son through their Spirit would elect
Himself for us in Christ. The Son, in being begotten by the Father, enowns His
own divinity by affirming the Father’s election of Him (see chs. 3 and 8.3).
This is His election of the Father and in this free act the Spirit is breathed by
the Father and rests on the Son. At this ‘moment’, the Son receives all the
Father’s intentions and binds them to Him by choosing—and actualizing
through the Spirit—to be Jesus Christ, God for us. The free paternal inten-
tions, however, are plans that the Son can freely take up or not. The Son does
indeed freely affirm His own self-election by electing Himself as God for us in
Christ through the Spirit but it could have been otherwise. He need not so act
to be God (F3). Once the Son binds Himself to this ‘possibility’ or ‘intention’,
in the very same act in which He makes ‘free’ (F3) His own natural generation
(N3), He determines that He will only be God for us in Jesus Christ (N3). The
Father’s primordial self-election of the Son is primarily a fundamental, nat-
ural, and necessary act which could not be otherwise and is only free and open
to an ‘otherwise’ retrospectively (N3)F3). In the case of divine-human
election, however, the order of our axis is reversed (F3)N3) with freedom
not necessity being presupposed. Creation ab ovo is a free self-giving of God
(F3) and only retrospectively de facto necessary (N3).
The paternal intentions are not abstract postulations of possible modes of
action of God towards the world. They are realized possibilities like Cusa’s

divine ‘Actualized-possibilities’32 where the absolute actuality and possibility
of a being coincide.33 Within the divine life they exist as modalities of love,
which are eternally rehearsed within the free self-giving and self-receiving of
the divine hypostases. But these modalities are capacious enough that they can
include within them the whole divine economy. Indeed, all the possibilities can
be said to be simply expressions of the Son’s perfect obedience to His Father.
Expressed differently, taken together they express a pre-sacrificial divine self-
emptying love of each of the hypostases to the other which is only actualized in
terms of sacrifice in light of sin and death.34 These actualized possibilities
include within them all creaturely aspects or modes of Being, including all
the pathways that Christ takes from His birth to His Ascension but in a
pre-accomplished form that need to be realized in creation. Furthermore,
these actualized possibilities are infinite as an expression of the absolute
potentiality of the divine Being which is in itself not bound to any particular
mode of operation.
Above all these intentions include the free possibility that God might elect
Himself as God for us in Christ, thereby expressing and confirming in another
what He is in Himself, which is a primordially self-electing God. Still, although
the possibilities are infinite, all of them conform to the taxis of the Trinity, in
which Christ is the Uridee. This is a life of free self-bestowal and acceptance,
coequal eternal union in the difference of an anterior reality to a posterior
reality, that is, a perfect obedience of the One to the Other confirmed by a
third. This third who confirms the gracious exchange of the Father to the Son
is the Spirit who rests on Christ, the eternal Son of the Father. He inspires Him
in loving gratitude to His Father, who has begotten Him as His only-begotten
Son, to freely and eternally accept that He will follow as a necessity a particular
free intention of the Father. The Son, therefore, freely reaffirms in choosing to
bind Himself by going into the far country His own free but necessary
acceptance of His election as an election of God as His Father. The Spirit,
simultaneously, freely but necessarily reaffirms in and for creation the very
same free resting on the Son by which the Father’s eternal election of the Son
in begetting Him is affirmed.
Yet this dialogue of affirmation and reaffirmation has only just begun, for
we ourselves as humanity, the pinnacle of creation, are called by the Father
from before the ages in Christ to become one with Him in His Son. This
calling can only be realized if through the Spirit we elect Him, enowning Him,
as our God in Christ. In light of the Ascension, as we said earlier, this election
of God by man in Christ is then identified by God (‘enowned’) as one with His
32
Cusa, De Possest, 2: 14, 921; cf. Balthasar, GL, V, 215ff.
33
Cusa, De Possest, 25, 927; i.e. possest=posse + est or ‘the-actual-existence-of possibility’ (see
n. 23, 959).
34
See Speyr 1956, 345, cited at Balthasar, TD, V, 510.

own primordial self-election and so a creaturely reaffirmation of His own self-
affirmation of Himself in the Trinity. Creation, which is external and not
proper to God, is made God’s very own by this divine enownment. When God
enowns divine-human election, making it proper to Him like His own prim-
ordial election, then creation can truly be said to become a ‘portion of God’.
In Christ through the Spirit we can therefore participate in God’s primor-
dial election by divine-human election. It is the Spirit, as the Absolute
Freedom of divine love-desire, who in resting on Christ inspires Him as the
eternal Son of the Father to freely make the necessary but free will of
the Father His own necessity (F3–N3) in electing Himself as God for us in
Christ. This divine-human election is a reaffirmation of His own divine
election by the Father and His election of the Father through their Spirit in
dependent freedom (F3) and free dependence (F3–N3). Finally, it is again the
same Spirit, in resting on the Son of Man, by whom we are incorporated into
Christ, who inspires Him to respond in loving obedience to freely elect God as
His God (F3), embracing the path of the cross (N3).
This act of inspiration by God of man allows for a divine ‘surprise’ in two
ways. Firstly, although God has voluntarily blinded Himself to the ultimate act
of the Son of Man, nevertheless, this in no way rules out His loving persuasion
of creation through discovering new ways of coaxing the world back to God
through His Spirit.35 Through this persuasion of creation to follow God as its
God, the Spirit, working in a synergy with man in Christ, accomplishes, in the
Absolute Freedom of love that synthesizes freedom and necessity, the inten-
tions of the Father to which the Son had bound Himself in uniting God with
creation. However, in resting on both creation and God in Christ, the Spirit in
effecting divine-human unity manages to surprise even God Himself, since
divine expectations for unity with creation are surpassed in bringing that
creation through the Ascension into the heart of the Trinity. Indeed, when
God finds out that the Son of Man affirms Him as His God, it is as if the
curtain covering the ultimate decision of the Son of Man, the ‘space’ of
creatureliness in God’s self-knowledge, as to whether He would put aside
His human will for the sake of His divine will, and by which God voluntarily
blinded Himself, is torn in two from top to bottom. God is shaken and split
with a bright sadness in His astonishment. His Son will take up His cross
and enter into the far country, into the region of dissimilarity, bringing
creation up to God.
Secondly, in resting on Christ, in drawing creation up to God in Him, the
Spirit is the One who in love inspires the Son to continue towards the cross. He
then raises Him up in new life and finally takes Him up with all creation back
to its Creator. In the Ascension of Christ through His Spirit in His return to
35
Compare Fiddes, SWKG, 161–6.

the Father God, we can speak, retrospectively as well as retroactively, as a gift,
of the surprising election of God by man in Christ as being His very own self-
election as God. Now creation dwells precisely as created in the heart of the
Trinity in God in Christ since God has enowned it in response to His divine-
human enownment in Christ. God, in other words, through His Spirit gifts
creation by grace in Christ with the very same synthesis of freedom and
necessity that He has by nature. This synthesis is seen in His begetting of
the Son and spirating of the Spirit. The gift of the synthesis to creation need
not have been given. All could have been otherwise. The Son in history need
not have taken up the chalice presented to Him by the Father and the eternal
Son need not have bound Himself to the particular determinate possibility of
creation and redemption in Christ. Thus, creation in Christ, obtaining its
height in His election of God as His God, is both a free gift of God which need
not have been given but it is a gift which shares in the very same necessity of
the Triune life of free love which is seen in the begetting of the Son. We can
say, audaciously, that God to be a God of love had to love beyond Himself in
creation and redemption. Creation can by grace in Christ give something back
to God which is its own creaturely participation in God’s self-generation as
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
* * *
We have discovered that Christology intensifies the problematic of freedom
and necessity for the doctrine of God by forcing it to balance God’s freedom in
relation to creation and His eternal self-determination to be God for us in
Christ. However, Christology, it has been argued, also provides us with tools
for a reasonable response—though not a rational explanation—to the prob-
lematic. With Bulgakov we affirm that any account of Christology must be
understood as a coincidentia oppositorum of two loves-desires, divine and
creaturely Being/Sophia. Moreover, God freely needs His creation (F3) so that
He might be God for us in Christ and this self-giving is pre-accomplished in
eternity as various modes of love but only actualized in time. In needing
creation, God cannot but love it since His free self-giving in Christ cannot
be otherwise (N3). With Barth we stress the free election of God of Himself for
us in Christ in eternity and of God by Christ in history which both could have
been otherwise, as there are many possibilities in God, and cannot be other-
wise (F3–N3), since God has acted and creation is given thereby a de facto
necessity. Furthermore, we are inspired by him to think of election as charac-
terizing the divine life in itself. With Balthasar we perceive, in the begetting of
the Son by the Father, the eternal free acceptance (F3) by the Son of the
Father’s intention for Him to become incarnate. The Son binds Himself
irrevocably to this goal (N3) and the Spirit enacts it in the world. Moreover,
also following Balthasar, we find creation to be embedded in God in Christ in
both its possibility and its realization. We need to hold both the elections
together—primordial and divine-human—in a unity-in-difference. We also

need to emphasize the unity of the divine-human activity of God in Christ and
man in Christ in the eternal election of God in Christ for us and the temporal
election of God by man. Following the ideal of Bulgakov and Barth, we resist
all attempts to reduce either F3 to N3 or N3 to F3, but with Balthasar we hold
that this axis can be applied differently to God and creation according to their
similarity and greater dissimilarity. F3 and N3, as the ‘otherwise’ and ‘not
otherwise’ of divine life, are primordially moments of Absolute Freedom. We
can see analogues of their unity in all creaturely activity and, more basically, in
created Being itself. With all three writers, we affirm that creation is founded
in its Being on Christ crucified. Finally, drawing on ideas of all three thinkers,
we are inspired to speak of creation graciously participating in God’s eternal
generation/primordial election, a divinization which, following Balthasar, is a
‘surprise’ even to God Himself.
Despite the fact that Christology has resources to respond to the very
problematic it had created for Trinitarian theology, our hybrid response to
the problematic, employing dialectic and analogy with a Christocentric focus
on election, is no definitive ‘solution’ to a determinate problem. There is no
resolution that turns the dazzling darkness of incomprehensibility into day
being, as it were, the theological equivalent of klieg lights. Quite the contrary is
in fact the case. No final rational resolution is indeed possible, as a problematic
is merely a conceptual expression of a mystery, and our response aims
ultimately to discern the shape of that mystery more clearly so that we
might enter more deeply onto the path of theological questioning. Indeed,
our response, if it is successful, will actually lead to the darkening of our sight,
since in penetrating more deeply into the cloud of what is unseen all that one
perceives is how much one cannot see. It is like looking down the opening of a
well where the light slowly drains into the shadows and one glimpses in a flash
in the blackness a sort of spatter of luminescence indicating a long drop to the
bottom. At the very least, a proper theological response to our problematic will
reiterate the mystery of God’s everlasting love for us in Jesus Christ, but, at the
very most, it will show us how deep that mystery goes.
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Index
Page numbers in italics indicate figures.
Absolute: analogy of being:

Bulgakov on 10–11, 51, 53, 56, 62–4, 73–6, Balthasar on 165, 167–8, 172, 175, 179–80,
88–9, 92–3, 98–9, 132, 133, 137, 139, 187 187, 198–9, 201–6, 212
description of 56–7 Barth on 131, 132
dialectics of 57 Christ as 203–6, 212; see also analogia entis;
freedom of 48–9 analogy
Hegel on 85, 87, 93, 122, 201, 208, 214 Angelus Silesius 35–6, 35 n. 110, 36 n. 111,
hypostaticity of 73–5, 77–80, 82–3 88, 129
as immanent Trinity 62–3, 86, 92, 152 antinomy/ies:
in kataphatic theology 62, 63, 71–4 of Bulgakov 7, 45, 46, 54, 63–7, 67 n. 181,
Not-is described 63, 72–3, 87 67 n. 184, 83, 93, 104, 112, 126, 140,
Schelling on 58, 92, 129 144–5
Solov’ev on 55, 56, 57–8, 85, 89, 93 cosmological 71–2, 76–7, 83, 84, 93
Sophia relationship to 56, 58, 78–81, Hegel on 26, 47, 65–6
86–91, 96–8, 205 of Kant 26–7, 46–7, 49–50, 64, 66
as Trinity 73–5, 83, 89, 98; see also problematic response and 144–5, 160–1
Absolute-Relative sophiological 61–2, 69, 70, 70 n. 1, 71–2,
Absolute Freedom/love-desire, 90, 93, 112
see love-desire/Absolute Freedom Aquinas, Thomas:
Absolute-Relative: on Being 17, 76, 169–70, 171, 173, 175
Bulgakov on 10–11, 46, 51, 53, 62, 64, on esse 170
84–9, 92–4, 92 n. 163, 98–9, 132, 133, love-desire/Absolute Freedom 75
136, 187 on possibilities/archetypes 207, 207 n. 37
Hegel on 98 potentia absoluta 95–6, 147
hypostaticity of 96 on real distinction 169, 170
in kataphatic theology 62, 63 archetype/s 197–8, 200, 207–8, 210, 212, 215;
Sophia relationship to 136, 205; see also see also possibilities
Absolute Aristotle 23, 23 n. 2
activity 191; see also retroactivity Arius 14, 15, 32
actualism 28, 123–4, 128–35, 138, 140–1, Ascension 101, 103–4, 113, 221–2, 244–5,
145, 156–7 247–9
Allchin, A. M. 220 Athanasius 16–17, 31, 32–3, 76, 92, 159
analogia entis: Augustine 27–8, 82
Balthasar on 9, 131, 131 n. 116, 180, 187, axis of F3–N3:
192, 206 n. 27 Being and 169, 173, 175–8
Barth on 9, 130–2 binding and 152, 208, 211
Being and 168, 180, 187 and binds, freely 245, 249
of Christ 185, 206 Christ and 205
metaphysics and 168; see also analogy Christology and 103, 140, 141, 148–9, 157,
of being 159, 249
analogy: concrete/ness and 239, 241, 243
axis of F3–N3 and 165 description of 37–9, 83
Barth on 131–2, 144, 145, 166 divine-human election connection
dialectics as tandem with 165–7, 181–2, with 239, 241–2, 245–6, 248
185, 194, 201 election and 125–6, 128, 152, 184
problematic and 181–5; see also Father and 196–7, 218, 249
analogia entis and freedom, finite 192–4
288 Index
axis of F3–N3: (cont.) on concrete/ness 203, 204, 206, 206 n. 27,
generation and 246 209, 215
gift/s and 221 on dependence 189, 190, 191, 193, 194
God and 245 dialectics of 167, 169, 172, 179, 192–3, 195,
God and world difference and 173, 175 198, 201
identity and 165, 181 on dissimilarity 168, 178, 250
intratrinitarian kenosis and 84–5, 94, on divine-human election 181–2, 184
100–1, 149, 158, 242 divinization of 201
letting be and 189, 192 on economic Trinity 190, 199, 212, 220–1
love-desire/Absolute Freedom need on Einbergung or sheltering/
as 97–8, 187, 207–8, 210, 215–22, 238, ensheltering 210, 210 n. 65, 213–14,
243, 246 217, 221
and necessity, de facto 243, 246, 249 on esse 168, 169–70, 174, 175, 177–8, 203
needs/neediness and 97 on essents 168, 170, 175, 177–8, 180, 182,
otherwise/not otherwise and 38–9, 239, 187, 201, 203
240, 241, 249–50 on faith 203–4, 212
pantheism and 245 on Father 180, 187–90, 195–200, 205–8,
possibilities of 200 211–13, 215–22
primordial intra-hypostatic election on fourfold difference 169, 171–2, 175–6
on 238, 241 on freedom 189–90, 195–8, 207, 216,
problematic and 95, 111–12, 181, 185 220, 222
self-binding and 198, 199, 239 on freedom, divine 7, 9, 29, 167, 173, 177,
Son and 196–8, 218, 249 188, 191, 211
Spirit and 198–201, 216–19, 248–9 on freedom, finite 182–4, 192–4, 200–1,
taxis and 208, 240, 241 204, 206
Trinity and 189–91, 193, 198–201, 204–5, on freedom, infinite 181–4, 193–4, 200–1,
214, 215 204, 206, 210
on freedom and necessity 172–3, 176–7,
Bakhtin, Mikhail 19, 63–4 181, 183, 188–9, 191, 193–5, 200
Balthasar, Hans Urs von: on generation 188–9, 195–7, 205, 207 n. 37,
on activity 191 207–8, 212, 213, 216, 218–19, 221
on analogia entis 9, 131, 131 n. 116, 180, on gift/s 172–3, 178, 180, 182, 187–90, 193,
187, 192, 206 n. 27 195, 204, 220–2
on analogy as tandem with on God and world difference 170–1, 173,
dialectics 165–7, 181–2, 185, 194, 201 175–80, 187, 190, 213
on analogy of being 165, 167–8, 172, 175, on hypostaticity 83
179–80, 187, 198–9, 201–6, 212 on I and Thou 169, 172
on archetypes 197–8, 206–8, 210, 212, 215 Idealism and 9, 184, 198, 213
on Ascension 221–2 on idea or Uridee 207, 209–11, 215–16,
Barth’s interrelation with 9, 168, 169, 172, 218, 221
176, 178, 182, 191, 205, 215, 218 on identity 168, 169, 170, 173, 180,
on begetting the Son 180, 187, 189, 195–7, 181–4, 217
207–10, 218, 220–1, 249 on immanent Trinity 190, 212, 220–1
on Being 167–9, 178–9, 181, 186–8, 195, on intratrinitarian kenosis 8, 10, 100, 102,
198–202, 203–6, 208–13, 218–19, 222–3 190–1, 194–5, 198
on Beings 170–1, 173–81, 186 on love 95–6, 137, 172–3, 182–3, 187, 191,
on binding 196, 198, 208 195, 210–11, 219
on binds, freely 196, 198 on love-desire/Absolute Freedom 95–8,
biographical information about 6, 45 173, 182–3, 187–8, 191, 193, 200–2,
Bulgakov’s interrelation with 10, 167, 168, 207–8, 210–11, 215–22
169, 172, 176, 178, 182, 184, 188, 190, metaphysics and 167, 168, 179, 198–9
191, 195, 206, 211–13, 216–17 on necessity 169, 172, 195–6, 207, 215–18,
on child and mother 172–3 220–2
on Christ 187, 188, 193, 199, 201, 203–6 on needs/neediness 215, 221–2
on Christology 7, 165, 168, 179–81, 188, on obedience 215, 218
203, 215, 217–18, 220–3, 249 on participation 177, 182, 221
Index 289
on passivity 189–90, 191 on freedom, divine 7, 9, 135–9, 151–2, 191
on polarity 7, 169, 176 on freedom and necessity 146, 147, 151,
on possibilities 178, 197–8, 200, 206–8, 160, 188
215–18, 220–3 on holy mutability/immutability
on primordial divine election 181–4, 152–5, 205
187–8, 198, 219, 221 Idealism and 9, 9 n. 24
problematic and 6, 7, 9, 165, 167–8, 173, on immanent Trinity 156–7
178–9, 181–5, 199–202, 220, 222–3, on intratrinitarian kenosis 8, 102, 148–9,
233–8 157–8, 198
on real distinction 169, 170, 179, 180, 181, on logos/Logos asarkos 118, 119, 121, 123,
187, 191–2, 211 126, 153, 156–7
on risk 214 on logos/Logos ensarkos 118, 119, 121,
on self-binding 198, 199, 220 156–7
on similarity 165, 168, 178, 180, 181–3, 250 on love 129, 188
on Son 180, 187–90, 195–8, 205–13, on obedience 126, 127, 148 n. 30, 148–9,
215–22 150, 159, 218
on space for Son 210–11 pantheism of 123, 138, 161
on Spirit 187, 189–90, 193, 195, 198–202, on participation 125
205, 208, 210–12, 216–22 on possibilities 197
on surprise 220, 222, 250 on potentia absoluta 147, 147 n. 44, 151,
on taxis 195, 208 197, 215–16
on tension 168–9, 172–3, 176–7, 185, 204, on potentia ordinata 147, 147 n. 44, 150,
206, 228 197, 215–16
on Trinity 90, 187, 189–91, 193, 195, on primordial divine election 159–60
198–201, 204–5, 211, 214, 215 problematic and 6, 7, 9, 117, 144–5, 160–1,
Barth, Karl: 231–3, 250
actualism of 28, 123–4, 128–35, 138, 140–1, on risk 158–9
145, 156–7 on similarity 130–2
on analogia entis 9, 130–2 on taxis 149
on analogy 131–2, 144, 145, 166 on Trinity 77, 117, 130, 132–3, 139, 146,
on analogy of being 131, 132 149, 151–2, 158
Angelus Silesius’s interrelationship Basil the Great 13
with 35, 35 n. 110 begetting the Son:
Balthasar’s interrelation with 9, 168, 169, Balthasar on 180, 187, 189, 195–8, 207–10,
172, 176, 178, 182, 191, 205, 215, 218 218, 220–1, 249
on begetting the Son 139, 154, 159 Barth on 139, 154, 159
on binding 123, 152 Bulgakov on 81, 100, 101–2, 159
biographical information about 6, 45 divine-human election and 244–7, 249
Bulgakov’s interrelation with 10–11, and freedom, divine 14, 16, 28, 32, 33,
10 n. 35, 11 n. 40, 117, 129, 140, 144–5, 208–9
157, 215, 218 as necessity 221, 246, 247
on Christology 7, 118–19, 128, 158, 218 obedience as bound with 159
contradictions and 133, 135, 143, 149 primordial divine election and 246
on de facto necessity 139, 146, 148, 150, Being:
153–4, 155, 157, 158–9, 184 axis of F3–N3 and 169, 173, 175–8
dialecticism of 7, 124, 133 Balthasar on 167–9, 178–9, 181, 186–8,
dialectics of 7, 124, 126–7, 133, 140, 195, 198–202, 203–6, 208–13, 218–19,
142–58, 160–1, 166 222–3
on divine-human election 160–1 Beings and 170–1, 173–81, 186
on economic Trinity 157, 199 child and 172–3
on election 117–28, 123 n. 50, 142, 145, Christology and 7, 165, 168, 179, 181, 188
146, 148 n. 31, 152–4, 156–61, 167–8, dependence of 193
182, 187 dissimilarity of 131, 131 n. 118, 132,
on faith 125, 127–8, 131–2, 140, 144, 157–8 168, 178
Florovsky’s interrelationship with essents of 168, 170, 175, 177–8, 180, 182,
10 n. 35, 11 186, 187, 201, 203
290 Index
Being: (cont.) on freedom and necessity 29, 46–7, 160,
freedom of 167, 177, 181, 220 188, 193
gift/s of 172–3, 178, 193, 195 on hypostaticity 73–5, 77–80, 82–3
God and world difference and 170–1, 173, on Idealism 9, 47, 106
175–80, 187 on immanent Trinity 10–11, 38, 53, 62–3,
identity of 168, 169, 180, 182 86, 92, 112, 152
necessity of 169, 172–3, 175–6 on intratrinitarian kenosis 8, 10, 81–5, 92,
as ousia/Ousia 58, 77, 89, 96–7, 153, 180, 92 n. 163, 94, 100–2, 148–9, 157–8, 190,
187, 188–9 195, 198, 213
participation in 177 on love-desire/Absolute Freedom 29, 49,
real distinction and 169, 170, 179, 187, 211 77, 78–80, 90, 94, 95–6, 98, 137, 188
space of 23–4 love/Sophia and 109, 111, 129, 136,
tension and 168–9, 172, 173, 176–7; 137, 188
see also analogy of being on necessity, determinate 75, 85,
Beings 170–1, 173–81, 186 93, 208
Berdyaev, Nicholas 11 on obedience 101–3, 218
Bernard of Clairvaux 28 on ousia/Ousia 58, 67, 77–8, 80–1, 87,
binding 73, 123, 152, 196, 198, 208, 211; 89–90, 96–7, 111, 137, 191, 205
see also self-binding on panentheism 91–2, 111
binds, freely 196, 198, 241–3, 245, 249; on pantheism 85, 89, 91–4, 108, 111,
see also self-binding 114, 213
Boehme, Jacob 55, 58, 77, 93 on participation 91, 101, 108–9
Bulgakov, Sergii: on passivity of Son 81, 101–2
on Absolute 10–11, 51, 53, 56, 62–4, 73–6, on possibilities 95–6, 99, 103,
88–9, 92–3, 98–9, 132, 133, 137, 139, 187 110, 113
on Absolute-Relative 10–11, 46, 51, 53, 62, on potentia absoluta/ordinata 96, 215–16
64, 84–9, 92–4, 92 n. 163, 98–9, 132, 133, on primordial divine election 73, 78, 88–9,
136, 187 92, 105, 107, 107 n. 82
on antinomies of Kant 26, 46, 47, 49–50 problematic and 6, 7, 9, 46, 53, 61, 93–4,
antinomy of 7, 45, 46, 54, 63–7, 67 n. 181, 100, 111–12, 228–31, 250
67 n. 184, 83, 93, 104, 112, 126, 140, Schelling’s interrelationship with 48
144–5 on similarity 91
on Ascension 101, 103–4, 113 on Solov’ev 45, 60–2
Balthasar’s interrelation with 10, 167, 168, on Son 81, 101–2
169, 172, 176, 178, 182, 184, 188, 190, on Sophia 45–6, 51–4, 61–2, 64, 78–81,
191, 195, 206, 211–13 86–91, 93, 104–7, 109, 111, 129, 136, 137,
Barth’s interrelation with 10–11, 10 n. 35, 205–6
11 n. 40, 117, 129, 140, 144–5, 157, on sophiological antinomy 61–2, 69, 70,
215, 218 70 n. 1, 71–2, 90, 93, 112
on begetting the Son 81, 100, 101–2, 159 on sophiology 38, 45, 54, 58, 68–9, 90–1,
biographical information about 6, 45 94, 167–8
on Christology 7, 99–108, 105 n. 67, on space of God 86
106 n. 75, 205–6, 218 on theological antinomy 51, 71–2, 73,
on contradictions 65, 66, 68 78, 83
on cosmological antinomy 71–2, 76–7, 83, on Trinity 28, 55, 59, 73–5, 77, 79–81, 89,
84, 93 117, 146, 149, 158, 211
on desire, divine 96–8, 100–1, 109, 129
on determinism, sophianic 90, 93–4, Calvin, John:
109–11 on election 124–5
dialectics of 46, 53–4, 65, 143 on freedom and necessity connections 28
divinization of 104, 107, 112 on logos/Logos asarkos/ensarkos 118
on economic Trinity 10–11, 38, 53, 62–3, changes:
86, 100, 112, 199 in Christ 210, 211
on faith 84, 88 in God 213, 219, 220
on freedom 46–8 in Son 219
on freedom, divine 7, 9, 29, 136, 191 child and mother interrelationship 172–3
Index 291
Christology: of Barth 7, 124, 126–7, 133, 140, 142–58,
axis of F3–N3 and 103, 140, 141, 148–9, 160–1, 166
157, 159, 249 of Bulgakov 46, 53–4, 65, 143
Balthasar on 7, 165, 168, 179–81, 188, 215, description of 6–7
217–18, 220–3, 249 between freedom and necessity 30, 38, 169
Barth on 7, 118–19, 128, 158, 218 of Hegel 65–6, 195
Being and 7, 165, 168, 179, 188 problematic and 6–7, 144–5, 160–1, 250
Bulgakov on 7, 99–108, 105 n. 67, of Schelling 30, 143
106 n. 75, 218 of Solov’ev 56
and freedom, divine 7, 11, 108 of Trinity 195, 201
God and world difference and 168 difference, God and world, see God and world
identity and 182, 184 difference
kenosis in 100, 104–5, 128, 158, 168, dissimilarity:
203–4, 212 of Being 131, 131 n. 118, 132, 168, 178, 250
love and 7 description of 40
metaphysics and 168, 179 necessity and 184
possibilities of 103, 110, 113, 249 problematic and 181; see also similarity
problematic and 7–8, 11, 108–9, 112–14, divine desire 96–8, 100–1, 109, 129; see also
140–1, 160, 220, 222–3, 249–50 love-desire/Absolute Freedom
real distinction and 180, 181 divine freedom:
retroactivity and 103–4 Balthasar on 7, 9, 29, 167, 173, 177, 188,
similarity and 185 191, 211
of Sophia 104–9, 205–6 Barth on 7, 9, 135–9, 151–2, 191
of sophiology 108 in begetting the Son 14, 16, 28, 32, 33,
tension and 172, 185, 204, 206; see also 208–9
Jesus Christ; Trinitarian theology; Trinity Bulgakov on 7, 9, 29, 136, 191, 211
Cicero 24–5 Christology and 7, 108
Coakley, Sarah 242 description of 6, 13–17
co-inherence 20 kenosis and 191
concrete/ness: love and 48, 111, 135–9
of axis of F3–N3 239, 241, 243 necessity as identified with 6, 29–30, 34
Christ and 203, 204, 206, 206 n. 27, 209, Schelling on 29, 48, 195
215, 239, 241 in Trinitarian theology 7, 9, 191; see also
contradictions 65–6, 68, 133, 135, 143, 149 freedom; God
divine-human election:
dependence: Ascension and 244–5, 247–9
of Being 193 axis of F3–N3 connection with 239, 241–2,
of Father 189–90 245–6, 248
freedom in 18–19, 20, 36, 40, 139, 140, 141, Balthasar on 181–2, 184
152, 189, 191, 194 Barth on 160–1
N3 or free dependence 12 n. 1, 22, 36–8, 49, begetting the Son and 244–7, 249
62, 85, 111, 113, 136, 137, 139, 142, 145, and binds, freely 241–3, 245, 246
146, 148, 149, 152, 153, 183–5, 189, Christ and 248–50
195–6, 203, 238–40 description of 238–9
passivity and 191 faith and 239, 241, 243
desire, divine 96–8, 100–1, 109, 129; see also freedom of 238, 245
love-desire/Absolute Freedom as gift/s 238, 245, 248–9
determinate necessity 75, 85, 93, 208 kenosis and 241
determinism, sophianic 90, 93–4, 109–11 necessity and 241, 243, 248
Diadochus of Photiki 13 needs/neediness and 239–40
dialectics: obedience and 127, 241, 248
of Absolute 57 otherwise/not otherwise and 245–6, 249
analogy as tandem with 165–7, 181–2, 185, possibilities and 244, 246–7
194, 201 self-binding and 239, 241, 243
of Balthasar 167, 169, 172, 179, 192–3, 195, and self-blinding, divine 239, 241, 242, 243
198, 201 space and 242–4, 248
292 Index
divine-human election: (cont.) dependence of 189–90
Spirit and 248 free will of 248
Trinitarian theology and 239, 241, 242 generation by 188–9, 195–7, 205, 207 n. 37,
Trinity and 238–9, 241–2, 244–5, 248–9 207–8, 212, 213, 216, 218–19, 221
waiting in 239, 243; see also election; gift/s of 180, 182, 187–90
primordial divine election as letting be 180
divine love, see love-desire/Absolute Freedom love and 187, 195
divine self-blinding 239, 241, 242, 243 necessity of 195–6, 207, 215–18, 220,
divinization 35, 104, 107, 112, 201, 250 222, 246
Drozdov, Met. Philaret 37, 101 possibilities of 197, 200, 206–8
Duns Scotus 15 self-binding of 198, 199, 220; see also
begetting the Son; God; Son
economic Trinity: Fichte, J. G. 8–9, 46, 47, 48, 74, 78
Balthasar on 190, 199, 212, 220–1 Fiddes, Paul S. 19, 38, 39, 86, 87, 97
Barth on 157, 199 finite freedom 182–4, 192–4, 200–1, 204, 206;
Bulgakov on 10–11, 38, 53, 62–3, 86, 100, see also freedom; infinite freedom
112, 199 Florensky, Pavel A. 26, 39, 52, 64–5, 67,
description of 8, 83–4 68–9, 80
immanent Trinity relationship to 10–11, Florovsky, Georges 10 n. 35, 11, 33,
38, 53, 62–3, 86, 94, 112 106, 117
intratrinitarian kenosis and 102 fourfold difference 169, 171, 175–6, 178;
in kataphatic theology 62, 63; see also God and world difference
see also Trinity Frank, Semen 68
Einbergung (sheltering/ensheltering) 210, freedom:
210 n. 65, 213–14, 217, 221 of Absolute 48–9
election: axis of F3–N3 and 192–4
axis of F3–N3 and 125–6, 128, 152, 184 of Being 167, 177, 181, 220
Barth on 117–28, 123 n. 50, 142, 145, 146, of Christ 193, 209, 238
148 n. 31, 152–4, 156–61, 167–8, 187 in dependence 18–19, 20, 36, 40, 139, 140,
binding through 123 141, 189, 191, 194
Calvin on 124–5 of divine-human election 238, 245
of Christ 117–28, 123 n. 50, 157–61, 182 divine-human election and 238
primordial intra-hypostatic 238, 247–50 F1–F2 relationship 19, 30, 41, 41, 46,
problematic and 238–50 169, 188
of Trinity 123, 126, 161, 181–4 see also F1 or without ratio 12 n. 1, 13–14, 15, 17,
divine-human election; primordial divine 19–20, 22, 28, 29–30, 40, 41, 46, 47, 56,
election 60, 75, 138, 192–3
Eliot, T. S. 156, 210 F2 or with ratio 12 n. 1, 13, 16, 17, 19–20,
enownment (Ereignis) 39–40, 39 n. 131, 160, 22, 26–7, 28–30, 32, 40, 41, 46, 47, 49, 56,
176, 247–8 60, 75, 136, 139, 151, 175, 183
esse 168, 169–70, 174, 175, 177–8, 203 F3 or dependent freedom 12 n. 1, 18–20,
essents 168, 170, 175, 177–8, 180, 182, 186, 22, 35–6, 49, 62, 75, 77, 85, 111, 113, 136,
187, 201, 203 137, 139, 145–6, 148, 151, 183–5, 189,
Eunomius 32 203, 207, 238–43, 245–6, 248, 249
Evenus of Paros 23 finite 182–4, 192–4, 200–1, 204, 206
of free will 12–13, 16, 20, 28, 33, 35, 41
faith: of generation 189–90, 191
Balthasar on 203–4, 212 of God 13–17, 135–9, 238–40, 242–3, 246,
Barth on 125, 127–8, 131–2, 140, 144, 248, 249
157–8 hypostaticity identification with 32
Bulgakov on 84, 88 infinite 181–4, 193–4, 200–1, 204, 206, 210
divine-human election and 239, 241, 243 kenosis and 13, 19, 37, 41
Father: of Son 189–90, 195–8, 207, 216, 222, 246
as archetype 197, 206–8 of Spirit 248
axis of F3–N3 and 196–7, 218, 249 Trinity and 7, 20, 186–92; see also axis of
binding of 198, 208, 211 F3–N3; divine freedom; freedom and
Index 293
necessity; necessity; problematic changes in 213, 219, 220
of freedom and necessity freedom and necessity synthesis in 222,
freedom and necessity: 239, 246, 248–9
antinomies of Kant and 26 freedom of 13–17, 135–9, 238–40, 242–3,
Balthasar on 172–3, 176–7, 181, 183, 188, 246, 248, 249
189, 191, 193–5, 200 as giver of gifts 195, 204, 220–2, 239,
Barth on 146, 151, 160 241–4
Bulgakov on 29, 46–8, 160, 193 as love 3–6, 17, 31–2, 129
description of 12–13, 22, 40–1, 41 mutability/immutability of 27–8,
dialectics between 30, 38, 169 152–5, 205
F1–3 and N1–3 relationship 22 necessity as applied to 4–7, 9, 24 nn. 13–14,
F1–N2 relationship 138, 169 24–5, 215–16, 221–2, 240, 243
F2–N2 relationship 33–5, 77, 83, 96–7, 111, needs/neediness of 35, 38, 61, 97–8, 215,
113, 137, 138, 139, 152, 183, 193, 239 239–40
God as synthesis of 222, 239, 246, 248–9 participation in/of 91, 108–9, 221
love-desire/Absolute Freedom and 27–9, risk of 158–9, 214, 239, 242–3
35, 38–41, 41, 94 space of 86, 248
mystery of 3–4, 5, 6, 227 surprise of 220, 248, 250
problematic of 4–7, 11, 227–8, 238–9, 249 as Trinity 5–8, 20, 28, 31, 35, 36, 38–9,
Trinity and 3–4 121–2; see also Absolute; Absolute-
unsystematic systematic theology of 6, 226, Relative; begetting the Son; divine desire;
228, 238; see also axis of F3–N3; necessity divine freedom; divine-human election;
freely binds 196, 198, 241–3, 245, 249; see also divine self-blinding; Father; God and
self-binding world difference; love-desire/Absolute
free will: Freedom; primordial divine election;
of Father 248 primordial intra-hypostatic election
freedom of 12–13, 16, 20, 28, 33, 35, 41 God and world difference:
historical identification of 24–5 axis of F3–N3 and 173, 175
love-desire/Absolute Freedom of 27, 49 Balthasar on 170–1, 173, 175–80, 187,
190, 213
generation: Being and 170–1, 173, 175–80, 187
axis of F3–N3 and 246 Christology and 168
of Christ 245 description of 165–7
by Father 188–9, 195–7, 205, 207 n. 37, Hegel on 180, 190
207–8, 212, 213, 216, 218–19, 221 identity and 168, 169, 173, 180–3, 213
freedom and 191 letting be and 180, 189
primordial divine election/ 250 Gregory of Nazianzus 25, 62
primordial divine election and 244–6, Gregory of Nyssa 110–11
249, 250
of/by Son 188, 195–7, 205, 207 n. 37, Hallensleben, Barbara 8
207–8, 212, 213, 216, 218–19, 221, 246 Hegel, G. W. F.:
of Spirit 189, 205, 208, 212, 216, 218–19 on Absolute 85, 87, 93, 122, 201, 208, 214
of Trinity 207, 216, 221, 244, 249 on Absolute-Relative 98
Geschehenlassen 189 on antinomy 26, 47, 65–6
gift/s: on contradictions 65–6
axis of F3–N3 and 221 dialectics of 65–6, 195
of Being 172–3, 178, 193, 195 on God and world difference 180, 190
Christ as 220, 222, 245 on Idealism 8–9, 47, 55
divine-human election as 238, 245, 248–9 on Trinity 36, 55, 85, 90, 129
of Father 180, 182, 187–90 Heidegger, Martin 210 n. 61
from God 195, 204, 220–2, 239, 241–4 on Being and Beings 169, 170–1, 173,
hypostaticity of 234, 236 175–6, 178
of Son 180, 182, 187 on enownment 39, 160, 176
God: on Zusammengehörigkeit 39, 48
axis of F3–N3 and 245 holy mutability/immutability 27–8,
and binds, freely 245 152–5, 205
294 Index
Hunsinger, George 122, 122 n. 47, 138 divine-human election and 248–50
hypostaticity: Einbergung or sheltering/ensheltering
of Absolute 73–5, 77–80, 82–3 in 210, 210 n. 65, 217, 221
of Absolute-Relative 96 election of 117–28, 123 n. 50, 157–61, 182
freedom identification with 32 enownment or Ereignis of 247–8
gift/s and 234, 236 and freedom, finite 204, 206
primordial intra-hypostatic election and freedom, infinite 204, 206
and 238, 247–50 freedom of 193, 209, 238
generation of 245
I: as gift/s 220, 222, 245
Not-I versus 19, 48 as idea or Uridee 209–10, 215, 247
Thou and 169, 172 love-desire/Absolute Freedom in 187,
idea (Uridee) 207, 209–11, 215–16, 218, 247 188, 204
Idealism 8–9, 9 n. 24, 47, 50, 106, 184, 195 as necessity 248
identity: obedience of 102–3, 126, 148 n. 30,
axis of F3–N3 and 181 148–9, 247
Balthasar on 168, 169, 170, 173, 180, participation in/of 91, 125, 182, 249
181–4, 217 possibilities of 247, 248
Being and 168, 169, 180, 182 in problematic 4–5
Christology and 182, 184 problematic and 199, 201
God and world difference and 168, 169, risk of 158–9
173, 180–3, 213 and self-blinding, divine 241
problematic and 182–5 space of 242–3; see also Christology; Son;
immanent Trinity: Trinitarian theology; Trinity
Absolute as 62–3, 86, 92, 152 John of Damascus 18, 23, 24, 32
Balthasar on 190, 212, 220–1 John of the Cross 3–4, 5
Barth on 156–7 Jüngel, Eberhard 21, 122, 152–3
economic Trinity relationship to 10–11, 38,
53, 62–3, 86, 94, 112 Kant, Immanuel:
intratrinitarian kenosis and 102; antinomies of 26–7, 46–7, 49–50, 64, 66
see also Trinity on freedom 47
infinite freedom 181–4, 193–4, 200–1, 204, on freedom, divine 34
206; see also finite freedom; freedom on Idealism 8–9, 47, 50
intratrinitarian kenosis: on Reason 26–7
axis of F3–N3 and 84–5, 94, 100–1, 149, Karsavin, Lev 55–6
158, 242 kataphatic theology 62, 63, 68, 71–4, 83–4
Balthasar on 8, 10, 100, 102, 190–1, kenosis:
194–5, 198 in Christology 100, 104–5, 128, 158, 168,
Barth on 8, 102, 148–9, 157–8, 198 203–4, 212
Bulgakov on 8, 10, 81–5, 92, 92 n. 163, divine-human election and 241
100–2, 148–9, 157–8, 190, 195, 198, 213 and freedom, divine 191
economic Trinity and 102 freedom and 13, 19, 37, 41
immanent Trinity and 102 love and 191; see also intratrinitarian
love-desire/Absolute Freedom and 81–2, kenosis
84; see also kenosis Kierkegaard, Søren 166
Kireevsky, Ivan 63
Jesus Christ: Kukavin, Valery A. 68
analogia entis of 185, 206
as analogy of being 203–6, 212 Leontius of Byzantium 106, 106 n. 75
as archetype 210 letting be 177, 180, 189, 192, 221
Ascension of 101, 103–4, 113, 221–2, logos/Logos asarkos 118, 119, 121, 123, 126,
244–5, 247–9 153, 156–7
axis of F3–N3 and 205 logos/Logos ensarkos 118, 119, 121, 156–7
changes in 210, 211 Loofs, Friedrich 106
concrete/ness and 203, 204, 206, 206 n. 27, Losev, Aleksei 61
209, 215 Lossky, Vladimir 55–6, 74–5, 107
Index 295
love: necessity:
Balthasar on 95–6, 137, 172–3, 182–3, begetting the Son as 221, 246, 247
187, 191 of Being 169, 172, 173, 175, 176
Barth on 129 of child 172
Father and 187, 195 Christ as 248
and freedom, divine 48, 111, 135–9 determinate 75, 85, 93, 208
freedom and 135–9 dissimilarity and 184
God as 3–6, 17, 31–2, 129 divine-human election and 241,
kenosis and 191 243, 248
Son and 187, 195, 219 of Father 195–6, 207, 215–18, 220,
Sophia/ 109, 111, 129, 136, 137, 222, 246
182, 188 and freedom, divine 6, 29–30, 34
of Spirit 187, 195, 210–11, 219 God’s relation to 4–7, 9, 24 nn. 13–14,
Trinity and 3, 17, 186–92 24–5, 215–16, 221–2, 240, 243
love-desire/Absolute Freedom: N1–N2 relationship 36, 41, 41, 75, 76, 156
activity and 191 N1 or external necessity 12 n. 1, 22, 23 n. 2,
axis of F3–N3 and 97–8, 187, 207–8, 210, 23–7, 28, 33, 35–6, 46–7, 56, 138, 139,
215–22, 238, 243, 246 175, 183, 192–3
Balthasar on 95–8, 173, 182–3, 187–8, 191, N2 or internal necessity 12 n. 1, 22, 27–35,
200–2, 207–8, 210–11, 215–22 36, 49, 53, 60, 75, 85, 86, 88, 139, 175,
Bulgakov on 29, 49, 77, 78–80, 90, 94, 95–6, 183, 188
98, 137, 188 N3 or free dependence 12 n. 1, 22, 36–8,
in Christ 187, 188, 204 49, 62, 85, 111, 113, 136, 137, 139, 145,
description of 4, 22, 92, 94 146, 148, 153, 183–5, 189, 195–6, 203,
Ereignis of 39–40, 39 n. 131 238–40
freedom and necessity and 27–9, 35, ousia/Ousia identification with 32
38–41, 41, 94 Trinity as 245, 246, 249; see also axis of
of free will 27, 49 F3–N3; problematic of freedom and
intratrinitarian kenosis and 81–2, 84 necessity
passivity of 191 necessity, de facto:
Schelling on 48, 49, 75, 97, 191 axis of F3–N3 and 243, 246, 249
scholars on 30–1 Barth on 139, 146, 148, 150, 153–4, 155,
Solov’ev on 97 157, 158–9, 184
Sophia relationship to 80–1, 96–7, 107 needs/neediness:
Spirit and 193, 200, 202 axis of F3–N3 and 97
Trinity and 4, 75, 77, 92–3; see also desire, description of 18–19, 21
divine; love divine-human election and 239–40
of God 35, 38, 61, 97–8, 215, 221–2, 239–40
Marcel, Gabriel 5 Newman, John Henry 143
Maury, Pierre 119–20 Nicholas of Cusa 63, 64, 174
Maximus the Confessor 13, 24, 24 n. 12, 87, Not-is (NE-est’) 63, 72–3, 87
102, 106, 197, 215, 216, 218
McCormack, Bruce 119–24, 130, 132, 138, obedience:
143, 155–7 begetting the Son as bound with 159
metaphysics: divine-human election and 127, 241,
analogia entis and 168 247, 248
Balthasar and 167, 168, 179, 198–9 of Jesus Christ 102–3, 126, 148 n. 30,
Christology and 168, 179 148–9, 247
Methodius of Olympus 24 of Son 20, 101–2, 150, 215, 218, 231, 247
Milbank, John 173 of Spirit 248
Molnar, Paul D. 122, 138, 151, 157 O’Regan, Cyril 211
Moltmann, Jürgen 8, 35, 97, 213 Origen 15, 20–1, 24 n. 12, 110, 138
mother and child interrelationship 172–3 otherwise/not otherwise:
mystery, definition of 5 axis of F3–N3 and 239, 240, 241, 249–50
mystery of freedom and necessity 3–4, 5, 6, divine-human election and 245–6, 249
227; see also freedom and necessity problematic and 23, 27–8, 33–5, 37–41
296 Index
ousia/Ousia: primordial intra-hypostatic election 238,
Being as 58, 77, 89, 96–7, 153, 180, 187, 241, 247–50; see also primordial divine
188–9 election
necessity identification with 32 problem, definition of 5
Sophia as 58, 78, 80–1, 87, 90, 96–7, 111, problematic of freedom and necessity 4–7, 11,
136, 137, 153, 191, 205 227–8, 238–9, 249; see also specific
scholars
Palamas, Gregory 51–2 Przywara, Erich 130–1, 131 n. 116, 169
panentheism 91–2, 111, 213
Pannenberg, Wolfhart 31, 103–4 Rahner, Karl 45, 110
pantheism: real distinction 169, 170, 179, 180, 181, 187,
axis of F3–N3 and 245 191–2, 211
of Barth 123, 138, 161 retroactivity 103–4, 160; see also activity
of Bulgakov 85, 89, 91–4, 108, 111, Rilke, Rainer Maria 27, 240
114, 213 risk 158–9, 214, 239, 242–3
Solov’ev on 60
Sophia and 51 Schelling, F. W. J.:
Parmenides of Elea 24 on Absolute 58, 85, 92, 129
participation 91, 101, 108–9, 125, 177, 182, Bulgakov’s interrelationship with 48
221, 249 dialectics of 30, 143
passivity 81, 101–2, 189–90, 191 on freedom, divine 29, 48, 195
Pasternak, Boris 19 on Idealism 8–9
perichoresis 20, 205 on Kant 26, 47
Plato 17, 23, 34 on love-desire/Absolute Freedom 48, 49,
polarity: 75, 97, 191
Balthasar on 7, 169, 176, 228 Solov’ev’s interrelationship with 58–9
description of 7, 23, 40, 41, 169; on Trinity 55
see also dissimilarity; similarity Seinlassen 189
possibilities: self-binding:
of axis of F3–N3 200 axis of F3–N3 and 198, 199
Balthasar on 178, 197–8, 200, 206–8, divine-human election and 239, 241, 243
215–18, 220–3 of Father 198, 199, 220
Barth on 197 of Son 196
Bulgakov on 95–6, 99, 103, 110, 113 Trinitarian 194; see also binding; binds,
of Christ 247 freely
of Christology 103, 110, 113, 249 self-blinding, divine 239, 241, 242, 243
of divine-human election 244, 246–7 sheltering/ensheltering (Einbergung) 210,
of Father 197, 200, 206–8 210 n. 65, 213–14, 217, 221
of primordial divine election 247 Siewerth, Gustav 169, 171
of Trinity 197–8; see also archetype/s similarity:
potentia absoluta 95–6, 147, 147 n. 44, 150, Balthasar on 165, 168, 178, 180,
151, 197, 215–16 181–3, 250
potentia ordinata 96, 147, 147 n. 44, 150, 197, Barth on 130–2
215–16 Bulgakov on 91
primordial divine election: Christology and 185
Balthasar on 181–4, 187–8, 198, 219, 221 description of 40; see also dissimilarity
Barth on 159–60 Solov’ev, Vladimir:
begetting the Son and 246 on Absolute 55, 56, 57–8, 85, 89, 93
Bulgakov on 73, 78, 88–9, 92, 105, 107, Bulgakov’s critique of 45, 60–2
107 n. 82 dialectics of 56
generation/ 250 freedom and God 14
generation and 244–6, 249, 250 on love-desire/Absolute Freedom 97
possibilities and 247 on pantheism 60
Trinitarian theology and 244, 245 Schelling’s interrelationship with 58–9
Trinity and 245, 247–8; see also on Sophia 46, 52–3, 58–9, 78, 79
divine-human election; election on Trinity 55, 59–60, 77
Index 297
son: love-desire/Absolute Freedom and 193,
surprise of 220, 222 200, 202
Son: love of 187, 195, 210–11, 219
as archetype 206–8, 210 obedience of 248
axis of F3–N3 and 196–8, 218, 249 passivity of 189–90
and binds, freely 196, 198 surprise of 220, 222; see also Trinitarian
changes in 219 theology; Trinity
freedom of 189–90, 195–8, 207, 216, Stevens, Wallace 30
222, 246 surprise 220, 222, 248, 250
generation of/by 188, 195–7, 205, 207 n. 37,
207–8, 212, 213, 216, 218–19, 221, 246 taxis 149, 195, 208, 240, 241, 247
gift/s of 180, 182, 187 tension:
idea or Uridee of 209–10, 211, 215–16, 218 Being and 168–9, 172, 173, 176–7
letting be of 180, 221 Christology and 172, 185, 204, 206
love and 187, 195, 219 description of 22–3
obedience of 20, 101–2, 150, 215, 218, Thou, I and 169, 172
231, 247 Tillich, Paul 9, 45, 166
passivity of 81, 101–2, 189–90 Tracy, David 40, 165–7
self-binding of 196 Trinitarian theology:
space and 248 description of 130
space for 210–11; see also begetting the divine-human election and 239, 241, 242
Son; Father; Jesus Christ and freedom, divine 7, 9, 11
Sophia: primordial divine election and 244, 245
Absolute relationship to 56, 58, 78–81, problematic for 239, 250
86–91, 96–8, 205 systematic theology connection with 7–8;
Absolute-Relative relationship to 205 see also Christology
Bulgakov on 45–6, 51–4, 61–2, 64, 78–81, Trinity:
86–91, 93, 104–7, 109, 111, 129, 136, 137, Absolute as 73–5, 83, 89, 98
182, 205–6 as archetype 212
Christology of 104–9, 205–6 axis of F3–N3 and 189–91, 193, 198–201,
love/ 109, 111, 129, 136, 137, 182, 188 204–5, 215
love-desire/Absolute Freedom relationship Balthasar on 90, 187, 189–91, 193, 195,
to 80–1, 96–7, 107 198–201, 204–5, 211, 214
as ousia/Ousia 58, 78, 80–1, 87, 90, 96–7, Barth on 77, 117, 130, 132–3, 139, 146, 149,
111, 136, 137, 153, 191, 205 151–2, 158
pantheism and 51 binding and 123, 152
Solov’ev on 46, 52–3, 58–9, 78, 79 Bulgakov on 28, 55, 59, 73–5, 77, 79–81, 89,
Trinity and 79–81 117, 146, 149, 158, 211
sophiology: dialectics of 195, 201
antinomy of 61–2, 69, 70, 70 n. 1, 71–2, 90, divine-human election and 238–9, 241–2,
93, 112 244–5, 248–9
Bulgakov on 38, 45, 54, 58, 68–9, 90–1, 94, election of 123, 126, 161, 181–4
167–8 freedom and 7, 20, 186–92
Christology of 108 freedom and necessity and 3–4
and determinism, sophianic 90, 93–4, generation of 207, 216, 221, 244, 249
109–11; see also Sophia God as 5–8, 20, 28, 31, 35, 36, 38–9, 121–2
space 23–4, 86, 210–11, 242–4, 248 Hegel on 36, 55, 85, 90, 129
Speyr, Adrienne von 194–5, 196, 217 love and 3, 17, 186–92
Spinoza, Baruch 34, 58 love-desire/Absolute Freedom and 4, 75,
Spirit: 77, 92–3
axis of F3–N3 and 198–201, 208, 216–19, as necessity 245, 246, 249
248–9 possibilities of 197–8
divine-human election and 248 primordial divine election and 245, 247–8
freedom of 248 Schelling on 55
generation of 189, 205, 208, 212, 216, Solov’ev on 55, 59–60, 77
218–19 Sophia and 79–81
298 Index
Trinity: (cont.) Ware, Kallistos 101
taxis of 195, 208, 247 Whitehead, A. N. 213
through self-binding 194; see also Williams, Charles 20
Christology; Trinitarian theology Williams, Rowan 220
Ulrich, Ferdinand 169, 171, 179 Yeats, W. B. 212, 213

unsystematic systematic theology 6, 226,
228, 238 Zizioulas, John D. 32,
55–6, 74
waiting, in divine-human election 239, 243 Zusammengehörigkeit (belonging-
Ward, Keith 39, 39 n. 128 togetherness) 39, 48

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OXFORD THEOLOGY AND RELIGION MONOGRAPHS

OXFORD THEOLOGY AND RELIGION MONOGRAPHS

Ethics and Biblical Narrative

Freedom and Necessity

References and Abbreviations xvii

INTRODUCTION: THE ABSOLUTE FREEDOM

PART I. GOD AS BOTH ABSOLUTE AND

PART II. DIVINE SELF-DETERMINATION

PART III. JESUS CHRIST AND THE TRINITARIAN

CONCLUSION: THE ABSOLUTE FREEDOM OF GOD

References and Abbreviations

AA Athanasius’ Against the Arians

xviii References and Abbreviations

Filo. Solov’ev’s Filosofskie nachala tsel’nogo znaniia

References and Abbreviations xix

PR 1–3 G. W. F. Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vols. 1–3

Freedom and Necessity as Trinitarian

4 Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology

Freedom and Necessity as Trinitarian Mystery and ‘Problematic’ 5

6 Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology

Freedom and Necessity as Trinitarian Mystery and ‘Problematic’ 7

8 Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology

Freedom and Necessity as Trinitarian Mystery and ‘Problematic’ 9

10 Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology

Freedom and Necessity as Trinitarian Mystery and ‘Problematic’ 11

Divine Freedom—A Dialectical Approach

What do we mean when we speak of ‘freedom’ and ‘necessity’? These terms

The Shape of a ‘Problematic’ (A) 13

14 Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology

The Shape of a ‘Problematic’ (A) 15

16 Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology

The Shape of a ‘Problematic’ (A) 17

18 Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology

The Shape of a ‘Problematic’ (A) 19

20 Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology

The Shape of a ‘Problematic’ (A) 21

Divine Freedom—A Dialectical Approach

The Shape of a ‘Problematic’ (B) 23

24 Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology

The Shape of a ‘Problematic’ (B) 25

26 Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology

The Shape of a ‘Problematic’ (B) 27

28 Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology

The Shape of a ‘Problematic’ (B) 29

30 Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology

The Shape of a ‘Problematic’ (B) 31

32 Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology

The Shape of a ‘Problematic’ (B) 33

34 Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology

The Shape of a ‘Problematic’ (B) 35

36 Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology

The Shape of a ‘Problematic’ (B) 37

38 Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology

The Shape of a ‘Problematic’ (B) 39

40 Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology

The Shape of a ‘Problematic’ (B) 41

Sergii Bulgakov (1871–1944) is a thinker who is increasingly viewed by critics

46 Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology

4.1 SO P HIA AS A LIVING ANTINOMY—THE

Bulgakov’s early sophiology was formulated in response to Neo-Kantianism

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50 Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology