By "fresher" I don't mean new and innovative. (What we are looking for actually goes back to the church fathers.) I mean moving away from the soteriological models which, I think, have dominated and impeded progress in Christian psychology. This was the point of my last post, how the soteriological-to-therapeutic shift has created some problems for Christian reflection regarding therapy and mental health. We seem to toggle between the "competent to counsel" approach of "biblical counseling," where the sciences of human flourishing can be breezily ignored. Or swing to the humanism of positive psychology where "faith" and "spirituality" can be picked up or laid down as one among many coping strategies: Pray if you want, or not, do what works for you. As I wrote about in January, when we rely on soteriological models of divine and human agency we tend find ourselves in an either/or competition between God and humanity, choosing between Augustine or Pelagius in thinking about mental health. Both, I think, are problematic.
So we need to search for some fresher metaphysical waters than the nature versus grace debates in soteriology. And I think we find those waters when we look at theologies of creation, how properly to think about the transcendence of God in relation to the created order.
As noted in January, I've been convinced of this move through my encounter with the work of Kathryn Tanner, along with the word of Thomas Aquinas. The book of Tanner's I used in January was Christ the Key. But that book wasn't Tanner's first in tackling this subject. Her initial look at transcendence goes back to her very first book, published in 1988, God and Creation in Christian Theology.
I've actually found God and Creation more helpful than Christ the Key, as God and Creation is directly and specifically about the problem we're talking about, God's relation to created being. So, for the rest of this series I want to sketch out (and archive for myself) some key moves of Tanner's argument.
We start with the relation between God's transcendence versus immanence.
Tanner starts by focusing on Christian speech. Specifically, Christians want to say two different things about God. First, we want to say that God is transcendent. God is Wholly Other, separate from creation. Second, we also want to say that God is present, close, intimate, and active in our lives. God is transcendent, but also immanent. God is Wholly Other and we are also radically dependent upon God: "In Him we move, live and have our being."
As Tanner points out, and as we've also observed, these two claims exist in some tension. Many philosophers have argued that they are incoherent, that you can't claim both without contradiction. This goes to my point about the necessity of metaphysics. The paradoxes and issues we struggle with regarding God's role in mental health flow out of missteps we make here, at the start, with our metaphysical assumptions about God's transcendence and immanence. Mistakes with the metaphysics lead to downstream contradictions.
Following Tanner, here's the mistake we make. We tend to frame transcendence and immanence "contrastively," as an either/or. That is, the more we focus on God's transcendence, the more God is Wholly Other and separated from creation, the more we start drifting toward deism. God is "far away" and distant from creation, which moves along without God. In short, the more God is defined as transcendent the less immanent God seems.
Conversely, the more God is defined immanently, the more God is identified with creation itself, the more we tend toward pantheism, where Nature/Reality simply is God. (This is Spinoza's Deus sive Natura, "God or nature." It's also the immanent God of process theology.) This is the reciprocal to what we observed above: The more we toggle toward immanence the less God is transcendent and Other.
Here's a crude summary of the either/or of a contrastive metaphysics of transcendence and immanence:
Suffice it to say, almost all of our problems regarding God's relation to mental health are rooted in this sort of contrastive metaphysics. This tends to play out in all of the tensions outlined above, where either God or human agency is present and given credit for mental health.
What is needed, says Tanner, is a non-contrastive metaphysics when we speak of God's transcendence and immanence. We'll turn to that metaphysics in the next post.
