Larry Chapp is a former professor of theology at DeSales University. He is presently busy starting a Catholic Worker farm. Mr. Chapp is a longtime veteran of religion and science dialogues. His book The God of Covenant and Creation is one of the most significant recent interventions in science and religion debates. He is also the editor of How von Balthasar Changed My Mind: 15 Scholars Reflect on the Meaning of Balthasar for Their Own Work. His The God Who Speaks: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theology of Revelation is unfortunately out of print, but available in most major libraries.

The following dialogue issues from questions raised by my religion and science book list. The first part of the interview can be found here.

Rabelaisian Catholicism: I'd like to throw you a curveball. Please pardon the lack of theological rigor, but I wasn't trained as a theologian. I've always had trouble reconciling the understanding of God (transcendent yet immanent) as ipsum esse and the person of Jesus Christ (immanent yet transcendent)--they live in separate compartments of my mind and come together only in short flashes of insight. You've thrown some bridges between those two perspectives in the answer above. What are some other ways of thinking about this connection with more clarity?

Larry Chapp:  The Transcendence of God is precisely what makes his ubiquitous immanence possible. Non transcendent gods cannot be truly immanent but can only occupy a delimited space in space and time like the rest of us. As such they are all "local". Even God viewed as a "supreme Being" at the top of a great chain of being remains implicated in the worldly order in a temporal and spatial way. Only a God who is wholly "Other" (aliud) can be the radically "non other" (non aliud). A truly Transcendent God is radically distinct from finitude which is precisely what makes his omnipresence in all finite things most intimately, possible. Thus, it is possible for a truly Transcendent God to be metaphysically "present" in our spatio-temporal world without for all that becoming localized. If this were not so, then when the second person of the Trinity was incarnated as the man Jesus, then for all the years he was "on the earth" he could not have been also still within the Godhead. The Incarnation will always remain a theological mystery in the strict sense since we are not capable of truly conceiving how the Infinite "works" and thus we are not capable of understanding the mechanics of the incarnation.

We must also pay attention to the addition to our understanding given by the Revelation of the Trinity. What this doctrine does is highlight that God’s “act” as pure Being is an act of relational love. God is not first God and only then differentiated into three persons, as if the divine nature were somehow antecedent to the relational persons. Rather, it is precisely the eternal, relational, circumincession of the persons within God that IS the divine nature. It is relationality all the way down so to speak. This was the insight of the modern trinitarian theologians like Balthasar, and Schindler is one of its best current expositors. Furthermore, because God is not a homogenous and static “unity” conceived of in the flat mathematical currency of “one” or “sameness”, but rather, a dynamic unity in distinction and distinction within unity, then it is possible to say that there is “otherness” within God, so long as we understand the proper analogical limits of saying that, and that the intra-divine otherness is always already the very source of the divine unity as love. Thus, the otherness within God becomes the condition of possibility for God to posit a world–a finite other–with which to enter into relation ad extra. Thus is all worldly difference and distinction grounded in the Trinitarian otherness. Philosophers from time immemorial have grappled with this problem–the problem of the one and the many–and usually come away with a monistic reduction of worldly difference in the acid of the One (Plotinus). Thus does the world become a mere illusion (maya as the Hindus call it) or a place where all distinctions are viewed as a false dualism of consciousness (advaita in Buddhism) needing to be overcoming by dissolving all differences in the universal solvent of non-being. Only Christianity, therefore, can provide us with an ontology of Trinitarian love that properly grounds the world precisely as “world” and grounds worldly difference and distinctions in the realm of real being giving them standing. Christianity thus preaches the resurrection of the flesh, and a new heavens and a new earth–not the reduction of all things at the end into the realm of illusory shadows. Christianity is therefore the most worldly of all world religions and is the only religion that can give us a true theology of creation as such. Christ is therefore, as Balthasar puts it, the “concrete universal” that shows us that that path to the truth is not in bypassing worldly structure and the realm of “things”, but in and through their mediation. As Balthasar puts it: Das Ganze im Fragment (the universal is mediated in and through the particular fragment).

Another key point that follows from all of this is that alterity is not a declension from an original unity nor is finitude a declension from the Infinite. Both are positive perfections of our being and are rooted in a supereminent way in God's intra-alterity-in-unity. Post Kantian, postmodern thinkers like Derrida view the world of "objects" as a rupture from the ground of all things, thus rendering metaphysics impossible, and all we can "know" are the "appearances" (Kant's phenomenal world) and in no way know the ground. This is why postmodern thought wallows in a radical empiricism of the absoluteness of concrete things--a kind of nominalism on speed--emphasizing along the way that all of our higher order thinking on the "depths" of concrete things are a form of false consciousness. Thus is all knowledge a veiled grasping after power, all love a veiled lust and desire to possess, all justice veiled revenge, all friendship veiled manipulation. There are no "higher level things in things" and insofar as we posit such things we are merely playing word games. But in the Christian approach, outlined above, there is no rupture between the ground and its appearing in the world of objects, although there is a metaphysical distinction between them to be maintained. Namely, one cannot merely reduce the ground to its appearing nor the appearing to the ground. The "shining forth" (splendor) of finite things is a genuine luminosity of Being that in its beauty gives us an analogy for the divine Glory. Finite things participate in this Glory but are not reduced to it and they shine forth with its light precisely insofar as they remain squarely within the creaturely realm, not seeking to bypass it through the Wuli dance of unknowing and the search for spiritual immediacy with the Infinite. This was the deep flaw of all ancient gnosticisms. And Cyril O'Regan is right, in my view, to see the essence of the modern project as a neo-gnostic attempt to treat the finite things of this world as just so much pointless "stuff" that we need to "get beyond" in order to see the true nature of existence. And that true nature is Nietzsche's "last man" who sees through everything in order to have power over it all--a power that comes only if we are willing to see in finite things a meaninglessness that only we can overcome through the sheer force of our will.