A Companion to the Theology of John Webster by Allen Michael;Nelson R. David;Vanhoozer Kevin J.;

Author:Allen, Michael;Nelson, R. David;Vanhoozer, Kevin J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Published: 2021-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

The Perfection of God

Christopher R. J. Holmes

John Webster was a theologian of God’s perfection. God’s perfection, understood as “the eternal depth of his creative goodness as the one who loves, elects, accompanies, reconciles, and glorifies creatures” is the center of Webster’s distinguished contribution to Christian theology. I can think of no other theologian of his generation (whether they be Protestant, Anglican, Roman Catholic, or Orthodox) who so pressed this point. In this chapter, I focus on what he said about God’s perfection, why I think he said it, and how.

The theme of God’s perfection became more and more a preoccupation of Webster’s. From the middle part of the first decade of the 2000s, we were treated to several essays and chapters that take up this theme. Perhaps the most arresting and clearest statement available is his 2011 essay, “Perfection and Participation.” Therein he reminds us of the “reference back,” or what he also calls the “backward reference.”1 When considering God’s works, we must always refer “back to the groundless, infinite life of God disclosed in them.”2 Perfection is thus “a positive, material concept.”3

In order to unfold its positive character, Webster takes up Thomas Aquinas’s idioms. Perfection equals “this plenitude of processions.”4 The “anterior perfection” of God is his “paternity, filiation, and spiration.”5 Perfection has a Trinitarian density. It denotes the relations of origin whereby God has his life. To use a Thomistic idiom, the perfection of God is convertible with the processions among the three. This is a crucial point. Clearly distancing himself from Karl Barth, Webster discourages us from conceiving of God’s perfection “as a matter of God’s free self-determination.” As Webster’s thinking matured, Barth’s work held less appeal to Webster, at least in this regard. Accordingly, Webster notes that God’s perfection is not contrastive, “discontinuous with or antithetical to created reality.”6 It is, Webster argues, the positive truth that theology must ponder.

There is an economy of salvation precisely because God has life in and of himself. If such is the case, then we avoid confusing God’s being with his outward activity. It is Aquinas on whom Webster draws in making this point. To be sure, Barth helps Webster to appreciate God’s prevenience and sovereignty with respect to all that God does. However, Barth, as is well known, also describes God’s outward activity in terms of God’s being in act, something that Webster becomes less and less comfortable with. This is a subtle point, to be sure, but not an unimportant one. By pointing to God’s will as the linchpin that holds together “the realities of God in himself and God’s economic presence,” we honor, Webster avers, God’s plenitude and the immanent processions of the three as the basis for creation, reconciliation, and redemption.7

A few years earlier, in his Kantzer Lectures of 2007, Webster says that God’s perfection is the “condition of [his] presence.”8 Herein we see Webster’s blossoming approbation of Trinitarian metaphysics. Although his 2007 judgments are more guarded than those of only a few years later,

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