Actuality of Atonement: Chapter One

One of my doctoral supervisors (though I'm currently on hold) studied with Colin Gunton. This week I started reading Gunton's, "The Actuality of Atonement." I see why the super wants me to write as he does: it reflects how Gunton wrote. The first chapter of Actuality is Gunton's effort to carve out a space for a rational study of atonement in the face of rationalism, the belief that reason is the sole source of knowledge. This, he says, cuts off a large chunk of the world in its examination.

He gives three examples of thinkers who succumb to rationalism: Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel. For Kant, rationalism gets expressed in that human reason can both discover and obey morality. Moral tenets are discovered by reason and able to be obeyed. Because we cannot know the world (or the Divine) in itself, knowledge is limited to this morality and so theological study becomes ethics. Schleiermacher, however, urged a new category for theology: aesthetics. This meant that doctrine was not simply ethics, but the aesthetic experience of the doctrine. God's plan was to form persons, and so doctrine serves this purpose, but does not capture reality. Hegel, contrary to Kant, believed that the Divine could be known, but to the point that reconciliation between God and humanity deteriorated almost to the point that they almost became one. Reconciliation between God and humanity nears simply being a recognition that divine and human reason are the same things. This leads Hegel to note that conception exceeds metaphor in reality. Ideas surpass history in their ability to reveal.

To counteract this rationalism, Gunton aims to propose that metaphor is linked with language and, as such, a new dynamic must be developed to show that Hegel is wrong and that history and metaphor can tell things they way they are. That will be chapter two tomorrow.