The Remythologized Author Analogy for God
Chapter 3 of My Systematic Theology Master's Thesis on the God-World Relation
Chapter 3: The Remythologized Analogia Auctoris
“Though God is the Author of all that is, human beings nevertheless exercise a secondary authorship, and hence genuine freedom.”
-Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology, p.303.
In this chapter, I lay out the distinctives of Kevin Vanhoozer’s Authorial Analogy, or Author Analogy, for the God-World relation. I argue that not all author analogies are created equal and that Vanhoozer’s is the best on offer. In chapter’s four and five I use the disctinctives laid out here in order to answer some problems of evil. So stay tuned for those chapters, that’s where the real meat it!
As our study has shown, thus far, that viewing God as the Author of the world can aid the finite human mind in more deeply understanding the way God relates to us. In chapter 2 we surveyed a few of the ways in which authorial analogies have been appropriated to bring conceptual clarity to specific doctrines connected to the God-world relation. But as we have likewise seen, use of these particular analogies also invites the supposition that God as the author of sin and evil—a categorization which no historically minded Christian, at least without a good deal of rationalization, is comfortable with. But if these analogies invite such a heinous charge against the God they are meant to more fully reveal, then shouldn’t we rid any semblance of their use from our theological toolkit? The goal of this present chapter is to repristinate the specific authorial analogy put forth by Kevin Vanhoozer in his Remythologizing Theology in order to later demonstrate that not all authorial analogies equally fall prey to the problem of authoring evil, and furthermore, that Vanhoozer’s explanatory analogy even provides the tools needed to think through various other problems of evil like the amount of evil, gratuitous evil, and divine hiddenness.
Not all authorial motifs are created equal; this we have seen. They come in various shapes and are used to various ends by various thinkers, including philosophers, theologians, and scientists. It is possible that raising the problem of authoring evil is not inherent to every conception of the God-as-author motif, but the problem with most of the authorial analogies which do invite the specter of authoring evil is that they are not full-blown strong explanatory analogies like we described in chapter 1. Instead, most authorial motifs are used as some sort of metaphor, intuition pump, weak explanatory, descriptive, or some other form of non-explanatory analogy. But if we are going to forcefully wrestle with the problem of authoring evil, then we need an analogy broad enough to explain the God-world relation in a way that provides a story to justify the God-as-author motif and exculpate the analogy from the charge that it tarnishes our conception of God. It is in light of these intuitively promising, but disappointingly half-baked analogies, that Vanhoozer’s remythologized strong explanatory analogia auctoris shines.
Authorship
Vanhoozer contends, in language which the reader will find reminiscent of strong explanatory analogies, that “we will come to a better understanding of the relation of God’s authorial agency to that of human beings, and of divine transcendence and immanence in general, by working through the analogia auctoris (analogy of authorship).”[1] But as in any endeavor, if we want to succeed, we must begin by asking the right preliminary questions. Thus, we begin this chapter with the question, what does Vanhoozer mean by ‘author’?
According to Vanhoozer, an author is “a person who originates or creates a work by speaking or writing, a person responsible ‘for the acts that words are.’”[2] He then defines ‘authorship’ as that which “designates the capacities and status associated with being an author.”[3] Vanhoozer goes on to explain that,
The author is the efficient “cause” of his or her work, the person responsible for the form (ethos), content (logos), and intended effects (pathos) of the thing done or word made. Authorship involves owning up to what one has done in using words in particular ways to do particular things. One’s authorship is the measure of what one can do and hence the index of one’s “poetic” (creative) power…[4]
With these definitions in hand, it is not hard to see how God, who spoke creation into being by the Word of His mouth, rightly qualifies as an author - indeed, as Vanhoozer puts it, “God is the ‘unauthored Author.”[5]
The analogia auctoris put forward by Vanhoozer flows effortlessly out of his model for remythologizing theology, which gives God’s speech-acts pride of place. He explains that “To remythologize theology is therefore to adhere to the twin principles that ‘God does as God says’ AND ‘God is as God does.’”[6] Vanhoozer further states that
Divine speak-acting serves as both the material and the formal principle of remythologizing theology. Fully to understand the God-world relation means coming to grips not with a generically causal but with a specifically communicative joint: God’s relation to the world is a function of his triune authorial action, the self-communication of God the Father through the Word in the Spirit.[7]
Thus, by properly focusing on God’s trinitarian self-communication, as revealed in Scripture, one is naturally led toward viewing God’s relation to the world as an author’s relation to his novel. Furthermore, and in keeping with his penchant for alliteration, Vanhoozer explains that the three C’s of creation, covenant, and canon further motivate his authorial analogy,