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Bishop Barron + William Lane Craig - Symposium Part 1 - Divine Simplicity

Bishop Robert Barron and William Lane Craig joined around 20 scholars and academics for a symposium at Claremont McKenna College on January 13, 2018. The symposium was hosted by the Claremont Center for Reason, Religion, and Public Affairs and featured two sessions. In this first session, Bishop Barron spoke on the divine simplicity. In the second session, William Lane Craig spoke on the atonement. Both presentations were followed by roundtable discussion among the attendees.


INTRODUCTION: Hey, this is Brandon Vogt, the content director for Bishop Robert Barron's Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. We're happy to present you with this audio from a recent academic symposium. The symposium featured Bishop Robert Barron and Dr. William Lane Craig. The event was hosted by The Claremont Center for Reason, Religion and Public Affairs and featured around twenty different scholars coming from both the Catholic and Protestant traditions. The symposium was split up into two sessions. In the first session, Bishop Robert Barron presented a paper on the divine simplicity. And then Dr. Craig responded to the paper. Then there was a roundtable discussion from all the scholars in attendance. In the second session, Dr. Craig presented a paper on the atonement. Bishop Barron offered a few thoughts in response. And then, again, a discussion was shared by the academic attendees. We would like to share this symposium audio in two parts. The part you're listening to now is just the first session, and then you should find the link to the second session directly underneath this. We apologize in advance for the poor quality of the audio. It seems that the air conditioning was picked up pretty heavily in the audio recording. But we think you'll still be able to make out what most of the speakers and attendees are saying. We hope you enjoy this symposium, and don't forget to listen to part two.

BISHOP BARRON: Thank you very much, and thanks everyone for coming. It's a great honor for me to be here. We've been working on this for about a year – haven't we? – to make it happen. So I’m very grateful to all the organizers and everyone for coming.

I remember the first time I heard of William Lane Craig was in 2007. I was at the North American College in Rome talking to one of the brighter students there. We were bemoaning the state of Christian apologetics. This is when you’ll remember the New Atheist we're really on the rampage at that time. We were observing the fact that so many Christians did so poorly against the New Atheists. And he said to me, “Do you know William Lane Craig?” I said, “No, I never heard of him.” He said, “Well, you have to watch his debate with Hitchens.” I think at that time, maybe Sam Harris. So I did. I went to YouTube and watched the debates and became a fan overnight. So from that moment on I had followed Dr. Craig carefully, especially in these wonderful dialogues with the New Atheists. I said to him this morning – I believe this – I think maybe in God's strange providence that the rise of the aggressive New Atheism served a purpose which is to wake a lot of Christians up and to sharpen our intellectual tools. I do think Dr. Craig has just been a pioneer in that. So I'm very grateful for the work he's done and for being with him today.

It was maybe only a year or so ago someone said to me, “Do you know William Lane Craig?” I said, “Oh, yeah, he’s great.” He said, “Well, you know he doesn't hold to the divine simplicity.” And I said, “Oh, really? Is that right?” Because for me it's such a key notion in Catholic theology. That piqued my interest, and so I began reading around a little bit and finding out his views on that. When we were organizing the symposium and we're looking at different topics, I said, “One thing that interests me anyway is this divine simplicity issue.” They said, “Why don’t you give it a go.” So that's the reason why this topic emerged today.

Just one thing. I can't resist before starting. I heard this story some years ago. There was a lady who wanted to read Thomas Aquinas, and she approached him for the first time. Going through these famously complex texts, she was kind of despairing. She finally turned and saw an article on the divine simplicity, and she thought, “Well, this might be a good thing.” [laughter] She said, “Well, if that's the divine simplicity, I don't want to read about Thomas Aquinas!

I find the debate in contemporary philosophy of religion concerning the divine simplicity to be not only compelling as a sheer intellectual exercise but also of supreme significance in regard to both the dialogue with non-believers and to the ecumenical conversation among Christians. In the course of this very brief presentation I'll attempt to lay out the doctrine of God's simplicity especially as it's been articulated by Thomas Aquinas, to respond to some of the principal objections that have been raised over the years, to demonstrate how this teaching has a significant bearing on the doctrine of the incarnation, and finally at least to indicate how the doctrine of the divine simplicity helps us at least to recontextualize I think some of the dilemmas and puzzlements bequeath to us by the 16th century Reformers. Again, all this in very short compass necessarily.

First of all, what does it mean to say that God is simple? What's the import here? To say that God is simple is to say that in him there's no distinction between his essence and his existence, between what he is (his quidditas) and that he is. For Thomas Aquinas, this divine simplicity follows clearly from God's status as the uncaused cause of the being of the created world. According to Thomas's metaphysical program, a thing's existence is a function either of its own essence or of the influence of some extrinsic cause. Either it explains itself or it has to be explained through appeal to some agent beyond itself. Now, everything in our immediate experience is marked by a real distinction between essence and existence for we can contemplate their natures apart from their acts of existence. In regard to all such things, therefore we are logically compelled to seek a cause of their being precisely because there could be no infinite regress of caused causes in a series subordinated per se and not merely per accident. There must exist finally a reality whose existence is a function not of an extrinsic agency but of its own essence or nature. This simple reality, who's very quidditas is to be and who grounds the to-be of every creature, is what the great tradition has meant by the word “God.”

Another way to explicate this doctrine is through appeal to the act-potency distinction. For Thomas, the first reality, whether construed as unmoved mover, uncaused cause, or necessary being, must be characterized as actus purus – pure energy or actuality. But essence functions as a principle of potency since it delimits the actus essendi – the active being – somewhat in the manner that matter sets the limit to form. Thus, my humanity determines that I am a very particular type of being relating to my existence as potency to act. Therefore in the actus purus God there can be no principle that delimits the divine act of “to be,” or, to state the same thing, there can be no distinction between essence and existence in God. As David Burrell, the theologian and philosopher from Notre Dame put it, to be God is to be “to be.” In regard to any creature from an archangel to a stone, no such formula could possibly be applied.

A third way to illuminate this teaching is through the principle of the one and the many. In the medieval metaphysical schema any reality which is complex (that's to say, composed of parts) would have to be reduced to a more basic cause that brought the parts together. This is particularly clear in regard to matter and form. By an altogether correct intuition we are led to wonder precisely why matter is found in a given configuration at a particular speed. Here rather than there, according to this modality rather than that. In a word, the distinction between form and manner compels us to search for the cause that brought them together. The same principle holds for Thomas regarding essence and existence. If the two are distinct, as indeed they are in every creature, then we must seek for a cause that brought them together. Therefore if essence and existence are not identical in God, we'd have to search out the extrinsic cause of the divine being. But this is repugnant of the claim that God is the uncaused cause of finite existence.

In light of these clarifications we can understand why for Thomas Aquinas God cannot be strictly speaking defined. For, as the word itself indicates, any definition involves the setting of a limit, and all limitation is a type of potency. It's also why it would be incorrect to say that God belongs to any genus, even that most generic of genera, namely, being. Accordingly, God is not (for Aquinas) a being – one thing, however ontologically impressive among many. It is invalid, he says, to refer to God as an individual. Though it's true that sometimes Aquinas uses the phrase ens summum (or highest being) to speak of God, he much more commonly uses the expression ipsum esse subsistens – a subsistent act of to be itself.

As my own manner of expression is suggesting, I believe the divine simplicity is best read under the rubric of the via negativa – that is to say, removal from the idea of God of any and all creaturely imperfection. In service of defending the divine transcendence and sovereignty, the doctrine holds off any temptation to describe God in categorical terms. As Thomas himself famously says, “with regard to God we cannot know what he is but only what he is not.

Just a word about some of the objections. Before considering some of the objections to the doctrine that have arisen in recent years, I think it is important to point out that the position Thomas Aquinas defends is by no means peculiar to him. Rather, he summarizes and gives pointed expression to a tradition that stretches back to the church fathers and comes up through the high Middle Ages. Augustine, Ambrose, Anselm, Bonaventure all defend the divine simplicity and the point of fact, as Stephen Long has demonstrated, none of the great Reformers essentially quarreled with the idea. Nevertheless, as Aquinas himself says, the argument from authority is the weakest. So let us consider the rather strenuous exception that a number of serious critics, including Dr. Craig, have taken to this classical idea.

The first objection voiced by a number of critics especially in the Protestant world is that the doctrine of the divine simplicity is unbiblical. Drawing it seems far more on pagan philosophical sources than on the scriptural witness, Aquinas has presented, it seems, a deeply distorted and hopelessly abstract notion of God more akin to a Buddhist Abyss or a Hindu Absolute than the living, personal, and very particular God of the Bible. Here’s how the Catholic scholar Eleanor Stump summed up the problem – who could possibly use second personal address in any locution towards God if God is ipsum esse (or being alone)?

Before getting to a point in response to this, it might be Illuminating to consider something that I think is often overlooked; namely, Aquinas’ rather intense relationship to the Bible. As a young man at the University of Naples, he was beguiled by the street preaching of the Dominicans, an order devoted to a back-to-basics evangelicalism. When Thomas assumed his role as magister – master or teacher – at the University of Paris, his first responsibility was praedicatio – preaching. Attended immediately upon this was the obligation to engage in biblical commentary. In the course of his career Thomas produced a substantial number of such commentaries including a masterpiece on the Gospel of John. Moreover, he assembled a so-called Catena Aurea, a compilation of patristic observations on the Gospels. Indeed, one of the titles he bore was Magister Sacra Pagina – Master of the Sacred Page. As any serious commentator on the Scriptures realizes, a close reading of the Bible leads naturally enough to questions, conundrums, and puzzles. Hence a Magister Sacra Pagina would become inevitably preoccupied with what the medievals called questiones disputatae – disputed questions. Indeed Thomas entertains such questions throughout his public career. Finally, eager to present these theological musings in an organized systematic manner, Thomas produced Summaries (or Summa) of his thought. I think far too often even careful students of Aquinas read only the Summa and they overlook the rootedness of these texts in biblical commentary and preaching. This produces a distorted understanding of Thomas as a pure philosopher or detached rationalist. Indeed the master was composing the Summa Theologica, including the great text on the divine simplicity, at the same time that he was writing commentaries on John, Isaiah, and the apostle Paul. So I think that at the very least it should give critics pause to consider that the subtlest mind of the Middle Ages quite evidently did not see the slightest contradiction between the God of the Bible and the simple God articulated through more philosophical categories.

The clearest conceptual link between the God of the Scriptures and the simple God is the notion of creation which runs of course throughout the sacred writings. For Thomas, the claim that God makes the world ex nihilo is functionally equivalent to the assertion that God is the unique reality in which essence and existence coincide, for anything that is marked by distinction between quidditas and actus essendi would require ultimately the sustaining influence of the one whose very essence is to be. To put this in more straightforwardly biblical terms, creatures depend upon the Creator. To claim, as the Bible clearly does, that God is the creator of the heavens and the Earth, a reality qualitatively other than anything in the universe is tantamount to affirming that God's essence is not other than God's existence.

It becomes apparent upon even the most cursory reading of Aquinas' texts on the matter is that the identity of essence and existence in God is in fact signaled by one of the most famous and influential of all biblical verses. To give just one example from Aquinas’ [X], in article 11 of question 13 of the first part of the Summa Theologiae, Thomas wonders whether Qui est (the one who is) is “the most proper name of God.” In the Sed contra of the article he cites Exodus 3:14: “It is written ‘Moses asks, “If they shall say to me: ‘What is His name?’, what shall I say to them?” And the Lord answers him, “Thus shall you say to them: ‘He Who Is has sent me to you.’”’ Therefore, this name [Qui est] is maxime proprium nomen Dei.” So there's Aquinas' citation. In the respondeo of that article we discover this elaboration: “since the existence of God is his essence itself which can be said of no other, it is clear that among other names this one specifically denominates God.” The great 20th century Thomist Étienne Gilson went so far as to characterize Thomas' doctrine of God as a metaphysics of Exodus.

Of course, this biblical critique of Thomas' teaching on God becomes more pointed. How could a God who is not an individual, not a definite existence, not a person in possession of attributes other than existence, possibly be the God who speaks to his people, enters into covenant with them, becomes aroused in anger at their sin, and who loves them abidingly? Doesn't the Bible speak of God as good and righteous, as intelligent and compassionate, as provident and merciful? Then how could Aquinas possibly assert that all we can know of God is what he is not? How could a Magister Sacra Pagina set before us a vague entity that cannot be defined and that seems to possess only the thinnest of qualities, namely existence itself. Here we have to be careful lest we construe Thomas' via negativa as sheer apophaticism. We must indeed remove from our conception of God anything that smacks of creaturely imperfection or finitude. But by the same token we must affirm of God anything that is good and perfect within the realm of creatures. Thus under the rubric of the negative way we must say that the simple God is immutable (since he cannot be reduced from potency to act), eternal (since he cannot be circumscribed temporally), immaterial (since he's not susceptible to formal change). But under the rubric of the via positiva we must also say that he is intelligent, loving, providential, personal, powerful, etc., as Thomas clearly does. Ipsum esse, in other words, is not a thin abstraction. Just the contrary, he (and I use the personal pronoun here very much on purpose) is unlimited to be. That is to say, fully actual, entirely realized existence, ens realissimo – the most real reality, in Thomas' terminology. Hence it's all together correct to say that the simple God is in absolute possession of any and all ontological perfection. To affirm therefore that God is not a being or an individual is by no means to imply that he's less than personal or doesn't have the perfection of individuality.

The second principle criticism of the doctrine of the divine simplicity comes from Alvin Plantinga and his school marked by an analytical philosophical approach to these matters. Plantinga correctly points out that an implication of the classical teaching is that God precisely as simple is identical to his “properties.” Thus it's not the case that God is a subject that has certain qualities, rather God is his own goodness, his own justice, his own power, etc. But it seems to involve, the Plantinga school argues, the identification of God's manner of being with the manner of being of a property which is to say impersonal, abstract, and incapable of engaging in action. I'm quoting now from Plantinga: “No property could have created the world. No property could be omniscient or indeed know anything at all. If God is a property then he isn't a person.” But this critique in my judgment is born of a confusion. In creatures we find a distinction between substance and accident or a subject and properties. In this sort of metaphysical composite, the latter does indeed have a mitigated mode of existence vis-a-vis the former. It would be silly to say, for instance, that my power is acting or that my justice is offended. But it's precisely this sort of distinction that does not obtain within the simple God. Therefore, instead of saying that God is a property or set of properties, one should say that God has no properties – that God is all substance if you want. In other words, I just move in the other direction of the criticism.

A related critique is that given the simplicity of the divine being all properties of God are in fact identical. Thus his intelligence is his power which is his mercy which is his justice, etc. But this seems to the critics on the face of it contradictory for those attributes are quite obviously distinguishable one from the other. Well, they are indeed distinct in creatures; that's to say, in finite substances that have properties. But God is not a creature, not a Supreme Being among many. What appear as separable qualities in finite things cohere in God just as a prism breaks the sheer white light into an array of colors. To illustrate the principle with just a few examples. We could choose many more. Consider the knowledge, will, love, and power of God – four qualities or four properties. For Thomas Aquinas, God's knowledge is not passive and derivative as ours often is. Rather, it's always creative. God doesn't know things because they are; they are because he knows them. This is what a philosophically refined expression of the biblical idea of the divine Word as productive of what it enunciates. “As the rain and snow come down from heaven and do not return without watering the Earth, so my Word does not go forth from me in vain” (from the prophet Isaiah, of course). Thus knowledge and power are identical in him. Moreover, to know the good as good is precisely what it means to will, and since God knows himself completely as the Supreme Good, will and knowledge coincide in him. Finally, to love is to will either the absent good or to savor the good that one possesses. Since God is always (by his knowledge and will) in possession of his own good, he is by the same token marked by the shearest love. Hence knowledge, will, power, and love coincide in him, or stated differently, all are different ways of squinting from our perspective at the one simple divine act of to be.

A third major objection that I will consider also comes from the Plantinga analytical school. The charge is that the doctrine of the divine simplicity locks God into a sort of necessitarianism whereby every move, thought, and action on his part would be determined and his freedom effectively eliminated. If God has no accidental properties, it seems impossible to imagine that God could have created a world different than the one he has in fact created or, indeed, that God might have chosen not to create at all. Using, as is their want, a possible world schema, the followers of Plantinga argue that if God is truly free we must be able to imagine a variety of scenarios in which God remains God but in which God has different relationships in which he performs a different set of actions. But if we can imagine this, we must assert that, along with certain essential features which would obtain in all the different worlds, God must have accidental qualities that obtain only in a given world, but this seems to militate against the divine simplicity. By way of very initial response to this objection, which I think is an important one, I would note that from beginning to end of his career Thomas Aquinas maintained both that God is simple and that there's a distinction between things that obtain necessarily within God (such as the trinitarian relations) and things that are the result of God's free choice (such as creation). Unlike Alvin Plantinga, he saw no contradiction in the matter. The explanation therefore hinges upon the difference between the world's relationship to God which involves causal dependency and God's relation to the world which involves no such dependency. In Thomas' admittedly ambiguous formulation, the former is a real relationship while the latter is not. Creatures are utterly different depending upon how God relates to them whereas God is utterly the same whether creatures are related to him or not. As Robert Sokolowski specified this unique state of affairs “after creation, there are more beings, but no more perfection of being.” Hence we can indeed imagine an array of possible worlds, even the scenario in which God didn't create at all, but in any and all such worlds God's simple nature will remain unaffected.

Just a last little section here. A few implications on the doctrine of the incarnation. Just by way of conclusion, I want to make a connection between the doctrine of the divine simplicity and that most characteristic of all Christian doctrines, namely the incarnation. The Chalcedonian claim that two natures, divine and human, come together in the person of Christ “without mixing, mingling, or confusion” is predicated upon the assumption that the to be of God is qualitatively different than the to be of any creature. Finite natures always exist in an ontologically competitive manner. What is distinctive to one nature militates necessarily against what's distinctive to another nature. Hence we could speak of one creaturely nature becoming another only through some process of destruction or assimilation. The wildebeest becoming the flesh of the lion, or the podium becoming a pile of ash. But in Jesus, God becomes human without ceasing to be God or compromising the integrity of the created nature he assumes. This means that God is transcendent but precisely in a non-competitive manner. He is indeed other, even totaliter aliter, but by a non-contrastive otherness for he's not competing for space so to speak on the same ontological ground as creatures. The best way to express this unique form of transcendence is to speak of God not as a being but rather as the sheer act of to be itself. Ipsum esse is obviously other than anything in the realm of beings, but at the same time he's the most intimate ground of whatever exists in the finite arena. If God were simply one being among many, the supreme instance of the genus of being, it's difficult indeed to imagine how his nature could come together non-competitively with the creative nature.

Extrapolating from this insight, Catholic theology sees many of the conundrums and dilemmas posed by the Reformers to be full of problems. The zero-sum game that Luther and his disciples saw as obtaining between faith and works or between divine glory and human achievement or between grace and the cooperation with grace are born (Catholic theologians would tend to see) from a misconstrual of God as competitive with his creation. We have no time, of course, to explore the roots of this and the abandonment, I would say, of the analogical conception of being. But suffice it to say, from a Catholic perspective, the best way to avoid (or at least, let's say, re-contextualize) these dilemmas is to embrace with enthusiasm the Irenaean model gloria Dei homo vivens – the glory of God as a human being fully alive – and to return to what undergirds that, I would say, the understanding of God as the simple act of to be itself. Thanks everybody.

DR. CRAIG: I want to express as well my thanks for the privilege of taking part in this dialogue. I was very eager to join with Bishop Barron in doing the event this evening. I think it's wonderful to have this symposium, as well, before.

It's evident from the topic he's chosen that Robert Barron is not one to shy away from controversy! For he has elected to defend one of the most controversial of the divine traditional attributes, namely divine simplicity. He has ably stated that doctrine in its most radical Thomistic form, and fairly and forcefully stated several of the objections which have led many, if not most, contemporary Christian philosophers, not to speak of theologians, to reject it. Alas, I find myself among them.

It seems to me that the question is not whether God is simple but whether divine simplicity is best understood along Thomistic lines. Consider the three objections Bishop Barron mentions to the Thomistic construal of divine simplicity.

1. The Thomistic construal is unbiblical. I must confess that I could not agree more with the objector that “drawing far more on pagan philosophical sources than on scriptural witness Aquinas has presented a deeply distorted and hopelessly abstract notion of God more akin to a Buddhist Abyss or a Hindu Absolute than to the living, personal, and very particular God of the Bible.” The roots of Thomas’ doctrine are to be found not in the Bible but in neo-Platonism. For thinkers like Proclus and Plotinus, the One is an absolutely undifferentiated unity from which all multiplicity derives. By contrast, in the Bible God is described as a positive being who has properties like holiness, power, eternality, goodness, personhood, and so forth. Whereas other divine attributes like omnipotence, omnipresence, eternality, holiness, and so on find support in the biblical text, there is no support for Thomistic simplicity. Aquinas’ treatment of Exodus 3:14, (“I am that I am”) is a classic case of eisegesis. If this statement in the mind of the Pentateuchal author was meant to be a metaphysically heavy statement rather than just a way of saying, “Don't stick your nose into things that don't concern you” then why take it as a proof text of Thomistic simplicity rather than a proof text of divine aseity (self-existence) or metaphysical necessity (broadly logically necessary existence)? Aquinas reads his thesis of the identity of divine essence and existence into (not out of) the passage.

The terrible consequence of Thomism is that all the wonderful biblical attributes for which we worship him are annihilated by divine simplicity. For the pure act of being is not delimited by any essence. God becomes an unintelligible blank. God is no longer religiously accessible except through mystical experience. Bishop Barron insists that under the rubric of the via positiva we must also say that God is intelligent, loving, providential, personal, powerful, etc. The problem is that these positive predicates cannot be literally ascribed to God on Thomism. They are at best analogical. But God is not literally personal, nor does he love you, nor is he active in the world. For the pure act of being has no properties and stands in no real relations.

2. Thomistic simplicity falsely makes God a property. Bishop Barron's response is telling: “Instead of saying that God is a property or set of properties, one should say that God has no properties.” Yes, and that is precisely the problem! The pure act of being is inconceivable because it has no properties. We really have no idea what we are talking about.

3. Thomistic simplicity brings about a modal collapse. Since God is absolutely simple across possible worlds never knowing or doing anything differently, modal distinctions collapse and there is in effect only one possible world. God can have no contingent knowledge or action for everything about him is essential to him. Since God knows that P is logically equivalent to P-is-true, the necessity of the former entails the necessity of the latter. Thus divine simplicity leads to an extreme fatalism according to which everything that happens does so with logical necessity.

Bishop Barron tries to avert this unwelcome consequence by appealing to the Thomistic doctrine that while creatures are really related to God, God is not really related to creatures. The problem with this doctrine is that it makes the existence of creatures inexplicable. Since God is absolutely the same in a possible world in which no creatures exist as he is in a world chock full of creatures, the explanation of the difference cannot be found in God. But neither can it be found in creatures for they come too late in the order of explanation to account for why they exist or not. It follows that on Thomism there just is no explanation of the existence of creatures or the differences between possible worlds which seems absurd.

In light of these objections it seems to me imperative that we retrace our steps and ask ourselves where things went wrong. It seems to me that the most plausible candidate for the crucial misstep is Aquinas’ affirmation of a real distinction between essence and existence. It is this that lies at the root of the causal regress that terminates in something uncomposed of essence and existence but just is existence itself. Why think that beings are metaphysically composed of essence and existence? Bishop Barron says, “Everything in our immediate experience is marked by a real distinction between essence and existence for we can contemplate their natures apart from their acts of existence.” But this suffices to show only a conceptual distinction between essence and existence. Compare properties. On Aquinas’ view, properties are merely entia rationes – not mind-independent realities. They are formed by the mind's abstracting from an object everything except for the particular feature in question. They are no more really distinct things than, say, the southern exposure of a house is a thing distinct from the house. Deny the real distinction between essence and existence, and the nerve of Thomism is cut.

Finally, that leads to the question: How then ought we to understand divine simplicity? Well, how about this? We reject constituent ontologies. We should not think of things as metaphysically composed in any way. In this sense, everything is simple. But there are still positive predications true of them, including God. If we want, we can strengthen divine simplicity by adding that God is not composed of separable parts. That suffices for a biblical and philosophically intelligible doctrine of divine simplicity.

The Thomistic interpretation of divine simplicity is not essential to Catholic theology. To be sure, the Catholic Church, like the Protestant Reformers, affirmed divine simplicity. The Fourth Lateran Council declares God to be “absolutely simple,” and the First Vatican Council “completely simple.” But neither counsel cashes out these expressions in Thomistic terms. Their statements are consistent with interpretations of divine simplicity that are not committed to the radical Thomistic theses that God has no properties but is the pure act of being unconstrained by any essence or that God stands in no real relations to the world. Catholics who balk at these claims should feel free to embrace a different understanding of divine simplicity than that offered by Thomas Aquinas.

MODERATOR: Bishop Barron, do you want to say a few words now?

BISHOP BARRON: A couple things. I think you are a big fan of Thomas Aquinas. That comes through very clear. [laughter] Let me just say a couple things, and it reflects very well the reading I've done of Dr. Craig and a lot of his colleagues. I think he summed up very well the back and forth that goes on. I think a key thing is the question of analogical versus univocal predication. I think you're quite right suggesting for Aquinas all of our language about God has this analogical quality. So, yes, when I say God is intelligent, God is powerful, God is loving, I don't mean that in a univocal way. I can't simply say he's the greatest instance of a loving thing or the greatest instance of a powerful thing. I'm taking something from the creaturely realm but applying it only in a highly analogical way to God. But it doesn't lead, it seems to me, to a complete apophaticism or to a surrender to the Buddhist void or something. I think we can say meaningful things about God that respect his integrity of being. They don't reduce him to the level of a creature so that the difference of God is honored but also our ability to name God and to do so using all the biblical categories as Thomas clearly does. Thomas affirms God is intelligent, full of will and love, full of power, etc. So he wouldn't deny that for a second. But he placed all that under the heading of analogical rather than univocal predication. To my mind, that's where things got off the rails, if I can rip on your observations. I think in the later Middle Ages when the analogical gave way to the univocal in Don Scotus and especially in Ockham, and that was received then by a lot of modernity. I think that's where a lot of the discourse went off the rails. Simplicity's got to be read under that rubric. I would just insist again it's not a complete apophaticism – if I say God has no properties therefore I can say nothing about God. I can say plenty about God, but under the right epistemological discipline lest we collapse God to the level of a creature. As I listen to your rhetoric, Bill, and that school, God starts sounding to me like a very impressive creature – a being with these qualities at a very high level rather than something that really is qualitatively other than the world even as he grounds the world. That's where I think simplicity is trying to maintain – that balance. I'll just end with this. I’m very interested in your last comments about other ways of understanding simplicity. I think there's something valuable there. I wouldn't say Catholic theology has to be married to Thomas's way of doing it. I think he gives very precise expression to it, but you look at a Bonaventure and you look at Anselm, even Anselm says “God is that then which something greater can’t be thought,” that's the simple God that I'm describing. If God's a Supreme Being then God plus the world is greater than God alone. Sokolowski's remark there about “after creation there are more beings but no more perfection of being.” So in commaios cotetari ne quid [?] can’t be a big being. It has to be the sheer act of to be. I think Anselm's naming what Aquinas is naming with somewhat different philosophical tools. I find that intriguing. I mean, other ways of approaching the question, other systems of thought. But I still think Thomas names it precisely. Those are a couple things that just struck me as you were expounding. I am eager to have other people jump in.

MODERATOR: What we are going to try is to do this without raising hands, without me having to call on people. If the traffic gets too heavy then we'll make an adjustment. Let's have a conversation, and people can come in as they see fit. But having said that, I did see my colleague with his hand up so we’ll let him go first.

QUESTION: Anselm calls God (it’s often translated) “the greatest conceivable being; something that is greater cannot be conceived.” I’ve always thought that it does not in any way impune or mitigate God's transcendence to say that God is a being. Aquinas clearly thinks it does and you clearly think it does. I just have never quite followed that. If “being” is a bad word then I'll make up some other word that includes every creature plus God and make up a new noun to cover all those things, and now we'll say God is the greatest member of that set.

ANSWER: That is what you can’t do.

FOLLOWUP: I am wondering why? Why not?

BISHOP BARRON: Because then God does become a being.

FOLLOWUP: Yeah. Right. That’s right. Absolutely.

BISHOP BARRON: ... and that can't be the creative self-existing reality Thomas is talking about. If you make that move . . . you’re right, that’s why Thomas denies that God can be put in any genus, even the genus of being. And that's where he differs from people like Ockham.

FOLLOWUP: Right. That’s true. But why can't God be the thing you just mentioned if God is a being? I’m stuck on that.

BISHOP BARRON: Because it makes him potential and finite for one thing.

FOLLOWUP: No, it doesn’t.

UNKNOWN: What you're doing is you're making him an instance of a category – an instance of a kind. Several problems arise from that way of framing God's nature. One thing – if he's one instance among others of a kind or even a unique instance of the kind, we have the question the way we would with any other instance of any other kind – an instance of the kind tree, the instance of a kind dog – what makes it the case, what causes it to be the case, that that universal is instantiated? That that kind is instantiated? So we bring in a causal question with respect to God, but then he's not the first cause. The way that the Thomist, of course, would frame this is also that if you make God an instance of a kind (an instance of a universal) then you are implicitly bringing in an essence-existence distinction within God in which case that raises the specific question: How is it the case that in God his essence and existence are combined? What causes this essence, which is of itself merely potential, to be actualized by being conjoined with what Aquinas would call an act of existence?

FOLLOWUP: I’m still not seeing why. If I say God is a being, God is a being that is absolutely unique unlike any other being (a self-existence being, a necessary being), that that raises all the questions about how he got that way. If he’s a necessary being . . .

UNKNOWN: It's the fact that he's an instance. That's the problem. It doesn't matter what he's an instance of. If he's an instance, that is to say he's a particular instantiation of a general pattern of a universal, say, that’s the problem.

FOLLOWUP: OK, so you don’t even think he’s an instance of divinity?

UNKNOWN: No.

FOLLOWUP: OK, well I do.

DR. CRAIG: This is the real distinction between essence and existence. It's being presupposed here, and I think if we deny that . . .

QUESTION: When you say he’s a being, do you mean he’s a being in the world? Because I think that’s where the confusion is.

UNKNOWN: When you say “in the world” do you mean [the universe]?

DR. CRAIG: He created the world – the universe.

QUESTION: But then what categories does he belong to? If he's not part of the world, how can you use “being?” I think from my perspective this conversation seems to be a confusion between the way Catholics and Protestants use the term “being.” I think the word “being” the way Bishop Barron is using it is talking about beings as objects in [the world]. A being is going to be something different than that.

UNKNOWN: I think to be a being is the widest possible category, widest possible noun, that can cover anything that has an identity apart from other things and that has properties. And I think God is one of those.

DR. CRAIG: It is too facil to try to dismiss this as being a misunderstanding. Many of us have made great efforts to try to understand Aquinas and to represent his views fairly. It's not a matter of misunderstanding. It's a genuine disagreement about whether or not God is a thing or a being or an individual. I want to respond to the argument you gave that if God is a being then the world plus God is greater. I can think of two reasons that that argument is not sound. First, God is infinite goodness, and infinity plus any natural number is still infinity. In trans-finite arithmetic, aleph-null plus two is aleph-null. So it's impossible for there to be something greater or more good than God. Secondly, I think it's false to think that there is such a thing as God plus the world. There isn’t any such thing to be greater.

BISHOP BARRON: That's a way to say it. That's what I'm arguing in some ways. You can't fit God into a pattern like that. You can't see God as an instance of a genus. So in a way that's right that you can't make that sort of conceptual move with God.

QUESTION: I think part of the problem here is that when we're saying being is not a genus, it's because it's not said univocally of all the things that come under it. For example, this problem comes up with just the ten categories of Aristotle. You got the genus of substance and quantity, quality, relation, time, place, etc. Aristotle argues that being is not said univocally of all of those. He wants to say, yeah, you can call them all beings, you can call a place a being, a color a being, but obviously I don't mean exactly the same thing when I call a horse a being and when I call white a being. He’s saying that word is being used analogically and not univocally. That doesn't preclude us from saying God is a being, but you are just realizing when I say being and I call God a being I don't mean exactly the same thing as when I say Socrates is a being.

UNKNOWN: I think this is important to add because I think this is one area where Professor Craig misunderstands St. Thomas. You characterize analogical languages non-literal, but that's a mistake. In Thomism, non-literal or metaphorical language is one kind of analogical language. It's not the only kind. It's not the kind that's operative in theology and metaphysics.

UNKNOWN: Actually, St. Thomas actually says metaphor is improper whereas analogy is proper predication. So when I say God is good, goodness properly belongs to God. But if I call God a lion, a lion doesn't belong properly to God. That's a metaphor. He makes that distinction.

DR. CRAIG: Good. The point is that analogical predication is empty if there isn't any univocal element. And that's where I agree with Scotus. Ultimately we're talking equivocally if God has no properties and that there is no univocal conception that applies. I would say furthermore, even if the meanings were entirely [quivocal], one is still ascribing some sort of property to God in that analogical predication that Thomists have to say he doesn't really have, even if it's a totally different meaning.

UNKNOWN: That's where we can say the kind of thing you said before – that those things are conceptually distinct but not really distinct. You can have that with creatures. You don't even need to have God in the equation for that. Good and being don't mean the same thing. Good being in one don't mean the same thing, but they're all said of all the same things.

DR. CRAIG: OK. I don't see the point. The point is whether or not God has these.

UNKNOWN: You can say God is wisdom and God is a substance and say those don't have to be two really different things about him. You mentioned mathematics earlier. So I'm going to bring up an example from that. In triangles, you can have different centers. So you've got the place where the altitudes meet; you've got the place where the perpendicular bisectors meet. You've got all these different kinds of centers. And they have different names. In the case of an equilateral triangle, they're all the same point but they all still meet the definition. All those definitions apply to that one same point. So in God you've got something like that where “he is existing” is not something different from “his loving” which is not something different from “his understanding” which is not something different from “his being a substance.” So in him wisdom is substantial, and it adds to the biblical point – we haven't been talking too much about that right now. I kind of agree with you that philosophy shouldn't sort of take center stage when we're talking about these questions in theology. In Scripture you see God is love, God is wisdom, God is truth, God is life, God is word. Those sound like properties, and they should shock us, but are they metaphors? Well, maybe. But if you say that they're metaphors you're bringing your own philosophy to it antecedently and reading the scriptures in light of it. That's where St. Thomas would say, “No, my doctrine is quite biblical.” There are surprising things. Wisdom is what created the world, not just the one who is wise. Wisdom did it. That's what Proverbs says. Also, as to the Catholic doctrine point, we're not really free as Catholics to say “God is love” is just a metaphor. I don't think so. I think we are required to say, “It means he is an act of Love.” That is what God is.

QUESTION: A lot of the biblical texts are underdeterminative. What really matters is what you've been discussing up to now. It's the metaphysical [...]. Do the arguments work or not? If they do work, if the essence-existence argument or the act-potency argument so that Aquinas’ philosophical system of divine simplicity is true then the restrictions can be read in such a way including Exodus 3:14. Moreso with the Septuagint than with the Hebrew – the Hebrew is more ambiguous so I don't think the essence-existence aspect that you get [...] alone exhausts the meaning. I think there's other things going on in that passage about the lost covenant relationship with Israel as well. But I think lots of Scriptures are in themselves underdeterminative, but once you sort out them as metaphysics you can see that Scriptures are compatible.

UNKNOWN: I agree with that. That’s quite right.

BISHOP BARRON: Can I just jump in on that. That’s a very important point. In Aquinas' method, I'm always resistant to univocal construles [...] “Thomas begins with philosophy then he kind of marches his way toward the biblical prooftexts or something.” Or, “He's a biblical theologian.” They wash back and forth in Aquinas as they do often in all the medievals. Sometimes biblical commentary washes toward metaphysics. Sometimes metaphysics is the propaedeutic to the Bible. It's manu ducsio, Thomas says – to lead you by the hand. He would see Aristotle and [...] as simply as a propaedeutic to get people ready to read the Bible properly. But I don't think we have to lock him into a method. I think it washes back and forth a lot in his thinking. You're quite right about Exodus 3:14 – the famous debates around that. I use it simply to illustrate Thomas using it as a biblical exegete, and that he saw his metaphysics as rooted in the Bible. In the wake of Gilson's famous metaphysics of Exodus there is a huge debate then around . . .

UNKNOWN: Revelation 1 . . . the New Testament . . . Jewish scholars would feel freer to reject the Septuagint translations. I don't think Christians can, because of Revelation 1 where you have the self-existent one even before the one who was and is to come. I know in Revelation 4 it's done [...] but that is because God as the eternally self-existent one – it has already established the theology in Revelation 1.

UNKNOWN: In terms of the biblical commentary, Aquinas believes, and many Christians do, that Scripture is God's Word. So the proper interpretation of Scripture for him has to do with God's intention. Because of his understanding of who God is there's an inexhaustible sort of richness to the interpretation of Scripture that is untrue of any other text – a kind of plenitude of meaning. That, seems to me, opens the door for this sort of interpretation to come later in the [traditions]. But the other thing I want to mention, and this goes to what Bill was saying about possible worlds, Aquinas’ view is that God didn't have to create it all, and that God also didn't have to create this particular world. There could have been other sorts of worlds that God created. The reason for that is that he thinks that the created world that exists, and any created world, only dimly reflects the infinity of God and so no created world could partly mirror who God is. So God from all eternity and the one eternal after the world freely chose to create the world that exists. He didn't have to create it at all, and he didn't have to create the particular world that we're in.

DR. CRAIG: Of course. I realize that. The question is whether or not these affirmations are coherent. In the same way that these positive predications about God are incoherent given the doctrine that God has no properties but just is the pure act of being, the statements that creation is a free act, that creatures don't have to exist, that it doesn't lead to modal collapse – these are incoherences in the Thomistic system that these objections are intended to bring to light.

UNKNOWN: St. Thomas has the proofs for the existence of God. The article after that is the one on the divine simplicity. The one following that is on perfection. He really has to do the divine simplicity first because all his arguments for divine simplicity had to show that any kind of composition points [...] involves imperfection. He doesn't just deal with essence and existence. The first one is whether God has a body. Second is whether he's composed of matter and form. The third is whether his nature and his subject is the same. Then the fourth one was whether his essence is the same as his existence. He asked whether his substance is the same as his accidents. What he's showing is that there is no composition. And that's what he really means by simple. There's no composition. Any kind of composition would involve imperfection.

QUESTION: Why is that so? I get off the bus right there.

DR. CRAIG: Yeah, me, too.

QUESTION: Why does it involve imperfection?

UNKNOWN: Because it involves some kind of potency.

FOLLOWUP: Not necessarily.

UNKNOWN: Or dependency – dependence on something else.

FOLLOWUP: Not if the thing is a necessary being whose parts are all necessary parts.

UNKNOWN: . . . one being unless one thing is to another is potency to act. If you have a bunch of different things that are components and you say you got one being but it's all actual. Well you've got an actual component and an actual component. Right? That's when you've got two actual beings. What makes them one? Either they are in potency to something else that forms them and constitutes that one or one is in potency to the other. If you don't have that you really just have many beings. So you need potency there.

UNKNOWN: I think it's crucial here to point out that there is an ambiguity in the proposition that God has no properties, which I think Professor Craig and also Alvin Plantinga – they make a lot of heavy use of that proposition as a weapon against divine simplicity. What does a Thomist mean (because Aquinas doesn't use precisely that formulation)? . . . just a side quibble, the word wouldn't be “properties” anyway. The word “property” has a very specialized use in Thomism, but putting that aside, if we use a term like “attribute” or “accident” the claim is certainly not that God has no accidents in any sense whatsoever. The idea is rather that God does not instantiate any accidents. He's not instantiating Platonic forms. He's not instantiating universals, or anything like that. So can we say that God has wisdom? Can we say that God has power? Absolutely. Not only can we, we ought to say those things. We must say them. But that doesn't mean that God is one instance among others – of powerful things.

QUESTION: [What about his] wisdom? It's something that he has, and is different from him.

UNKNOWN: Yes. Right.

UNKNOWN: And that’s what we mean when we say Socrates was wise. He had this attribute. . . . He can either have it or not have it. And we are saying in God there is not that separation.

UNKNOWN: The substance of Socrates is not good enough and rich enough to also be Wisdom.

UNKNOWN: Socrates is an instance of wisdom, but God is Wisdom. He's not an instance.

UNKNOWN: That's true. It's a slightly different point but Socrates, his being a man, is not good enough by itself. It's not rich enough to make him also be Wisdom. God's substance is good enough. His act of existence is rich enough to also be his Wisdom. He doesn't need something additional to that as if his substance were too impoverished and needed sort of accessories.That's not the case with God. With us it is.

UNKNOWN: That's why I thought question four which follows the divine simplicity is important because [...] argues that God has all the perfections that any creature has because he's the cause of all the creatures. So he pre-possesses in a preeminent mode, as he says, all the perfections of creatures. So those are the things we want to attribute to him positively.

UNKNOWN: So he has all of that. All of the things that answers the definitions of wisdom and love and so on. But without any of the things that are in those definitions that imply limitation or imperfection or potency. He has them all in one actuality – one perfection.

QUESTION: Can I ask a general question? Is it the case that this is an issue (divine simplicity) that almost universally splits Catholic and Protestant theologians?

BISHOP BARRON: No. I think there are some implications there, but I wouldn't see it as like the sort of falling or standing point between . . .

FOLLOWUP: One gets the impression from the conversation that maybe most Protestants have a problem with divine simplicity as far as the theologians.

DR. CRAIG: Well, Thomism.

UNKNOWN: Most Protestants and most Catholics do not understand it.

BISHOP BARRON: But I do think rightly understood it's a hinge point. It's an extremely . . . it's Thomas' way of naming what's really distinctive to God, and we can't define God, but what's distinctive to God. The best we can do is to name this issue. God is the absolutely unique reality in which essence and existence coincide. Everything else is a creature.

QUESTION: I know you pointed to some of them, but what other significant major theological issues turn on that hinge?

BISHOP BARRON: To me it is that competitiveness. This goes back to Robert Sokolowski. The ipsum esse is a non-competitively transcendent reality. That's to say transcendent to the world; God is not the world. God is totaliter aliter. Not the way that the planet Jupiter is not the planet Earth. Just set at a distance apart from. Augustine – that God is superior [...]. That’s the hinge. God is higher than anything I can possibly imagine, and he's closer to me than I am to myself. That's possible only if God exists in this absolutely unique way. I would say non-contrastively or non-competitively transcendent to the world. I think a lot then hinges on that. As I was suggesting, when we start thinking of God over and against us all sorts of problems begin to arise. I go back to Irenaeus. When you say gloria Dei homo vivens – God's glory is more fully alive. It's not as though God's glory is bought at a price of creaturely degradation, the more the creature is enhanced, the more God is glorified. That signals something very unique about God.

QUESTION: One thing I want to add is you made the application of divine simplicity to the incarnation. I think that's actually where things get even more interesting. Because I think that the whole issue of the non-competitive thing really clarifies for me the whole Eucharistic debates between Protestants and Catholics. That's something that I write on, but it seems like that whole understanding . . .  I've used the Chalcedonian formula of the two natures – leaving out the two natures-two persons and the one nature-one person – so leaving out the Nestorians and monophysites – we have the Chalcedonian formula that stands. They argue about it during the 16th century Reformation. In the end the whole notion of the transubstantiation in the Eucharist – so the incarnation comes up again in the practice of the Eucharist. The question that's debated over and over is how is Christ present? I think this is where . . . the difference actually comes up again and it's around this competitive/non-competitive aspect because transubstantiation (which is the traditional Catholic doctrine about what is happening and how Chris is present in the Lord's Supper) understands that the essence of God is there somehow. The substance of God is there. But you still see the cup and you still see the bread, but those are the accidents. But Protestants do see it as competitive. For them if Christ is fully human, if you really want to embrace the incarnation fully and say Christ is human, then Christ also has to have human properties. So the issue of location is where competition comes up. How can Christ be at the right hand of the Father? How can Christ be in the supper? Then this becomes one of the debates. I think divine simplicity, when you say it's a hinge, it also becomes a hinge in something like the doctrine of the Eucharist.

BISHOP BARRON: It's a huge thing you are opening up there, but I do think you're right that in both the incarnation and sacramental theology there are very important implications. If we get the doctrine of God wrong then other things start falling down, too. So I think that's quite right. I think that non-competitiveness has been a hinge up and down the centuries. How do you read that?

QUESTION: Where would Eastern Orthodoxy fall with the Thomistic divine simplicity? Because they have the essence . . . distinction?

BISHOP BARRON: Uneasy for different reasons. [...] depart from Aquinas in significant ways. I wouldn't claim any expertise to go much beyond that but they are uneasy. They take maybe a hyper-rationalism of Aquinas for one thing and the whole essence-[energies] debate. That’s a whole kettle of fish I wouldn’t want to open right now.

QUESTION: The Cappadocian fathers – are they compatible with the Thomistic doctrine of divine simplicity?

BISHOP BARRON: On what issue?

FOLLOWUP: It's often said that there's more emphasis on the threeness of God in the Cappadocian fathers than what you get in the West. Would the understanding of God that you find in the Cappadocian fathers being with divine simplicity fit in with Thomistic/Thomas’ understanding?

UNKNOWN: I’m not aware that they said anything that is relevant to that.

FOLLOWUP: They may not.

UNKNOWN: I don’t think they do.

UNKNOWN: Does it seem right that St. Thomas’ treatise on the Trinity and the divine simplicity is key to understanding the procession of persons in the divinity? If it weren’t for the divine simplicity, the Word would not be God. . . . he argues for the fact that God's act of understanding is the same as his essence but the Word that comes forth in the divinity has to be God.

BISHOP BARRON: To keep simplicity, he’s got to say the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not parts.

FOLLOWUP: That’s right. And his Word is not like our word.

UNKNOWN: But also to keep monotheism.

DR. CRAIG: It seems to me that with respect to the incarnation, the doctrine of simplicity makes the doctrine of the incarnation all the more difficult if not impossible because the doctrine of the incarnation is that the second person of the Trinity assumed a human nature. Right? He has a nature – and that's exactly what divine simplicity denies. God's essence is his pure act of being. So how does the second person of the Trinity have a nature? He's got human properties.

UNKNOWN: He doesn’t turn into a creature.

DR. CRAIG: That's the other point I wanted to make. I think you gave a false analogy that just jumped out at me as you were reading your paper. I hadn't noticed it before. On the last page, “We could speak of one creaturely nature becoming another only through some process of destruction and assimilation.” It struck me – that's not analogous to the incarnation. The doctrine of the incarnation is not that the divine nature turned into a human nature. That kenoticism. So what we want to say is when you say “How can his nature come together non-competitively with a created nature?” – by having both natures possessed by the same hypostasis. One person has a divine nature and a human nature. So there's no problem. But the problem with being simple is he can't have any properties – human or divine.

UNKNOWN: I don't think St. Thomas, when he says God's essence is the same as his existence, is denying that God has an essence.

UNKNOWN: His essence is to be.

UNKNOWN: I guess what you are saying is every creature has a distinction between essence and existence because they’ve received their existence. But God does not . . . so there is no real distinction there.

DR. CRAIG: That’s the difficult . . . well, that is the doctrine, isn’t it? His essence is “to be.”

UNKNOWN: His existence is not something received. The first being can’t receive his existence.

DR. CRAIG: I think what Steve and I have been emphasizing is you don't have to affirm divine simplicity to affirm things like divine aseity and metaphysical necessity. These are affirmed by non-Thomists.

UNKNOWN: I think the worry is that if you hold to divine necessity and you also hold on to there is some kind of act-potency distinction in God that in fact what happens is you have one thread of the sweater and if you start pulling it the necessity comes apart because if the being is composed of act and potency there has to be some principle by which that composition is made. So in other words, every composed entity has some sort of composer – some sort of principle by which it has its unity. So the trouble is that God's necessity ends up being undermined unless we also affirm that in God there is no act in potency . . .

UNKNOWN: The difficulty is to see that creatures actually have a composition of essence and esse.

DR. CRAIG: That’s what I think we ought to . . .

UNKNOWN: That’s what I think is really the thing that is a point of difficulty. If people agree on that I think we agree on the rest.

BISHOP BARRON: Do we exist in a limited way? Do we exist in a definable way? For Aquinas my actus essendi are received and delimited precisely by the potency principle of essence. That's why I'm different than God. God can’t [as a being receive] in such a way. Otherwise then all the potency-act stuff kicks in and we have to find a cause that brings them together and so on. That's his problem.

UNKNOWN: Nothing is his own limit. So if you have unlimited or infinite being, that's what God would have to be. If you've got a finite being, a limited being, you're going to have to have something other than just the existence which is sort of the capstone in which it exists. That’s the essence. Those are different things.

MODERATOR: We’re almost out of time for this segment. But I do want to make sure – is there anyone who hasn't gotten into the discussion who’d like to before we close down this first half. Would either of you like to say another word about this?

UNKNOWN: You're wrong.

[laughter]

BISHOP BARRON: I'm just delighted. Thank you. I appreciate it very much. I think it's a very stimulating conversation. I do think it's an important point. What I feel strongly about in ecumenical conversations – I've been in a lot of them – what I call ecumenism 1.0 is that we can get together around a table and not hurl [anathemism], we're friendly, and all that which I think is great. But I always say let's get to ecumenism 2.0 where we can really start engaging issues and what I love about this issue is it's behind the 16th century. It's not the immediate 16th century – justification, sacraments, and so on. It's a deeper issue that does inform those. So I'm just delighted to have a conversation like this.