What should we say about the traditional notion of the analogy of being, rejected vigorously by the very different Reformed theologians, Karl Barth and Cornelius Van Til?  Some initial thoughts follow:

1) The Bible gets along just fine without saying God is “Being itself.”  So can we.  On the other hand, the Bible never says “homoousion” either, and yet we confess that.  “God is Being” is part of the Christian tradition, and so we need to grapple with it.  The question is, is what theologians are getting at with saying “God is Being” a biblical truth about God?

2) Van Til and other Reformed thinkers tend to take “analogy of being” and “God is Being” as a univocal statement.  That is, they take it in a Scotist (or, to hedge, in an allegedly Scotist) sense.  Being is the master category that encompasses both God and creation; God just has more of the stuff called being than the creation does.  This is a problem because a) there is something “bigger” than God and b) it puts God within a scale-of-being framework and therefore violates the doctrine of creation.

3) But this is not what Thomas and others mean when they say “analogy of Being” or “God is Being.”

Analogy of being means precisely that the line of analogy runs between the way God is and the way creatures are.  God exists and creatures exist, but when we say that we aren’t using “exist” univocally.  If we were, we’d be talking like Scotists and not like Thomists.  God exists as Creator, Sovereign Lord, eternal Trinity, etc; we exist as dependent creatures.  Understood in this way, “analogy of being” seems to be pretty much what Van Til is getting at by making the Creator-creature distinction basic to all theology.  If we say “analogy” when we are talking about God’s power, goodness, justice, love, etc, why not say it when we are talking about His existence?

4) What about “God is Being”?  For much of the Christian tradition, “being” is opposed to “becoming.”  Creatures are becoming in the sense that they are not completely in act, not completely actualized as the creatures they are.  Humans have potentialities that are not realized, or not yet realized; therefore, human beings are not fully “being” but are composites of being and becoming.  God isn’t like that.  He is fully actualized, with no unrealized or hidden potentialities.  He is not “becoming” but simply is.  Therefore He is being.

5) Now, is #4 correct?  Jenson says Yes, and adds that for Thomas, God’s essence is His existence; He doesn’t have existence, but simply is.  Jenson wants to flip that, and say also that God’s existence is His essence, that is, the essence of God is the act of existing, the abundance of life among the Father, Son and Spirit.  To say “God is Being” is thus for Jenson to say that God is His act of existing.