PRESIDENT'S ESSAY
Substance or Tune?
POSTED
July 22, 2024

Jonathan Edwards didn’t think the world is a machine. At the heart of the mechanistic interpretation of Newtonian physics, he discerned, was the notion that “bodies” are (in Robert Jenson’s words) “the sort of thing that either can or cannot act ‘properly by themselves.’”

The mechanistic world picture involved an “unthinking application of the ancient Western notion of substance to physics’ conception masses in motion” (America’s Theologian, 25).

Substance, Edwards discerned, “is part of a notion of deity, so that its application elsewhere is either polytheism or mere confusion.” If philosophers use the word at all, Edwards said, they should use it of God.

Everything else should be “demythologized”: “there are no little self-sufficient agencies beside God, natural entities are not godlets, and therefore the world harmony is not self-contained” (25-6). In a Christian framework, only God can act “properly by Himself.”

Jenson thinks Edwards is right to be suspicious of “substance.” The Greeks used the word to describe anything that remains the same through time: “A substance is the possessor and asserter of its attributes, maintaining itself in being by the security of its grip upon them.”

A chair is a substance because it is “stable, can uprightly accommodate”; it remains a chair so long as it retains these qualities. In short, “to say that something is a substance is to say that it possesses and asserts itself against time; the constitutive hopes are of self-retention and persistence.”

In the fullest sense, “only immortal entities” are substances – only the gods or their “philosophical sublimations.” When Greek thinkers used “substance” to describe all reality things, they intended to say all things are potentially divine (26).

Adopting the theological concept of “substance” was thus a “chief misstep” of early Christianity. In the sense the Greeks used it, “substance” cannot accurately be applied to the God of the gospel, since He is “not God by his self-preservation and immunity to history – quite the contrary.”

The “baneful influence” of substance was mitigated by the doctrine of the Trinity, but the use of the category in both theology and metaphysics produced intractable problems (26).

Jenson summarizes: “‘Substance’ is a God-concept. In older Christian thought, its use of others than God was tolerable, since all remained within the economy of history and its personal agents, open and correlated to the gospel’s active and purposeful God. It is the elevation of an ahistorical and therefore purposeless world-system and its constituents to the title of substance that is the nihilist strain in vulgar modernity. That atoms or other masses should be, even if created once upon a time, self-possessing in their being and action denies God, whatever else may be asserted” (26-7).

What’s the alternative? Edwards and Jenson turn to musical analogies. The world order is a harmonization on the Supreme Harmony of the Trinity. As Jenson says (Systematic Theology, 2.39): “to be a creature is to belong to the counterpoint and harmony of the triune music.”

Jenson doesn’t mean this in a “metaphorical” as opposed to conceptual or metaphysical sense. After all, “there is no a priori reason why, for example, ‘substance’ – which after all simply mean ‘what holds something up’ – should be apt for conscription into metaphysical service and, for example, ‘tune’ should not.” No reason at all.

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