God and Creation in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth

God's simplicity and perfection shapes both God's distinctive relation to creation and how theologians properly acknowledge this distinctiveness in thought.

This book explains how Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth help us understand God's distinction from and relation to creation through fresh, attentive readings of their theology of God and God's works and its philosophical entailments. It will interest readers of both figures, contemporary theology and metaphysics, and ecumenical dialogue.The legacies of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth remain influential for contemporary theologians, who have increasingly put them into conversation on debated questions over analogy and the knowledge of God. However, little explicit dialogue has occurred between their theologies of God. This book offers one of the first extended analyzes of this fundamental issue, asking how each theologian seeks to confess in fact and in thought God's qualitative distinctiveness in relation to creation. Wittman first examines how they understand the correspondence and distinction between God's being and external acts within an overarching concern to avoid idolatry. Second, he analyzes the kind of relation God bears to creation that follows from these respective understandings. Despite many common goals, Aquinas and Barth ultimately differ on the subject matter of theological reason with consequences for their ability to uphold God's distinctiveness consistently. These mutually informative issues offer some important lessons for contemporary theology.