Seeing by the Light: Illumination in Augustine’s and Barth’s Readings of John
By Ike Miller
IVP Academic, 2020
248 pages (paperback), $35.00
If one has read only the Institutes of John Calvin, it may come as a surprise when Calvin writes in his commentary on the Gospel of John that in his exegesis “Augustine . . . is excessively addicted to the philosophy of Plato.” Many following in the wake of Calvin’s thought have therefore seen fit to disregard the sermons and exegesis of Augustine, focusing their attention solely on his more well-known works: City of God, Confessions, and On the Trinity. It is indeed not without reason that these wise and learned works have taken the center of attention in most modern appropriations of Augustinian thought, but the African bishop offers much more.
Despite the weight of history and the harsh judgment from someone like Calvin, Ike Miller undertakes to explore Augustine’s doctrine of illumination through his exegesis of John in the collection known as the Tractates on John. While this is not the first study of the Tractates on John, it certainly is a neglected area within Augustinian studies. The quote from Calvin seems more apt when one considers that the doctrine of illumination is itself connected to the underlying Platonic elements of Augustine’s thought. Miller boldly moves past these concerns to find much of value for the contemporary Christian in Augustine’s preaching and exegesis.
Miller’s study seeks to remap not only the oft-forgotten territory in Augustine, but that of the great Swiss theologian Herr Karl Barth as well. Many know Barth more for his dogmatic treatises than his lectures on John, which to this point had gone untranslated into English from the original German. Both Barth and Augustine in their exegesis on the Gospel of John expound on their understanding of how Christ, the light of the world, illumines his chosen ones and retrieves them from their own self-inflicted darkness. What better Gospel than John to explore how Christ accomplishes this in his earthly sojourn?
Moving to the work itself, Miller conceives of this ambitious project in three parts. He moves chronologically from Augustine to Barth, and he completes the study with his own dogmatic proposal rooted in Scripture to fit within the IVP Academic series focused on Christian doctrine and Scripture. Before embarking on his journey into the doctrine of illumination, Miller carefully demarcates his boundaries. Critical for him is the definition of illumination, which in his own proposal means “human participation in the Son’s knowledge of the Father by the power of the Holy Spirit” (1). As Miller continues to give his justification for the study, he importantly highlights that illumination is more than simply cognitive but affective as well (3).
To expound and explore the affective element, Miller draws attention to the ways in which Augustine conceives of illumination in more than purely cognitive terms. Barth’s emphasis on revelation and regeneration provides a necessary expansion on illumination. It is worth noting that, although Miller mentions the fact that Barth engages with Augustine directly in the first part of his lectures on the Gospel of John, he does not give any citation to explore exactly how Barth understood Augustine (4). This reviewer would have liked to see in what ways Barth assessed Augustine. Miller also establishes the pericopes that offer the most poignant places for constructing his dogmatic proposal (John 1:1–18; 3:1–21; 4:1–42; 9:1–41; 20:11–18; 21:12–13). As he progresses through the study, he looks at those passages in Augustine and Barth.
To organize and aid the reader in sorting through Augustine’s method of interpretation, Miller creates a tripartite structure based on his analysis of Augustine’s sermons. He argues that to make sense of how Augustine preaches and explains Scripture, one must recognize that he works on literal-historical, salvation-historical, and rhetorical-historical levels. This is an admirable and novel attempt at explaining Augustine’s approach, but this reviewer found the appendage of the historical as inconsistent among the three. More to the point, the analysis lacked an engagement with other studies of Augustine on preaching, which indicates that Augustine understood himself as a kind of spiritual guide to union with God—what Michael Cameron calls “mystagogy” or Paul Kolbet calls “psychogagy.”
Having set forth his heuristic for interpreting Augustine as preacher, Miller moves through the selected passages of John to describe Augustine’s account of illumination. For want of space, I will highlight only a few insightful sections. In the pericope about Nicodemus, Miller notes that “human blindness to God was not due to the light’s absence from humankind, but humankind’s absence from the light” (37). When discussing the woman at the well, Miller bids us to look at ourselves in the place of the woman in Augustine’s salvation-historical reading of the passage. Rather than chastising Augustine for his “allegorical” interpretation, as Calvin is wont to do, Miller finds Augustine’s reading beneficial insofar as it helps readers enter into the story in a more spiritual way (45–47). He concludes his rehearsal of Augustine’s exegesis by noting, “Christ the Logos is both the light we see and the means by which we see it” (53).
The final section on Augustine draws out the more enduring elements of Augustine’s doctrine of illumination—the most significant of which is the notion of participation. As Miller reads Augustine, the participation that Christians have in Christ is a graced participation, not strictly speaking ontological but by adoption. Miller discusses this participation in five ways, but he relegates the importance of the church to a footnote (68). (In my conversation with Dr. Miller, he discussed how this probably reflected his own emphases, and he struggled with whether to include this in the main body of the text.)
Part 2 of the work is probably the most significant in terms of its contribution to historical readings of theologians. Miller is the first to write a sustained engagement with Barth’s previously untranslated lectures on the Gospel of John. Furthermore, as he proceeds into Barth’s dogmatic proposals, Miller finds significant passages in the Church Dogmatics to construct a more robust pneumatology from Barth. This has long been a critique of Barth, and Miller goes some way to addressing that need.
The most noteworthy reason to choose a study of John is that Barth was developing his own theological method while lecturing on the Gospel of John. Miller summarizes Barth’s emphasis: “He asserted that the Bible has one, single, indivisible subject matter—the revelation of God in Jesus Christ” (78). Barth thus does not seek to get behind the text but to be confronted by God in the text. As Miller moves to Barth’s exegesis of John, he highlights that the “Word creates its own hearers” in the Holy Spirit (92). Once the Spirit begins this work, “it commands obedience not in coercion or by threat. . . . Obedience is the manifestation of received revelation. Obedience is ‘knowledge in action’” (120). In sum, he deftly works the importance of the Spirit into Barth’s reading of the Gospel of John and the process of illumination. In his final section on Barth, Miller helpfully summarizes Barth’s position: “The product of illumination is faith and obedience, and the ultimate aim is union with Christ” (123). He expounds on this to argue, though, that we should not assume it ends with Spirit; in the end, it is truly Trinitarian in nature.
After a brief section going through the Gospel of John on his own and a short excursus on the topic throughout the entirety of Scripture, Miller offers his own proposal: “Illumination is participation in the Son’s knowledge of the Father by the power of the Holy Spirit. Participation in this knowledge is implicit in the faith and obedience of the participant” (178). Leaning heavily on Barth and John, Miller’s proposal helpfully reminds Christians to consider the fullness of participation in divine illumination, obedience, and communion, in addition to the cognitive aspects of illumination.
I would have liked to hear more about why Miller explicitly rejects the “ontological” nature of participation. Speaking specifically about Augustine, David Meconi has shown that Augustine has a robust doctrine of deification, which would certainly include an ontological participation in God. It seems that more work could be helpful in defining how exactly this participation (whether ontological or not) relates to the church. Though Miller mentions baptism in his section on Augustine, one wonders what difference an ecclesiological rootedness might make for the doctrine of illumination.
In conclusion, Miller certainly offers much to those who want to consider the doctrine of illumination and especially an engagement with an obviously important text from Barth, one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century.
Charles Kim Jr. holds a PhD (Saint Louis University) in historical theology focusing on Saint Augustine of Hippo’s theology of preaching. He is the host and creator of the podcast A History of Christian Theology. To listen to his conversation with Ike Miller, visit https://ahistoryofchristiantheology.podomatic.com/.
