Bruce L. McCormack

Overview

Bruce Lindley McCormack (b. 1952) is an American Presbyterian systematic theologian and interpreter of Karl Barth. Steven J. Duby names him, alongside Paul Molnar and George Hunsinger, among the contemporary interpreters of Barth whose competing readings of Barth’s doctrine of election he declines to adjudicate between.¹ McCormack is best known for a constructive proposal, built on his reading of Barth’s doctrine of election, that revises the classical Christian account of God’s being in favor of grounding it in God’s self-determination in Jesus Christ.² The proposal has drawn sustained engagement, much of it critical, from theologians defending a more classical account of God.³

Life and Ministry

McCormack was born November 27, 1952, in Peru, Indiana.⁴ He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics/business administration and religion from Point Loma Nazarene University in 1976, followed by a Master of Divinity from Nazarene Theological Seminary in 1980.⁴ He completed a PhD at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1989 with a dissertation on the development of Barth’s theology between 1921 and 1931.⁴

He served as Lecturer in Reformed Theology at the University of Edinburgh from 1987 to 1991, then joined the faculty of Princeton Theological Seminary, where he held the Weyerhaeuser professorship in systematic theology and, from 2009, the Charles Hodge Professorship of Systematic Theology, until 2022.⁴ He has since taken the Chair in Modern Theology at the University of Aberdeen.⁴ In 1998 he received the Karl Barth Prize from the Evangelical Church of the Union in Germany, awarded for his book Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909-1936 (1995), and in 2004 he received an honorary doctorate from Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena, Germany.⁴

Theological Contribution

Christology and Reformed Kenoticism

McCormack argues for an essential, not merely economic, relation between the immanent and economic Trinity: no “metaphysical gap” separates the eternal Trinity from what is revealed of God in the economy, so that metaphysical terms must be defined in light of God’s “lived relation to the world in Jesus Christ” rather than in advance of it.⁵ On this basis, in The Humility of the Eternal Son: Reformed Kenoticism and the Repair of Chalcedon (2021), he argues that the Chalcedonian Definition’s reliance on a Logos asarkos, the Word considered apart from the incarnation, produces an unresolved “two-subject” disunity in the person of Christ, and proposes a revised, kenotic Christology in its place.⁶

The Ontology of Election

Central to McCormack’s project is a revision of classical “substantialist” ontology. Following Barth’s claim that Christ is “the electing God himself” and that there is “no such thing as Godhead in itself” apart from this election,³ McCormack holds that God’s being is constituted by his eternal, free self-determination to be, in Christ, “the God who redeems in Jesus Christ.”⁷ He presents this as resolving what he takes to be an inconsistency in Barth’s own theology between an earlier, more traditional doctrine of the Trinity and Barth’s later, historicized Christology, framing the question as whether “the earlier doctrine of the Trinity really provide[s] the ontological ground for the later Christology.”⁸ McCormack has pressed this reading of Barth against fellow interpreters, including a direct exchange with George Hunsinger over whether election has this kind of ontological priority over the Trinity.⁹

Divine (Im)passibility

McCormack’s revision of divine being carries over into the doctrine of impassibility. Where classical theism holds that God cannot suffer, McCormack’s system “entails passibility,”¹⁰ a position he has developed under the label of divine “constancy” rather than strict impassibility.¹¹ He has, however, also argued against open theism, on the grounds that open theists retain classical assumptions about God’s being that are inconsistent with their own rejection of classical theism, and that a Barth-style revision of metaphysics, rather than open theism’s, better resolves the inconsistency.¹²

Historical Significance

McCormack’s reading of Barth on election and the Trinity has drawn responses from both fellow Barth interpreters and defenders of classical theism. Steven J. Duby argues that McCormack’s account, in following Barth’s own claim that election precedes “the being and will and word of Christ,” ends up compromising divine aseity and freedom in the incarnation, and commends the Reformed alternatives offered by John Owen and Thomas Goodwin, who located the incarnation’s grounds in God’s free decree without making God’s own being dependent on it.¹³

Alex Charles Tibbott’s 2024 dissertation devotes an extended section to McCormack, evaluating his Christology, ontology, and doctrine of impassibility against Francis Turretin’s classical theism.² Tibbott argues that McCormack’s account of God’s self-determination in election makes creation necessary to God’s own constitution, since on McCormack’s account the Son is “completed” only in the incarnation, which Tibbott takes to compromise God’s freedom to create or not create.¹⁴ Tibbott further argues that McCormack’s rejection of the classical Creator-creature distinction, in favor of grounding the knowledge of God solely in Christ’s economic relation to the world, leaves no way to affirm that God’s decision to create was genuinely free, since a free decision requires a God who can be considered apart from that decision, which McCormack’s method sets aside.¹⁵

Related Doctrines

References

Steven J. Duby, God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian Theology, Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), chap. 3, “Incarnation in Context,” 177. ↩
Alex Charles Tibbott, “Turretin in Conversation,” in “De Impassibilitate Et Satisfactione: An Examination of the Methodological Implications of Trinitarian Classical Theism for the Doctrine of the Atonement” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2024), 269. ↩ ↩²
Duby, God in Himself, chap. 3, “Incarnation in Context,” 173-74. ↩ ↩²
Wikipedia, s.v. “Bruce L. McCormack,” accessed August 31, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_L._McCormack. The Theopedia Library holds no dedicated biographical treatment of McCormack’s life; Princeton Theological Seminary’s own faculty page was attempted first and blocked by this session’s network access, so this entry was the only source available for these biographical facts (dates, institutions, degrees, posts). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
Bruce L. McCormack, The Humility of the Eternal Son: Reformed Kenoticism and the Repair of Chalcedon, Current Issues in Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 7-8, quoted in Tibbott, “Turretin in Conversation,” 269. ↩
Tibbott, “Turretin in Conversation,” 271-72, citing McCormack, The Humility of the Eternal Son, 63. ↩
Tibbott, “Turretin in Conversation,” 274. ↩
Bruce L. McCormack, quoted in Tibbott, “Atonement and Impassibility: A Literature Review,” in “De Impassibilitate Et Satisfactione” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2024), 21. ↩
Bruce L. McCormack, “Election and the Trinity: Theses in Response to George Hunsinger,” Scottish Journal of Theology 63 (2010): 203-24, cited in Duby, God in Himself, “Bibliography,” 310. ↩
Tibbott, “Turretin in Conversation,” 276. ↩
Bruce L. McCormack, “Divine Impassibility or Simply Divine Constancy? Implications of Karl Barth’s Later Christology for Debates over Impassibility,” in Divine Impassibility and the Mystery of Human Suffering, ed. James F. Keating and Thomas Joseph White (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 150-86, cited in Duby, God in Himself, “Bibliography,” 310. ↩
Bruce L. McCormack, “The Actuality of God: Karl Barth in Conversation with Open Theism,” in Engaging the Doctrine of God: Contemporary Protestant Perspectives, ed. Bruce L. McCormack (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 185-242, cited in Tibbott, “Atonement and Impassibility: A Literature Review,” 20-21. ↩
Duby, God in Himself, chap. 3, “Incarnation in Context,” 174-75. ↩
Tibbott, “Turretin in Conversation,” 274-75. ↩
Tibbott, “Turretin in Conversation,” 275-76. ↩