How to fortify Christian imagination for life-giving engagement with God and the world He loves
Talk about God is delightful and difficult. It is difficult in a world in which legitimate explanation does not include recourse to God.[1] That puts Christians (and I think people of all faith traditions) on the defensive. So much of what Christians write these days in the West seems defensive – unduly methodological, halting, preamble, throat-clearing.[2] Apologetic is the mode of most Christian theologies. Apologetic theologies work to show a secular public that belief in God and the Gospel is consistent with other kinds of knowledge and the perceived priorities and needs and desires of today. It is not so much that theologians make arguments or confessions about what is true; it is more that they want to demonstrate the meaningfulness of the faith on terms set by dominant systems of thought or current issues. Translation of the content of Christian confession into a more general idiom for broader appeal and availability and, above all, meaning is usually the apologetic project. The desire seems a sound one, indeed almost a missional one.
The irony is that while this strategy aims to demonstrate relevance to our “cultured despisers,” it comes across as needy and, worse still, boring. At times it reduces all religion to the outward expression of inner feeling, a private matter out of public view and influence. It often gives the impression that Christians do not have anything to say or feel or think that a good atheist does not already grasp from affective delight, one of the multiple forms of authentic individualism, or current cultural causes. We imagine apologetic theology as heroic, edgy and courageous, when in fact it has become a more-or-less sophisticated act of conformity to the ambiance of moment. Christians often end up in a reductive-therapeutic-theistic fog when the solvent of relevance-to-the-moment and “public”[3] norms of intelligibility dissolve Christian confession. Instead of the spicy particularity of the Triune God, who comes among us as Jesus to rescue us from ruin and effect the transformation of all things, we can get a saccharine, same-saying substitute. We aim at relevance; we get redundance. It isn’t that we don’t want to engage and make a difference in the world at opportune moments. It is just that we are tempted to a certain cultural respectability which mutes the always awkward relevance that questions, challenges and upends the prevailing wisdom of the spirit of the age.
“The delightful oddness of Christian theology is doped down when we get too anxious about providing answers to the questions of the time.”
This conformity is a problem for the church. It means that instead of expanding the imaginative register of our time and place with humane Gospel-generated options, we appear to be serving up what everyone already knows better from elsewhere. Remember we live in a time when six of the seven deadly sins are medical conditions — and pride is a virtue. Philosophical systems, therapeutic expressions and cultural causes become the template into which Christian confession is pressed and the unique story of Scripture is denuded of its life-giving offer. Flannery O’Connor said, “you will know the truth, and the truth will make you odd.” The delightful oddness of Christian theology is doped down when we get too anxious about providing answers to the questions of the time. Theology becomes uninteresting when we think of the Christian faith as answerable to an obligatory God-bereft picture of the world and its problems.
I suspect, instead, that a patient exposition of the content of Christian faith raises the most pertinent questions. The burning issues of the day arise from a Gospel reading of the world. Christian relevance is best demonstrated in the prophetic tension that confession of the God of the Gospel creates with the times, systems of thought and causes that are in circulation. Vive la différence is a more faithful approach to theological endeavour in the light of the incarnation of the Son of God, Jesus of Nazareth. And strangely, the relevance of Christian confession to the “situation” may be best demonstrated by the distinct sense-making contributions, the framing of where in the world we are, that Christians can make to cultural common life out of the distinct shape of Christian confession. The most boring conversations are between people who agree about everything.
In what follows, I want to address some of the intellectual and practical temptations that theology faces and detail some of the practices and convictions that might help hold us accountable to the odd particularity of Christian confession when we engage in theological study. The recommendation of these practices is rooted in the subject matter of theology: God. Just before that, I want to anticipate two possible objections. There are at least two things that holding ourselves accountable to Christian particularity, an unapologetic approach to Christian theology, does not mean.
First: this approach does not mean that we absent ourselves from interdisciplinary study and engagement, from ad hoc borrowings and learning from various fields of endeavour and from joint-efforts with a series of conversation partners. Christians have always taught the faith in the language and thought forms of their time. It is not only unavoidable, it is desirable. We want to communicate the meaning of our confession. At their worst our predecessors got co-opted by the thought forms of the time and confused that with Christian confession. At their best, our forebearers in the faith bent those thought forms into the service of the grammar of Christian confession. They used the language and concepts available in their day to make the same theological judgments the Bible does about God, and everything else in relation to God, in a language appropriate to their time and place. That’s not translation; it is more re-description and reiteration.[4] It is andenken,[5] thinking the thoughts of Scripture after Scripture, a sort of intellectual-spiritual discipleship in which redeemed reason follows the story and provides commentary that always directs attention back to the story Scripture tells and never dispenses with the story for another system or idiom or ethos. As much as our mothers and fathers in the faith wanted to communicate to their contemporaries, it was even more important to be guided by the subject matter of the faith. And so, they bent and contorted language and concepts – “they dug out of the mines of God’s providence, which are everywhere scattered abroad”[6] – to serve faithful communication of the content of Christian confession, even if that meant hearers became disoriented by recontextualized use of terms. Fidelity to the system from which language was borrowed got subverted, in the best cases, to the grammar of the Christian story as scripture tells it. Sometimes to get what the Christian message entails nothing less than conversion, detoxification and a senior seminar (catechesis) are required.
Second: holding to Christian particularity, even before audience engagement and internalizing the so-called public norms of intelligibility, does not inhibit Christian participation in public life. Christian theology wants to engage in public life and witness since God loves the world. In the pluralistic society in which we live, we ought to look for partners as we witness to the Reign of God and the coming reconciliation of all things through Jesus Christ. And we can do this with all sorts of humane movements of our time. People who do not share Christian convictions also work for the good of the world in ways Christians recognize as consistent with the faith Christians confess. Where we observe common cause or “overlapping consensus”[7] around seminal issues or challenges, we share in the work in Jesus’ name with our neighbours. People of other faiths and of good will have their own motivations and interests born of deep conviction, as do Christians. The motivations may not be the same but the commitment to the work of human fullness in specific instances will be the same. Swiss Theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968) asserted that because of unconditioned commitment to Jesus Christ, Christians necessarily have provisional commitments to a whole series of movements that help human rights and worth in the world.[8] Parables of grace are all over the place in God’s good world when we look at the world through the Gospel.
“God enters our context to not confirm it, but to alter it, to reconcile and overturn it.”
And so, let’s return practices and convictions that foster and fortify Christian imagination for life-giving engagement with God and the world God loves. We can work these in any order since they are connected and overlap. There are at least five: 1) keep God central in theological thinking; 2) engage in charitable reading; 3) pray to be permeable – for conversation and transformation; 4) stay specific to Christian confession and; 5) God is excellent at revelation.
Keep God Central in Theological Thinking
Karl Barth said, “Theology is not anthropology spoken in a really loud voice.”[9] The subject matter of theology is God, and then everything else in relation to God. Barth spotted a problem that is still very much with us. We start off intending to speak of God and then subtly but surely begin to transfer the weight to anthropology – our morals, our experiences, our causes. We even apply for grants to study the physiological and biochemistry of religious experiences and then compare them with other experiences of heightened consciousness so that they become an instance of a class of human experience. We inquire after the social function of religion in descriptive fashion that focuses only on human actors and historical artifacts. “Did hyssop grow in Palestine?” “Does this reflect a Hittite suzerainty treaty?” These kinds of studies serve some good ends – the ends of moving beyond excavation to exegesis. They could matter to the theological exegesis of Scripture. However, excavation is not theology since attention here is not on God as the subject of the text and the active agent in interpretation, but the social world of a text’s production.[10] The subject matter of theology is God. Theologians, while not unconcerned with religious experience and aspects of the ancient world, focus their attention not just on the generated but on the generative. We rivet our attention on the ways and works of the Triune God as these are revealed to us through Holy Scripture in the power of the Spirit and witnessed to in the history of the church’s testimony. For this very reason, theology sits uncomfortably on the campus of a university. God is a difficult subject matter and so often the closer theology gets to the university, the more colonized by the “immanent frame”[11] it becomes. Instead of Scripture study, we get Biblical studies. Instead of theological study, we get religious studies. The defining feature of both moves is that it precludes speech about God; it brackets God out of consideration in the interest of objectivity which is really agnosticism as default position.
Those who have been educated lately know that “context is everything.” We post-moderns understand the situatedness of all work, all our interpretation, all our claims. We do not live above history and culture, no one, except God, has a God’s eye point of view. We interpret Scripture and theological texts with agendas and in the light of problems of a time and place, which is as it should be. The trouble arises when we universalize from our context, get imperious about our interpretative vantage point and impress it on other people (by “saming” them). This inhibits their opportunity to hear a word from God in their time and place and culture and give expression to the good-news as the people they are. Colonial impress has often led to imposition and violence on the part of those who would enforce their interpretation on the world. The latter move is especially perverse when Christianity gets mixed up with the imperial aspirations of the regnant order and overrides the dignity and humanity of other people in the guise of paternalism.[12] These important recognitions have become central to much theologizing of the late 20th and early 21st century. They are now collectively, a point of departure and unfortunately, at times, they have become a destination.
One of the challenges that accompanies these observations is that we have so foregrounded context, the self-description and cultural place of readers and interpreters, that the subject matter of theology, God, gets marginalized. The self-description of the interpreting subject or subjects and their projects overwhelm the interpreted subject matter. We can end up studying lenses (the perspective or world placement of the interpreters) and not what is looked at. I think there are at least four doctrinal considerations which insert themselves into this problematic.
First, identity in the history of the Christian church is grounded in baptism. We are, through the miracle of the grace of adoption, children of God. As the baptized, we are engrafted into Christ and the household of faith and therefore we do theology as children of God, first and foremost. Baptism is what gives theology its character as faith seeking understanding.
Second, while we are creatures and so located in history and time and culture with a variety of secondary identities, our primary context as the history of Christian confession teaches is “before God” (Coram Deo).[13] Whatever the microclimate of our confession, we live before God, in the presence of the one who loves the world, who sent the Son for the reconciliation of all things, and who gives the Spirit of adoption and mission. That’s our context.
Third, the fellowship of the saints extends through time and space in the power of the Spirit. We need to beware of so articulating our identity, our time, our culture, our church that we cut ourselves off from the interpretative fellowship of the saints, both the living and the dead. While other Christian communities through time and across the world now each have or had their own situation in which to confess, their language about God is truth-intending, it gestures toward the God revealed in Jesus Christ, especially in praise and adoration. Catholicity implies that we approach them and include them, not to globalize Western church norms and struggles[14] but in a spirit of humility and teachableness with a willingness to repent for the error of our ways. None of us gestures in words and witness toward the triune God perfectly or without group-interest or error, sometimes serious and pernicious error; but that is precisely why we need to listen and speak with the church catholic.
Fourth, the church has a mission to witness to the reconciling action of God in Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit and so has something to say to the context. Douglas John Hall, in many ways a parent of contextual theology in Canada, has noted the perils of this good idea. He notes the tendency to treat context as fate, to reduce “the context” to a single issue of cultural currency and to forget that the Christian message gives us things to say which might just challenge the context.[15] It may be that the relevance of the Christian confession to this time and place is its contrary message in the service of life. God enters our context to not confirm it, but to alter it, to reconcile and overturn it. The action of God in Jesus Christ creates a context, a new creation.[16]
Engage in Charitable Reading
When I was an undergraduate philosophy student, I was taught the principle of charity by Prof. Bernard Suits. He told us that before we begin a critique of someone’s position, first we take the very best reading of the position we subject to examination. Do not caricature or misrepresent another person’s point of view or we end up shadow boxing with our own bad interpretation rather than offering a legitimate analysis of an argument. Professor Suits told me this principle is observed mostly in its violation.
Whole theological schools of thought have begun in response to a misrepresentation of the longer Christian tradition or aspects of it. For example, I have found critiques of an “interventionist god” to be critiques of theologies of the past that, in fact, do not exist. I have not found a major Christian theologian yet that sets up a theology of creation so that God is estranged from the world God creates and therefore can only engage with creation as Creator by interloping. God doesn’t break the natural order of things when God acts in the world. It is God’s world, God is always already involved in it – God does not get all “supernatural” from time-to-time. Islam, Judaism and Christianity agree – God is creating now, creation and providence are ongoing; the world is now and always “upheld by the word of his (the Son’s) power.” (Hebrews 1:3). All this to say, beware of mischaracterizing a position that is not your own. Take the strong version of what you read; do some historical study to inform your perspective for the sake of justice and charity. Check your interpretations against other interpreters. Talk to others in your class to see if your problem in understanding is, well, you.
If philosophers have a principle of charity, Christian readers ought to have an interpretive disposition of an analogous character. We ought to interpret other people as our theological neighbours, whom we honour as creatures made in God’s image, given to us by God for our learning and edification. Their gifts are for us. We ought to linger with our neighbour’s writing, as an act of love, to understand what they want to say to us. One way of thinking about interpreting those who have gone before us in the faith is as an act of “communion with the saints.” Those who went before us, in different times and places, struggled with making sense of the faith in their circumstances, and while different from our own, there are always things to be learned, even if they fall into the errors to avoid column. When we interpret with imagination, however, often we observe analogues and precedents that are remarkably prescient for our place and time.
Lots of interpreters will emphasis distance; an imaginative interpreter seeking to learn for the sake of salvation and discipleship and praise sees proximity. Hilary of Poitiers (315-368) has things to teach us about the gendered use of language with respect to God. “The Son was conceived in the womb of the Father,”[17] he said. By saying this he contorts what we know of biology so that we speak more truly of God and don’t simply project maleness onto God. Marguerite de Navarre (1492-1549), the Sister of the King of France – Francis I, can teach us about the importance of theological conversation over “ostentatious debates” – like those of Martin Luther and John Calvin – in conversational theological writings.[18] The Barmen Declaration (1934),[19] made against attempts to coordinate the church to National Socialist ideology was a seminal document. It inspired both the Belhar Confession (1982),[20] made against apartheid in South Africa, and the recent “Reclaiming Jesus” document (2018),[21] which confesses faith in the here-and-now of the struggle of the Christian Churches in the U.S around truth-telling and racism. The Barmen Declaration is itself inspired, in part, by the 1528 Ten Theses argued by Berchold Holler and Franz Kolb at Bern and behind them Zwingli, especially in the use of the phrase – “and does not hear the voice of the stranger” – from John chapter 10.[22] What shocks a reader of these documents, and of other authors from the past, is not the historical gulf between then and now, but the incredible analogical relevance and immediacy of the past to the present through retrieval. Appropriation of what these friends in the faith teach us, requires humility, sustained attention, a teachable frame and a sanctified imagination open to a word from the communion of saints. We have got to be traditioned to be creative, formed to be transformative, or we repeat the slogans of the age in which we live and call that edgy.
Another charitable way to construe reading theological texts is by means of the command to ‘honour your father and mother.’ This commandment comes in the second tablet of the law, and is in fact, part of what it means to love some of our closest neighbours, our parents. Parents are not, of course, always correct in their advice or knowledge. Sometimes parents in the faith fail us and lead us astray – the complicity of the church in residential schools and apartheid are pernicious examples. However, parents also have been around longer than their children. They have longer life-experience and, often, faith-experience. Honouring your parents is wise. Listening to those who have struggled with what you now face can save you some unnecessary pain, mis-spent time and lead you from thinness to depth. Honouring our mothers and fathers in the faith also presents a challenge. They disturb us; they make it hard for us to relax in lassez faire clichés – “you can’t fight city hall,” “people never change.” And then along comes the saints who wrote and lived in ways that overturned and changed things. They can inspire us to bother writing and acting in Jesus’ name in our own situation. Listening to ecumenical confessions and creeds of the past, reading theologians commonly esteemed by the church, can help we people of faith with our struggles to be faithful and effective in our time. It does not mean the authors of these documents or any theological writer is infallible – in either their script or their life; it does mean that they have learned and said things commonly recognized as astute, even definitive, for the life of the Christian community through time. They tried to confess Christ in their time, often in the face of adversity. They can disappoint us with their blindness and prejudice; but they can also encourage, shock and inspire us by their example. I think a special measure of sympathy and care needs to be exercised here. We should be more skeptical of our explanatory schemes and prejudices and exercise the greatest possible imaginative sympathy to our predecessors, even in disagreement.
“. . .reading is analogous to eating. Reading Scripture and important theological texts requires chewing, lingering and tasting so that the text is digested for nourishment.”
A practical note: we are embodied readers so pay attention to your body when you read. Sometimes reading will make us feel uncomfortable. Our hands will sweat, and our hearts start to race. Be careful not to give up when this happens. Worthy texts have a way of challenging what we have always thought. Learning sometimes involves dislodgement of long held ideas, and that’s threatening. The defensive move is to throw up the safe-guard of theory and use sophisticated tools to protect yourself. The more hermeneutics we learn, the greater the temptation. Instead, we should go for a walk and pray. Pray that in our reading we will be permeable to what we need to hear. It could be that an author is just wrong; it could be that we are being taught, even by God. And so, we try and identify what we read that produced this discomfort. At these moments we are discovering our theology. When cherished beliefs come under scrutiny, it is disorienting. We may need to read further to be charitable to the writer. Perhaps he or she has yet to address the other side of the point or go on to a thicker account of the matter. Or perhaps, we are being reoriented by means of what we are reading. Great texts have a way of doing that especially when and where God is or becomes the active agent by whom we are taught. We all start reading as people of a time and place and we think we know what matters and where in the world we are and what our life might mean. And now, we encounter a new thing, a new reality, and we are recontextualized in the light of it, and we start to read the world, painful as it is, in terms of the God about whom we are reading. It could be conversion, calling, deepening of the love of God. If we experience the grace of that kind of encounter when we are reading about God, give thanks.
It’s astonishing, but Christ is so powerful that he can even manifest himself among the theologians. We cannot force him, but every now and then he permits us to see and hear something.[23]
Pray to be Permeable – for Conversion and Transformation
The concept of a “teachable frame” comes from John Calvin’s commentary on the Psalms.[24] For Calvin, teachableness before the text of Scripture and other esteemed teachers is crucial. When we come to read the Bible and important theological texts, fully armed with inflexible preunderstanding, we miss the opportunity to be instructed and transformed. If reading is simply an opportunity for us to engage in criticism based on high-powered theory that is set, gelled and hardened (privileged), we will use every important text as an opportunity to hear ourselves think. Calvin’s interest in prayer before the reading of Scripture, in a prayer he called the prayer for illumination, is a recognition of our need of God’s help to open us up to what is strange and unusual in what we encounter in Scripture. It means that in our encounter with Scripture and in texts which are commentary on the Bible, we participate in dying and rising with Christ.
There are at least three problems encountered by students in seminaries and theological colleges where it comes to a teachable frame. One is that we are distracted with technology, constantly searching for external stimulation which makes us incapable of disciplined attention. Alan Noble writes; “Living a distracted lifestyle does more than waste our time, it forms our minds, often in ways that are harmful for deep, sustained thought – the kind of thought so important to religious discourse.”[25] Noble, while by no means a Luddite, proposes community and individual practices, acts of discipleship, that grace our capacity for attention to God: silence, saying grace, observing Sabbath, incarnate attention to the liturgy, all for the sake of stoking a disruptive witness in a distracted culture.
“We are enabled to speak of the infinite. The confidence to do so is grounded not in our abilities but in God’s movement toward us: the incarnation.”
Another obstacle to a teachable frame is that professors can give students too much to read and, even when they do not, reading can be minimalist and consumptive. With the flood of compulsory readings coming, a theological student is liable to adopt a rather rudimentary threshold for what counts as reading. Eyes-passing-over-the-page is not reading. We as professors can subtly encourage the need for speed, which does not allow students to linger with the words, to contemplate formative matters offered in texts.[26] Texts will not resound and form the reader – contaminate a reader – where speed and extraction for research are the only goals in reading. If every text is simply strip-mined for papers, following a story or an argument for its formative potential is occluded from the outset. Resource-mining which glosses texts does not allow us to share in the interpretative fellowship of the saints.
The other temptation in reading the Bible and important theological texts is born of the state of the industry in literary and critical studies. Critical reading in the academy, where most students and professors are formed before they come to theological institutions, has almost exclusively come to mean “suspicious” reading. We have all become aware that texts are located, that authors write from a point of view and we want to interrogate the moves being worked on us, the “normative” worlds writers assume. Reading, on this approach, is equivalent to smoking-out authors and their interested points of view, detective like. It is less suspicious of interested readers who seem to operate from an immune transcendental standpoint![27] Suspicious reading as it turns out is not so much interpretation as diagnosis, most often of power moves on the part of the author. While this mode of reading has produced some interesting and helpful results, an increasing number of literary and educational theorists note how critical-suspicious reading estranges readers from the claims texts make on us. We end up speaking power to truth.[28] It makes us unteachable; aloof to what we are called to consider. “Standing back” and even paranoia is the posture. Diagnosis and exposure are the goals. Affective delight and “heroic pedagogy” are very often the motivation.[29] Lack of surprise – confirmation of strong theory – is almost always the result. Some literary scholars even ask, “Is critical reading really reading at all?”[30]
I think the more devastating comment – we theological types ought to hear – is well-articulated by Rita Felski, who asks: “Why – even as we extol multiplicity, difference, hybridity – is the affective range of criticism so limited? Why are we so hyperarticulate about our adversaries and so excruciatingly tongue-tied about our loves?[31] In our vigilance against texts, we use the “barbed-wire of criticism” to “guard us against the risk of being contaminated and animated by the words we encounter.”[32] But that’s what Christian readers want as we “pour over the Bible” . . . “in a state of reverence and joy.”[33] Critical-suspicious reading can render us impermeable to Scripture and theological teachers and texts that could instruct and form us.
For much of the contemplative Christian tradition reading is analogous to eating. Reading Scripture and important theological texts requires chewing, lingering and tasting so that the text is digested for nourishment. To use another metaphor, the serious religious reader becomes a “resonant manifold” – a chamber in which the text sounds and resounds so that meaning echoes in our lives.[34] This way of putting it draws our attention to sensuous wholistic engagement with scripture, theological texts and traditions.[35] Commenting on the sources from which John Calvin drew his understanding of reading the Bible, Wesley Kort, notes his use of monastic practices of lectio divina. This way of reading was designed to allow Biblical texts to have their maximum effect on the reader “even to be inscribed on the reader’s body.”[36] Reading and hearing are acts of communion with God, first with words and concepts and images; lectio is inseparable from meditation, from prayer and contemplation. The Bible is, as one of Calvin’s favourite authors, Bernard of Clairvaux, put it, “the wine cellar of the Holy Spirit.”[37] By reading one receives the text with the palate of the heart. And because of God’s agency by means of the Bible, Scripture reading is ‘inexhaustible fecund” and “intoxicating” such that the Bible, and formative theological texts, can never be discarded or dominated.[38]
Let me show you an example of how reading Scripture works for Basil the Great (330-379). Here is the beginning and the end of a sermon on Genesis. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” is the text on which he preaches. It is quite disorienting for us to listen to him instruct us on how to comport ourselves for theological study of Scripture and the ends toward which Scripture interpretation moves.
What ear is worthy to hear such a tale? How earnestly the soul should prepare itself for such high lessons! How pure it should be from carnal affections, how unclouded by worldly disquietudes, how active and ardent in its researches, how eager to find in its surroundings an idea of God which may be worthy of Him!
‘God created the Heavens and the Earth.’ Let us glorify the supreme Artificer for all that was wisely and skillfully made; by the beauty of things let us raise ourselves to Him who is above all beauty; by the grandeur of bodies, sensible and limited in their nature, let us conceive of the infinite Being whose immensity and omnipotence surpass all the efforts of the imagination. [39]
The interpretation of Scripture, engaging with the doctrine of creation in this case, will require nothing less than the conversion of the interpreter. When a person (as a member of the community) takes up what is a holy enterprise, holiness is required. We are not worthy of this kind of familiarity with God’s word and work; but can be made so. And Basil is not speaking about the acquisition of interpretative tools and hermeneutical prowess, of “herding divine realities into the approved pens of dialectical arguments and critical studies.”[40] We need deliverance from the downward tug of the flesh. We need to shake off the uneasiness and anxiety that the false aspirations of the flesh and the twitchy multi-tasking 21st century world engender. This includes the affective delight of showing ourselves smarter than the “interested” author, a critic of the naïve. Without freedom from carnality and disquietude, talk about God goes straight into the service of our personal projects, political aspirations and hardened ideologies. And then instead of loosing ourselves to the praise of God and God’s cause in the world, we will praise ourselves and use God to promote career aspirations.
Basil insists that interpretation is hard work; it will require us to be “active and ardent our research.” This diligence, spiritual and intellectual, is in the service of finding ways of speaking of God that are worthy of God. Sanctified reason scans the world for ideas that do not diminish but extol God. Basil promotes passionate creativity that searches for analogical language worthy to express the eminence of God in ways that are congruent with the scriptural story. He knows the “weakness of our intelligence” to “penetrate the depth of the thought” in the Bible. But, he also knows the power of the words of Scripture inspired by the Spirit to produce salvation in those who hear them. The goal of interpreting Scripture is not to display our genius, but to get caught up in the work of salvation by God. Learning Scripture, and theology, is to be taught by God about God.
Where real engagement with Scripture takes place, it moves interpreters to the praise of God. Here the language soars in glorification of God who makes all things, whose beauty is above all things beautiful and whose Being is no simple extension of sensible and finite things but is one-of-a-kind (sui generis) and surpasses all our attempts to speak of God. And yet, by visible and finite things we raise ourselves up to the invisible and infinite God. We get summoned to “conceive of the infinite Being . . . who surpasses all the efforts of our imagination.”
That’s the exact space in which theology works: to conceive of the One who eludes our grasp with the very best analogical language we can muster, guided by Scripture, taught by the church’s teachers and empowered by the Spirit. This requires spiritual discipline and awed attention. And it is a task that is not in vain. Christians are not agnostics. We are enabled to speak of the infinite. The confidence to do so is grounded not in our abilities but in God’s movement toward us: the incarnation. Stephen Pardue states the meaning of incarnation for speech about God: “The Lord of heaven is in the habit of crossing boundaries, and thereby bringing fecundity where barrenness otherwise reigns.”[41] It is not within our grasp to speak truly of God. However, words can bear witness to God, in partial and clumsy but true ways accommodated to human capacity when they get enlarged by divine grace. Theological learning requires a teachable frame, so we are taught by God, through human teachers, and so that with sanctified intelligence we borrow language fit to extol God, which is the proper end of our learning.
Stay Specific To Christian Understanding
The Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana said, “The attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no religion in particular.”[42] The point is a crucial one in theological study. We can lose everything that makes Christianity, and other faith traditions, interesting by the quick move to talk about religion in general. People do not speak language in general. They speak English or French or Spanish or Tagalog. And so it is with religion. People are not religious in general, they belong to distinct traditions which embody and inscribe beliefs, practices and ways of disposing lives together.
It may be one of the lingering habits of modernity to move quickly to general categories so that particular things become instances of a class. This move can inhibit real surprise, unique practices and beliefs and odd features for purposes of classification and policing reality. I am not sure there is even such a thing as religion in general, contra Immanuel Kant and Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone. There are religions, even religions that have some common formal features. However, as soon as we press into the language and structure and practice of a faith tradition, we begin to observe subtlety and uniqueness related to the local. We use general language to handle groups of things for the sake of communicative ease. That’s impossible to avoid; it is a gift that helps professors name their courses and draw disparate things together so that we have subject matter and a course outline. The difficulty arises when we mistake the general term for the subtle realities we gather under that banner. Let me explain. It is quite possible to have a course on sacred texts or religious communities. It may also be quite possible to observe overlap and intersection between them – commonalities and similarities certainly exist. But to reify general terms like “sacred text” as though the Christian Bible, the Tanakh, the Koran and the Vedas are instances of class is a fallacy that distorts each of them. Every one of these texts is most at home in the community for which they function authoritatively – like Orca in the ocean. Each of these texts is embedded in a world of practice and reading and theological understanding. Remove them from their natural habitat to a clinical world for observation and examination and they are Orca in an aquarium – behaving out of keeping with their nature because domesticated.[43] What’s more, the things religious texts have “in common” will not be across the board. The Christian Bible has commonalities with the Tanakh that it does not have with either the Koran or the Vedas. The Koran has things in common with the Tanakh and the Christian Bible that it does not have with the Vedas.
Where doctrinal discussion takes place in Christian theological study the same difficulty arises. Formal features can replace the storied world of Scripture which is the primary basis of Christian belief. If someone asks me to tell them about my spouse, I don’t say, “she’s a biped.”[44] That’s a formal feature, an abstraction. To describe my spouse, I’d tell stories about how we met, what she loves, what her family of birth is like. The significant doctrines (teachings) of the Christian faith are related directly to the long story that is the Bible, Holy Scripture, read according to a Trinitarian pattern with a Christ-centered focus, as the creeds of the church teach us. Doctrines are secondary commentary on the story; not designed to replace it with higher order conceptual precision. Indigenous cultures in which story-telling is primary challenge the modernist assumption that abstraction brings us closer to truth. The incarnation also pushes us in this direction. When Christians speak and write about God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit and salvation they have a particular story, read by particular people, in a particular pattern, in mind. “God” is a cypher-term until we identify which God we are speaking about. Christians identify this God through the long narrative of the Bible. This is the God of Abraham and Sarah, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is this God identified with these people, who creates the world and people and makes and keeps covenant promises with Israel for the sake of the world. This is a God who comes among us as one of us, who lives, dies and rises again for our salvation as Jesus Christ and sends the Holy Spirit to direct the transformation of all things to God’s good ends. That’s not God in general, an instance of a general class. The habits of modernity are still alive, and we need to unlearn them to appreciate the rich particularity of Christianity, and other faith traditions. As Ludwig Wittgenstein said, “don’t think, but look.”[45]
God is Excellent at Revelation
God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom he also made the world (Hebrews 1:1-2).
The assumption that we can speak of God in theological study is a big one and it is an arrogant one if we believe we can manufacture this speech out of the residue of our interiority, community experience, naked observation of the world or current cultural trends. The danger is as Voltaire noted: “God made man in God’s image, and man returned the favour.” Idolatry is a perpetual danger in “constructive” theology and it is especially acute when theology is forgetful of divine initiative and divine disclosure.
In the history of Christian theology, revelation is what generates our salvation and our thankful, awestruck, bewildered speech about God. We meet God in the places where God has chosen to meet us. And the good news is that God, if the author of Hebrews is right, is loquacious. If we have a problem around God speaking, it will be that God is way too communicative, says too much for us to take in, is overwhelming. Based on Biblical testimony, in fact, that’s what happens to Isaiah and John of Patmos and to people whom Jesus delivered with a word. They were all gobsmacked, amazed. They asked, “Who is this?” said, “he speaks with authority.” Stammering witness to what disorients and reorients finds a voice. This God wants to be known and loved. This God desires fellowship; opens a conversation[46] with the creatures in the world God made. This God chooses not to be God without us. And so, God talks “baby talk,” says Martin Luther. God accommodates to our condition, says John Calvin, so that we can receive words about God, experience fellowship and life as God intended it.[47] Behind both these statements lies the doctrine of the incarnation. God accommodates to the human condition. We understand in Jesus of Nazareth, the Word become flesh, that creaturely reality, flesh and language, is graced to accommodate divine speech. We can know God, not exhaustively, but truly through God’s effective downward reach toward us and entry into the human condition. One Trinitarian way of thinking about this we get from Karl Barth.[48] It goes like this: God is revealer, the one who takes the initiative to come to us; God is revealed, the one who comes to us as Jesus Christ to rescue us from all that is less than what God wants to give us; God is revealedness, the very power to receive God’s revelation so that it is effective for faith and life is the work of the Spirit and not natural human capacity. God can effectively deliver the message of reconciliation. “The Holy Spirit is no skeptic.”[49]
Having been spoken to, the church speaks. Christians, including theologians, are witnesses with words to what God has done for the world in Jesus Christ. Lately, the church and some of its theologians seem to draw back a bit from speaking about God, as a humble gesture. There is wisdom in this. Apophatic theology (“negative theology” which articulates what we don’t know about God since God is beyond any final formulation) is a noble part of the mystic traditions of Christian theology. God’s infinity and beauty and grandeur exceed our comprehension, always and everywhere. Awe is the human gesture Scripture records before the revelation of God. And the book of Ecclesiastes councils: “Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth. Therefore, let your words be few” (Ecclesiastes 5:2).
There is, however, more than one kind of apophatic theology. Some of what passes for “apophatic” theology is more akin to agnosticism born of Enlightenment philosophy around epistemological limits. We have no sensible experience of God, according to Kant, and so no real knowledge of God. This approach to the limits of theological language is, it seems to me, simply a denial of revelation; that is, that God can effectively make God’s self known through Jesus of Nazareth. Apophatic theology of this sort may not be about humility but rather an attempt to press revelation into a theory.[50]
“. . . we take up the invitation “to conceive of the infinite Being whose immensity and omnipotence surpass all the efforts of the imagination.”
Negative theology, in the history of the Christian church, is less sanguine where it comes to speech about God. It is often accompanied by a more kataphatic confidence; that is, while we cannot say everything about God, we can truly, but never exhaustively, speak of God by grace. It affirms that we cannot finally capture who God is in our formulations; but also that this is a joy, not a reason for silence. The inability ever to reach closure in our speech about God, doesn’t lead them to conclude that nothing can be said of God. What they affirm is that no form of words, however true as far as it goes, is going to be fully adequate; there is always more to say (even in heaven). This is a theology that is hopeful because of the conviction that there is always more, and that this ‘more’ is always more compelling and wonderful.[51]
And so, we speak of God as those who have heard and are provoked to praise. We pray for deliverance and take up practices to temper our carnal affections and worldly disquietudes and, like Basil, we scan the world in search of analogical language which may be worthy of God. In Christian theology, we take up the invitation “to conceive of the infinite Being whose immensity and omnipotence surpass all the efforts of the imagination.” And so we pray . . .
Creator of all things, true source of light and wisdom, origin of all being, graciously let a ray of your light penetrate the darkness of my understanding. Take from me the double darkness in which I have been born, an obscurity of sin and ignorance. Give me a keen understanding, a retentive memory, and the ability to grasp things correctly and fundamentally. Grant me the talent of being exact in my explanations and the ability to express myself with thoroughness and charm. Point out the beginning, direct the progress, and help in the completion. I ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen (Thomas Aquinas).
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Photo of Killer Whale at Howe Sound/Richard R. Topping
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Bibliography
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Barth, Karl. Barth in Conversation, vol. 2, 1963, ed., Eberhard Busch and trans., Darrell Guder, et. al. Westminster/John Knox, 2018.
_______. Church Dogmatics, I/1, trans., and ed., by G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance, et. al. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1936.
_______. The Christian Life: Church Dogmatics IV, 4 Lecture Fragments, trans., Geoffrey Bromiley. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981.
_______. The Theology of the Reformed Confessions 1923, trans. and ed., by Darrell and Judith Guder. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 2005.
_______. The Word of God and the Word of Man, trans. Douglas Horton. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957.
Basil of Caesarea. Translated by Blomfield Jackson. From Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 8. Edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1895.) Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight. <http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/32011.htm>.The Hexaemeron, Homily I, “In the Beginning God made the heaven and the Earth,” accessed August 16, 2018.
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_______. The Uses of Literature. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2008.
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Hilary of Poitiers, “On the Trinity.” Translated by E. W. Watson and L. Pullan. In Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, eds., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. ix, Second Series (Peabody Massachusetts: Hendrickson, 1994), Book 12, section 8, 219-220.
Jensen, Robert. A Theology in Outline: Can These Bones Live. New York: Oxford, 2016.
Johnson, Luke Timothy. The Creed: What Christians Believe and Why it Matters. Danvers: Image Books, 2004.
Kort, Wesley. Take; Read: Scripture, Contextuality and Cultural Practice. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996.
Luther, Martin. General Editors Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehman. Luther’s Work’s, vol. 33: Career of the Reformer III. Edited by Philip Watson. “The Bondage of the Will.” Trans. by Jaroslav Pelikan. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972.
McIntosh, Mark. Divine Teaching: An Introduction to Christian Theology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008.
Noble, Alan. Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age. Downer Grove: IVP, 2018.
Pardue, Stephen. The Mind of Christ: Humility and the Intellect in Early Christian Theology. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015.
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Rigby, Cynthia. Holding Faith: A Practical Introduction to Christian Doctrine. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2018.
Santayana, George. Reason in Religion, vol., 3 in The Life of Reason. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906.
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Stroup, George. Before God. Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 2004.
Tanner, Kathryn. Christ the Key. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
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Thysell, Carol. The Pleasure of Discernment: Marguerite de Navarre as Theologian. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
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Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations, 3d ed, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1958),
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Notes
[1] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 2-3, 550.
[2] Jeffrey Stout, Ethics After Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), 184.
[3] The idea that there is a “general public” is a problematic assumption. Often public norms of intelligibility are really the norms of the academy or some region of it. Even the phrase “public norms of intelligibility” is not a way of speaking that has currency across multiple cultural publics.
[4] See Cynthia Rigby, Holding Faith: A Practical Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2018), xix. Speaking of translation of doctrinal language Rigby says, “This common approach too often fails to communicate because what is distinctively meaningful about the terms in question can get lost in the process.”
[5] Paul Ricoeur uses this term to describe “a call to reflection or meditation” in response to encounter with biblical discourse. See Critique and Conviction: Conversations with Francios Azouvi and Marc de Launay, trans. Kathleen Blamey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 149. On the danger of translation as a form of assimilation and the necessity to “let the untranslatable situation stand” see Talal Asad, et. al., Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (Oxford: OUP, 2013), xvi.
[6] Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans., J.F. Shaw (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2009), 75.
[7] Taylor, A Secular Age, 532. Taylor borrows this term from John Rawls.
[8] Karl Barth, The Christian Life: Church Dogmatics IV, 4 Lecture Fragments, trans., Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981), 267-268. This is the source of Barth’s rejection of theologies of experience. He is concerned about the collapse of God into human subjectivity. However, and this is often missed, Barth expresses an interest in theologies of experience if and when they are attempts do theology beginning with the Holy Spirit. He believes this is a centre from which to read Schleiermacher. See From Rousseau to Ritschl: Protestant Theology in the 19th Century, trans. Brian Cozens (London: SCM Press, 1959), 341.
[9] Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man, trans. Douglas Horton (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957), 14. This phase can be found throughout Barth’s work.
[10] Robert Alter notes that much of the “excavative” work done on biblical texts focuses on “unscrambling to omelette” not tasting it. See The World of Biblical Literature (New York, 1992), 133.
[11] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 550.
[12] See Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice in Love (Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 2011), 223ff.
[13] See George Stroup, Before God (Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 2004). In the book Stroup notes that the sense of life in the presence of God has been eclipsed in modernity and encourages counter-cultural ways for recovery.
[14] See Kevin Ward, A History of Global Anglicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 308-315. When we do globalize North American norms and struggles, we are just as colonial as 19th century Christian mission, without the necessity to travel.
[15] Douglas John Hall, “The Future of the Church: Critical Remembrance as Entrée to Hope,” The Kenneth Cousland Lecture, Emmanuel College, University of Toronto, October 16, 2013. Alan Noble makes the point concrete: Christians are not testifying to one more version of human fullness to add to the consumer options. “A disruptive witness denies the entire contemporary project of treating faith as a preference.” Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age (Downer Grove: IVP, 2018), 81.
[16] It is interesting how little this gospel consideration has figured into theologies that simply answer “the context” as it is served up by non- or pre-theological depiction. On the other hand, literary scholar Rita Felski notes the effect of powerful literature. “If we are entirely caught up in a text, we can no longer place it in a context because it is the context, imperiously dictating the terms of its reception. We are held in a condition of absorption . . . transfixed and immobilized by the work and rendered unable to frame, contextualize or judge.” The Uses of Literature (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2008), 57. Charles Taylor also notes that great spiritual movements “transform the frame in which people thought, felt and lived before . . . Things make sense in a wholly new way.” A Secular Age, 731.
[17] “On the Trinity,” trans. E. W. Watson and L. Pullan, in Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, eds., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. ix, Second Series (Peabody Massachusetts: Hendrickson, 1994), Book 12, section 8, 219-220. Kathryn Tanner argues: “The gender-bending use of gendered imagery here – a Father with a womb – might very well present the best hope for avoiding the theological reinforcement of male privilege.” Christ the Key (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 215.
[18] See for example L’Heptameron of Margaret, Queen of Navarre: Selected Tales, ed. Stanley Appelbaum (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2006). See also Carol Thysell, The Pleasure of Discernment: Marguerite de Navarre as Theologian (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 9.
[19] See Eberhard Busch, The Barmen Theses Then and Now, trans., and annotated by Darrell and Judith Guder (Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 2010) for an excellent treatment of the theses and their ongoing relevance.
[20] See Rothney S Tshaka, Confessional Theology? A Critical Analysis of the Theology of Karl Barth and its Significance for the Belhar Confession (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013). The book argues for the political significant of confession and demonstrates the relationship between Barmen and Belhar.
[21] See http://reclaimingjesus.org/, accessed August 17, 2018.
[22] See Karl Barth, The Theology of the Reformed Confessions 1923, trans. and ed., by Darrell and Judith Guder (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 2005), 75. Barth’s teaching of Reformed Confessions in 1923 obviously influenced his imaginative repertoire for the Barmen Declaration of 1934 together with the 1933 Dusseldorf Theses. For the genealogy of these influences on Barmen see Eberhard Busch, Barmen Then and Now, 21-22. He notes that using past confessions for present confession involves instruction by the past but that “in order to say the same thing that had once been said, it had to be said a new way.” Ibid., 22.
[23] Karl Barth, Barth in Conversation, vol. 2, 1963, ed., Eberhard Busch and trans., Darrell Guder, et. al. forthcoming (Westminster/John Knox, 2018), 107.
[24] Calvin, Jean Calvin’s Commentaries, Vol. 8: Psalms, Part I, tr. by John King, [1847-50], at sacred-texts.com – http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/calvin/cc08/cc08005.htm, accessed August 16, 2018. “God by a sudden conversion subdued and brought my mind to a teachable frame, which was more hardened in such matters than might have been expected from one at my early period of life.”
[25] Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness, 20.
[26] In a recent In Trust article, the disparity between the values of doctoral programs, in which theological professors are shaped, and the needs of theological colleges and seminaries are noted. While professors in theological disciplines are generally taught to value research and teaching in graduate school, the ethos is relatively indifferent to formation of students and actively hostile to administration as part and parcel of the work. See Deborah H.C. Gin and Stacy Williams-Duncan, “Faculty Development: perk or priority,” 20-22, in In Trust (Summer, 2018), 20.
[27] Stefan Collini, What are Universities For? (London: Penguin Books, 2012), 83.
[28] Rowan Williams, Faith in the Public Square (Kindle Location 5380-5386). Bloomsbury UK. Kindle Edition, 2012. Williams writes, “The cost of giving up talking of truth is high: it means admitting that power has the last word. . . . . [P]olitical philosophy needs to give an account of suffering for the sake of conscience, and without a notion of truth that is more than simply a list of the various things people prefer to believe, no such account can be given. Ibid., (Kindle Location 5389). Rita Felski believes that questions of greater gravity than power are important to text interpretation. Rather than simply: “’But what about power?’” she suggests, “’But what about love?’” and “‘What is your theory of attachment?’” Felski, Limits of Critique, 17-18. See also Heinz Bude, The Mood of the World, trans., by Simon Garnett (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), pp. 13-14. Bude describes postmodernity’s “fear of truth” and “fear of knowledge.”
[29] Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 6-7, 186-193.
[30] Michael Warner, “Uncritical Reading,” 13-39 in Polemic: Critical or Uncritical, ed., Jane Gallop (New York: Routledge, 2004), 15. Warner notes: “Critical reading is the folk ideology of a learned profession, so close to us that we seldom feel the need to explain it. …” Ibid.
[31] Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique, 13.
[32] Ibid., 12.
[33] Ibid., 55.
[34] Paul Griffiths, Religious Reading (New York: Oxford, 1999), 47-48
[35] See for example Shawn Wilson, Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2008), 55ff. There is much to learn from Indigenous cultures and the practices of other faiths about wholistic -sensuous, intuitive, emotional and interested – engagement in research and reading. “Emotionless, passionless, abstract, intellectual research is a god-damn lie, it does not exist.” Ibid., 56.
[36] Wesley Kort, Take; Read: Scripture, Contextuality and Cultural Practice (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 19-36.
[37] Griffiths, Religious Reading, 42.
[38] Ibid.
[39] Basil, Translated by Blomfield Jackson. From Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 8. Edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1895.) Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight. <http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/32011.htm>.The Hexaemeron, Homily I, “In the Beginning God made the heaven and the Earth,” accessed August 16, 2018.
[40] Mark McIntosh, Divine Teaching: An Introduction to Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 3.
[41] Stephen T. Pardue, The Mind of Christ: Humility and the Intellect in Early Christian Theology (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015), 182.
[42] George Santayana, Reason in Religion, vol., 3 in The Life of Reason (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906), 5.
[43] Thanks to my colleague Ross Lockhart for this helpful oceanic metaphor.
[44] Thanks to my friend Bishop William Willimon for this example of abstraction from the personal to the conceptual.
[45] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3d ed, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1958), #66
[46] Robert Jenson maintains that the possibility of conversation with God is what it means to be made in God’s image. A Theology in Outline: Can These Bones Live (New York: Oxford, 2016), 4, 14-16, 68-69. “The blessing of listening to God is not given to Israel for Israel’s own sake, but for the sake of opening a conversation between the human race and this lively talkative God.” Ibid., 15, author’s emphasis.
[47] Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vols., ed., John T. McNeill (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960: I.13.1.
[48] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/1, trans., and ed., by G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance, et. al (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1936), 295-299
[49] Martin Luther, in Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehman, gen. eds., Luther’s Work’s, vol. 33: Career of the Reformer III, Philip Watson, ed., “The Bondage of the Will,” trans. by Jaroslav Pelikan (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972, 24.
[50] For a detailed discussion of differences between “classical apophaticism” and its modern Kantian versions with examples see Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998, cited in Pardue, The Mind of Christ, 178.
[51] Rowan Williams, Faith in the Public Square (Kindle Location 1408-1414). Bloomsbury UK. Kindle Edition, 2012. See also the lucid treatment of apophatic and kataphatic traditions in Rigby, Holding Faith, 19-25. She makes the important point that discussion about God ought not to terminate here – at whether we can speak about God – but move to what it is about and how it matters to life.
Thanks for posting here. I would not have come across this excellent piece, otherwise. Theology is not anthropology. Indeed. In our time and place, even this most obvious of truths needs to be said clearly and often.