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July 4 - July 9, 2017
‘That which we cannot speak of is the one thing about whom and to whom we must never stop speaking.’
I found myself drawn to the Christian mystics (such as Meister Eckhart), for while they did not embrace total silence, they balked at the presumption of those who would seek to colonize the name ‘God’ with concepts. Instead of viewing the unspeakable as that which brings all language to a halt, they realized that the unspeakable was precisely the place where the most inspiring language began. This God whose name was above every name gave birth, not to a poverty of words, but to an excess of them.
these mystics helped to develop, not a distinct religious tradition, but rather a way of engaging with and understanding already existing religious traditions: seeing them as a loving response to God rather than a way of defining God.
That which we cannot speak of is the one thing about whom and to whom we must never stop speaking.
In faith we are held, in theology we hold.
The argument is made that naming God is never really naming God but only naming our understanding of God. To take our ideas of the divine and hold them as if they correspond to the reality of God is thus to construct a conceptual idol built from the materials of our mind.
To love is to know God precisely because God is love. The emerging community, at its best, can teach us again that love must be the first word on our lips and also the last, and that we must seek to incarnate that sacred word in the world. I recently heard a well-known speaker say that if faith does not cost us something, then it is nothing. Only much later could I respond: if faith does not cost us everything, it is nothing. Orthodoxy as right belief will cost us little; indeed, it will allow us to sit back with our Pharisaic doctrines, guarding the ‘truth’ with the purity of our
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In a similar way, we can say that we never see the world as it really is (as symbolized by the lines) but always place meaning onto it (symbolized by the duck or rabbit).
This idea of conceptual idolatry is repeatedly attacked within the Bible itself. The first thing we notice when reading about God in the Bible is that we are confronted, not with a poverty of descriptions concerning God, but rather with an excess of them. We do not find some simple, linear understanding of YHWH developing through the text, and thus we do not find a single, coherent definition of God, as proclaimed by many contemporary churches. In the Bible we find a vast array of competing stories concerning the character of God that are closely connected to the concrete circumstances of
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We are like an infant in the arms of God, unable to grasp but being transformed by the grasp.
The primary problem with idolatry is not that it falsely claims to have a connection with God but rather that it falsely claims to understand the God that it is connected to.
idolatrous relation in which we believe that our ideas actually represent the way that God and the world really operate.
It is no longer thought of as a human discourse that speaks of God but rather as the place where God speaks into human discourse. In other words, theology is understood as the site in which revelation makes its appearance in the world, the place in which theos (God) impacts, and overwhelms, the human realm of logos (reason). Consequently we do not do theology but are rather overcome and transformed by it: we do not master it but are mastered by it.
we must seek, not to speak of God, but rather to be that place where God speaks.
For while those who imprison us, employ us or sell products to us may treat us as objects, the ones who love us treat us as subjects, subjects who can never be fully grasped in terms of cold facts and statistical probabilities. Indeed this is the difference between love and lust, for while lust treats the other solely as an object to be devoured, love treats the other as a subject who cannot be reduced wholly to an object.
God can never be and ought never to be reduced to a mere object for consideration, for in faith God is experienced as the ultimate subject. God is not a theoretical problem to somehow resolve but rather a mystery to be participated in.
we ought to affirm our view of God while at the same time realizing that that view is inadequate. Hence we act both as theist and atheist.
It is an acknowledgement that a desert of ignorance exists in the midst of every oasis of understanding.
In contrast, the a/theistic approach can be seen as a form of disbelieving what one believes, or rather, believing in God while remaining dubious concerning what one believes about God (a distinction that fundamentalism is unable to maintain). This does not actually contradict the idea of orthodoxy but rather allows us to understand it in a new light (which is the subject of the next chapter).
This a/theism is not then some temporary place of uncertainty on the way to spiritual maturity, but rather is something that operates within faith as a type of heatinducing friction that prevents our liquid images of the divine from cooling and solidifying into idolatrous form.
Gregory of Nyssa speaks of the move towards God as a journey into divine darkness, arguing that while religious knowledge begins as an experience of entering into the light, the deeper we go, the more darkness we find in that light.34
This reading of Anselm has been largely overlooked because his claim that God is ‘something than which nothing greater can be thought’43 is interpreted as a definition of God rather than a (non)definition. Indeed, it has the form of a definition but actually ascribes no positive essence to the divine: it does not say that God is the greatest conceivable being but rather that a greater than God cannot be thought. We can indeed conceive of something beyond thought but we cannot think of something beyond that.
We must speak and yet we must maintain our silence, we must maintain distance amidst the proximity of God, and we must worship while being careful not to make God into the object of our worship: for God is the subject before whom we worship. This site of uncertainty and unknowing is often a frightening place to dwell, but while the comfort provided by religion is placed into a certain distress by the idea of doubt, this distress, too, is not without a certain comfort. For while we do not grasp God, faith is born amidst the feeling that God grasps us.
an awareness of his or her limitations and a space of knowledgeable ignorance.
true knowledge is always knowledge plus – that is, knowledge that understands that it is always penetrated by unknowing.
God is the one who is conceived as inconceivable.
we imagine that our words are like arrows, then we can say that those arrows always fall short of the heavenly realm to which we aim them. In short, an emerging discourse acknowledges that speaking of God is never speaking of God but only ever speaking about our understanding of God.
However, this approach diligently maintains a conceptual distance between ourselves and God, one which approaches the divine mystery as something to be transformed by rather than solved.
Yet in reality it is only in the midst of undecidability that real decisions can be made.
The vows of marriage are not so much affirmations of what one believes will take place but rather promises that one will work towards ensuring that it will indeed happen. To decide for marriage knowing that all manner of things may conspire against the union is to make a truly daring and authentic decision – the only type of decision worthy of the name. Here we can see that doubt provides the context out of which real decision occurs and real love is tested, for love will say ‘yes’ regardless of uncertainty. A love that requires contracts and absolute assurance in order to act is no love at
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A faith that can only exist in the light of victory and certainty is one which really affirms the self while pretending to affirm Christ, for it only follows Jesus in the belief that Jesus has conquered death. Yet a faith that can look at the horror of the cross and still say ‘yes’ is one that says ‘no’ to the self in saying ‘yes’ to Christ. If one loses one’s life only because one believes that this is the way to find it, then one gives up nothing; to truly lose one’s life, one must lay down that life without regard to whether or not one finds it. Only a genuine faith can embrace doubt, for
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Like a lover of nuts who is offered thousands of shells with no centre, so we offer God thousands of ‘converts’ with no heart.
The point of this a/theology is that it understands that God is testified to in the transformed lives of believers rather than in some abstract doctrinal system, and that our particular Christian tradition is the means by which our ancestors speak their wisdom in aiding this transformed life.
for in Jesus I see not merely an individual who acted as a catalyst for a new religious movement, but also a subversive prophet who signalled the end of all religious movements. To be part of the Christian religion is to simultaneously hold that religion lightly.
Because God, as hypernonymous, can never be made utterly present, desire is never satisfied in God. This is very different from how desire generally operates. For instance, if we desire a new car, the desire is fulfilled in its possession: what was previously absent has been made present and thus has satisfied the void which desire had formed. However, God is never made present in this way: God’s presence is always Hyper-presence. This is analogous to the idea of a ship sunken in the depths of the ocean: while the ship contains the water and the water contains the ship, the ship only contains
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In love we desire our beloved, indeed the presence of our beloved is that which sparks the desire. This is because the presence of the one we love testifies to the fact that what we know of them is only a fragment of what is still to be discovered. This helps us understand why Augustine said, ‘For certainly nothing can be loved unless it is known.’52 Hence we see here that seeking God is not some provisional activity which precedes the goal of finding, but is itself evidence of having already found.
For instance, to seek God for eternal life is to seek eternal life, while to seek God for a meaningful existence is to seek a meaningful existence. A true seeking after God results from an experience of God which one falls in love with for no reason other than finding God irresistibly lovable. In this way the lovers of God are the ones who are most passionately in search of God.
In this brief exchange we are not presented with the traditional form of atheism (by which one would deny the existence of a creator). Instead Meursault has turned his back on both theism and atheism altogether, rejecting the former because it strikes him as asking a meaningless question and the latter because it takes this question too seriously. For Meursault there is no response to the spiritual question precisely because there is no question. This approach can be described as a type of quiescent anti-theism in the sense that it pays no attention to either theism or atheism. In many ways
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The alternative is not a relativistic acceptance of every position but rather a dialogue in which we treat everyone we meet as individuals who we can learn from and perhaps teach, rather than reducing people to the same massive and clumsy categories such as ‘Christian’, ‘Islamic’ and so on. Indeed, we see this model of treating everyone in a singular way in the life of Jesus.
Rather than being a sign of weakness, this powerless approach is a sign of strength, for one is committed to the idea that if we genuinely seek truth from above, we will not be given a lie, for God does not give scorpions to the one who seeks bread.
To know the Truth is thus to be known and transformed by the Truth. In the Epistle of John we find an extrapolation of this theme when we read that knowledge of God is evidenced in a life of love rather than in the affirmation of a theoretical, dogmatic system: Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love … No-one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us … God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God,
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Here John equates the existence of religious knowledge with the act of love. Knowledge of God (the Truth) as a set of propositions is utterly absent; instead he claims that those who exhibit a genuine love know God, regardless of their religious system, while those who do not love cannot know God, again regardless of their religious system. Truth is thus understood as a soteriological event. This word ‘soteriological’ is derived from the term soteria, from which we get the word ‘salvation’. In precise terms the word refers to a cure, remedy or healing.
However, if we take truth to mean any act which positively transforms reality, rather than describes reality, then there is no problem acknowledging that, while denying there are Jews in the house is empirically incorrect, it is true in a religious sense precisely because it protects the innocent (as well as protecting the soldiers from committing a horrific act).
By acknowledging that all our readings are located in a cultural context and have certain prejudices, we understand that engaging with the Bible can never mean that we simply extract meaning from it, but also that we read meaning into it. In being faithful to the text we must move away from the naïve attempt to read it from some neutral, heavenly height and we must attempt to read it as one who has been born of God and thus born of love: for that is the prejudice of God. Here the ideal of scripture reading as a type of scientific objectivity is replaced by an approach that creatively
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With this in mind, we must grasp that the central interpretive tool that Jesus employed when interpreting the scriptures was the prejudice of love: he exhibited this prejudice when interpreting them in relation to his concrete interaction with those who were poor, weak and marginalized. He thus remained faithful to the text by reading it with the poor, weak and marginalized in mind. Failure to engage in this loving prejudice towards the poor can result in readings from power, readings in which we legitimate our own desires over and above the needs of those around us.
If we are more drawn to the first response, then we are affirming that the teachings of Jesus are a type of ethical rulebook that must be followed in their substance; if we are drawn by the second, we are affirming that Jesus came to teach us a way of life that is dictated by the radical excess of love rather than an ethical rulebook.
Love is never satisfied by what is required but must always do more. If ethical duty requires that we give ten per cent of our money away, then love will always look to give more than this. In this way love fulfils the telos (goal) of ethics by existing as the excess of ethics.
However, if a church is not helping in our transformation, then the problem need not be the church’s, or our own; rather, this may simply be the wrong context for us to be in. Rather than encouraging people to join our community (whatever ‘our’ community happens to be), we ought to be trying to help people to find the right community that will aid them in their further conversion.
As soon as we say that we should love, then love disappears, for love is the law that has no law, the way that knows no ‘should’. Love is the law that tells us when to subvert the law, when to obey the law and when to break with laws, yet love is a lawless law that cannot be argued for.
Is this not what is really meant by the biblical injunction to give so as the right hand does not know what the left has given? The love that arises from God is a love that loves anonymously, a love that acts without such self-centred reflections, that gives without thought. Our lives should be full of acts of love of this kind, and yet, by definition, they will be invisible to us. As Meister Eckhart once said: When one can do the works of virtue without preparing, by willing to do them, and bring to completion some great and righteous matter without giving it a thought – when the deed of
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