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Embrace the Mystery“What you say God is, is not true; but what you do not say God is, that is true.”--Meister Eckhart Our words fall short; we cannot locate locutions to elucidate the Lord. Another way of saying this is: "God transcends our definitions, our delineations, our delusions." We must resist the urge, however robust or feeble, to confine that which is ineffable with the fetters of fallible human reasoning.When we profess, "God is love," we must, simultaneously, confess that we do not have our epistemological lariat fully around love's neck. Even if we did somehow fumble blindly upon a roped scruff, we would be like a boy holding a dragon's leash. Who's really in control? Love is slippery and relative and bigger than our words. We know what love is like, and we may know how love feels but we do not know love in any ontological sense. Likewise, our pious confession that God is good is less than true because we cannot grasp the profundity of goodness. Like the child who pleads, grasping for truth, for answers: "Daddy, how pretty is yellow? how small is one? how tasty is peanut butter?" Before such questions we stumble and stammer and evade. The truth is this: God is not good in the way you think God is good and God's goodness supersedes the cognitive value you have placed upon the word. The experience of a shadow's cool is not stymied by ignorance of the shadow caster. Just let go. Please! Confess that God is love; profess that God is good. But do not mistake that which is mysterious with those things that can me known; embrace the mystery, don't try to control it. posted by Jake at 12/27/2006 10:11:00 AM  
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Jake,
Nice post, but I sense the same apophatic reticence of Rollins in your renunciations of any claims on God.
You lose the Incarnation in the purely apophatic mode adopted here. Why proclaim anything positive if none of it is true (a la Eckhart)? Because some of it is true, revealed and mediated by the incarnation of the Transcendent in the Immanent.
Our epistemic fallibility is bridged (in part) by the self-revelation of God in Christ. While this leaves room for apophatic critique, it smacks of infidelity not to cherish that which we have received from God.
Embracing positive statements about God (dogma) is not an attempt to control (this is Marx, Levinas and Derrida), it is an attempt to be faithful.
I look forward to more exchange, brother.
Andy,
Good thoughts. Thanks for reading. You are correct to notice my Rollinsian (if that can be a word) resistance to cataphatic rigidity. That does not, by the way, mean that I reject positive statements about God received via revelation. I affirm God's self-disclosure through a range of mediums.
At the end of my post I opted for the words 'confess' and 'profess' rather than, say 'aver'. This, I think, is a more appropriate stance: one of enigmatic affirmation without totalization; and this is anything but novel. As Irenaeus wrote, “God is pure light, and yet unlike any light we know.” In a similar posture, we ought to embrace the mystery of God's gracious self-revelation, not as incontrovertible dogmas, but as testimonies, saying, "Yes, we have seen and heard and experienced that God is love, but we are quick to remind ourselves and everyone around us that by this we neither understand the profundity and scope of love nor God in relation to God's loveliness." As Rollins reminds us, we need to move beyond orthodoxy in the sense of 'right-belief' to 'believing in the right way.' Peace.
This is a fascinating conversation. I truly appreciate Rollins' description of the emerging church:
"The emerging church is thus able to leave aside the need for clarity and open up the way for us to accept the fact that what is important is that we are embraced by the beloved rather than finding agreement concerning how we ought to understand this beloved (as if a baby can only really love her mother if she understands her.)"
--
Further, in a fascinating way, I hear Rollins and Newbigin's "Proper Confidence" coming together to call for bold humility..
peace
mark
This is a fascinating conversation. I truly appreciate Rollins' description of the emerging church:
"The emerging church is thus able to leave aside the need for clarity and open up the way for us to accept the fact that what is important is that we are embraced by the beloved rather than finding agreement concerning how we ought to understand this beloved (as if a baby can only really love her mother if she understands her.)"
--
Further, in a fascinating way, I hear Rollins and Newbigin's "Proper Confidence" coming together to call for bold humility..
peace
mark
This is a fascinating conversation, not least because I think it goes to the heart of contemporary Christianity, especially the popularity of Emergent.
I think we fundamentally agree that there is no way to legitimate our affirmations by some neutral ground. I think we further agree that God's freedom does not offer itself to the violence of human finitude.
What concerns me is how we agree. Mark's quote of Rollins is unsettling to me. It is true that we are embraced by the beloved, but "what do I love when I love my God?" This is Augustine's question, and both Rollins and John Caputo want to leave the question open where Augustine closed it. Augustine's answer is Christologically clear. Philosophy may be able to arrive at God, but God's unique love is only revealed in the Incarnation, Passion and Resurrection. We love because God first loved us--in Christ! The lover reveals his love in Christ, who only subsequently becomes the beloved; before that he is the despised.
But already I have imported affirmations, dogmatic affirmations, just as Pseudo-Denys imports the dogma of the Trinity at the very beginning of his Mystical Theology. His prayer is not to the beloved who utterly loves us in his utter otherness, but to the Trinity.
At this point, I should clarify my earlier remarks, for the problem is not apophasis, but negation. These two are different, and (in my limited experience) Rollins and Emergent deal more with the latter than the former.
Apophasis always entails cataphasis, which is not to be considered as rigidity, since cataphasis is merely affirmation. While we may indeed wish to confess and profess rather than aver, verification already in-forms confession and profession. To confess only what we see and hear is to lose the element of faith and belief that allows us to see more than we can see and hear.
Faith seeks understanding. Dogma is the deposit of the church seeking understanding. And dogma, because it is bound to language in a peculiar incarnation is subject to transubstantiation (more loosely, reinterpretation).
There is room between affirmation and totalization in faith. Our claims to truth are legitimated not by the totalizing iron hand of "neutral" reason, but by the very invested freedom of faith, faith that is not private or that lacks courage, but that is bold because it has the strength of both the contemporary and historical communities of faith.
I wish I could say more, but I will need to cut my remarks short here. I am enjoying this exchange very much.
Blessings,
Andy