It is by emphasising the very humanity of God, as Being and Act of God, on our behalf, which can only re-direct, radically, questions of our being and action (ie. practical matters), away from ourselves onto the very ground of Christ himself. Questions of human response to God then become revised along the lines of Christ’s human response to God, on our behalf. This is in an effort to re-appreciate the context in which knowledge of Christ occurs, which could be described as ‘breaking-into’ the circle of God’s knowledge of himself. Contrast this with the idea that response to God is a human reciprocation, the response of our subjectivity along the lines of two erroneous options: one, the reciprocation of God’s love according to an interpersonal human model of interaction. or the slippery slope which leads to a fanaticism of ‘conviction’, in fundamentalist or secular guise. In the former case, we may wonder how it is that we can truly love God when he is different from ourselves. What, indeed, would be sufficient reciprocation? Alternatively, I could so easily become a ‘disciple’ of some humanitarian cause as in my vocation. It is religion’s weakness and banality to transpose itself inwardly, become self-regarding – ie., in opposition to an unconditional view of faith, which could be summed up in the formula ‘Be nice to each other’!
The mind and its rag-bag of dualist philosophies of which phenomenalism, (see below), is one, points to the tendency of all dualist philosophies – strong within Western Culture – to create a damaging split between the human and divine aspect of the Word. This causes all sorts of problems, not only in the knowledge of the things of God, but concurrently, with regard to the practical issues of faith.
Phenomenalism versus Realism.
If the Bible is treated in an anti-realist phenomenalist frame of mind, ‘instead of [the bible being regarded as] conveying a real Word from God, a biblical writing is automatically held to reflect only what people happened to believe in accordance with the cultural standards of their own time, as if they had no direct access to standards of truth and falsity transcending their time’ (T.F. Torrance, Space, Time, Resurrection, Handsel Press, 1976, 3). The bible can be bent or put to the use of any time-conditioned philosophies. Set against this is the objectivity of God’s Word upon which theological realism rests. Is something like this not behind the wish of some contributors here who would wish to make the Bible relevant, ie., contextualised to a specific time and place, as in a contextualised theology? For me, what is of the essence is the singularity, ie., unrepeatablity of what has already been accomplished with finality, by way of Revelation, applicable and sufficient as to each and every new situation already. If the life of God the Father is lived in God the Son, and that same life is the vicarious life of God in the humanity of Jesus, then who this Jesus is, is enough for anyone, surely? (footnote 1)?
Towards the end of this piece I have picked out for examination some articles posted on this site by Andrew, not because they are not readily intelligible, but because they show up difficulties of theology, starkly, as in the theoretical or interpretative strategies for understanding the Word, and for their practical consequences for faith.
Competence, meritocracy and Christianity.
We sometimes confuse Christianity with a message requiring little competence – because we want Christianity to be anti-meritocratic. If little competence is required, we tend to hold onto cherished positions all the more strongly. This is often because we tend to confuse words (ie., the message) with the Word.
Because the author of the One who inspired the Book has left the scene, He, that is God, is ineffable, ie., cannot be directly experienced, and we have difficulty getting beyond perplexity. There is something of the non-appearance of an author at a book festival. Would it not be more comfortable for us if we He had left a set of instructions? Then we could simply interpret the ‘rules of life’, or get someone cleverer than ourselves to do the job for us; then we would know how to live. I came across this, ‘The Christian theologian has a calling from God to teach us the Christian worldview, i.e. to tell what life means and how it ought to be lived.’ Can you imagine the burden of responsibility if that were true?
Jesus, the book and the reader
There is no literary form that can contain the ‘Story of God’, for the relation between ‘Author’ and reader has been subverted. There is not the conventional dialogue between author and his work, and us his readers. Nor are there the usual vicarious pleasures of reading. Instead there is life lived as in the vicarious life of God, a participation of the whole of our lives, taken up in the life of his Son, or no Communion at all, just bits of poetry and archaic language (footnote 2).
Our disconnectedness from reality; ontological disruptions
The problem for interpretation may best be summed up by this statement: ‘Jesus Christ encounters us as a person whose presence speaks volumes. He comes to us clothed with his character and substance and heart, and clothed with the sheer weight and reality and intelligibility of his communion with his Father in the Spirit’ (C. Baxter Kruger). It is not always realised what is to be confronted be the living Word: ‘He comes to us clothed with his rationality, and the rationality of his presence engages our minds and summons us to obedient and objective and scientific and rational thinking about God….’ The conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees centered upon this point of unstated logic. The Pharisees could not perceive the real rules of theological discourse – or would not see them – and they consistently tried to trap Jesus in their little linguistic nets. Jesus, on the other hand, spoke and reasoned out of the logic of the Spirit, out of the rationality of his communion with his Father.
While they used the same words, Jesus and the Pharisees spoke a different language altogether. “Why do you not understand what I am saying (lalia)? It is because you cannot hear my word (logos)” (Jn.8:43). The Pharisees listened to what Jesus said, but paid no attention to what he meant, for the meaning of his audible words flowed out of the life he shares with his Father, which they resisted. This is why Jesus said, “the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life,” (Jn.6:63) for his words had their origin in and pointed to the communion of the Spirit.
So what about the infinite qualitative distinction between creature and Maker, that it is impossible to believe using our innate capacities? That even reliance upon a spark of initiative from the voice of conscience is not enough. That dislocation between knowing and being, faith and reason, love and judgement, which requires the healing Word (and Act) of God, to put us right. That the whole cosmos became disordered and with it the terrible feeling, of non-being or nothingness, at the end of it all. Is it any wonder, then, that in such a state of being, we are confused by the Man who came for us, debased creatures as we are? Whenever we hear of the man Jesus we have, historically, failed to associate the Jesus of faith and the Jesus of history. Instead of using binocular vision, Jesus has been pulled apart by critical analytic methods, a chasm opened up between faith and history (cf. chapter 8 of Torrance, Space, Time, Resurrection). Jesus gets split asunder into manageable, believable pieces – pieces which fit with our preconceived (empiricist or rationalist) notions of what it means to be this ‘character’. Are we not more concerned with ourselves, sometimes, than of who he represents? Yet this God-man challenges us to find a new way of describing the world through the very personal terms he has initiated, as opposed to viewing the world in impersonal ways.
The problem of the intellectual or cognitive relations of faith
The basic problem we face is that we all have our “baggage.” As two people inevitably bring habits of living and relating into their marriage, we all bring habits of mind into our discussion of Jesus – whether we are aware of it or not. Growth in our knowledge of Jesus involves an increasing awareness that we can inadvertently impose upon him our own ideas, forcing him to fit the mould of our preconceptions.
We all have “mental instruments” that we use to perceive and make sense of the world around us. These mental instruments are ideas and concepts, categories and assumptions, which function as a pair of glasses, as it were, through which we see and interpret everything that we encounter in our lives. (Without these instruments or glasses, we would not be able to conceive of anything or know it in any meaningful way.)
The cost of wrongheadedness
Our pair of glasses allows us to see and interact with – and to know and experience – life. But what if our pair of glasses has the wrong prescription? What if our mental instruments are skewed? The problem of knowledge lies right here, whether we are talking about two persons seeking to know one another in marriage, or a scientist seeking to know the nature of the atom, or a person seeking to know Jesus Christ. We must refine our mental instruments so that they are increasingly appropriate to the thing or person we want to know. Otherwise, we are incarcerating ourselves inside our own heads, and thus inevitably imposing our own ideas upon the world and the people around us.
If we are in fact re-creating that person in our own image and relating only to the image we have invented, what is the cost? In science, the price of imposing our own ideas onto reality is the loss of discovery, with all its rewards. In Christian faith, it is the loss of the knowledge of Jesus Christ. Moulding Jesus in our own image, we are unable to be fully free from our bondage into abounding life. It is as we come to know him – the real Jesus, as he is in himself as the Father’s beloved Son and the Lord and Saviour of the human – that we are and inspired with a life and joy that are not our own.
The struggle with language, rationality and philosophy in the understanding of the Word.
‘The New Testament is the record of their explosive joy and overflowing confidence and hope, on the one hand, and of their struggle, their mammoth struggle (my italics), to comprehend the staggering meaning of Jesus’ death and resurrection, on the other’ (C. Baxter Kruger: ‘The Undoing of Adam’). If it is through language that we experience the world, then that language is influenced by social-economic-and political factors from our earlier experiences so, as Post-modernism knows, we cannot shake off the prejudicial aspects of our perceptions and cognitions that easily. If faith is not to be like dishwater – disposable – we need something ‘Other’ – the One who speaks objectively and outside of ourselves.
Who would have thought that our minds needed to be remoulded? That is to say, our minds inhabit, largely in opposition to a (critical) realist philosophy, a rag-bag of unacknowledged philosophies or parts of them. For example:
1. In toying with the Newtonianism, either consciously or subsconsciously, theism is bent in the direction of diesm. In which case the Incarnation of God becomes untenable. This cosmic dualist perspective prevents any real Word of God crossing the gulf between God and his creatures. The work or activity of Christ is turned into myth or story.
2. Elements or fragments of Kantian epistemology – ie., rationalist idealism – so easily enter the mind, countering claims to know God in any real, meaningful way. Positivism, too, has difficulty with Divinity, and therefore the Word in any real sense. Commonly held, this epistemological dualism states that we can know things not as they are in themselves but only as they appear to us. Again this undermines our confidence in the specificity of the God of Jesus Christ who would, in making himself objective in Space-Time, intimately know us.
3. Both liberal and fundamentalist forms of belief are hampered by dualisms. In the former case, it is not the reality of God’s self-revelation which would be the ultimate judge of the truth or falsity of our thought about it, but the self-conscious and self-referring human spirit. That is, they stumble at the identity between God and his revelation, not only by the denial of the deity of Jesus Christ but in the assimilation of the Spirit of Jesus to the human spirit. Within fundamentalism, whilst the deity of the Son is acknowledged, instead of beliefs being open to the continual revisability of the continual self-giving of God, beliefs are given a finality and rigidity in themselves, somewhat stifling Christian experience so interpreted. These are the practical, epistemological and dualist consequences of fundamentalism.
In the article ‘What is post-evangelicalism?’ on this site Andrew starts out with a realist view of truth but settles for equivocation (dualism) – for whilst initially asserting matters of faith as true (part of ‘virtuous circle’ of belief), he later vacillates, finding matters of faith need to be dealt with in a relational (relative?), experiential, and subjective manner. A chasm or dualism persists.
More hopefully he writes ‘This is…. the old struggle between religion and grace. Evangelical religion has become a highly intellectualised affair, and the compulsion to conform to religiously mandated standards of behaviour has moved in an inward direction. … we put our faith in the soundness of our discourse as a guarantee of righteousness; rather than stand naked before God…. ‘
The vacillation between realism and non-realism is recognised as a strategy in ‘A house of cards’:
…to re-centre faith around something other than the troublesome question of whether it is all true or not. Various movements, from Pietism to Pentecostalism, have made personal religious experience the determinative factor: if the experience of faith remains viable, then it does not matter too much if the intellectual framework is in an advanced state of dilapidation. Others have found sufficient reason in the life of community, in artistic expressions of religious sentiment, in ecclesiastical tradition, or in social and political activism to keep marching - nominally, at least - under the banner of Jesus Christ. Christian religion appears then to provide its own moral or social or aesthetic justification, regardless of whether the original story is credible or not.
Thinking across the ontological gulf; the struggle against dualism
We must become aware of our habits of thought and examine our inherited ideas. This in itself is painful and costly, but it also runs the risk of exposing the wrong-headedness of cherished notions, even of our inherited theology. The Christian faith means, in part, to examine our mental instruments, to bring our habits of thought, our ideas and categories into the open. To follow Einstein is necessarily to call Newton into question. But Newton was no small man on the periphery of Western thought.
Perhaps it is more than accidental that the first words of Jesus in John’s gospel form a question: ‘What do you seek?’ Is this not the question facing each new couple in marriage, and each new generation of scientists, and each new generation in the church? It is a simple question, really, but a loaded one. ‘What do you seek?’ translates into: ‘Are you prepared to do what is necessary to find it?’ Like it or not, science and theology live by being willing to rethink everything we thought we knew, so that we can see more clearly. To have clearer sight is to experience liberation and joy.
This is more than a good message, a set of instructions, for he heals an ontological and cosmic rift. He comes not as a prophet only, but as Man. As Man on earth, God in Jesus is acting vicariously, standing under God’s judgement, the very place were we ought to have been. As ascended High Priest, he ‘speaks’ for us, as in his prayers to the Father.
‘If he is not able to meet us in person and share his own mind and heart and Spirit with us, the door of heaven remains locked before us. We are left outside with a book about God. It may be an accurate book; it may be filled with inerrant statements about God. But a book is not a person, information is not communion. Without Jesus Christ and his miraculous ability to encounter us in person, there is no possibility of our communion with God, and thus of real knowledge of God at all’ (C. Baxter Kruger ‘The Communion of the Holy Trinity as the Basis and Logic of Christian Theology’). We need to fashion our understanding of doctrine not as a series of check boxes as in a series of detached propositions of a debased systematic theology but to apprehend the Word/Reason/Logos, in unitive or associative fashion as befits a tentative Dogmatic Science of God.
(1) Incidentally I tend to think that when the life of man is viewed in such vicarious terms, it can be difficult to go back into an institutional form of religion, especially when one may not be having the enlivening experience of the vicarious expansion of the mind, so readily experienced in the different media now available, albeit not overtly Christian forms, as in literature, reading in general, or listening to an inspiring voice on the radio. Of course one is leaving out actual embodied communities of people from the equation. But it is in the feeling of one mind in contact or communion with another, so easily missed from our modern way of life, that the radio, for example, can offer an interesting supplement or alternative. Certainly these vicarious experiences have as much to offer as when faith operates, unfruitfully, given non-realist forms of expression.
(2) In my previous article, on reading the bible, I tried to make a distinction between the vicarious role of the mind of the reader and the unique vicarious role of Christ. Jesus subverts are normal readerly role. Just as, in the act of reading, we access the inner life and intimacies of character, so we can, by imperfect analogy, understand something of the intimate knowledge God has about us. It is, in effect, the prior knowledge and love He has for his ‘characters’ ie us, that allows us to participate in his Communion: Father – Son relationship.
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