There is of God in se nothing to say.
Consideration 1—the proofs of God
Man has always had much to say about his gods, or rather to report about that which the gods have had to say of themselves. Anciently, that there were gods was not muchly debated. If there was a question, it was more in the order of which from among the gods was the right god, the true god, the potent-most god, or the effective-most god. Few were vociferously agnostic or atheist. In the early years of Christianity scholars were occupied with the reasonableness of the faith in God’s Christ, and in the internal relationships of a singular God who had within itself three “persons.” God, however, was a fact. The only question was the right understanding of this one triune God.
In the early mediaeval period there arises a need to explain the reasonableness of belief in God. This need seems strange. The church was secure, growing in powers, influence, and numbers. The West may have been divided amongst Christians, Moslems, and Jews, but they all were theist, and all held to a singular deity. Some opine that through the writings of Boethius Aristotelean logic was taking hold of scholarly thinking, and everything needed to be logical. This is true. On a deeper level, the belief in the resurrection of the body underscored the unity of the physical and spiritual. Faith may be “spiritual,” but it could not be unrelated or unrelatable to the physical world and in that to the faculties of man, chiefly his reason and will. There had to be a type of “unified field theory” that encompassed God and faith in God. From another perspective, perhaps the collapse of world-order that followed the implosion of the Roman Empire had created the slow emergence of a deep-seated anxiety in the ultimate rationality of the world that wanted an assurance beyond faith and hope that God was there and caringly so. Whatsoever the cause, scholars in the West began to speak not only of the reasonableness of the faith, but of the reasonableness of the idea of God itself.
Anslem of Canterbury entertained a thought experiment he thought capped all experience. The concept of the greatest possible being must necessarily denote the existence of the greatest possible being because it could not be the greatest being if it did not have existence. This greatest possible being is God. Few have subscribed to the idea because it is fundamentally a tautology: the greatest possible being one can think of = God. More to the point, the questions that needs to be asked is this: can a finite being formulate an adequate concept of an infinite being? Nevertheless, there is some value to Anslem’s proposition. For all practical purposes, a man’s god is whatsoever is his highest ideal, goal, or vision. It is that which gives ultimate meaning to his world, his life, his orientation to his world and his life. Unfortunately, as prophets have long bewailingly noted, here is the ground rich with potential to birth not only false-gods, but hells.
There were other avenues of argumentation. These are usually known as the five proofs for the existence of God. They muchly rely upon Aristotle’s meta-physics or theory about how world-reality is constructed. Three of them look at the theoretical beginning to the cosmos from different perspectives. The first claims all change is a movement from potentiality to actuality. There must be a Prime Mover, an actuality—which is itself not moved by another—to begin the chain of movement from potential to actual. The second claims there must be a Prime Cause to begin the chain of cause and effect that constitutes our reality as far as there cannot be an infinite regression. The third claims that everything we know is contingent, relying upon something anterior to it for its coming into being. There must, therefore, be a non-contingent being, a Necessary Being, at the head of this process. The fourth argument is about gradation, and presumes all judgements of better or worse imply an absolute standard. This standard is the Absolute Good because not-good [bad, evil] is defined as a deficiency of being. The fifth looks upon inanimate, non-rational, nature and sees in it a purposefulness toward growth that cannot be resident within it of itself. This “rational plan” in nature implies the existence of a Supreme Intelligence that has set the whole of the cosmos on track towards a definitive end. These five considerations cause us to posit a being outside of time-space that stands the headwater of time-space, and so is eternal, omnipotent, the Good itself, and omniscient. This being is that to which man refers when he speaks of God.
All five arguments have been faulted. Aristotle could only examine the superficial world of everyday experience, and so cause and effect, contingency, and orderly motion were the elements of sense-data with which he had to work. The analyses of Darwin, Heisenberg, and Dirac highlight a tincture of irrationality, freedom, and variance not only in the world but in the mathematics we tend to hold invariable. In positing a primal cause or a necessary first being we enter the world of hypothesizing. Gradation is a judgemental comparison that in no wise demands more than a theoretical standard of high and low. Last, purposefulness is a value judgement, an interpretation, we make. It does not imply a primal guiding intelligence over and above the randomness of energy.
The classical arguments for the rationality of the existence of God are philosophical speculations. They may buoy the believer, but they provide no proof. Indeed, all those seriously engaged in these arguments were not trying to “prove” that which they believed, but to underscore belief and its kerygmatic thrust with the reasonableness of its stance. It was, in their term, fides quaerens intellectum [faith seeking understanding]. They believed their quest was supported by scriptural warrant. Prophets and psalms had spoken of the world reflecting the glory, the substantiality, of God: “The heavens proclaim his glory…display his craftmanship, and from day to day they speak continuously, from night to night they make him known” (Psalm 19: 1-2). The apostle Paul also had taught that man can come to know the attributes of God through his works (Romans 1: 19-20). But the knowledge scripture speaks of one has by faith, in faith. All can see the wonders of material reality, but not all conclude they are the handiwork of a god. Indeed, Israel’s neighbours were castigated for coming to the wrong conclusions about who and what the God they found in creation was, and so worshiped false-gods. As noted above, the origins of the world in terms of contingency of being, the mechanism of cause and effect, or evolution from potential to actual do not tell reason there is behind it all an omnipotent being. The presumption of purposefulness is merely a value judgement that tells nothing of an originating omniscience. Moral and physical evil are and always have been the existential argument against the existence of divine goodness, power, foresight, and love. Reason, in brief, underscores nothing more than man’s inability to justify his faith, and in that leaves faith in God to be that which scripture has always claimed it to be, a gift from God supervening the workings of the world (Ephesians 2:8-9). Man is not called to under-stand or com-prehend faith, but to live it. Yet, searching for the reasonableness of faith may serve a kerygmatic end as long as it seeks to be no more than a similetic correlate. It is a delicately balanced fulcrum meant to aid, but it has nevertheless confounded preaching and understanding from the beginning.[i] Spiritual truths are always disoriented in words. No one has ever found the point where the words of this world and the Word of creation meet. That is exactly the point made by the Council of Chalcedon when it stated the human and divine natures in God’s Christ were united as one, but in a manner “unconfused.” More pointedly, when Jesus told doubting Thomas to come forward and touch his wounds, Thomas did not. He could not. Thomas understood he was confronted with something that could be seen and yet not be grasped. Thus, he knelt and in faith confessed: “my Lord and my God!” Proofs of God’s existence all fall before God, for a god that can be proved is too small to be God.
Consideration 2—the limits of human reason
We live in an age informed of the vastness of space. There is the seeming eternality of the cosmos counted in billions of years. The best of our minds tell us it is massively constituted of a dark matter and a dark energy which we know not. There is a roaring paucity to our knowledge of the universe. We have, admittedly, developed an ostensibly sophisticated technology to maneuver our ever-expanding bit of the universe, but the most honest among us know it is little in comparison to the vast amount unknown and, at the moment, unknowable. And all that becomes a pittance when we are confronted with the possibility that this, our universe, is but one among many. We may laud our accomplishments, and well we ought, but we are abecedarians still learning the fundamentals of physical reality.
We know also little about ourselves, our souls, our psyches, our spirits. Since the beginning of our recorded history we have differentiated between an “internal us” and an “external us.” We have divided ourselves in two. We have spoken of body and soul, and searched for ways to coordinate them. How can the immaterial and the material combine? Is the immaterial but an illusion, an epi-phenomenon, a mistaken excitation and misnamed parcel of materiality? Do body and soul meet in the workings of the glands? Do hormones govern psyche or does psyche govern hormones? Is the brain the “thing” that joins visible and invisible? Were the ancient Egyptians more sapient than we when they tossed away the brain and considered the core of man to be the heart? How can materiality defined by cause and effect co-exist with the apprehension of a freedom of will that defies determinism? Is free-will an illusion, a relic of a primitive form of self-understanding? Have we become mesmerized by the study of the brain to the detriment of the rest of man’s constitution? Have we become too rational in our analyses of man, and forgotten to weigh the powers of feeling, sentience, intuition? How little do we know of ourselves, our souls and bodies, our psychology and biology, our psycho-biologic co-ordination? How little are we able to know ourselves?
How little then can we, do we, know of God? For all our reaching for the stars, all we have done is unveil the how little we have ever known of God. We have long ago removed God from the realm of a heavens floating somewhere above, renamed him Love, and claimed to have idealized love in our hearts as the new divinity. Yet, for all our want of love, of acceptance of self and other, of a better world, a world informed of love, all our wanting has exposed is the littleness of our hearts. What can man say of God when there is, despite all our accomplishments, so little cherished of man, the earth and the cosmos he inhabits? What can man say of God when we have done so little to show ourselves godly?
Our glorification of reason has made us most unreasonable. One need only to look out upon this world being incrementally torn apart by political factions, ethnic hostilities, and blind and brutalist commercialism to see we are as a species little more than a bacterium attacking the planet that ought to be sustaining us. We have enshrined reason and have made it an idol that sees not, feels not, reflects not. Likewise have we enshrined the ideal of love. We have set it out in proclamations of “rights,” and very much left it there like a god to be visited on holydays and holidays, and otherwise ignored as we plod along to get along in this “everyman for himself” world. Intuition is mocked, feeling is sentimentalized. We have created an ever-growing artificial intelligence in our own image. It is full of algorithms emulating the brain, and shrived of heart, insight, touch and embrace. We have made for ourselves the image of our wonton individuality and its destructive abhorrence of the sociality of this world, the unity of its life, its air and waters, its plants and animals of which we are but one. How shall we know of God when we parade ourselves in ignorance and ignoring? How smug are we in ourselves as we look neither up, nor out, nor within? What do we know? For all our technology what are we doing to ourselves and the world? How much do we in-deed care? In such a world what sense does one make of an omniscient and benevolent God? Such a God affronts our sensibilities! Like those gathered before Pilate that mournful day, from our disoriented and dissociated depths we are given to say: “Away with him!” What proof need we of an entity we so visibly do not care to have?
Consideration 3—the experience of the mystic
The mystic is overcome. Self-consciousness is washed away, and with it its interlocutor, its ego, and thus also desire. All that is passing passes. The mystic swoons and faints. There is a moment, not of unconsciousness, but something beyond consciousness—presence. There is no-thing, nothing. It is “being-out-of-being,” ecstasy. It is stillness. What is there to move? It is silence. Who is there to speak? The world and the I melt away. To define it matters not. To explain it matters not. There is nothing to de-fine or to ex-plain. The mystic is drawn into God, into that light inapproachable. He sees and yet his self is blinded. There is nothing to do but reside. When the moment fades he must fall back to earth, fall back behind the shield of the icon, and from thence of God and grace to speak in symbols. He speaks of power, of light, of being held, being loved, being pierced. There is here an annihilation of self, and in it an annihilation of the idea of God. The plenitude becomes a nothingness. The mystic reaches the point before creation, the vastness where there is nothing, and yet above which soars the Spirit. Here, in the icons of Christianity, is the cross wherein all is sacrificed for the sake of a new creation that for man-in-the-world ever resides in that dawn-moment that is the resurrection.
The mystic knows the hollowness of his hallowed words. He knows also the necessity of them for this world veiled in flesh. This too is part of the cross—the old ever passing away, dying, the new ever dawning, ever being reborn. Between that twilight and dawn life becomes faith and hope, faith and hope in that which has embraced the soul, love. Here is the poverty of naught but old wine-skins that cannot contain his wish to speak of “Ah! Bright wings.” Here is the stillness of being warned “Do not grasp at me.” Such is the report of the mystic. Is there anything in the ordinary man capable of finding this same knowing of silence and inexpressibility that shields this power, this light, this penetration of a man’s being? Is this being touched by the apparent all-transcendent reserved to the few? Is there anything in man’s reason that to such attains? Is there some other power of man, of psyche, of soul that aspires to this? If there is, is it the core of the all too human search for a god to care for man, a heaven to heal the wounds and sufferings of man, an eternity to balance the distorted tilt of the scales of fate? One may opine the mystic has indeed grasped the ungraspable, or has been by the ungraspable grasped. However, there ostensibly are more that opine the mystic is bounded in an illusion, a delusion, a delirium, a psychosis. Even if the mystic proves himself the most goodly and godly of men, they will argue it is merely the happy result of a weird turn of the brain or its chemistry. It proves nothing more than a certain individual had a certain experience that may or may not have resulted in some noble action.
Consideration 4—the psychological experience of self
The analyses of depth psychology posit a core or depth of the psyche that propels the psyche towards the integration of the individual and of the individual into his environment of other and world. It is a power of evolution that seeks to make of man and his world a whole, or in religious parlance, holy. The symbol of this whole-making power is variable dubbed the Self, or the God-image, or the Christ archetype. The depth-power toward integrity of being is there in every psyche. It needs but to be heard, and as a man ages it makes its voice more poignant. This estimation of how the psyche ultimately operates has given rise to an understanding of religion. The teachings and rituals of the great world cults are coded manifests of this psychic thrust to integration of life. They present truths of self so profound that reason cannot directly hold them, yet they are necessary to be in some form confronted. Like dreams, daydreams, and fantasies they speak in symbols that command attention. The symbols carry meanings that cannot be exhausted, and so they continuously engage man in forward moving dialogue about his self and his meaning. All religions are in this analysis on-going analyses of man, of his soul, of the orientation of his life.
Thus neither reason nor its finitude, friability, and nescience define man. Man may be a faltering earthling, yet he has from the depths of his psyche been enriched with inspired, spirit-driven, narratives that reveal him an earthling in whom breathes a most-ancient creativity. Some may call that creative thrust towards integrity of being a power of evolution to move forward. Some may call that power the “grace” of God who has set evolution in motion. Some may call it the “trace of God,” or “the presence of God.” Whatsoever the term used, it expresses there is more to man’s inner workings than ego and assorted masks for assorted occasions. There is in man an elan vital, a spirited-ness. It is this core power that does not so much define man as un-define man, un-confine man. It is this power within to which religions have always looked. It is an unfathomable depth, and there is a reason for its unfathomability.
If man cannot grasp the unity of his being, he has at least some sense of its complexity, its seeming stratification, its evolutionary history. Biology felt a leap forward when it discovered the embryo replicates the evolution of the species. Psychology also felt a leap forward when it discovered the psyche also replicates evolution, that it resonates with the power of evolution, the trace of evolution—possibly from that theoretical moment of a “big-bang” to the present. Man carries within the print, the experience, the thrust of creation and its unfolding. Man carries within the world, the universe, the cosmos. Man is a vessel of a depth unsearchable ever churning, ever propelling, ever demanding life and the fulfillment of life. Man carries within the clues of life, the clues of Life. Through honest introspection and analyses man finds his own well of memories, a personal unconscious in which resides the seat of emotion. Beyond that there is a greater depth, a reservoir of memory that transcends individuality. It is a terrestrial heritage, the memory, the trace, of man’s emergence from the primal matter of earth and its primal seas. This is a common field of memory and instinct that unites mankind, a collective unconscious. Such strata moved the ancients to opine that in man there abide three souls, three psyches: the plant-like sentient soul, the animal-like concupiscent soul, and the human defining rational soul. Yet, to all this there is a depths greater, a trace not of terrestrial origins but of the cosmic endowment. It is something the ancients spoke of as the “spark of the divine,” something post-Kantian philosophers tried to describe in notions of a transcendental ego, a “will” to power, to be, to life, something depth psychologists speak of as the God-image within. The imprint of the seemingly eternal cosmic evolution whispers within of a primal power beyond the vastness of unfolding being, of the coming and going of cosmos, of energy and entropy, of life and death. It alludes in man to his notions of immortality and eternality. It conjures a vision seen dimly, a vision of that which no vision can capture: an immortal one who abides beyond all things visible and invisible.
How does man explain the eternality of being? How does man explain the phenomenon of his being, his layer upon layer of psychic depth, his need to differentiate his self as a body with a psyche, a soul, a spirit? He cannot, and yet he does. Psyche itself produces for man an image of that which man cannot define, cannot put into the brackets of rational thought. Psyche creates the cults of the great cultures.
It is worth our time to reiterate the position of depth psychology regarding the great cults. All religions are and ever have been endeavours to express and deal with the immensity of power and memory resident within, and the complications that arise from the press of the primal evolutionary forces within. Those forces are set out to integrate man into the environment of society and world, and yet maintain an individuality within that commonality. Thus, we may understand all ritual action, all dogmatic statements as metaphorical encapsulations of psychic truths flowing from the greatest depths of man that man needs to come into contact with, and yet cannot so do directly because of both their fundamental nature, and the immense life-giving, creative power of that nature. Religion, in that sense, is set out to transmit the power of the first moments of cosmos, that evolution causing moment, that moment of the Spirit hovering above the abyss and God speaking “Let it be,” let there be being, let there be life. Reason, being a by-product of that evolution cannot com-prehend it, cannot bend its head around it, and so we are left with metaphors (behind-the-forms), and analogies (items before/without logic). We are left with the gifts of art and artistry, with narrative, poem, dance, song, the soaring speculations of the “love of wisdom” (philosophy) and its crowning “science,” the word about Life itself, the word about God (theo-logy).
There is, however, no science of God in the sense modern man is wont to use the word science—an organized body of theories based on empirical data and experimentation. To return to the opening sentence of this lecture, man cannot talk of God in se. Man can, however, speak of his confrontation with the sense of the eternal within. Man can speak of the phenomenon of a sense of creativity and freedom within. Man can speak of his apprehension of freeing power within. Man can do so in the words that the creativity within itself has given him: grace, the divine imprint, the spark divine, the Spirit indwelling, the symbol of the integrated individual (the Christ archetype) to which he is summoned to con-form. And man can speak of the sense of the absolute that accompanies his experience of such items within. He can in their absoluteness place his trust in them. He can believe on them, on the spirited evidence of them. He can become man acting on faith and in fidelity to their manifestations and evocation. And over and above this man can see all this as a reasonable underpinning to his faith in God. This God revealed within is still, however, a mystery, a presence unsearchable.
The mystery within is not a riddle that needs solving, but a milieu in which to gestate, to suffer, to grow, to be born anew and arise. Mystery is not to be discounted. Mystery defines us and the cosmos, our origins, our being. It bears the marks of the absolute, the silent, the terrifying, the enticing. We cannot comprehend it because it is that which prehends us and all that is. Man thus sees it at times as an emptiness, a silence, and at others as the fullness of all that is. At times it seems totally beyond, and at others totally within. Perhaps one might say it is all of these and none of these. In this sense mystery takes on the character of the sacred. It is something self-enclosed, a “Holy of Holies.” Of itself, it has no place within or without. When it is by man for man given a place or a time it can only rightly be a safe, a sequestered, an enclosed time and place, much as is the case with time and space in the baring of the individual’s soul in therapy or confession. When the therapy and confession are of the depths not merely of the individual but of mankind, they become cultic. Therein time and space are “sacred” time and space, a dimensionality that is in itself and of itself “whole.” It is sequestered and protected from ordinary time-space because it goes beyond time-space. It enters the eternality of life that is to be addressed. It is out of sequence and congruity with the everyday world. It is “spiritual.” If that enclosure away from the mundane world of thought, and speech, and dress, and habit is compromised the exhibition and celebration, the workings and the potency of the spirit-laden mystery is compromised.
As with the symbols that arise in psychotherapeutic analysis, the symbol words of creeds and doctrines, the symbol acts of rites need to be allowed to envelop one in the mystery they enfold. They need to allow that contact with the sacred, the sacrosanct, the untouchability of life itself to touch the heart, the soul, and from thence to impart their power to mind and body. One can mistakenly take the symbol as a concrete item, and apply to it logic and analysis. But here symbol becomes, not the point for inspiration, but the object of intellection. One can look at a sunset and analyze the experience according to the rules of human optics and planetary physics. One can also allow that sunset to wash over the soul, and bathe it in the beauty of the moment. One can further reflect on that aesthetic moment and listen to what sadness or joy it may speak to the soul, and question the why and wherefore of that experience, and from that discover a corner of self hidden from the rush of the everyday. Symbols are not things. They are passage-ways between the ever unknowable and the unknown of self. The question is then one of will. Am I willing, am I open, to be moved by the symbol? Am I open to something other than “me” to speak to me, to take hold of me? Am I open to find I am more than my everyday contrivances, conformities, expectations? Am I open to the mystery that restlessly roots both me and the cosmos? Am I open to the workings of a god? Am I open to God? Am I willing to be empty to receive All? Or, do I will to receive the symbol merely as the object of the unsophisticated imagination of another that carries for me no personal value? The literalization of the great religious symbols has caused many to indeed see them defalcated of their power, reduced to meaningless objects of, at best, historical curiosity.
In this regard, it must be stressed that God is neither a person, nor a being, nor a power. All those designations are analogical expressions pertinent to a being who is a person and a power, in brief, to man. Man can only conceive of God as in some manner a “being,” because man has no conceptual frame-work for anything beyond be-ing, beyond “is-ness.” Not-being is no-thing. Not-being does not exist. Man has no way of relating personally to something that is not a person or at least person-able. Man personalizes all manner of things to relate to them. It is man who makes a person of mother nature, motherland and fatherland, aircraft and seacraft, pets and toys. Man is a person, and he relates by incorporating the world about him into some type of personhood. Man also de-relates by removing personhood from his fellow men and thus, not merely this or that individual, but entire nations, races, and religions have been de-person-alized, de-humanized in the effort to dis-engage them from their inherent reality and any relatability. Therein they are objectified, and then, having been de-fined, they may be con-fined, and eventually dis-re-garded, or more sharply, discarded.
God is not a person. God is not a being. God is not a concept or an idea that we can devise. God is beyond all such items. Only when we confess our unknowing, our absolute creatureliness, does God appear, not as majesty, but as Mystery, the mystery beyond the mystery of life itself that endlessly creates life, cosmos, world, person, other. The sacred-most icons of Father everlasting, of Logos and Spirit, and of their unity are hallowed images for-us. That is the reason theology speaks of a Beatific Vision, a seeing of God as he is, as the ultimate moment of our redeemed being, our being “saved” from the superficiality and folly of ego and masks, of the faltering body and the plague of sin. It is the first apprehension of man risen, justified, sanctified in a new heaven and a new earth, a resurrection-reality. God in se is for-us always God-incarnate—be that in the grace resident in the depths, or in the being who is our neighbour. Like so many we dis-re-gard, God is not seen until he is related to, and nature itself from the core of psyche speaks: “Hear me,” relate to me, let my word and your words come together, let thou be truly the human thou art meant to be—whole, holy.
Ritual and icon can lead us to the door of the mystery within, but the door, like life itself, opens itself, opens in its own time. Thus, scripture notes that faith in God is a gift of God. It is only the man who can fully embrace the Mystery and interpret it as Love who can definitively and truly say: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me.” Scripture tells us we can know God only in the Spirit (1Corinthians 2; 10-11), the Spirit of God who makes God incarnate. Scripture says also that the knowledge of God is not a matter of rational epistemology but of spirituality (Colossians 1:10), and that God’s ways are beyond our knowing (Romans 11:33-36).
Nevertheless, the analyses of depth psychology and its considerations of religion are not without opponents. Materialists and determinists deny a creativity, a mystery within. They claim all that moves man is experience and response to experience. Everything is mechanical cause and effect. In-spiration is an illusion. It is not a new position. Empiricists have long argued man operates by cause and effect of sense-data, and that the very idea of a self, of an enduring “I,” is an illusion. Reality becomes a machine. Man is at best a pack animal. Pavlov rules. If some men go running after a god or two, it is simply because the church bells have trained them they can find comfort in an illusion. Religion is the opium of the masses, and at times it behooves a situation to have the masses opiated. Thus, like reason and the experiences of the mystic, the analyses of depth psychology offer us no irrefutable word about God, least of all about God in se.
Consideration 5—faith
If there be any proof of an omnipotent and wise God it is that God does not force himself upon man or the world. He is in the “still small voice”—ignorable and ignored. He comes humbly—a tradesman, a member of an ethnic minority in a backwater of a sprawling empire, a man scorned and criminalized. God does not cling to sovereignty or power, but dissipates it. Indeed, that Jesus becomes confessed a Lord-for-us, as the image of the eternal Father, as the visible re-present-ative of the unseen God, the God in se, says more about the human psyche than about either God or Jesus. It speaks about the need of psyche for forgiveness. It speaks about the need of psyche to have its sense of moral responsibility redeemed, redeemable. It speaks of the need of soul to know itself loved unconditionally as only a God who is Love can do. It is the man who knows his frailties and failures forgiven and redeemed who can face the world without anxieties, can face the world freely. It is the man who knows he is loved who can himself love. And, it is only the man who can love who is free to do good. Love gives, gives itself, and it ever patiently awaits, ever patiently hopes to hear its echo. Love needs no proving. Love proves. Love im-proves.
One may be most capable of explaining line by the line the meaning of the creed and its contingent dogmas. One may well be able to explain them theologically, philosophically, psychologically. Those explanations and expositions—all their brilliance, all their striving, all their encompassing—do not mean one under-stands God or the sweep of man’s salvation, man’s formulation into a “whole” individual within an integrated world. They are no more than tokens of reason before the unthinkable. The creed, the doctrines, the rites are not items to be intellectually conquered, but to be submitted to, bowed before. They are believed because they cannot be grasped. They cannot be grasped because they grasp the individual. They speak to the heart of man of his mystery, his meaning, his meaningfulness, his inestimable value. They are confessions of love, not of man’s love for God, but of God’s love of man. This is the “knowing” of faith of which St. Paul speaks.
There is, however, a disjunction in theology. A host of church pronouncements claim God can be known from the trace of the divine in nature. Yet theology, following scripture, claims the faith one has in God is something over and above the natural agility of man to trust, to believe. It may be bolstered by the experience of nature. It may be paralleled or reflected in the workings of psyche, but it is, nevertheless, something other. It is a supernatural gift. It is also a divine process. It is the process whereby God incarnates as man. When, despite all the turmoil it will patently bring to her life, Mary says yes to Gabriel’s message, when she embraces his message in faith, she brings God into the world, not as power, not as artistry, not as purposefulness, but as something humble and ignorable. She brings forth God as man. From the self revelation of God in her son comes the means for all humankind to follow him, and become earthen vessels re-present-ing, each to his own bit of world, God.
The Christian believes God incarnates. God enters creation. He is hidden in creation, yet he is not creation. He pulses to be one with man, yet even when he is at-one with man, he is distinct from man. He moves man to be at-one with him, yet he is One within himself. He bears man’s sins that man by them be not destroyed, but it is he who is destroyed for the sake of man and cosmos and yet, he is not. In his self-destroying he transcends himself, revealing himself more than a God of law and order, more than a God of justice and mercy. He reveals himself the God who is love, the self-giving God even in depths of death and hell. In this he liberates man that man may be free to embrace him without anxiety of his mortality, his ego, his sin. This says much, and it says little more than that God relates to man, makes himself relative to man, that man be at liberty to relate to God and so become himself godly. The union of God and world, of God and man is realizing and real yet, to borrow from Chalcedon, in a manner “unconfused.” It is perhaps better to say in a manner “gracious.”
Yet there are them that will ask: why this “Christian God,” this God and father of Jesus, and not the God of Moses or the God of Mohammed? Why not a more ancient god—Zeus, Apollo, Osiris, Mithras, Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, Shang-di, Amaterasu? Faith is not proof except to the heart of him who believes. It is proof of a relationship he lives. If there be any rational, any experiential, any empirical proof it is the life of the believer, the world the believer weaves around himself. What in this day of that world can be said? Many may well mourn its sorrowful state of fracture and disregard, of callousness and carelessness. Yet many may well also celebrate and give thanks for that which has been accomplished, that which has been well moved forward and fostered. The concrete and irrefutable proof of man, of the humanity of man, of this world, and of any God from whose word it proceeds awaits the day when all else is said and done, and each man will need ask: “When saw I thee hungered and fed thee, thirsty and gave thee drink, a stranger and took thee in, naked and clothed thee, sick or imprisoned and came to thee?”
Until that day there is of God in se nothing to say because God for the sake of man and his world has chosen to be man, Emmanuel [God-with-us].
[i] The attempt to make faith “reasonable” has led too many to equate idea with empiric reality. Thus we are deluged with talk of the provability of the star of Bethlehem, the parting of the Red Sea, the trek of the Magi, the eloquence of Balaam’s ass, etc. Sacred stories meant to depict spiritual truths are turned into concrete world-facts, when reason ought to lead man to see these sacred tales as earthen vessels trying desperately to capture a spirit for that momentary and transporting glance.