Yesterday in the Theological Reflection class we spent some time savouring the spiritual prose poetry that is the writing of A J Heschel. This writer was mostly new to the class members, and his style of writing a stark contrast to much that passes for spiritual writing today. From the first day they saw this book cover there was interest in a man who had such a lived in face, and near the end of the course when choices have to be made about what there is still time to explore and discuss - my suggested omission of Heschel was thankfully over-ruled. So we worked through a handout of brief extracts, each of us reading one, not feeling the need always to comment, but now and then saying what we had found touched us, or how what we read found us. It was an important interlude when teaching doesn't need the constant explanatory, expository, interrogatory voice. It was a class taught by numerous acts of reading, reflecting and occasional vocal appreciation. And I think what was learned wasn't so much how to do Theological Reflection, as how to recognise the profoundly reflective way of doing theology that arises from depths of human experience. Such expereince is forged in the fires of a faith both profound and immediate, a burning passion for God that welds the mystical and practical, and from the resulting fusion, a philosophical theology distilled to the essence of the religious encounter between the human and the divine, which is the meeting of holiness and humanity, divine pathos and human need.
Here are a couple of examples of Heschel's remarkable glimpses into the nature of prayer as both joyful discovery and unassuaged longing:
Prayer begins where expression ends. The words that reach our lips are often but waves of an overflowing stream touching the shore:We often seek and miss, struggle and fail to adjust our unique feelings to the patterns of the texts. Where is the tree that can utter fully the silent passion of the soil. Words can only open the door, and we can only weep on the threshold of our incommunicable thirst after the incomprehensible.
In no other act does the human being experience so often the disparity between the desire for expression and the means of expression as in prayer. The inadequacy of the means at our disposal appears so tangible, so tragic, that one feels it a grace to be able to give oneself up to music, to a tone, to a song, to a chant. The wave of a song carries the soul to heights which utterable meanings can never reach. Such abandonment is no escape...For the world of unutterable meanings is the nursery of the soul, the cradle of all our ideas. It is not an escape but a return to one's origins.
Centuries of Jewish dealings with God have shaped such a theology of the soul's astonishment. The extracts come from Man's Quest for God. It would be to inexcusably misunderstand and misrepresent Heschel to point out that Christian theology teaches the greater truth of God's quest for humanity - Heschel would rightly point out, with something of that pathos he understood so personally, that such a view of the initiative of God is yet another idea Christians borrowed from the Hebrew Bible and the people God chose to be an 'echo of eternity'. Such theological plagiarism (unacknowledged borrowing) tends to obscure the beauty of the tradition out of which, in the providence of God, the Christian faith emerged. The human quest for God, uttered, or unexpressed because inexpressible, is always going to be the soul's response to the grace that first creates the urge towards God, and calls for that reckless trust so full of risk, to begin the journey with God into a future without tangible certainties.
Augustine's great prayer, 'Thou has made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee', is the cry that recognises that human incompleteness is itself the truth that turns us towards the One in whom all longing may be satisfied - but not yet, not here, and perhaps - not ever, for how can we ever have the capacity to have enough of God? P T Forsyth had no interest in being a 'finished futility' - he too recognised that the longing for God, the inadeqaucy of human expression to do justice to the inexpressible and ineffable, the categorical deficit in human capacity compared to divine inexhaustibility of grace, suggests that even in the encounter with God, in the fullness of glory and face to face, we will still be lost in wonder, love and praise. Which comes back to Heschel, and his willingness to be content, not with reductionist explanation, but with eternal mystery - which is why he confessed, 'I asked for wonder......' and not 'I asked for answers!'
The Unknown God
For a long time now I've used the Revised Common Lectionary Online as a basis for daily reflection on the Bible. The four weekly passages ensure that there is a reading from the Hebrew Bible, Psalms, Epistle and Gospel on which to think and pray each week. One or two of the passages I usually explore much more thoroughly - an exercise in exegesis intended to keep me exegetically fit, the equivalent of the three or four times a week run to sustain aerobic fitness.
Alongside this particular trek through the Bible in company with the many Christian traditions which use the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL), I use the New Interpreter's Bible (NIB) on each passage as a mid-range commentary. There are contributions to the NIB which are very high quality biblical comment - Fretheim on Genesis, Brueggemann on Exodus, Birch on Samuel, Newsom on Job, McCann on Psalms, Miller on Jeremiah, O'Day on John, Wall on Acts, NT Wright on Romans, Craddock on Hebrews I've found are highlights in a set that does have some less impressive efforts.
One passage this week is Acts 17.22.31, Paul's speech at the Areopagus. I've always found this a passage that shows Paul at work as a skilled, innovative mission tactician - on this occasion outmaneouvering the cultural intellectuals on his way to making his witness to Christ the saving revealer of God. Maybe the church today has to respond 'to a similar "culture war" in which the gospel is challenged by cities "full of idols" and where the church is asked to respond to the important questions of secular intellectuals. In which case Paul's proclamation of resurrection faith as a thoughtfully presented challenge to those other ultimate loyalties (modern idols) to which people now give their lives. The knowability of God, the grace of the One who is no 'unknown God' but comes near in love and judgement, not the God of the Philosophers but certainly the God the philosopher is groping after; but the God who is not found by argument, not contained by reasoned logic, not domesticated by abstract concepts at a sufficient remove to leave the deep places of the soul undisturbed. The living personal God who is known in encounter, who speaks and calls, who comes and invites, - but also the God who to use a phrase used by Flannery O'Connor of Karl Barth - throws the furniture around.
The living room of the mind is given a radical makeover by affirming faith in the resurrection of Jesus. Faith in Jesus' resurrection isn't a correction of mental perceptions; it isn't a surprising change of opinion; it is a reordering of the mind, a new worldview, a radical break with that most comforting of securities, that we inhabit a controllable predictable world. The resurrection of Jesus is a miracle of theology, not a miracle of technology. In Jesus, incarnate, crucified and risen, the unknown God (comfortingly vague and safely distant), becomes known.
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