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Part 1 Faith Seeking Understanding The Nature of Theology HAT, REALLY, IS THEOLOGY? It is certainly “knowledge about God,” as the roots of the word “theology” imply, but it is much more. God is ultimately unknowable in human concepts and images, and so the “knowl- edge” we have of God in theology is a knowledge that is the result of our own free response to God’s offer of relationship and friendship with Godself. The purpose of part 1 of this book, then, is to come to a definition and understand- ing of theology in the light of the fact that any knowledge we have of God is really the result of God’s gift. Theology, in other words, is the result of grace! In chapter 1 we will approach a definition of theology by reflecting in a kind of first step on the incomprehensible and ineffable Mystery of God, always and everywhere present in the whole of creation and in human history, who offers women and men a personal relationship and, indeed, friendship through the offer and gift of revelation. Then, in a kind of second and third step, chap- ter 2 will reflect on the human response to revelation—the act of faith—and then on how that response inevitably moves toward a deeper understanding that involves the entire person. When this move happens, theology—or the- ologizing—has begun. The best definition of theology, I will suggest, is an old one. It comes from the writings of the eleventh-century monk and bishop Anselm of Canterbury, who describes the act of theologizing as “faith seeking understanding.” Chap- ter 2 will then move to a deeper understanding of our definition by showing how each one of the three words in this definition is important, and why “faith” and “understanding,” in Catholic thought, need always to be kept together. Chapter 3 will then draw out eight implications of our definition in a kind of variation on a musical theme in the light of the reality of today’s world church. Theology, we will see, is much more than simply “knowledge about God.” It is a special kind of knowledge—true, and yet always incomplete— that is discovered when any Christian seeks to understand her or his faith, but it is best discovered when this seeking is done in the context of the com- munity of other Christian believers. It is always a seeking for understanding

8 Faith Seeking Understanding in a particular culture, always inspired by and directed to ministry and mission, always nourished by and nourishing in turn our spirituality. Theology, as we will see finally, cannot be confined to logical discursive thinking, or even to words. Christians do theology in poetry, in drama, in the visual and the musi- cal arts. However and whenever faithful Christians seek to understand their faith, with whatever resources are available, they have begun to do theology. Mystery and Revelation &« THEOLOGY,” ALMOST ANY EDUCATED PERSON KNOWS, is derived from two Greek words: theos, which means “God,” and logos, which means “word” or “thought.” Etymologically, then, theology means a word or thought, or speaking or thinking afou God. A number of years ago, the Scottish theologian John Macquarrie wrote a book about the nature of the- ology and entitled it according to this etymological thinking: God-zalk; or, to refer to the title of a groundbreaking book by U.S. feminist scholar Rose- mary Radford Ruether, feminist theology is developed by reflecting on Sex- ism and God-Talk.! In his classic introduction to theology, the Quebecois Jesuit René Latourelle gives a more scholastic definition. Theology, he says, is knowledge that has God as its object, or knowledge of God.? So if anthropology is knowledge about the human person (anthropos), and biology is knowledge about &ios, or life, and sociology is knowledge about society or social groups, theology is knowledge about God, knowledge that has God for its object. Now, these two ways of defining theology—etymologically and in the con- text of scholastic theology—are quite traditional, true, and in many ways very helpful. They are very close to the way Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) talks about theology in the Summa Theologiae® A theological textbook that was widely used in the 1950s teaches that theology “according to its etymology, means ‘teaching concerning God,” and the text refers to no less an authority than St. Augustine’s City of God (8.1) and concludes that “Thus theology is the science of God.™ As I say, these ways of defining theology are very traditional, certainly true, in many ways very helpful. They are certainly very neat and clear. There is, however, one big problem with this kind of approach: Ged is not and can never be an object! As Indian theologian Stanley J. Samartha expresses it, “God is never the object of human knowledge. God always remains the eternal sub- ject.” Or, as Chilean Ronaldo Mufioz writes, “We cannot make God into an ‘object’ in the scientific sense of the word, something we can place in front of ourselves, to examine its contours and understand it intellectually.™ God can only be subject; God is always ineffable Holy Mystery.

10 Faith Seeking Understanding KNOWING THE UNKNOWABLE GOD When we do theology we db really speak of God, and we 4o have real knowl- edge about God. This is indeed what theology is, for if we can’t speak of or have knowledge of God theology would be impossible! But when we say this we also need to recognize that, ultimately, God can never be adequately grasped or understood with human concepts or logic. What this means is that, right from the beginning, we have to understand what theology is within the long tradition in Christianity—and in other religious ways as well—of negative, or apophatic, theology (apophatic from apophainomai in Greek, which means “to refuse”). In Christianity, this tradition of negative theology is deeply rooted in the Bible. In the Book of Exodus, for example, Moses at one point asks God to show him the divine glory (33:18)—in other words, God’s deepest reality. In response, God says, “I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will pro- claim before you the name, “The Lord'.. .. But ... you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live” (33:19-20). So God shelters Moses in the cleft of a rock, covers him with the divine hand, and then passes by him with all the divine glory. And, God says, after passing by: “I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen” (33:23). Moses, in other words, could have indirect knowledge of God—knowledge of God’s “back’™— but, as 2 human being, he cannot have direct, face-to-face knowledge. Other examples from the Old Testament might be cited from Isaiah 6, the great scene of Isaiah’s vocation as a prophet, where the prophet comes face to face with the ineffable majesty of God; or from Isaiah 45:15, where God is described as a hidden God; or from the magnificent scene toward the end of the Book of Job, when Job, after hearing of God’s wonders, can only respond: “I lay my hand on my mouth” (Job 40:4; see also chapters 38-39). In the New Testament, as well, we read in John's Gospel that, despite the fact that God is revealed in Jesus Christ, “No one has ever seen God” (John 1:8). Indeed, even though we know God in Christ, we still know dimly, as if looking in a mirror (1 Cor. 13:12); God in Godself “dwells in unapproachable light” (1 Tim. 6:16). At the end of a long reflection on how, after Jesus, God will still be faithful to Israel, Paul ends by basically throwing up his hands: “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are God’s judgments and how inscrutable God’s ways!” (Rom. 11:33). This biblical insight about God’s radical ineffability is articulated through- out the Christian tradition as well, both in the East and in the West. Gregory of Nyssa (335?-394?), one of the great Cappadocian theologians of the fourth century (along with his brother and sister Basil of Caesarea and Macrina the Younger, together with their friend Gregory of Nazianzen), spoke of God as “that smooth, steep and sheer rock, on which the mind can find no secure resting place to get a grip or to lift ourselves up. . .. In spite of every effort our Mystery and Revelation 11 minds cannot approach him.”” Augustine, bishop of Hippo in North Africa (354-430), perhaps the most influential theologian in the Western church, says in a famous passage in one of his sermons that “if you have understood, then this is not God. If you were able to understand, then you understood some- thing else instead of God. If you were able to understand even partially, then you have deceived yourself with your own thoughts.”® And another Western theologian, Isidore of Seville (d. 636), wrote in the seventh century that “God is known correctly only when we deny that he can be known perfectly.” In the Middle Ages in the West, perhaps theology’s greatest achievement was Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae. Right in the beginning of this work, after he has demonstrated the existence of God with his famous “five ways” (part 1, question 2, article 3), Aquinas begins question 3 with a short but important prologue. He says that ordinarily, once we have proved the existence of something, we would proceed to answer “the further question of the man- ner of its existence, in order that we may know its essence.” But in the case of God, he says, that is impossible. “Because we cannot know what God is, but rather what He is not, we have no means of considering how God is, but rather how He is not.”° Aquinas then spends questions 3 to 11 speaking in largely negative terms about God: God’s simplicity, goodness, unity, infinity, eternity, omnipresence, immutability. Then, in questions 12 and 13, he goes on to reflect on how God can be known and named. God, says Aquinas, cannot be known “univocally,” that is, what we say about God is never exactly the way God is. But, on the other hand, God is not known “equivocally,” meaning that what we say about God does indeed bear some truth. Therefore, our knowl- edge of God is always by “analogy,” meaning that language about God can express what God is really like, but never completely what God is like. In fact, it says more about what God is no# like than what God is like—or, as one of my teachers once put it, analogy is like an arrow that always hits the target, but never hits the bull's-eye!*2 Aquinas goes on to examine virtually the whole Christian doctrinal and ethical tradition in the rest of the work, but always, it must be presumed, with the kind of respect for the apophatic tradition that he evidences in his treat- ment of God. Apparently, however, his caution was not enough. One day, the story goes, Thomas had a vision of Christ while he was celebrating Mass, and from that day forward never wrote again. “I cannot go on,” he said. “All that I have written seems like so much straw compared to what I have seen and what has been revealed to me.” He died soon after. 'The tradition of negative theology continued into the late Middle Ages and up until our own day. The German mystic Meister Eckhart (1260-1329) spoke of the importance, for true knowledge of God, of taking leave of God for the sake of God—in other words, recognizing that radical inability of our own efforts to express God’s reality adequately.** Another late medieval German mystic, Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), spoke of the best knowledge of God as

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12 Faith Seeking Understanding being a “learned ignorance” (docta ignorantia), “because he was sure that it was ‘learned’ to admit to ignorance about the One who thus transcends all human thinking, about the Trinity who transcends all human numbering, about the divine perfection ‘beyond the best.”* The early modern French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), who had his own experience of God’s ineffability as “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,” not of philosophers and scholars,”¢ wrote that “a religion that does not affirm that God is hidden is not true.”"” And two centuries later, the great Danish philosopher and theologian Seren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), reacting to the rationalism of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), insisted that there exists between God and humanity an infinite qualitative difference—an idea that influenced Swiss theologian Karl Barth's (1886-1968) theology as well.!® (Barth, it is said, used to joke that the angels would smile when they read his theology. Obviously the man who was arguably the greatest theologian of the twentieth century recognized that he also needed to do theology in the apophatic tradition!) Barth’s German con- temporary Paul Tillich (1886-1965) did theology in a very different way, but he certainly agreed with Barth in terms of being cautious regarding language about God. Tillich wrote that “one can only speak of the ultimate in a lan- guage which at the same time denies the possibility of speaking about it.” Articulations of the apophatic tradition can sometimes come from surprising sources. Writing in America magazine in 2004, U.S. Anglo philosopher Michael McCauley relates an incident in his class when a “shadowy figure with one name [Dooley] who slides in and out of class and oblivious to all assignments” remarks “when we give God a name, when we call Him ‘God,’ we shrink him."? Let me conclude this rather whirlwind tour of the Christian apophatic tradition with a passage from the contemporary U.S. Catholic feminist scholar Elizabeth Johnson. For Johnson, the tradition of divine ineffability is an important foundation for the construction of language about God that goes beyond the almost exclusively male language and imagery to include other imagery (e.g., rock), but especially female imagery. And so she summarizes the apophatic tradition as follows: In essence, God’s unlikeness to the corporal and spiritual finite world is total. Hence, human beings simply cannot understand God. No human concept, word, or image, all of which originate in experience of created reality, can circumscribe divine reality, nor can any human construct express with any measure of adequacy the mystery of God who is ineffable. .. .This sense of an unfathomable depth of mystery, of a vastness of God'’s glory too great for the human mind to grasp, undergirds the religious significance of speech about God. Such speech never definitively possesses or asters its subject but leads the speakers ever more profoundly into attitudes of awe and adoration.® Mystery and Revelation 13 As I mentioned earlier, this apophatic tradition is not confined to Christi- anity. It seems that in every religious tradition there is a strong, often subaltern, tradition of mysticism and caution about the language used about God or about what is most real in existence. A very famous phrase from Buddhism commands the religious person to i/ the Buddha if you actually meet him.? In the Kena Upanishad, one of the scriptures of Hinduism, we read about the knowledge of Brahman in a way that recalls Nicholas of Cusa’s idea of “learned ignorance”: “I cannot imagine T know him well,’and yet I cannot say T know him not.”"Who of us knows this, knows him; and not who says I know him not’. He comes to the thought of those who know him beyond thought, not to those who imagine he can be attained by thought. He is unknown to the learned and known to the simple.”” The Chinese classic the Tizo T2 Ching begins with the famous lines: “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. / 'The name that can be named is not the eternal name.”” Sura 18:109 of the Qur’an reads: “Say: if the ocean were to turn into ink (for writing) the (cre- ative) Words of my Lord, the ocean would be expended before the Words of my Lord are—even if we were to bring another ocean like it.”” In Judaism, finally, an example of the apophatic tradition is articulated by the great Ger- man Jewish philosopher and theologian Martin Buber (1878-1965): “God, the eternal Presence, does not permit Himself to be held. Woe to the man so possessed that he thinks he possesses God!"% KNOWING THE MYSTERY So the first step in understanding the nature of theology is to recognize, with the Christian tradition and with traditions of all the great religions of the world, that God is incomprehensible and ineffable: no thought, no image, no concept can adequately grasp God’s reality, and, really, the deepest knowledge of God is f0 know we cannot ever know. As Gregory of Nyssa says so beauti- fully: “For the one who runs toward the Lord, there is no lack of space. The one who ascends never stops, going from beginning to beginning, by beginnings that never cease.”” Paradoxically, however, as even the apophatic tradition hints, this does not mean that God cannot be known by human beings. At least in our Christian tradition we say that God is fully known in the person and ministry of Jesus Christ. Yes, as John says, “No one has ever seen God”; but he goes on to say that “it is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known” (1:18). As U.S. Anglo theologian John Sanders writes, “Jesus manifests the real nature of God. ... The God who comes to us in history is a God who relates, adapts, responds and loves. That is what God is actually like.”® What the Christian tradition of negative theology means is 7oz that we cannot know God at all, but rather that we always know God as Mystery, THE Mystery,

14 Faith Secking Understanding ABSOLUTE Mystery, or HOLY Mystery. Hilary of Poitiers (d. 368) put it profoundly: “I possess the Reality although I do not understand it” (quod ignoro iam teneo).” Even in Jesus, God is Mystery, and so we need to ask just what a Mystery is, and how we can £now such a mystery? Problem and Mystery A first step, I think, in approaching an understanding of Mystery is to dis- tinguish, as does the twentieth-century French Catholic existentialist phi- losopher Gabriel Marcel (1888-1973), between a “problem” and a “mystery.” For Marcel, a “problem” is something that is unknown, but that somehow, eventually, through human intelligence or just serendipity, I can figure out or solve: it is “something I meet, which I find complete before me, but which I can therefore lay siege or reduce.” For example, I have a problem with my computer, or with my car, or with a difficult theology book. With enough work, or study, or (most probably) knowing the right person to ask to help me, I can figure out why my computer keeps freezing, or how to change a flat tire, or how to understand Karl Rahner. I can so/ve problems, and basi- cally move on. A “mystery,” says Marcel, is very different. A mystery isnt something unknown or unknowable but something that is already £nown, but absolutely impossible to be figured out, solved, or controlled. It is, we might say, super- knowable—something so knowable that, like the Energizer Bunny in U.S. television commercials, I keep “going and going and going” into my under- standing of it. A mystery, says Marcel, “is something in which I myself am involved.”! Solving a problem, in other words, is like going from the dark into the light. Knowing a mystery is like being blinded by the light—there is a line in an old hymn that says when we know God “tis only the splendor of light hideth thee.”? Or, as U.S. Anglo theologian John Haught expresses it: Instead of vanishing as we grow wiser, [mystery] actually appears to loom larger and deeper. The realm of mystery keeps on expanding before us as we solve our particular problems. It resembles a horizon that recedes into the distance as we advance. Unlike problems, it has no clear boundaries. While problems can eventually be removed, the encompassing domain of mystery remains a constantly receding frontier the deeper we advance into it.* So the question is not that Mystery is unknowable, but how we come to know Mystery. One can know Mystery, but in a very different way than one comes to know the solution to a problem. This is what we need to reflect on a bit here.

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE SERIES Peter C. Phan, General Editor Ignacio Ellacurta Professor of Catholic Social Thought Georgetown University At the beginning of a new millennium, the Theology in Global Perspective Series responds to the challenge to reexamine the foundational and doctri- nal themes of Christianity in light of the new global reality. While tradi- tional Catholic theology has assumed an essentially European or Western point of view, Theology in Global Perspective takes account of insights and experience of churches in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Oceania, as well as in Europe and North America. Noting the pervasiveness of changes brought about by science and technologies, and growing concerns about the sustainability of Earth, it seeks to embody insights from studies in these areas as well. Though rooted in the Catholic tradition, volumes in the series are writ- ten with an eye to the ecumenical implications of Protestant, Orthodox, and Pentecostal theologies for Catholicism, and vice versa. In addition, authors will explore insights from other religious traditions with the potential to enrich Christian theology and self-understanding. Books in this series will provide reliable introductions to the major theological topics, tracing their roots in Scripture and their development in later tradition, exploring when possible the implications of new thinking on gender and sociocultural identities. And they will relate these themes to the challenges confronting the peoples of the world in the wake of glo- balization, particularly the implications of Christian faith for justice, peace, and the integrity of creation. Other Books Published in the Series Orders and Ministries: Leadership in a Global Church, Kenan Osborne, O.F.M. Trinity: Nesxus of the Mysteries of Christian Faith, Anne Hunt Eschatology and Hope, Anthony Kelly, C.Ss.R. Meeting Mystery: Liturgy Wership, Sacraments, Nathan D. Mitchell Creation, Grace and Redemption, Neil Ormerod Globalization, Spirituality and Justice, Daniel G. Groody, C.S.C. Christianity and Science: Toward a Theology of Nature, John F. Haught Ecclesiology for a Global Church: A People Called and Sent, Richard R. Gaillardetz THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE SERIES Peter C. Phan, General Editor AN INTRODUCTION TO THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE STEPHEN B. BEVANS DPBIS@BOOKS Maryknoll, New York 10545 2009

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