The impossible God

Christian Century, Feb 13, 2002 by Lois Malcolm

WITH BOOKS LIKE Blessed Rage for Order (1975) and The Analogical Imagination (1981), David Tracy became widely recognized as an important revisionist theologian--one who revised Christian categories in view of modern categories of thought. Tracy, 62, a Roman Catholic theologian who teaches at the University of Chicago, has also been associated with the theological "method of correlation," an approach that, following in the tradition of Paul Tillich, aims to correlate the Christian tradition and the modern situation in a way that is both mutually illuminating and mutually critical.

Lately, Tracy has taken his work in a new direction, focusing more on mystical and neo-Platonic traditions of thought and drawing heavily on postmodern thinkers. His new work speaks of God as "incomprehensible" (drawing on Dionysius, a sixth-century monastic and mystic) and "hidden" (drawing on Martin Luther). He also stresses in a new way the significance of spiritual exercises and suffering--especially the suffering of the innocent. I spoke with him about his current project and how it differs from his earlier work.

It seems you have taken a significantly different direction from the kind of thinking about God you did in Blessed Rage for Order.

I continue to read and learn from the modern debates on God--debates on deism, modern theism, modern atheism, modern agnosticism and modern pantheism. And as I argued in Blessed Rage, I think panentheism, the doctrine that all is in God but God's inclusion of the world does not exhaust the reality of God, is the best way to render in modern concepts God's relationship to us as described in the Bible.

But I believe such concepts do not provide the way to approach the question of God now. I am not suggesting one can get to "postmodernity" without learning from "modernity." But the real conversation about God intellectually should be with the category of the impossible. I have in mind the sense in which Soren Kierkegaard used this term: It is impossible to have a direct communication with God. God cannot be known by way of persuasion and argument; one either believes in or is offended by this God.

For moderns, the debate over God has been about what is actual and possible. Modern God-talk reflects concrete experiences, either actual or possible. When God is linked with concrete experiences, God can be understood by way of persuasion and argument--in an appeal to experience, reason or the imagination. Empirical or process theologies stress what is actual, and hermeneutic theologies deal with the possible.

When you shift to God-centeredness, however, you shift to the mystical and prophetic approaches--and therefore to notions of hiddenness and incomprehensibility. Hence the shift to ,impossibility." It used to be embarrassing to speak of the impossible. For modern thinkers like Weber, Dewey and Habermas, to introduce the category of the impossible was to provoke laughter. But it is a deeply meaningful category.

I want to attend to two namings of God: God as incomprehensible, in which case I am trying to rediscover the mystical tradition, especially from Dionysius, and God as hidden, in which case Luther offers a classic Christian expression.

Would you characterize this shift as a move to the "postmodern"?

I don't care about the word postmodern. I do care about the shift to the other and not the self. The shift is about undoing the arrogance and limits of modernity, especially reason. In this shift, the category of the impossible is again very important.

What is the major innovation in this approach to God?

I am trying to develop a theory of the religious fragment, the form best suited for the impossible. The fragment is something that sparks into the realm of the infinite yet disallows a totalizing approach, and at the same time opens up material realities--which we have learned from liberation and political and feminist theologies is very important. First forged by Romantics to disclose the "sparks" of the divine, the peculiar form of the fragment became for more and more artists, and then for philosophers and theologians, a form well suited to challenge any totality system, especially that of modernity. It is time for theologians to join this literary and philosophical discussion of fragments and to reflect on them in uniquely theological ways.

How can you develop a theory of fragmented forms?

I used to emphasize the distinction in religious forms between manifestation and proclamation. This distinction was based on issues of participation and distancing. When one has a radical sense of participation in a religious form, one has a "manifestation," as in a sacrament or ritual. When you have the breaking or the fragmentation of the whole, you have "proclamation" in a word or prophetic witness.

The danger of the manifestation form is that it moves toward becoming a totalized system--it presumes to offer a complete and absolute account of all reality. This is why the prophetic tradition remains so central to Christianity, Judaism and Islam. With proclamation, you have a fragmentation of totality and an emergence of a witness, a word, that the prophet must speak.