The impossible God

Christian Century, Feb 13, 2002 by Lois Malcolm

The next step is more reflective and yet more explicit in history and experience--this is when the religious form becomes either prophetic or meditative. The prophet always insists that it is not the prophet but God who proclaims. In fact, prophets usually don't want to become prophets. The meditative or contemplative form is found in the wisdom tradition, such as the wisdom books of the Old Testament and the Gospel of John in the New Testament.

Prophecy and wisdom can either be generalized or intensified. If the prophetic tradition is generalized, it becomes primarily an ethical tradition. I have always thought there is an intrinsic connection between modernity and liberal Protestantism, which is why Jews and Catholics tend to be far less troubled by the turn to postmodernism. Following Immanuel Kant, liberal Protestantism, Reformed Judaism and liberal Catholicism generalize the prophetic tradition and tend to collapse the religious and the ethical.

On the other hand, if the wisdom tradition is generalized, it moves toward the aesthetic realm. Iris Murdoch's novels are an example of how for many people art becomes the form of the good--in an almost religious sense. This is not bad, but it is inadequate.

When the wisdom tradition is intensified it becomes apophatic, or mystical. When the prophetic tradition is intensified, it becomes apocalyptic--especially when prophecy fails.

From its beginnings in Origen and Clement of Alexandria, apophatic theology seeks union with God by moving from physical sensations and concepts to their negation in the divine darkness that lies beyond experience and concepts. Apocalyptic theology, which has roots in Jewish eschatology, hopes for a reign of God on earth that can be established only as a result of a divine irruption into the present order that overthrows its evils.

Christian theology needs to recover its own classical fragmentary forms, especially the highly suggestive fragmentary forms of apocalyptic and apophatic.

If the ethical and aesthetic modes are "modern," would you call apocalyptic and apophatic religion "postmodern"?

These are the two things that matter to me in postmodern thinking: 1) breaking the totality systems, especially triumphalist ones, which Christianity is always tempted to be, and 2) attending, both intellectually and spiritually, not to the self but to the other.

What do apophatic and apocalyptic theologies look like?

The two most radical examples we have are that of Dionysius, who spoke of the incomprehensibility of God, and Luther, who spoke of the hiddenness of God.

Of course, there are great debates over how to read Dionysius. Is he Christian? Is he Platonist? Does Dionysius's apophatic theology suggest that reality itself is to be understood as a "gift"? These debates aside, Dionysius's writings not only fragment and negate all positive language for God but also insist that the thinker become a worshiper and enter the language not of predication but of praise and prayer. We move with Dionysius (and this is why the postmoderns read Dionysius) to an excessive language, that is, excessive in relation to all predicative namings of God, positive or negative. We stutter God's name by oscillating back and forth in praise, in hymn, in prayer, in contemplation between positive and negative namings of God in the ever more fragmentary language Dionysius believes is present in mystical union with the incomprehensible God.