(The comments below came out of an e-mail exchange with an old friend who’s been corresponding with me since I first thought that I might have a vocation to the religious life. She was shocked to think that I’d give up my tenured professorship for a less certain life as a Franciscan brother and wanted to know some of the considerations behind my decision. Here’s where I try to explain what, for me, constitutes real faith and how my own theology works.)
There was a fierce debate during the first century between more traditional Jewish Christians and Christians who wanted to reach out to other peoples, summarized by two brilliant and brief tracts, Paul’s letter to the Galatians, and the epistle of James. James, Jesus’ brother, insisted that the faithful must “be doers of the word, and not merely hearers,” while Paul, dedicated missionary to the hellenized world, argued that faith, and not works, led to salvation. I particularly like Galatians, since it’s Paul’s equivalent of what today would be a flaming email. For me, faith and works are part of the Moebius strip of Christian spirituality: show me one and I’ll show you the other — that’s my beef with so many of the Evangelical churches. Their emphasis on personal salvation at the expense of social outreach and justice smacks strongly of blind egocentrism and denies the necessary communal work that makes us into the Body of Christ. Since the Episcopal Church is usually seen as highly cerebral (although we do have churches that practice speaking in “tongues” which I find disturbing and looney and profoundly unscriptural), you’d think that we’d have a well-articulated and normative theology, but we don’t. Our theology doesn’t emerge in catechisms, like the Roman Catholics. Instead, you’ll find it in the liturgy, particularly the Eucharistic liturgy. That, I think, is because one of the strengths of our Anglican heritage is the realization that any statement about God, even those that are most positive — God is loving, merciful, creative, true, good, etc. — profoundly misrepresent the reality of the divine. God isn’t “loving, true, or good”; God is absolute Love, absolute Truth, absolute Good. Thomas Aquinas is reputed at the end of his life to have said of his great Summa, “it’s all straw,” which was a way of realizing that theology, while necessarily and even sometimes helpful, only takes us so far down the road to God. The four Cappadocians, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianus, Basil’s brother, Gregory of Nyssa, and Basil’s and Gregory of Nyssa’s sister, Macrina (who basically nagged her brothers into sainthood), all knew that any statement about God must be taken as partial and provisional. The Eastern churches have produced more mystic saints than the Western because the mystic seeks union with God without pretending to know God or to speak for the One.
The paradox, of course, is that we are all, all of our lives, theologians, and to talk about God with sincerity of mind and heart is to expose the you that will live for eternity to the gaze of the you that’s caught in time. It was much harder for me to come out of the closet as a Christian than it was to come out as a gay man, particularly in an academic environment — until, that is, I clued into the fact that Marxism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, feminism, deconstruction, etc.etc.etc. are all theologies too, just ones that seldom acknowledge their own limits. Walk the halls of any elite university or think tank and you’ll find pulpit-pounders as devoted as any sidewalk preacher.
Any theology that claims to have the definitive word on God substitutes human wisdom for God’s, and anyone with the hunger for God will eventually realize the rightness of Paul’s observation in 1Corinthians that ‘the foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of mankind and the weakness of God is stronger than the strength of mankind.’ I’m beginning to know the limits of my own wisdom; now I want the profound depths of God’s foolishness.
