Tag: Mystery

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“Faith Orients Reason”: Thoughts from Lumen Fidei

“Theology is more than simply an effort of human reason to analyze and understand, along the lines of the experimental sciences. God cannot be reduced to an object. He is a subject who makes himself known and perceived in an interpersonal relationship. Right faith orients reason to open itself to the light which comes from God, so that reason, guided by love of the truth, can come to a deeper knowledge of God. The great medieval theologians and teachers rightly held that theology, as a science of faith, is a participation in God’s own knowledge of himself. It is not just our discourse about God, but first and foremost the acceptance and the pursuit of a deeper understanding of the word which God speaks to us, the word which God speaks about himself, for he is an eternal dialogue of communion, and he allows us to enter into this dialogue. Theology thus demands the humility to be “touched” by God, admitting its own limitations before the mystery, while striving to investigate, with the discipline proper to reason, the inexhaustible riches of this mystery.” Lumen Fidei par. 36

Many of the posts on this blog touch on the theme of mystery in theology. It is certainly a preoccupation of mine. As this quote highlights, mystery can be a short hand way of saying God is subject, personal, rather than object, and so God is not and can never be merely an intellectual pursuit.

One reason I think I return to this theme again and again is to remind myself to be careful. In the words of the quote, it is easy to slip into theology where reason orients faith, rather than theology where faith orients reason. Or to slip into a theology where God is object rather than subject.

What also struck me about this particular quote is the relationship between mystery and humility. Theology attuned to mystery will be humble, but such humility does not say there is nothing to say about God. Rather such humility revels in “the inexhaustible riches of this mystery.” Moreover, such humility does not diminish reason but rather properly orients it by seeking the “discipline proper to reason.”

In the classic Christian understanding, as the encyclical says, “faith orients reason”, that is faith seeks understanding, so mystery tells us something about the subject of Christian theology, namely the Triune God. But mystery isn’t a convenient way to sideline reason either. Rather it properly orients reason. Faith is trust in what God as person has said and done, and reason oriented by faith seeks to understand the meaning of these words, these actions. But mystery remembers that God is Triune, one in three persons, and so he is joyfully inexhaustible. The journey goes on and on, but it is not futile, rather it is joyful.

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Indwelling the Mystery: Why in Theology Mystery > System

Paweł Czerwiński

“The mystery exceeds any system.”

So says Tracey Rowland in her book Catholic Theology, and she calls this the first principle of Catholic Theology. I would be so bold as to say that this impulse lies at the heart of catholicity itself, Roman, Reformed, or otherwise, because it acknowledges a wholeness while admitting that we cannot capture it on our own. No one theology is the theology. No one witness is the witness. No one system can ever be the system.

The New Testament, after all, is a collection of apostolic witnesses, all attesting in different ways to the same revelation, the same mystery of the Word made flesh, the same mystery of the crucifixion and resurrection of the Son of God, the same revelation of God as one in three persons. The depth of these mysteries demands that we need all the apostolic voices, as well as an ever-expanding troop of expositors, faithful to the task of bearing witness to their witness. Theology, at least theology for the Church, exists to bear witness to the apostolic witness, to faithfully steward the treasures they have bequeathed us.

To extend the metaphor, though there are many apostolic voices, there is one apostolic faith, and so the sound they make together is not a cacophony. Their voices are able to speak with one voice, as a choir can sing with one voice by harmonically collecting many voices into one. However, there is no one set of harmonic relationships, no one way of making many voices sing together, and so by extension there can be no one system.

If there cannot be a comprehensive system, then what becomes of Systematic Theology itself, the very discipline I am studying right now? Rowland’s point seems to be that while mystery > system, there is still value in speaking of theology in systematic terms. From my perspective, the value of a system is not in its supposed comprehensiveness, but in its ability to speak in terms of interlocking relationships. As one of a thousand possible examples, some of my favorite work in systematic theology is around the question of the relationship between our understanding of creation as it relates to the Incarnation. By putting just these two doctrines together, a whole set of questions emerge that might not have occurred otherwise. What does it say about the world if the one who made it can put on flesh and enter it? What does it say about the one who made the world that he would take on flesh and enter it? Or to take some other examples of relating doctrines to each other, how does creation relate to redemption, nature to grace, the church to the kingdom, the old covenant to the new covenant?

Thinking of a system as a set of interlocking relationships means that a system need not be comprehensive in order to be insightful or illuminating. Also, when you think of a system as a set of interlocking relationships, you can begin to ask a whole different set of questions of a system. When I speak of these doctrines as relating in these ways, what is illuminated? What is distorted? What comes to the foreground? What fades to the background?

To put it in slightly different terms, there is difference between an actual ecosystem and our ability at any one time to explain that ecosystem. But the better we understand the underlying set of relationships within that system, the better chance we have of saying true things about it, even if those true things to add up to saying everything that could possibly be said.

Our real position as creatures within a creation is that we can never get outside of our own ecosystem. We speak from within it. We speak as those on whom the light has shone, not as the light ourselves. This is exactly as it should be. As Trevor Hart wrote, speaking of the place of revelation in Karl Barth’s theology, “the mystery is never fathomed but rather indwelt.” Systematic theology is at its best when it is a means of indwelling rather than a futile attempt to swim to the surface of the mystery in the delusional belief that we can see it from the outside.

Some questions to take up in other posts: What happens when a system sings in a different key or from a different score than the apostolic voices? How can a systematic theology be evaluated? How can we say that one system more faithfully indwells the mystery than another?

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Bonhoeffer on the Interplay of Mystery and Joy

In the latter part of his biography of Bonhoeffer, Charles Marsh carefully works through Bonhoeffer’s prison writings. The prison letters have come to be seen as some of Bonhoeffer most important and challenging theological work, and in this post I’d like to reflect on two recurring themes from those letters, namely the themes of hilaritas and arcnaum. Hilaritas is Christian joy that embraces the this-worldliness experience of life and Being, while arcanum is the unfathomable mystery of God as God. I’d like to suggest that these two themes are deeply entwined, that the proper response to mystery is in fact joy, that the recognition of arcanum is not a throwing up of the arms in the face of mystery but a joyful embrace of life as life and God as God.

Bonhoeffer’s reflections on these themes speak to his understanding of the vocation of theology. In a purely academic setting there might be no place for mystery at all, expect perhaps to solve it or to dispel it. But this is not how Bonhoeffer ever saw his own theological vocation, and especially not in prison at the end of his life. As Marsh writes: “It was a great mistake, Bonhoeffer said, to think of theology’s purpose as being the unveiling of mystery, ‘to bring down to the flat, ordinary wisdom of experience and reason!’ Theology should rather, as its sole mission aim to ‘preserve God’s wonder as wonder, to understand, to define, to glorify God’s mystery as mystery,’ ‘In the arcanum,’ he said, ‘Christ takes everyone who really encounters him by the shoulder, turning them around to face their fellow human beings and the world.’ Theology’s task was to preserve the eternal mystery in a catastrophically demystified time.” (from Strange Glory)

And it is precisely at this point that joy enters the conversation because the preservation of mystery is not a dour task, but a deeply joyful invitation into the life of God and into the world itself. Bonhoeffer sums this theme up as hilaritas. Bonhoeffer’s initial reflections on hilaritas emerged from his reading of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics II.2 in prison. In that volume, Marsh notes, “Bonhoeffer discovered the value of hilaritas—good humor—as the quality of mind, body, and spirit most important to animating the greatest human achievements.” But it was more than this too. Hilaritas is also a joyful resistance to the nihilism Bonhoeffer saw around him. It is a refusal to accept the construal of the world as nothing more than power, an absolute determination to not surrender. But it is more than a No; it is first a Yes. As Marsh writes, “hilaritas is “saying the Yes and the Amen in gleeful defiance of the Nothing” (366).

Thinking of the interplay of mystery and joy, I’m struck that the book of Ephesians is both the most extended meditation on the mystery of God as revealed in the gospel and the most breathlessly doxological book epistle in the New Testament.

Joyful doxology is the proper response to mystery. If mystery becomes simply something to be solved, then two possible dangers emerge, one being a throwing up of the hands and the other being the temptation to move on once the mystery is “solved”. Balthasar expounds on this second danger, writing, “Problems do not exist in order to be solved; we can never get ‘behind’ Being. We always look with mild contempt on everything we have solved. Problems should always become more luminous in the light of the great mystery in which we live, move, and have our being.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat