There is an old anecdote in which a mystic, an evangelical pastor and a fundamentalist preacher die on the same day and awake to find themselves by the pearly gates. Upon reaching the gates they are promptly greeted by Peter, who informs them that before entering heaven they must be interviewed by Jesus concerning the state of their doctrine. The first to be called forward is the mystic, who is quietly ushered into a room. Five hours later the mystic reappears with a smile, saying, ‘I thought I had got it all wrong.’ Then Peter signals to the evangelical pastor, who stands up and enters the room. After a full day has passed the pastor reappears with a frown and says to himself, ‘How could I have been so foolish!’ Finally Peter asks the fundamentalist to follow him. The fundamentalist picks up his well-worn Bible and walks into the room. A few days pass with no sign of the preacher, then finally the door swings open and Jesus himself appears, exclaiming, ‘How could I have got it all so wrong!’
What is at issue in this anecdote is two different ways of approaching our religious traditions. The first is represented by the Christian mystic who is committed to his tradition yet acknowledges that it falls short of grasping the mind of God. This approach does not deny the existence of a relationship and does not imply that we cannot commit actively to the wisdom of our particular Christian tradition; it simply acknowledges that the relationship we have with God cannot be reduced to our understanding of that relationship. The second way (shown in a weak sense by the evangelical pastor and in a strong sense by the fundamentalist preacher) relates to a type of idolatrous relation in which we believe that our ideas actually represent the way that God and the world really operate. The weak sense, testified to by the pastor, is unintentional and dissipates in the face of divine encounter, while the second, evidenced by the fundamentalist, is Pharisaic in nature, for it refuses to give up its interpretation of God, even in the presence of God. Indeed, this can be seen as one of the central problems with the Pharisees as represented in the New Testament, for they held so closely to their interpretation of the Messiah that when the Messiah finally appeared in a form that was different to what they expected, they rejected the Messiah in order to retain the integrity of their interpretation.
The difference between the idea that our Christian traditions describe God and the view that they are worshipful responses to God is important to grasp, for while the former seeks to define, the latter is engaged with response. By charting the latter course, those within the emerging conversation perceive a very different way of understanding theology. It is no longer thought of as a human discourse that speaks of God but rather as the place where God speaks into human discourse. In other words, theology is understood as the site in which revelation makes its appearance in the world, the place in which theos (God) impacts, and overwhelms, the human realm of logos (reason). Consequently we do not do theology but are rather overcome and transformed by it: we do not master it but are mastered by it.
If theology comes to be understood as the place where God speaks, then we must seek, not to speak of God, but rather to be that place where God speaks. Through our words and actions we seek to be the site of revelation through which people encounter the life-giving Word of God. For some, this change in the understanding of theology seems to undermine the legitimacy of various Christian traditions, and ultimately that of Christianity itself. However, this is not the case. While our religious traditions may not define God, they can be seen to arise in the aftermath of God, both as a means of provisionally understanding what has occurred in the life of the person or community that has been impacted, and as a response to God. Our ‘theological’ musings can thus be called a/theological insomuch as they acknowledge that we must still speak of God (theology, as traditionally understood) while also recognizing that this speech fails to define God (a/theology).
Rather than viewing our traditions as windows through which we can see our beloved, those involved in the emerging conversation acknowledge that our reflections upon God arise as a result of the one who overflows and blinds our understanding. In this way the reflections of our various denominations do not testify directly of God, via their content, but rather testify to God indirectly, via their very existence. The result is not a change in what we think but rather a change in how we think.
One way of understanding the relation between God and humanity is through the distinction between knowledge of something as an object and knowledge of something as a subject. To understand this better we may take the example of prisoners in a concentration camp during the Second World War. In these camps the guards treated their prisoners as mere objects. They possessed a vast amount of data concerning such things as their prisoners’ age, previous occupation, family background and siblings. Yet this type of knowledge, however comprehensive, is poverty-stricken when compared to the type of knowledge that the prisoners’ loved ones would have possessed. While some of the guards may have held more objective data about an individual than that individual’s own family, the family would still possess a knowledge of the individual which the soldiers could never gain, a knowledge that is only opened up in love. For while those who imprison us, employ us or sell products to us may treat us as objects, the ones who love us treat us as subjects, subjects who can never be fully grasped in terms of cold facts and statistical probabilities. Indeed this is the difference between love and lust, for while lust treats the other solely as an object to be devoured, love treats the other as a subject who cannot be reduced wholly to an object.
God can never be and ought never to be reduced to a mere object for consideration, for in faith God is experienced as the ultimate subject. God is not a theoretical problem to somehow resolve but rather a mystery to be participated in. This perspective is evidenced in the Bible itself when we note that the term ‘knowing’ in the Hebrew tradition (in contrast to the Greek tradition) is about engaging in an intimate encounter rather than describing some objective fact: religious truth is thus that which transforms reality rather than that which describes it.
While descriptions concerning the experience of this ineffable encounter differ, there is a certain family resemblance between some of the most sophisticated and sustained attempts at explanation. These include the feeling of absolute dependence (Schleiermacher), the feeling of utter confidence in the face of anything (Barth and Bultmann), the feeling of ultimate concern (Tillich) and the feeling of being preceded by something other (Rosenzweig).33 Each of these expressions helps to articulate the sense that one is no longer master over one’s own existence – that God is not the object of our thought but rather the absolute subject before whom we are the object. This is confirmed in baptism when we say that we are ‘baptized into the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost’. Here we do not name God but God’s name names us.
By offering a robust a/theology which acknowledges the proper place of doubt, ambiguity, complexity and mystery, we acknowledge that God’s interaction with the world is irreducible to understanding, precisely because God’s presence is a type of Hyper-presence. Hyper-presence is a term that refers to a type of divine saturation that exists in the heart of God’s presence. It means that God not only overflows and overwhelms our understanding but also overflows and overwhelms our experience. While many of the communities taking part in the emerging conversation engage in highly creative forms of religious activity, encouraging a full range of sensual experience in worship, it would be a mistake to think that such openness to other languages (such as those of painting, poetry and ritual) allows privileged access to God that is inaccessible to reason. While helping to reintroduce a wide range of experience to worship, those involved in the emerging conversation testify to the idea that God can no more be contained in experience than in language. While both expressions are important, they each testify to that which cannot be contained in either. Indeed, one of the reasons why many of the communities involved in the emerging conversation engage in creative forms of worship lies, not in the conviction that opening up a wider array of sense experience in worship will lead to a more effective grasping of God, but rather in the fact that, in the aftermath of God, all our being cries out in response.
The acknowledgement that God is hyper-present has inspired Christians throughout history to think up different ways to express God as revealed through Christ. For instance, Paul Tillich spoke of the ‘God beyond God’; Jean-Luc Marion writes the word ‘God’ with a St Andrew’s cross through the centre; and Meister Eckhart spoke of forsaking God for the sake of God.
What is beginning to arise from the discussion so far is the idea that God ought to be understood as radically transcendent, not because God is somehow distant and remote from us, but precisely because God is immanent. In the same way that the sun blinds the one who looks directly at its light, so God’s incoming blinds our intellect. In this way the God who is testified to in the Judeo-Christian tradition saturates our understanding with a blinding presence. This type of transcendent-immanence can be described as ‘hypernymity’. While anonymity offers too little information for our understanding to grasp (like a figure on television who has been veiled in darkness so as to protect their identity), hypernymity gives us far too much information. Instead of being limited by the poverty of absence we are short-circuited by the excess of presence. The anonymous and the hypernymous both resist reduction to complete understanding, but for very different reasons.
It is unfortunate that this radical understanding of transcendence has largely been lost in the contemporary Church and is generally thought to be the polar opposite of immanence. The result of such thinking is the development of a false dichotomy that allows for disagreement between those churches which are accused of maintaining the idea of a distant God and those which are critiqued for celebrating immanence at the expense of God’s holiness. Yet in reality the Christian God destroys the idea of immanence and transcendence as opposite points in a diffuse spectrum, replacing this with the idea that immanence and transcendence are one and the same point: God remains transcendent amidst immanence precisely because God remains concealed amidst revelation. In this reading, Christ, as the image of the invisible God, both reveals and conceals God: rendering God known while simultaneously maintaining divine mystery. Here the God testified to in Christianity is affirmed as an un/known God.
This recognition of Hyper-presence leads us to reconsider the traditional atheism/theism opposition, for if our beliefs necessarily fall short of that which they attempt to describe, then it would seem that a certain atheistic spirit is actually deeply embedded within Christianity. The term ‘atheism’ can be understood in a number of ways. For instance, it can refer to the belief that the universe is all there is (existing without source or as its own source), or to the idea that the term ‘God’ is meaningless, incoherent or irrelevant (although this could more accurately be called ‘anti-theism’), or to the disbelief in some particular god or cluster of gods. The latter use of the word has always been acknowledged as part of Christianity; indeed, the early Christians were called atheists because their own affirmation of God involved a rejection of the gods advocated by the Roman Empire. Yet the atheistic spirit within Christianity delves much deeper than this –for we disbelieve not only in other gods but also in the God that we believe in.
As we have seen, we ought to affirm our view of God while at the same time realizing that that view is inadequate. Hence we act both as theist and atheist. This a/theism is not some agnostic middle point hovering hesitantly between theism and atheism but, rather, actively embraces both out of a profound faith. Just as Christianity does not rest between transcendence and immanence but holds both extremes simultaneously, so too it holds atheism and theism together in the cradle of faith.
This a/theistic approach is deeply deconstructive since it always prevents our ideas from scaling the throne of God. Yet it is important to bear in mind that this deconstruction is not destruction, for the questioning it engages in is not designed to undermine God but to affirm God. This method is similar to that practised by the original cynics who, far from being nihilists and relativists, were deeply moral individuals who questioned the ethical conduct they saw around them precisely because they loved morality so much. This a/theism is thus a deeply religious and faith-filled form of cynical discourse, one which captures how faith operates in an oscillation between understanding and unknowing. This unknowing is to be utterly distinguished from an intellectually lazy ignorance, for it is a type of unknowing which arises not from imprecision but rather from deep reflection and sustained meditation.
The a/theistic language employed by those involved in the emerging conversation is not merely a way of shedding some inaccurate ideas we have picked up about God and faith before we can begin the serious task of construction, and it is certainly not a provisional clearing away that must happen before a new religious structure is built: rather it is a recognition that negation is embedded within, and permeates, all religious affirmation. It is an acknowledgement that a desert of ignorance exists in the midst of every oasis of understanding.
This means that the emerging thought is a self-acknowledged form of heresy insomuch as it is aware of its failure to describe that of which it speaks. This recognition acts as an effective theological response to fundamentalism, as it unsettles the dark heart of its selfcertain power. Very briefly, fundamentalism can be understood as a particular way of believing one’s beliefs rather than referring to the actual content of one’s beliefs. It can be described as holding a belief system in such a way that it mutually excludes all other systems, rejecting other views in direct proportion to how much they differ from one’s own. In contrast, the a/theistic approach can be seen as a form of disbelieving what one believes, or rather, believing in God while remaining dubious concerning what one believes about God (a distinction that fundamentalism is unable to maintain). This does not actually contradict the idea of orthodoxy but rather allows us to understand it in a new light (which is the subject of the next chapter).
The point is not that our beliefs are inherently problematic but only that they become problematic when held in a manner that would claim more than some provisional, pragmatic response to that which transcends conceptualization. This a/theistic approach is not to be mistaken for some type of synthesis of opposites; rather, it is the uncollapsible tension between affirming our religious ideas while also placing them into question. This a/theism is not then some temporary place of uncertainty on the way to spiritual maturity, but rather is something that operates within faith as a type of heatinducing friction that prevents our liquid images of the divine from cooling and solidifying into idolatrous form.
This approach reflects the writings of such Christian thinkers as Justin Martyr, St Pantaenus, Clement of Alexandria and Origen, who, although affirming the divine presence, wrote insightfully about the danger of reducing God to a reflection of human rationality and counselled their readers about the need to prostrate the intellect before God. For instance, Gregory of Nyssa speaks of the move towards God as a journey into divine darkness, arguing that while religious knowledge begins as an experience of entering into the light, the deeper we go, the more darkness we find in that light.34 Or as the fifth-century mystic St Leo the Great wrote:
Even if one has progressed far in divine things, one is never nearer the truth than when one understands that those things still remain to be discovered. He who believes he has attained the goal, far from finding what he seeks, falls by the wayside.35
This is a realization borne from a hermeneutic approach that is profoundly sensitive to human finitude.
Augustine also delves into this tradition, encouraging us to bear in mind that God transcends all terms and escapes every conceptualization – even that of being beyond conceptualization.36 Yet one of the most influential thinkers of this tradition was Pseudo-Dionysius, whose Mystical Theology is a razor-sharp attack upon speculative thought and stresses the need for liberation from the idolatry of abstraction. Thinking along the same lines as Augustine, though expressing the matter more explicitly, Pseudo-Dionysius articulates an understanding of the divine as beyond the reach of all thinking, whether affirmation or negation:
While he possesses all the positive attributes of the universe (being the universal Cause) yet, in a more strict sense, He does not possess them, since He transcends them all; wherefore there is no contradiction between the affirmations and the negations, insomuch as He infinitely precedes all conceptions of deprivation, being beyond all positive and negative distinctions.37
Here we witness a way of thinking that seeks to go beyond saying both what God is and what God is not. Union with the divine, on this reading, involves a knowing unknowing in which the individual is radically undone. With this in mind, he writes:
Leave behind the senses and the operations of the intellect, and all things sensible and intellectual, and all things in the world of being and non-being, that thou mayest arise by unknowing towards the union, as far as it is attainable, with him who transcends all being and all knowledge.38
Pseudo-Dionysius argues that this knowing unknowing acknowledges its profound finitude and inability to grasp that to which the religious individual intends. This divine darkness represents a type of supradarkness that stands in sharp contradistinction to the sub-darkness of a desolate nihilism. While one is brought about by an absolute excess of light, the other results from a total absence; while one represents a higher form of unknowing that subverts reasoning, the other signals mere ignorance.
Indeed, Anselm, who is often seen as a key thinker in claiming that God is conceivable, writes that when gazing upon the Lord, the eye is darkened, noting that:
Surely it is both darkened in itself and dazzled by you. Indeed it is both obscured by its own littleness and overwhelmed by your vastness.39
Indeed, in chapter 15 of the Proslogion we find the following (non)definition of God:
Therefore, Lord, you are not merely that than which a greater cannot be thought; you are something greater than can be thought. For since it is possible to think that such a being exists, then if you are not that being, it is possible to think something greater than you. But that is impossible.40
This hypernymity is reflected in the thought of Simeon the New Theologian when he encourages his readers to:
Think of a man standing at night inside his house, with all the doors closed; and then suppose that he opens a window just at the moment when there is a sudden flash of lightning. Unable to bear its brightness, at once he protects himself by closing his eyes and drawing back from the window. So it is with the soul that is enclosed in the realm of the senses; if ever she peeps out through the window of the intellect, she is overwhelmed by the brightness, the lightning, of the pledge of the Holy Spirit that is within her. Unable to bear the splendour of the unveiled light, at once she is bewildered in her intellect, and draws back entirely upon herself, taking refuge, as in a house, among sensory and human beings.41
By recognizing the limits of human finitude Anselm formulates a definition of God that respects the transcendence of God. Hence his repeated reference to the Bible verse that declares, ‘God dwells in inaccessible light’.42 This reading of Anselm has been largely overlooked because his claim that God is ‘something than which nothing greater can be thought’43 is interpreted as a definition of God rather than a (non)definition. Indeed, it has the form of a definition but actually ascribes no positive essence to the divine: it does not say that God is the greatest conceivable being but rather that a greater than God cannot be thought. We can indeed conceive of something beyond thought but we cannot think of something beyond that.
For Anselm, the concept ‘God’ must include the idea of how the object of the concept transcends every concept. As the contemporary philosopher Jean-Luc Marion writes, ‘The root of the argument is not reliance on the concept but reliance on a non-concept, acknowledged as such.’44 This was something hinted at by the nineteenth-century Russian ‘hole worshippers’ who drilled holes in their walls and then prayed to them. Here the void that is prayed to replaces any divine object with empty space.45
For Anselm there are three levels of existence. The first, and lowest, level is that which exists only in the mind (for instance, a unicorn). The second refers to those things that exist both in the mind and in reality (such as a horse). The third level is that which exists in reality but which cannot be contained in the mind (i.e. God). It is this third level of existence that has often been overlooked by the Church, and yet it is here that we find God.
By exploring the idea that God cannot be reduced to our understanding or experience, we can already draw out two insights regarding the a/theological approach. First, this a/theology views our denominations as arising as a response to God; and second, it acknowledges that these denominations do not make objective claims concerning God. In short, it sees our various denominations as different ways of speaking about our beloved in a manner which maintains epistemological silence.46 We must speak and yet we must maintain our silence, we must maintain distance amidst the proximity of God, and we must worship while being careful not to make God into the object of our worship: for God is the subject before whom we worship. This site of uncertainty and unknowing is often a frightening place to dwell, but while the comfort provided by religion is placed into a certain distress by the idea of doubt, this distress, too, is not without a certain comfort. For while we do not grasp God, faith is born amidst the feeling that God grasps us.