‘God as a mystery to participate in’ is a phrase from Peter Rollins. I used it in describing my understanding of what he has written but that doesn’t mean that I necessarily agree in full or in part with the phrase.
Before we get to that, however, it is important to understand a little of what Rollins seems to mean by it. He would, I think, see God as a mystery to participate in for two main reasons.
First, God is revealed in events or happenings which are non-repeatable micro-narratives. This would seem to mean that there are a constant series of revelatory events and we cannot participate in them all so cannot receive a full revelation of God. The event is the first order experience and any writings about the event, as in the writings in scripture, are a second order experience at one remove from the event itself and (as I know from my own experience of writing) an activity in which the experience is changed as well as recorded (i.e. elements may be left out, descriptions/metaphors open up other interpretations etc.). Propositional statements then drawn from such writings are at a third remove. So, events or happenings are where God is most fully revealed and as we cannot participate in all such events God is always beyond and a mystery. Second, and this is a related point, God is always more than any record, description, image or event of him or his activity. Here Rollins is essentially restating classic apophatic theology as it is commonly found in Christian mystics.
Apophatic theology, the Christian mystics and Rollins pose important issues that cannot be countered simply by stating that the witness of the NT is that God has spoken through his Son, the Kingdom of God is proclaimed and people are called to respond.
My view (and this would be my contribution to a critique of Rollins) is that the form of scripture is not solely open; that what we find within individual books and narratives are a combination of open and closed forms and that, in the Christian scriptures, we have both a diversity of forms and a narrative threaded through that diversity in the way that a patchwork quilt can be held together by a single thread. As a result, theology must, I think, be dialogical responding both to the open and the closed aspects of scripture.
4. Is systematic theology a product of the Enlightenment? It depends on how you define systematic theology. I would argue not. In the New Testament we see Paul developing a systematic approach to his writing about God in his letters. He reflects on the nature of God as revealed in the person of Jesus, presents arguments and draws conclusions which he applies to the everyday life of the emerging churches. The apologists present reasoned structured arguments to give account of their faith in the midst of persecution e.g. Justin Martyr. The patristic period is full of systematic theology as the church wrestled with questions of how it should speak about faith. Was Augustine a systematic theologian? What about Anselm, Abelard, Luther, Calvin, Pascal …….
I think there are two issues with this. First, systematic theology per se may not be a product of the Enlightenment but most systematic theology written today probably is. I certainly think that is the case on the Conservative side where harmonisation is used to create an order and coherence to scripture that it simply does possess in the form in which it has been received by us and on the Liberal side where historical criticism is used to try to identify a consistent core of original material about which we can be historically certain. I think both are driven by the Enlightenment’s methodology of evidence-based logical reasoning and therefore attempt to screen out or explain away all that is contradictory, strange, unchronological etc. in scripture. I think Walter Brueggemann and N.T. Wright in different ways are very strong in demonstrating the problems of these approaches which I think have a common core in seeking consistency and coherence above all else and therefore are unable to accept the tensions of the dialectic that is actually found in scripture.
Second, Paul’s development of a systematic approach to his writing about God in his letters occurs within an unsystematic form. His letters are a debate or conversation (not a story) with the churches to which he wrote about issues of concern to him and matters on which the churches had written to him for advice. We don’t have the letters which the church members wrote to Paul or all the letters which Paul wrote to the churches so the conversation as we have it is a little one-sided and incomplete, although we can infer some of the points made by the church members from Paul’s record of and response to them.
My argument then is that we have a both/and in scripture; the systematic and the unsystematic, the closed and the open. A dialogue occurs between them and to be true to scripture we must maintain that dialogue in our reading of scripture not resolving it in terms of either open or closed forms alone. My complaint with systematic theologies is that they tend not to maintain the dialogue and privilege closed approaches.
5. For me the problem comes when one systematic theology is presented as the only legitimate way of speaking about God and this appears to be the issue which you are raising with regard to Richardson. For example, if penal substitution is presented as the only legitimate way of speaking about atonement, then I would question whether that is true systematic theology. Why? Because scripture itself draws on a whole range of ways of understanding what Christ has done for us on the cross. However, I am also suspicious of those who reject penal substitution as a way of understanding the cross for the very same reason.
I fully agree.
6. What does it mean to be open to scripture? I agree with you that there is an ongoing dialogue with scripture in which we are called to engage but does this mean everything is up for grabs? This dialogue does not take place in isolation and I am suspicious of the reader response approach which is reflected in some post modern engagement with scripture. Tradition and reason both have their place and we would be foolish to dismiss 2,000 years of faithful Christians wrestling with scripture. Engagement with scripture as a corporate activity within the worshipping community is also important and I guess my question to Rollins and Richardson would be what weight they give to this and what sort of boundaries do they draw on who is part of that community?
I put several questions to John Richardson (which he has yet to answer) and which touch on the questions and issues that you are raising here. They included:
- You say "that new developments may indeed be possible in theology." Can you give an example of a new development that you think has come in theology and of how that new development was appropriately tested by being brought to the bar of systematic theology?
- How does the process of appropriately testing a new development in theology that you envisage differ from the debate that is currently happening within the Anglican Communion over the issue of homosexuality? Is this debate not a means of testing a new development in theology and are the problems we currently face perhaps being exacerbated by people on both sides of the argument trying to cut short the testing process?
- How could the approach that you are advocating ever respond positively to a genuine paradigm shift in theology?
In his original post Richardson wrote about the way in which the Trinitarian Creeds were developed and accepted by the Church and this, I think, is an example of the openness in the Bible and of the Church being open to scripture.
The doctrine of the Trinity is not developed or articulated doctrinally within the pages of scripture (although it can be argued that it is assumed). However, the way in which the relationship between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is described and the way in which a Christology is developed in scripture both leave the reality of the Trinity an open possibility that the Church has then explored and articulated in response both to scripture itself and to its own experience of relationship with God through Jesus in the Spirit.
The both/and nature of the scriptures (containing both the open and the closed and seeking to maintain that dialogue) mean both that the Church (as the interpretive community) can arrive at generally accepted articulations of God as Trinity while constantly living with the tension (never more so than in the case of the Trinity) that all such articulations are provisional and that God is always more than any human articulation of his nature and being.
Jim White - Static On The Radio.
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