The Ways of Affirmation & Rejection

I've been musing on the ways of affirmation and rejection since being at Greenbelt. This has been prompted by the The Garden's installation/performance Possibility of the Impossible and Pete Rollins' discussion of Bonhoeffer's 'religionless Christianity'.

The sense of their being two ways by which we can approach God was clarified for me in the writings of Charles Williams. Williams' views on these two ways have been summarised as follows:

"The Way of Affirmation consists in recognizing the immanence of God in all things, and says that appreciation of whom and what God has made may lead us to appreciation of Himself. The Way of Rejection concentrates on the transcendence of God, the recognition that God is never fully contained in His creation; it says that we must renounce all lesser images if we would apprehend His. These two Ways have been expressed by the paradox "This also is Thou; neither is this Thou," and tend generally to illustrate, respectively, Catholic or Protestant thought in their attitudes toward the use of images.

While Williams insists that a complement of both these Ways is necessary to the life of every Christian, and that none of us can walk the Kingdom's narrow road by only affirming or only rejecting ... yet he contends that Christians are usually called primarily to one Way or the other. Williams himself was a practitioner of the Way of Affirmation. Explains C. S. Lewis:

'[Williams was] a romantic theologian in the technical sense which he himself invented for those words ... The belief that the most serious and ecstatic experiences either of human love or of imaginative literature have such theological implications, and that they can be healthy and fruitful only if the implications are diligently thought out and severely lived, is the root principle of all his work.'"

As an artist and priest, i.e. someone dealing on a daily basis, with signs, images, metaphors and symbols, it seems to me that I cannot do other than primarily follow the Way of Affirmation. My Greenbelt posts finished with the dilemma that, ultimately, both ways seem to exclude the other.

However, Williams holds out some possibility for these two ways been complementary aspects of the life of a Christian but I am unclear, other than shuttling back and forth beteen the two, how this might work in practice. On this front, though, it is interesting that both Rollins and The Garden are making extensive use of the Arts and of imagery in order to discuss what is essentially apophatic theology (the Way of Rejection). In doing so, they are either not fully appropriating apophatic theology or have seen ways of appropriating Williams' suggestion of a complementarity between affirmation and rejection in ways that I have yet to understand.

In thinking about the theology of betrayal, as Rollins' does in this latest book, it would be useful to introduce the ideas of W. H. Vanstone in The Stature of Waiting into the debate. This book is based on a search for a different understanding of the betrayal of Judas from the understanding that has been traditional in the Church and which throws light on the exprience of waiting and dependence as signs and consequences of the image of God in us. Also of relevance would be the theme of betrayal in the plays of Dennis Potter with his masterpiece The Singing Detective being a stunning example both of the effect of betrayal and the way in which re-living and re-shaping the experience of betrayal can lead to recovery.

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John Train and Peter Case - Two Angels.