Infinite God as Ineffably Knowable

Last summer, some of my favorite writers, including Jean-Luc Marion, David Bradshaw, David Tracy, and David Bentley Hart gathered at Fordham University's Center for Medieval Studies for a conference on Orthodox Readings of Augustine. Although I still have not gotten my grubby little hands on a collection of the papers read at the conference, my friend Brian Hecker was able to find an audio recording of a presentation by David Bentley Hart's at Calvin College last November in which he read a very condensed version of the paper that he had given at Fordham. And Brian had the graciousness and good sense to pass it on to me!

This condensed lecture, entitled "The Hidden and the Manifest: God and 'Being'", focused on the role that Nicene orthodoxy played in radically retooling the common metaphysical understanding of the universe at the time within pagan and Christian schools alike. Many things caught my attention in this lecture, and I intend to ingest Hart's book The Beauty of the Infinite this summer, but I was captured by his description of two kinds of apophatic theology.

To engage in apophatic theology is to describe God by way of negative rather than positive statements. That is to say, we speak of God not as he is but as he is not. Thus, God is not finite, he is not bound by time, he is not sinful, etc. To describe God with positive statements is called kataphatic theology. Historically, both East and West have affirmed the theoretical validity of both apophatic and kataphatic theologies, but both have recognized the critical role that the former has when speaking of a God whose existence is so far different from our own.

But Hart elaborates on two very different kinds of apophatic theology. Many theologians, particularly in the West (although he places Gregory Palamas and Vladimir Lossky in this category), have argued that we can describe God primarily by negative statements because he is Wholly Other, that is, he is so different and far removed in kind from us that any language that we might use to describe him would be useless unless it was only describing what he is not. This clearly leads to a dialectical agnosticism which wavers between univocal and equivocal descriptions (favoring the latter). It is a theology of distance, space, and darkness: of unknowing.

Hart, however, does not believe that this is indeed an adequate description of how we speak of him in whom we live and move and have our being. He follows Pseudo-Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, and (surprisingly for an Orthodox theologian) Augustine, arguing that in the God who has revealed himself to us, we are presented with a Being who is ineffably knowable. We must speak of God negatively not because he is Wholly Other, but because he is Wholly Infinite and exceeds our sensation, cognition, intuition, and description. Indeed, the more we learn about God, the more we realize that he exceeds our understanding. When we say that "God is Love," it is more true than we know or comprehend, and the more we know him the less we comprehend this statement, despite its truth, since he and his love are infinite. It is a theology of intimacy, excess, and light: of overwhelming knowledge.

Here, Hart gives a most excellent analogy: his knowledge of his own wife. Hart points out that after he had met her, he could tell someone all about her, because he barely knew her. He had a catalogue of descriptions which, though true, reflected not how much he knew her, but how much he did not. However, after twenty years of marriage, Hart now has no idea how to describe his wife to someone who asks, simply because he knows her so well that she defies his petty attempts to attempts to try to categorize her. Even if he does manage to speak of what she is like, he is intensely aware of the inadequacy of what he has said and of the extent to which she exceeds it.

Is not our God like this? Does not his Infinity invite our theological reflections, nay, our praises, in antiphonal response to how he has revealed himself to us in Jesus Christ? Are we not summoned to know him and revel in how far he exceeds the glory, laud, and honor that we offer to him, our Redeemer King?

Games and modulations

It's been a while since I've put a post (though not too long, I dare say), so I thought I'd post a poem that I wrote very quickly tonight. At a birthday party, we all had to write a poem within a certain time limit, unfailingly utilizing three words that someone else had give us. Then the group would attempt to guess which words in the poem were the required three words. This was my contribution. What do you think of it? And can you guess which were the words I had to use?


"Invocation"

Quixotic liturgy, blitzkrieg absolution,
Tribulatory tribute to bifurcated reality.
I stop and blink back the smarting
Tears of my unprincipled infatuation,
Reveling as I approach the breaded wine
And whiny hosts.
I assume the position of prodigious carnivore
As I kneel in the silence of the masses.
Piecemeal I ascend, stooped and extended,
To bleat out the fickle song of insurrection.

What to do about praise choruses?

As many of you know, I have been entrusted at my church with much of the instruction and leadership of our youth group, and this has included leading a time song and worship for the youth. As a result of a variety of circumstances, we have developed the need to put together a collection of hymns and praise choruses (most praise choruses) to use which are doctrinally, aesthetically, and doxologically sound. It's been quite a task, and my mind has been very preoccupied of late with questions surrounding the selection of praise choruses.

The fact is, I run in circles and go to school with many people who continually seem to ask a parallel question to Nathaniel's, wondering if any good can come from praise choruses? And let's be honest: since praise choruses came into vogue in mainline hippie Protestant and charismatic post-Vatican II Roman Catholic contexts in the 70s (during the reign of post-revivalistic hymn writing which was too often anachronistic or tragically sentimental), the vast majority of such music has been pathetic, banal, egocentric, kitschy, or even heretical. I remember with sadness when, at a mere tender 11 years of age, I watched my church bench our hymnals in favor of the ascendent praise choruses of the late 80s and early 90s (it was the mid-to-late 90s at the time), and sensed a profound loss in the quality of our worship. So, my personal inclination, especially as a hoity-toity Anglican, is to give up interest entirely on this genre of spiritual songs.

And indeed, the kerygmatic lack so much of the music peddled in the "worship" category is disturbing, mostly because the fact is that the bulk of our personal theology and piety is appropriated through the songs that we sing as a church body! Indeed, faith comes through hearing, and hearing through the Word of Christ, but much of the context for the whole of our Christian life comes from those songs that we sing. I remember a mere handful of sermons from my birth to my youth: I remember every single song that we sung regularly. As leaders in the church, we cannot reasonably hope that our parishoners to have a competent working theology if the songs that they sing from year to year in church do not set forth such a competent theology; in fact, we should not be surprised when we find the exact opposite.

Yet despite my deep-seated concerns with praise choruses and the concepts of God, Creation, Man, Sin, Redemption, Church, and Consummation that they all too often set forth, I am aware that there is a significant (and growing) corpus of praise music which is very appropriate for worship, and which I have come to hope to introduce to the youth and broader congregation within my church. And as I plan and execute a songbook which will hopefully last for a few years in our youth group, I find myself pleasantly surprised at the quantity and quality of many of the songs which, by the providence of God, have been brought to my attention. At this point the patient reader might ask: Such as what?

My first priority of music, following St. Paul's outline of music for us to sing (interestingly enough, in our hearts), are the Psalms and canticles which we find in the Bible. For centuries the Psalms have formed the core of music for the Christian church and individuals. We find expressed in the Psalms, despite their Old Covenant context, every range of emotion, every topic in the Bible, and every part of the life of our Lord Jesus Christ, in glorious detail. As St. Athanasius puts it, the Psalter is the Bible in miniature for the people of God for them to express themselves in worship to God as he Himself has inspired! However, the Psalms do need supplementing if for no other reason that at that point in Biblical revelation God had not expressed himself as fully as he later would. Helpful then are the other Biblical canticles, especially in the New Testament, such as the Benedictus, the Magnificat, the Nunc Dimittis, and the many canticles scattered through the Epistles and the Apocalypse of St. John. Together they present a condensed yet by no means diminished Gospel, and ought to constitute a large part of Christian worship!

To this end, I have found a number of singers and songwriters particularly helpful. The Roman Catholic singer/songwriter John Michael Talbot is, in my humble opinion, a master of making the Psalms personal, beautiful, and singable for congregation in a way that surpasses almost any other that I have heard. In particular, his penchant for combining an Old Testament psalm with a New Testament passage which highlights the Christ-centered character of that psalm is masterful. For instance, in "Lord, Every Nation on Earth Shall Adore You" Talbot uses a combination of Isaiah 45:22-23 with its New Testament fufillment in Philippians 2:9-11 as a chorus, with the verses being made up of exerpts from Psalm 72. The effect is powerful, moving, and edifying as one contemplates the Lordship of the Son of David who has been given all authority in heaven and on earth and confess, proclaim, and celebrate in song. Other contemporary songwriters who have written masterful arrangements of the Psalms and biblical canticles would be Michael Card, Rich Mullins, Mac Powell, and others.

Many of these singers and songwriters have written songs which, although perhaps not an adaptation of a biblical text to a tune, have succeeded in writing songs in praise of God or for the building up of his church which are marvelous in their harmonious ahderence to the Word of God. They are often pristinely simple, sometimes harmoniously complex, but they bring together conherently various strands of biblical theology to glorify God. A marvelous example would be Michael Card's song "Who Can Abide?" where he ties together texts from Isaiah, Jeremiah, Joel, Amos, Zechariah, and Malachi to describe the Coming of God, Judge and Redeemer, in the Day of the Lord. Another would be Rich Mullins' "The Just Shall Live," which interprets Psalm 16 in light of Christ and ties it with the description of those declared to be just by faith in Habakkuk 2 and Romans 1 and Christ's promise to raise up his people on the last day in John 6. Consider also this same artist's intimate plea to the ascended Christ in "Hard to Get," as the singer wrestles with the implications of Christ's presence and absence (a little understood or appreciated doctrine) to the real problems and anxieties of his own life.

Other artists areeven trying, however, to transcend the idea of contemporary music as "praise chorus" and actually write modern hymns which can be quite stunning. Keith and Kristyn Getty, Stuart Townsend, and the good people at Sovereign Grace Ministries (under the wonderful influence of GLAD's Bob Kauflin) immediately come to mind, of course. Some, such as Indelible Grace and the RUF crowd have even gone simply to revitalizing old hymns which have fallen on hard times. Together, they are trying to fill in the gaps with what the CCM industry has by-and-large left behind, and maintain a vibrant part in the tradition of hymnwriting in the Christian church through the ages.

All this to say is that when considering music for worship (and we must consider long and hard!), we must be searching out or writing a body of songs which are Biblical, Trinitarian, Christocentric, Personal, Corporate, Redemptive-Historical, and Beautiful which traverse every terrain of Christian doctrine and life. If we stick merely to praise choruses, can we say that we have arrived at this goal yet? Probably not, but as more doctrinally serious Christians take to the pen and the piano to write new music that can be integrated with the old, we are inching closer to the day when a church need not feel abashed or ashamed for having a worship service constituted by a large percentage of praise choruses, but on the contrary, can lift up its head (and heart and hands) to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit in praise and adoration through music which though recently coined bears the weight of past and future ages of the Church on its shoulder.

Fighting Temptation

Almighty and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou hast made, and dost forgive the sins of all those who are penitent; Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we, worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of thee, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Today is Ash Wednesday, and I have become intensely aware of late that I have been most negligent in posting on my blog. While, yes, I have many reasons why I have not been writing, not all of them are any good. So, as we begin this season of Lent, I have decided to hopefully revitalize my thoughtputting in this venue. Not to post so often (and thus I will probably not simply share random articles, lyrics, poems, or whatnot that others have written) but to post well and put my thoughts down.

And as we settle into a season where we focus on our weakness in the face of the onslaught of temptation, I am reminded that our only Help and Savior in this fight is Jesus Christ, very God and very Man, who was tempted in all things as we are. He fights temptation within us, but always because he first fought temptation on our behalf. He was tempted just as Adam openly by the devil himself (Christ could never be deceived, so why hide himself?) to gratify the lusts of the flesh, the lusts of the eyes, or the pride of life, but he beat down Satan under his feet. Unlike Adam, he overcame and began his journey to the cross where he would take our sins and nail them to that cross until they stopped moving.

On the basis of his overcoming his (or more truly, our) temptations, Christ now fights in us who have died with him and who also will be raised with him on the last day when he comes to judge in glory. This is our comfort, and only stronghold as we seek to overcome temptation and defeat those temptations which must come and which we by our sins and weaknesses are too pitiful to encounter alone. Let us pray that we fall not into temptation, but that we be delivered from evil, for he who is mighty has done great things for us, and holy is his name, and his mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.

And their witness was this

From the beginning until now God spoke through His prophets. The Word aroused the uncomprehending depths of their flesh to a witnessing fury, and their witness was this: that the Word should be made Flesh. Yet their witness could only be received as long as it was vaguely misunderstood, as long as it seemed either to be neither impossible nor necessary, or necessary but not impossible, or impossible but not necessary; and the prophecy could not therefore be fulfilled. For it could only be fulfilled when it was no longer possible to be received, because it was clearly understood as absurd. The Word could not be made Flesh until men had reached a state of absolute contradiction between clarity and despair in which they would have no choice but either to accept absolutely or to reject absolutely, yet in their choice their should be no element of luck, for they would be fully conscious of what they were accepting or rejecting.

-- W. H. Auden, For the Time Being