What Christianity Is Not. Douglas John Hall
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its particularity, when it is deeply understood, is infinitely more inclusive than are most of the allegedly universal religious messages put forward to replace that center—messages whose seeming universality usually cloak highly chauvinistic and biased assumptions. The point, therefore, is not how to avoid the skandalon of “the crucified God” (Luther/Moltmann), but how to avoid the false scandals that have indeed plagued the course of Christendom throughout its history and are still extraordinarily and virulently at work today. The point is not how to make ourselves and our message, as Christians, entirely and painlessly accessible to the multitude; rather, it is to try as steadfastly as we can to ensure that what the multitude hears is really the gospel and not some culturally biased religious doctrine or secular ideology that obscures the gospel and offends and alienates others wrongly or needlessly. The point is not how to achieve superlative political correctness of the kind that forfeits, in the end, the possibility of saying anything at all decisively, lest it offend; rather, the point is to avoid elevating to the status of the essential accidental, peripheral, or secondary concerns that too easily become the occasion for confrontation, conflict, and violence.
That is why, in these chapters, my purpose will be to identify certain misrepresentations of Christianity, which, though they all concern matters indeed closely bound up with this faith both historically and doctrinally, when they are raised to the status of Christianity’s essence or core confession must be perceived as false scandals poised to become flash points of conflict and alienation vis à vis others who are not of this fold—and also (let us acknowledge right away!) some who are of this fold. In a word, I want to identify some of these vulnerable spots of Christianity so that what this faith really is, what it really claims, what it wants of us, what it wants to give us—so that this core confession or kerygma might have a better chance of shining through the thick fog and darkness of the myriad claims to Christianity in today’s global village.
What really is Christianity? As one who has tried over nearly half a century to answer that question in the affirmative, I can testify to the near impossibility of doing so in a really satisfying way! But perhaps it is possible to say what Christianity is not. It is always more difficult to say what something is, especially when that something is an organic, moving, changing historical entity, than to say what it is not. Of course we must assume some more or less integrated, if tentative or intuitive, understanding of what a thing is in order to specify what it isn’t.4 But if we can eliminate what the thing is not, we may leave, at the center, a space where das Ding in sich (the thing in itself) may identify itself or (to say the same thing in other language) may come to us in all its ineffable mystery. If we exercise enough nuanced care and enough modesty about our own witness to God’s Word—if we “rightly divide the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15, KJV)—we may succeed in leaving room for the divine Spirit to fill in the holy silence that we cannot precisely or accurately name. That is my object here.
Theology via Negativa
What is Christianity not? What, among all the many things that Christianity is reputed to be, or has tried to be, or still presents itself here and there as being, ought we to rule out? What should we eliminate from our understanding of the core or essence of this faith tradition? The methodology upon which I shall be drawing as I undertake this project is certainly not new, though in Western Christendom it has been employed with any kind of consistency only sporadically. It is called negative theology or theology undertaken via negativa, by way of negation. Under the nomenclature apophatic theology, this approach has informed much of the theological thinking of the Eastern Orthodox tradition. While a few historic theologians of the Christian West, mystics chiefly, made considerable use of the via negativa (one thinks of Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, John of the Cross, and others), the West has usually preferred the via affirmativa, or kataphatic theology; that is, it has wanted to advance positive theological statements and systems—partly, one has to say, because such an approach serves more directly than any negative theology could have done the powerful hierarchic institutions of Western Christendom. Ecclesiastical establishments like papal Rome at its height, or even the less powerful Protestant state churches of Europe, seem to require equally definitive and triumphantly positive theologies. But for some sensitive Christian thinkers of the East, these Western theologies have seemed to diminish or violate the essential mystery of God and the things of God. Theologians like the so-called Pseudo-Dionysius, the Cappadocian fathers, John Chrysostom, and John of Damascus were so conscious of the ineffability of the deity that they found human attempts to describe God affirmatively to be lacking in humility and quite possibly to be courting idolatry. One has the impression that neither Catholic nor Protestant theology has been particularly worried about that possibility! And with hindsight, it seems to me, we might well lament the fact. Looking back over some of the immense and exhaustive systems of theology developed in Western Christendom, not to speak of such modern expressions of religious omniscience as Christian fundamentalism, one is often a little embarrassed today. It strikes many of us, I think, that too much Western theology knows a lot more about God than it should—or could! It lacks the kind of humility that contemplation of the Infinite ought surely to induce in finite creatures; and at a time when (as I’ve already suggested) modesty on the part of religion is no longer a bourgeois nicety but a condition for human survival, this theological omniscience of Western Christendom gives one pause. For the avoidance of giving false offense, whatever else it means, must first mean honestly recognizing the abysmal limitations of our own knowledge of God and the things of God, and therefore not putting ourselves forward as infallible authorities with exclusive claims to truth. There are no experts where the knowledge of God is concerned! The apophatic theology of the Eastern Christian tradition at its best is grounded, I think, in that recognition.
To be sure, all inspired and authentic theology is premised on the experience of divine revelation. The revelation that the presence of God conveys to faith, however, is not so much extraordinary and compelling knowledge (scientia)—and certainly it is not just information!—as it is sheer awe and humility before the holy, and the wisdom (sapientia) that can only be the fruit of such wonder. It is surely a sophomoric kind of mysticism that grounds itself in the sheer unknownness of the ultimate. Authentic Christian mysticism is born of the wonder that is revealed in the Christ: that the world—that we!—should be so loved! (John 3:16).
Of course exceptions arise to the generalization about Western preference for kataphatic and Eastern preference for apophatic theological approaches. I already alluded to the Western mystics, who were always a rather countercultural element in the West. Indeed that quintessentially Western theologian, Augustine of Hippo, who was perhaps the main architect of Western theology, in one of his several phases or personae manifests a highly mystical strain. No statement may be more exemplary of the apophatic tradition than Augustine’s terse phrase, Si comprehendis, non est Deus (If you [think that you] understand, it isn’t God you’re thinking about.)5 It was of course Augustine’s more kataphatic side, especially in his later or so-called Catholic phase that set the tone for the Western Middle Ages. During the High Middle Ages, when Scholasticism achieved what may be thought the pinnacle of kataphatic or affirmative theology, Christian mysticism was almost an underground movement; but the alternative the mystics stood for was never wholly submerged, and in fact it was found sometimes in the personal devotion of the Scholastic theologians themselves. Even the highest schoolman of them all, St. Thomas Aquinas, was drawn to mysticism after he had experienced a spiritual crisis, a dark night of the soul and the light that was given him in that darkness. In the aftermath of this mystical experience of the divine, Thomas told his secretary, Reginald, that he could not go on with his great Scholastic project, the Summae, because, he said, “everything I have written seems to me straw!” More significantly still, when around the middle of the fifteenth century the medieval Scholastic project ground to an effective halt, it was the mystical approach to the comprehension of the things of faith that emerged to fill the vacuum, and perhaps save Western Christendom from early dissolution.
This is not uninteresting to Protestants, because we remember that Martin Luther was profoundly influenced by some of these late mystical thinkers, especially the so-called German Mystics and Meister Eckhardt. So it is not surprising when one finds in Luther’s writings a frequent and lively use of the