Surprised by God

by Chris E W Green

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  To be awakened by the Spirit to contemplation is not to live with a lasting sense of God’s presence, or to enjoy constant consolation and peace. From time to time, we may find ourselves newly conscious of a deep, intimate communion with the love who is our life. But that is never what matters most. What matters most is that as we are living contemplatively we will begin to come newly aware of our neighbors, recognizing for the first time their true glory in their utter frailty. We will slowly come aware of the endless possibilities of caring for them so they can know the joy they’re meant to know. Contemplation is in the end a way of loving our neighbors precisely because it is a way of loving and being loved by God.

  Contemplation does not make us indifferent to evil or injustice. And contemplation does not solve all of our problems, or afford us everything we imagine we need. We do not turn to God so that in that experience we can find solace for or protection from the sorrows of this life. We do not pray, hidden away in spiritual ecstasies, while the world burns. Even as we keep our eyes on what cannot be seen, we, like everyone and everything else, suffer and die. Contemplation is nothing more or less than a way of living with God for our neighbors’ sake, especially the neighbors who see themselves as our remove period the midst of this life we have been given to share with them. It is a mode of engaging the world in all of its brokenness as it is transfigured by the light of the hope we have in the goodness of God.

  Seeing God as he is revealed in the life and death of Jesus Christ, to “look full in his wonderful face,” is not to lose sight of the world but to see it rightly for the first time. Attunement to that reality is the only way to refuse to be dominated by the terrors of fear. Not that the world is somehow rendered safe for us by our delight in the beauty of God. Not in the least. But we are in truth transformed by our vision of that beauty into the likeness of Christ, made to share in the character of the one whom we are contemplating. Beholding God by faith enlightens the eyes of our heart so that we see reality differently, and just in this way it begins to free us from the fear that would keep us from being ourselves for one another. Filled up with the love of God, we are strengthened to live as Christ lives, giving ourselves fearlessly with him for the life of the world.

  Chapter Two

  How (Not) to Believe in God

  “The God who made the world and everything in it . . . does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything.” Acts 17:24–25

  “God is not a human being . . . .” Numbers 23:19

  “Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.”

  Thomas Merton

  We are terribly familiar with God—at least with talk about God. Many of us are so familiar, in fact, we rarely if ever stop to think what we mean by it or what it means for us. Unlike the Athenians Paul encountered on the Areopagus, we do know the name of the God we worship (Acts 17:16–34). But too often we have only a fragmented and obscured sense of his character and nature. We have been so obsessed with the mechanics of living the Christian life, focusing our attention on the demands of ministry and the dynamics of spiritual experience, that we’ve lost touch with who it is we call by this name “God” and how we are to speak rightly to him and about him. We are not “fools” who believe there is no God (Ps 14:1), but we somehow have been fooled into assuming that it doesn’t matter much what we think about the God we are convinced we believe in. We know just enough not to realize how little we understand or why our ignorance and foolishness matter. In a strangely bitter twist, our very familiarity leaves us estranged.

  As a result, our current situation is in at least one respect even more challenging than Paul’s was. He had to explain the truth of God to people who readily admitted that they didn’t yet know. We have to rediscover the truth of a God we mistakenly presume to understand. That means that at least for many of us the process of coming to know how to think and speak about God will be inseparably bound up with unlearning deeply-ingrained opinions about him. The deepest assumptions we’ve held about the divine nature and character must somehow be uprooted and torn down before we can give ourselves fully to the process of learning to think faithfully about God. Meister Eckhart’s prayer has to become ours: God (as you really are) rid us of God (as we imagine you to be).

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  Many of our traditions have for a long time feared nothing quite so much as dead orthodoxy, lifeless spirituality, and ineffective religion. We’ve been convinced that what matters most is for our churches and ministries to get as many people as possible to believe as quickly as possible, and for individual believers to take responsibility for their “personal relationship with God” (rarely if ever stopping to consider what such language actually means). We’ve acted as if slow, deep catechesis is not terribly important, much less essential, in the discipleship process. And insofar as we give any attention to doctrine and theological formation at all, we’ve tended to focus on the distinctive teachings of our movement or denomination. Now, due as much to our successes as our failures, we are threatened not by nominal Christianities but by false ones. This comes particularly clear in what we say and think, explicitly and implicitly, directly and indirectly, about God. David Bentley Hart’s diagnosis is right on point: our very concept of God has become “thoroughly impoverished, thoroughly mythical.”

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  What is it that has gone so wrong in our thinking about God? And why does it matter? For many of us, whether we realize it or not, “God” refers to whatever it is that makes happen what we can’t otherwise explain. God is one—the primary one, to be sure, but still just one—of the causes of things that happen in the world. And because we imagine God as one agent among others, we have to conclude that God must be sometimes present, sometimes absent, sometimes active, sometimes passive—often if not always in response to something we personally have done or failed to do. We remain convinced that God possesses the strength to overcome every possible resistance to his will, of course. He has more power than any other agent in the universe, more power than all other agents combined. But sometimes for reasons we can’t quite decipher, God chooses not to overcome those resistances, leaving us to suffer the fallout from our own actions or the actions of others. Through it all, however, we do all that we can as people of faith to go on trusting that whatever God allows to happen will turn out for our good, somehow fitting into his plan for us.

  Obviously, I think more or less everything in the view I’ve just sketched is mistaken in one way or another. But even if I’m right, so what? What difference does it make if what we think about the divine nature is misguided or misleading? Doesn’t everything we say about God fail in the end to name the truth of the divine mystery? Theologians have always insisted that our understanding is no match for the divine reality. “If you think you have grasped God it is not God who you have grasped.” “God is revealed precisely where creaturely understanding cannot reach.” The lives of the saints impress on us the realization that there’s a lot that happens to us spiritually that doesn’t come as a direct result of theological study or reflection on the divine nature and character. And truth be told, no one with even the slightest sense of the complexity of our lives in the world could ever suggest there’s any simple, linear relationship between theology and sanctification, between thinking about God and coming to share in his character. How can I argue, then, that how we think about God makes such a crucial difference?

  I make the argument because I am convinced that we human beings are meant for the work of interpretation, created to make meaning of the reality given to us, purposed to know God in all things and all things in God. With that in mind, we can readily admit that all our thoughts about God are creaturely. Yes, our thinking and speaking fail to do what we wish they could do. Yes, reflection on the character and nature of God is highly demanding and at times even risky work. But this is nonetheless work that needs doing, work tha
t belongs to the Spirit’s shaping of our lives into the image of God in Christ. And to say that our words and thoughts are creaturely is not the same as saying they’re worthless or vain. Just the opposite, in fact.

  Hilary of Poitiers is unquestionably right to say that “our nature is not such that it can lift itself by its own forces to the contemplation of heavenly things. We must learn from God what we are to think of God; we have no source of knowledge but himself.” But the faith delivered to us insists that God in fact has made himself known. We are learning from God what we are to think of God. We have not been left as orphans. As Kate Sonderegger has put it, God is so humble that he joyfully lays himself down in the embrace of our knowledge. In St. Paul’s words, through the grace of the triune God, as the Spirit opens us up to the fullness of the life of the Son and the Son opens up to the fullness of the life of the Father, we come to know Christ with a knowledge that exceeds knowing. God just in this way raises us up beyond ourselves, beyond our own natural capacities and desires into the heights and depths, breadth and lengths of the divine mystery. This is the knowing of contemplation.

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  Theologically, we are led into this mystery primarily by the way of negation. We can know who and what God is only by recognizing who and what he is not. And that means learning to think faithfully about God is basic to discipleship and our formation into godli(ke)ness. (To be clear, learning to think about God is not the only lesson we have to learn—far from it; but it’s a crucial lesson, nonetheless.) As Aquinas insists, “no name belongs to God in the same sense that it belongs to creatures.” (For example, we may be wise, but God is not: God is God’s own wisdom. We may be loving, but God is not: God is love itself.) The recognition that God is God comes to have force for us just as we are forced to reflect on what we are thinking and saying about God and what we mean when we think and say it. To that end, Edith Stein, the Jewish Catholic philosopher and Carmelite nun, lays down the critical rule for all our God-talk: “God is always ever greater.” Greater than our affirmations. Greater than our negations. Greater than what we can say or think. Greater than what we can understand or even desire to understand.

  As we strive to find the least misguided and misleading ways of thinking about God, we are making ourselves available for transformation, a transformation that takes us out into the mystery that lies beyond anything we could imagine, much less put into words. In his Gifford lectures, Rowan Williams argued that we have to submit our language about God to the truth that the divine reality is endlessly excessive: it cannot be spoken of or thought about finally or exhaustively. God is infinitely self-determined and absolutely unconditioned and uncontrolled. In coming to that realization, we show that God is not a reality we are making for ourselves, not a projection of our own thoughts. Just for that reason, we have to speak about God carefully, discerningly, humbly. Coming to know God truly is inseparably bound with the practice of unknowing, with what Nicholas of Cusa styled “learned ignorance” and Sarah Coakley has called unmastery. Our thinking and speaking about God cannot explain the divine mystery, but it can, by grace, identify God faithfully. As Maximus Confessor put it, genuine faith makes possible the supreme ignorance that is required to know the supremely unknowable one. Perhaps this is why Jesus so sharply challenged the wealthy young synagogue ruler who asked what good work had to been done to find eternal life. “Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good.” By forcing the man to question himself and his thinking, Jesus creates space for his conversion and ultimate transformation. If the man lets Christ put all his convictions to the test, he can be delivered from his illusions. If he desires truly to know why it is that he has called Jesus good, he will make himself available for the transforming vision of the God Jesus reveals.

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  We see the way of transformational negation opened up for us in Balaam’s song to Balaak (described in Numbers) and St. Paul’s sermon to the Athenians (described in Acts). Prophet and apostle alike identify who God is by affirming what he is not. Balaam: “God is not a human being, that he should lie, or a mortal, that he should change his mind. Has he promised, and will he not do it?” Paul: “God who made the world and everything in it . . . does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.”

  Attending to their wisdom, we learn, first, that God is not an existent in the universe, not one of the things that exists. In fact, to put it even more pointedly, we can say with Aquinas that God does not exist at all: God simply is his own existence. If that just seems wrong, think about it like this. Imagine a chalkboard. On that board, draw a circle and then fill it with X’s of various sizes and colors. Let those marks represent everything that exists, from archangels to amoeba, from love to licorice. We are tempted to think of God as the largest X in the circle, or perhaps as the circle itself. But God is neither the circle nor one of the marks within it. God is, instead, more like the chalk and chalkboard and the event of marking. He is whatever it is that makes the circle a circle and the X’s the distinct marks that they are. In the language of Scripture, the triune God is “before all things, and in him all things hold together.” That there’s anything at all, rather than nothing, is due to the fact that God “upholds all things by the word of his power.” Understanding this, we can see what Simone Weil means when she says that it is purifying to pray to God not only in secret as far as our neighbors are concerned, but also with the thought “that God does not exist.” By putting to death our imaginations of God as an existent, withdrawing into the dark night of divine hiddenness, God saves us from loving him as the “miser loves his gold.” In this way, the cancer of idolatry is cut away from the organ of genuine faith—a surgery that has to take place again and again and again over the course of our lives.

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  We learn, second, that God is not sometimes present and active, sometimes absent and passive. God is not an (awesomely powerful, incredibly knowledgeable) agent among other (less powerful, less knowledgeable) agents. When we say that God is omnipotent, we don’t mean that God has the most power in the universe, power enough to overcome any and all resistances to his will. No, we mean that God has all the divine power there is. Only God is God. Everything else is not God. And that means that no creature has any (divine) power whatsoever; it has only the (creaturely) power given to it by its creator. As Jesus reminded Pilate, “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above” (John 19:11). In the same way, when we say that God is omnipresent, we don’t mean that God is capable of being anywhere he wants to be whenever he wants to be. We mean that God, as his own presence, is always present to us. God is an event, a happening, “not an object but a Life that is going on eternally and yet ever new,” as Hans Urs von Balthasar put it. In the words of Aquinas, God is “pure act”—and as such always fully all that he is. What does that mean? It means that if he weren’t actively present, holding us in being, ever nearer to us than we are to ourselves, we wouldn’t be ourselves at all.

  We don’t experience God in this way, obviously. But a little reflection finds that that is just what we should expect. God’s presence must be revealed to us—as we trust it will be in the End. For now, however, we know that presence only by faith, and our lives remain hidden in God even as God’s presence remains hidden from us. Perhaps no one understood this better than St. John of the Cross: no sensible experience is proof of God’s presence any more than the lack of sensible experience is proof of God’s absence. Because God always works with what St John calls “the condition of our mortal life,” we know that any “impression” that comes to us is not to be confused with the gracious presence of God that upholds us. No feelings, however profound, ever bring us nearer to God or God to us. In the same way, no lack of feelings can take us away from God. When all impressions fail, leaving us in “dryness, darkness, and desolation,” we sho
uld not even for a moment think that God is far from us. Nothing can separate us from the love that holds us in being, least of all our feelings. This is why St John of the Cross says that God is nearest to us when we are least aware of it.

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  Third, and finally, we learn that God is not in any way constrained or obligated. In the course of talking about what we believe, we often suggest or imply that God is subject to eternity as we are subject to time/space. As if God lives in and is conditioned by living in heaven like we are by living on earth. We also often suggest that in his dealings with us God remains subject to the rules of justice or to moral principles imagined as external to and other than God himself. But this simply cannot be true. Utterly unlike all created things, God is uniquely, absolutely free—free from all rivals, free from all laws. God is conditioned by nothing but God: this is the critical truth of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. It may at first seem merely academic, but reflection reveals it is at the heart of our faith. Saying that God creates from nothing means that everything that exists is other than God, and utterly dependent on God. And it also means that God has no needs and so cannot be manipulated or used.

  A needy God would be the worst possible reality, because it would mean both our existence and our salvation are ulteriorly motivated. A needy God can give no gifts; he can only strike bargains or offer rewards. And precisely for that reason a needy God is inherently vulnerable to manipulation. Once we know what such a God needs, we can use it against him, drawing him into service of our purposes just as we do with all other idols. Such a God would not and could not decide to be God for us, assuming our humanity as his own. Such a God would not and could not submit to the humiliations of torture and death to deliver us from the powers of alienation estranging us from ourselves and our world. Such a God would not and could not make room for us within his own life, sharing all that he has with us.