Eyre Lines

I was reading an article by Andrew Robinson about Thomas Aquinas seen through the eyes of modern Continental philosophy, and came across this statement:-

“The difficulty is that humans can’t have direct sensory access to God, or see from God’s point of view. How, then, is it possible to make claims like “God is good” or “God is wise”?”

It struck me immediately that this argues a transcendent-only God, not surprisingly as this is overwhelmingly the “God of the philosophers”, including Aquinas. The article goes on to say:-

“So why is this interesting for radical thought? Of course, this question is still important for Christian anarchists, liberation theologians, Jewish and Muslim anarchists, who are radicals and also monotheists. At first, this discussion might not seem very relevant to people with a secular disposition (atheists, humanists etc), or to pantheists, but it is also relevant to the question of how to talk about other kinds of things we don’t understand very well or cannot access directly. In contemporary poststructuralism, notably in the work of Derrida, Levinas and Spivak, the question of the unknowability of God is closely connected to the unknowability of earthly others.”

Note the exclusion of pantheists. I’m a panentheist, which is the uncomfortable position between the pantheist who sees in immanence-only terms and the transcendentalist who sees only God-as-wholly other. I suspect that Mr. Robinson has rightly seen that the pantheist (and panentheist) would say that they experience some things (notably God) apparently unmediated; I would certainly say that of some of my spiritual experiences if not all. However, the point is good – one cannot float around in a mystic haze all the time, as that tends to lead to bumping into lamp posts and dying of hunger…

In one of those coincidences which enliven the life of faith so much, we were talking about transcendence -v- immanence last Thursday night at our small group. The occasion was discussion of the second meditation from Jane Williams in book 5 session 2 of the Pilgrim Course (audio available online) in which she says:-

“If God were not Trinity, how could we know about God? We could learn about God through the creation but that means that knowledge of God would only come to us through what is not God. Alternatively, our knowledge of God could, somehow, be imposed directly by God, bypassing human cooperation. But the Trinitarian God is able to hold together transcendence and immanence because this God is already outpouring and returning relationship, in God’s very being”.

I wasn’t the only person for whom this made little or no sense. Knowledge of God always comes to us through what is not God, just as knowledge of everything comes through sense-impressions which are never the things-in-themselves. Arguably there is an exception if there is some form of direct revelation. But, of course, we assume direct revelation in the concept of the inspiration of scripture and pray for it ourselves when we ask for God’s wisdom and guidance.

We do not feel drawn to say that everything we come to know in the outside world is therefore Trinity, because otherwise we could not know it – my computer, for instance, is obviously much more than three, being possessed by Legion (it let me down printing yesterday and has crashed once during the writing of this post so far, so please forgive the anthropomorphic vitriol…). No, in fact it’s for these purposes one, albeit an unity composed of very many parts.

It seems to me that Ms. Williams fails to take account adequately of the experience of the immanence of God, whereas in a sense Mr. Robinson does at least mention an avenue in that direction (the pantheist). Is this surprising? I don’t think so – in discussion, some indicated that they didn’t really relate to the immanent God at all, and I think most related better to the transcendent God. In a less committed and less Charismatic-leaning group, I would have expected most if not all not to relate to the immanence of God at all.

This is not a new experience for me; I have regularly found myself talking with transcendence-only people over the years, and have not infrequently come over as an immanence-only person myself (For many years I used, irritatingly, to say that I didn’t need to believe in God because I experienced God). It is, of course, possible for philosophers to deduce the existence of a God (Aquinas is famous for it!), although I have never been very convinced of their lines of reasoning. The thing is, they always seem to end up with a transcendent God; the immanent God is, it seems, only accessible to direct experience.

Direct experience can also tell us that God is transcendent – but that is as far as experience can go, because transcendence is, I think, intrinsically impossible for the human consciousness to grasp. Human consciousness can become open to transcendence, but if my own experience is anything to go by, such occasions are fleeting because the mind recoils before the immensity of that which it cannot contain.

Immanence, however, is a different matter. Immanence collapses the transcendent into the real, the material (insofar as these are actually knowable, considering the general problem outlined above, they are far more readily knowable than the transcendent). It is, I think, what Jesus does in the Great Commandments; love of God has no practical form (there’s worship, but it’s hard to see that that is any benefit to God when conceived of as purely transcendent) but love of neighbour is how we can express that love in a practical way. It is, again arguably, what God does in Jesus; the incarnation shows God via the person, life and sayings of a real person, which allows Whitehead to say “God has to be at least as nice as Jesus”.

Of course, there is at root a philosophical problem, that of how the transcendent can be known at all. A more conventional approach to this in Christianity than Ms. Williams appears to be pursuing is to take Jesus/Christ (and I use the / to advert to the man/god duality of Christ which is orthodox Christianity) as the one and only possible mediator, being the intersection of the transcendent-only (in this conception) God with the immanent-only (in this conception) humanity. This agrees, for instance, with John 1:18, Col. 1:15 and in a different sense with the general argument of Hebrews, where Christ becomes in heaven a priestly figure of mediation. I will come back to this. I don’t actually think Ms. Williams is correct in saying that you need a concept of trinity in order to express this; incarnation by itself, it seems to me, does the job more clearly.

In a further coincidence later (much later, i.e. 2 in the morning) I found myself involved in an online exposition and some discussion through a Homebrewed Christianity course of Frank Tupper’s essay “The Self-Limitation of God”. (You may need to subscribe in order actually to read it, unfortunately). As you might gather from the title, Tupper puts forward a concept of God as creator having limited himself in order to allow human freedom and, indeed, the freedom of the rest of creation. Tupper is trying to address two problems there, the first being of theodicy (or, how an omnipotent and omniscient God can allow evil and suffering), the second being the manifest lack of interventionary action of God in the world as we observe it. This is in principle attractive to me, as someone who has major difficulty with supernatural interventions of any kind, being methodologically if not philosophically a naturalist (i.e. I expect to find natural answers to anything which I observe).

However, Tupper also wishes to be dogmatic about Jesus being “the definitive self-revelation of God”, and thus thinks that he needs Jesus to be  unique as a demonstration of this, i.e. the incarnation is a one-off event (which is close to the orthodox viewpoint of bridging the transdent-immanent gap). This has to be supernatural in Tupper’s framework, as it is an intrusion of God into the area of God’s previous self-limitation.

I agree with Tupper that God has to be limited, and self-limitation has to be the answer to preserving God’s axiomatic ultimacy and unity (any alternative would argue dualism, i.e. a real and preexistent contrary, therefore evil, force), but as I outline in “Rather different answers in Genesis”,  I see the creation as being a near-complete self-investment of God in creation, such that it would be contrary to God’s creative purpose to exert supernatural power on material things which God has formed out of his own essence (granted, Genesis only says “in his likeness”, though the word used could be interpreted as “substance”). This amply explains how God is immanent – all that is, is God, or at least is a part of that-which-is-God. My use of “near complete” rather than “complete” indicates that I am a panentheist rather than a pantheist; my experience tells me there is radically more of God than is invested in the material world (or cosmos). I see immanence and transcendence, in other words.

Or, at least, I see the inadequacy of my ability to grasp the fullness of that-which-is-God. Despite the temptation, I cannot state from this that anything about God is actually infinite, as I am (as finite) axiomatically unable to grasp fully anything which is infinite. I have, indeed, played with the idea that all infinities are no more than mathematical constructs, without any referent in reality. Unfortunately, the concept is so useful in Mathematics that the formulation of a new Mathematics (and therefore a new Physics) avoiding the concept seems impossible… at least so far.

I am unconvinced that any of the Biblical writers can say more than this, for the same reason. As a result, I do not actually need a conception like Tupper’s to argue that omnipotence and omniscience (at least in the sense of knowledge of future as well as past events) are likely to be flawed concepts; the limitation of those receiving inspiration on the subject means that even if those were truly characteristics of God, it would be beyond their ability to state. Omnipresence (which Tupper wishes to retain) is a different matter, as it merely requires that God be everywhere there is a somewhere to be.

That said, my quibbles about infinite attributes do not answer the problem of theodicy, which Tupper’s concept, and my own (of effectively universal incarnation, kenosis and self-investment), both do, at least to some extent. I set these against the alternative kenotic concept used by Hans Urs von Balthasar, who says:- “It was essential that Christ, in his Incarnation, should bring the fullness of heaven to earth . . . . Otherwise the contemplation of God would only have been possible in the forms of negative apophatic mysticism, which seeks to encounter God beyond all that is of the world, as the Wholly Other, who can be neither conceived, nor beheld, nor comprehended. Such a view, inevitably, does a great injustice to the world and our fellow creatures”. (Balthasar, “Prayer”, 1986). Balthasar (in common with quite a few other modern conservative theologians) solves the problem of theodicy by positing a self-withdrawal of God in order to allow room for creation to have free will, but this is at the expense of immanence, as clearly God’s ongoing immanence offers an immediate (and non-apophatic) route to contemplation of God, in accordance, indeed, with Psalm 19:1.

There can only be radical immanence, it seems to me, if the kenosis of God in creation is accompanied by near-complete self-investment, just as we see in the incarnation in Jesus a self-investment. For me, therefore, the uniqueness of the incarnation is not in the fact that in Jesus God is uniquely present in creation, but in the fact that this was recognised, and recognised both due to the unusual degree in which Jesus was conscious of God’s self-investment in him, to Jesus’ willingness to subordinate his will to that of God as a whole and to the particularity of Jesus’ death on the cross and resurrection to his disciples.

Jesus therefore exemplifies the human, being the “second Adam” as Paul sees him in 1. Cor. 15:45; the imitation of Christ is to seek to draw closer to his unique features, and as St. Athanasius put it “God became man in order that man might become God”. Christ is the template, the type and, indeed, “the way, the truth and the life”.