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How theology can be made simpler
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
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When we theologians interpret the great teachings of traditional Christianity — the doctrines of the Holy Trinity and the two natures of Christ, for example — it often appears that our task is a very difficult one. What I mean is that when we think about the three-in-oneness of God we tend to presuppose that this three-in-oneness is a mathematical absurdity, and when we think about the two natures of Christ we almost instinctively presuppose that we are thinking about a self-contradictory nonsense. This is because whereas it is normal to say that 1 + 1 + 1 = 3, we seem to be saying something that contradicts this when we say that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are God. Absurdly, we insist that ‘these three are one’. And whereas we know that squares cannot be circles, we seem to be saying something like this when we say that Jesus Christ is simultaneously God and man. Such doctrines confront us as difficult riddles that need to be solved, problems that need to be cracked. We presuppose that Christian doctrine is, in one sense or another, intellectually outrageous; we think that it is essentially paradoxical, and we think that it provides a challenge to human reason. And because theology spends its time dealing with confusing and bewildering paradoxes it seems appropriate that theology itself is understood to be something that is very difficult to do.
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1 John 5.7 — the Johannine “comma”— is the source of this phrase. Its influence on contemporary trinitarian theology can be clearly seen in the title of D.S. Cunningham's These Three Are One (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998)Google Scholar.
2 ‘For to say, without explanation, that the historical Jesus of Nazareth was also God is as devoid of meaning as to say that this circle drawn with a pencil on paper is also a square’ J. Hick (ed.), The Myth of God Incarnate, p. 178.
3 Brunner is one twentieth century example: ‘The logical absurdities of the doctrine of the Two Natures and of the Trinity express the inconceivable miracle of revelation. It would not be a divine revelation at all if it could be grasped by the mind, if it could be “perceived,” if it could take its place among our other activities of thought and experience, and thus be established on these lines. Revelation in the New Testament sense cannot be anything other than illogical, since it breaks through the continuity of out thought, as indeed it breaks through the continuity of the human and natural sphere in general’. The Mediator (London: Lutterworth Press, 1934), p. 278Google Scholar.
4 A word used by Douglas Farrow to contrast logic that is specifically Christian as opposed to other logics. See Farrow, D., Ascension and Ecclesia, (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), p. 110 n. 91Google Scholar.
5 ‘We conclude then, that notions of human language about God… can be guided by the christology of Chalcedon. Approaching human language about God in the light of the Chalcedonian Definition of the Faith will enable both the human and the divine and their relation, to be kept in view… christology can condition notions of human language about God’ Need, S.W., Human Language and Knowledge in the Light of Chalcedon (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), p. 218Google Scholar. ‘Christians can and should have their own ways of thinking about truth and about deciding what to believe. They need not take their truth claims on loan from some other intellectual or cultural quarter… a genuinely theological account of truth and epistemic justification needs to be robustly trinitarian. It ought to subject whatever ideas it may find useful to the formative discipline of the Christian community's convictions about the triune God’ Marshall, Bruce D., Trinity and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. xi–xiiGoogle Scholar.
6 It needs to be said that theological appeals to Kuhn's philosophy of science are illegitimate. It is true that empirical science requires that any thesis must fit the observed facts in order to save the phenomena, and that presupposed standards of reason needs must take second place to subject matter. But that which is a legitimate method for empirical science is not therefore a legitimate method for theology. A scientist can justify his method by repeating an experiment and observing facts. But how could the incarnation be an observed fact? Doctrines are intellectual hypotheses because they represent something people believe without evidence, and to view them as similar to shifts in scientific paradigm is unhelpful. Whereas a paradigm‐shifting scientist is getting the thesis to fit the facts, a paradigm‐shifting theologian is merely getting the thesis to fit another thesis! See I.T. Ramsey's comparison of scientific and theological paradoxes in his Christian Empiricism (London: Sheldon Press, 1974), p. 102Google Scholar.
7 Milbank's essay ‘The End of Dialogue’ in D'Costa, G. (ed), Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered (Orbis Books, 1990)Google Scholar is a case in point. Theology enters the ghetto and closes the gates. It creates it own discourse that is completely self‐referential, and therefore unable to be understood by anyone outside. In a review of this book G. Loughlin states (approvingly!) that Milbank ‘cannot but be misunderstood by his opponents’ (Theology vol. xciv July/August 1991 no. 760, p. 299). Milbank's comments on the back‐cover of C. Pickstock's After Writing (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998)Google Scholar provide a worst‐case scenario: ‘outside the logic of the Mass, there can be no meaning.
8 A colleague of mine (who has since revised his views) once remarked to me that all one needed to remember when attempting to solve any theological problem is the simple rule that kenosis (be it that of Christ on the cross, the church inspired by Christ, or the work of God in creation, etc.) is always refilled by perichoresis (be it of the Holy Spirit, the in‐dwelling Christ, or recreation, etc.). Of course, when I tried to shape systematic theology in this way I found that the precise points where emptying out stopped and filling in started in my theology often appeared to be rather indiscriminate, arbitrary and subject to my own individual whim. Thus I found that I could think about the theology of the cross in a Moltmannish way as the kenosis of Christ that is prevented from falling into utter Godlessness by the perichoretic witness of the Holy Spirit to the dead Christ, yet I could give little reason why the role played by the Holy Spirit should commence at one stage in the argument and not another. Does one allow Christ to be emptied out a little or a lot before Trinitarian theology is rescued by the presence of the Spirit? I was probably susceptible to ascribing a role to the Holy Spirit at whatever stage in the argument that I dare not think beyond. The cycle of kenosis‐perichoresis is all very handy, probably very Hegelian, and has little to do with Nicaea and Chalcedon. For examples of Hegel's continuing role in theology see Milbank, J., ‘The Second Difference’ in The Word Made Strange (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 180–183Google Scholar.
9 This will be made evident from references I make in footnotes whilst describing Cusa's work.
10 Pannenberg credits him with a renewal of theological thought that, whilst remaining faithful to the tradition, can be described as Christian humanism (Jesus — God and Man, p. 203, p. 346). To Gadamer he is an important metaphysical revolutionary; see Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., p. 434–435. Even C.S. Lewis wrote a poem ‘On a Theme from Nicholas of Cusa (De Docta Ignorantia, III. ix)’, in Poems ed. W. Hooper (New York, 1964) p. 70. For further admirers, including Thomas Merton, Martin Buber and Hans Küng, see H.L. Bond's introduction to the translation of Cusa's works that I am using here: Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings, trans. Bond, H.L. (London: SPCK, 1997), p. 16Google Scholar.
11 Biographical details are to be found in Bond, H.L., Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings (ibid.), p. 3fGoogle Scholar.
12 Cited by M. Watanabe in his preface to H.L. Bond (ibid.), p. xv–xvi.
13 The more than three hundred manuscripts in his private library still remains the largest German private collection of that date.
14 ‘Today no single theologian can any longer know even approximately all the facts that are relevant for his theology. And supposing that he actually acquires them in a more or less dilettante way, he is even less able to order them and weigh them up methodologically and appropriately. Universal theological geniuses like Origen, Albertus Magnus, Nicholas of Cusa are not merely lacking; nowadays they are hardly conceivable’ Kasper, W., Theology and Church (London: SCM Press, 1989), p. 2Google Scholar.
15 DDI 1.1.4. (DDI =On Learned Ignorance, trans. H.L. Bond (op. cit). p. 87–206).
16 Plato, Apology 23b.
17 Ecclesiastes 1.8.
18 Job 28.20–21.
19 Cusa may have received this notion of the infinite from Nicole Oresme. See Murdoch, J.E., ‘Infinity and Continuity’ in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge, 1982), p. 570, n. 17; p. 15 n. 17Google Scholar.
20 DDI 1.5.13.
21 DDI 1.5.14.
22 DDI 1.14.37–39.
23 In a different context Denys Turner has provided a similar argument. ‘God is not “one” in the sense that [one thing]… plus God equals two anything at all, even individuals. For, not being any kind of thing God is not and cannot be an additional anything. God is absolutely unique. There is not any collectivity to which God could be added as a further item … God is not an individual. Nor, in turn, does that entail that God is a multiplicity. God is neither one thing nor three things, because God is not a thing’. Turner, D., The Darkness of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 161–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24 I have argued the same case with reference to St Gregory of Nyssa's trinitarian theology — specifically his letter to Ablabius — in my ‘Problems for the “Social Trinity”: Counting God’ in Modern Believing, vol. 41:3, July 2000, p. 3–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
25 DDI 3.2.193.
26 Further, God is omnipresent, so one can hardly expect God not to be in the individual Jesus of Nazareth. ‘Since, therefore, God is in all things in such a way that all are in God, it is clear that, without any change to God and in the equality of the being of all things, God exists in unity with… Jesus’ (DDI 3.4.204). However, this raises the question of what it is that is special or unique about the relation of humanity and Divinity in Christ, for it remains improbable (not illogical) that this particular individual should be hypostatically united with the Word of God. Whereas both Thomas and Eckhart saw that there could be no logical bar on a repeat of the incarnation (how could there be?), neither could provide any necessary reason why this particular incarnation is unique. Thomas merely argues that once is probably enough times for God to be incarnate to effect salvation. Cusa, however, attempts to provide a more substantial argument. He takes the miracle stories in the Gospels as evidence that Christ was a perfect example of humanity, and since humanity is a fusion of the physical and intellectual spheres of creation, Christ is also the perfect individual in whom all of the perfections of creation are summed up. Since Christ is the perfect microcosm — the ‘contracted Maximum’— it is more appropriate that he is united to God in a unique and perfect way. See DDI 3.2.190 — 3.4.207, and the discussion of Eckhart and the incarnation in D. Turner, The Darkness of God, p. 165–166.
27 See note 2. The position represented by Cusa here has, of course, more recently been argued by Herbert McCabe in his review of The Myth of God Incarnate published in his God Matters (London: Chapman, 1987), p. 54–61Google Scholar.
28 DDI 3.8.231.
29 DDI 3.8.232.
30 This in itself is enough for theology to be content with since theology cannot prove such things at all. Theology is reflection upon the historical tradition — the memory of the church — through which we receive language about the ascension in the first place. On such theological method in general, see Tracy, D., The Analogical Imagination (London: SCM Press, 1981)Google Scholar, passim.
31 Cusa's understanding of the ascension does not lack a cosmological element that we may feel necessary to explain how Christ is physically in heaven (the ascension is confessed by Christians to have been a physical ascent, after all), and his cosmology is commensurate with his ultimately apophatic account of the doctrine. For Cusa, of course, as for Aristotle, Origen, Augustine, Maximus the Confessor, John of Damascus, Thomas Aquinas and Dante, the cosmos is finite, bounded by the sphere of fixed stars. If Christ has ascended above the highest heaven (Eph. 4.10), then he has ascended outside the universe, where there is no space. And since he has ascended to where there is no space, we cannot say that he got there by means of a journey through space. Further, since we now nothing about this realm outside the space of our universe, we cannot deny that Christ is there physically. Therefore, the doctrine that Christ has ascended physically to heaven corresponds to Cusa's ultimately apophatic account of it. And because Christ cannot be “located”, Cusa is quite right to say that he is both the centre and the circumference of the Aristotelian‐Ptolemaic cosmos in DDI 2.11. 156ff. (Naturally, we still hold today that the universe is finite, and so Cusa's doctrine in both its cosmological and apophatic dimensions remains viable today — see Lovell, B. ‘Creation’ in Theology vol. Ixxxiii, September 1980, no. 695, p. 359–364CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Cusa (and, incidentally, everyone from Origen and Augustine to Aquinas and Scotus) therefore outflanks D. Farrow's recent argument that much of Christian theology has reduced the ascension to docetism. Note that Cusa is speaking not just of a physical ascension to the intellectual sphere, but indeed of a physical ascension above and beyond intellect itself. See Farrow, D., Ascension and Ecclesia (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999)Google Scholar, passim.
32 DDI 3.11.245. The final allusion here is to 2 Cor. 5. 16: ‘even though we once knew Christ… we know him no longer’. On Cusa's interpretation of Paul's ascent see also De apice theoriae 2: ‘the apostle Paul, caught up to the third heaven… does not comprehend the incomprehensible’. In another work, de quaerendo Deum 1.17, the ‘vision of mysteries’ that St Paul received in the third heaven is connected with the sermon on the unknown God in Acts 17. Cusa's interpretation of Acts 17 is ingenious: the unknown God that the Greeks worship is not made known by Paul; rather God is proclaimed as remaining unknown by Paul. The Christian should not think of God as anything imaginable because there is nothing in human thought similar to God.
33 DDI 1.26.86.
34 DDI 1.26.88.
35 DDI 1.26.89.
36 Thomas argues that the chief role of revelation is not to provide propositional knowledge about God per se, but to show that God is unknown. Thus the task of revelation is to demonstrate concealment, lest we fall foul of the idolatrous illusion that we can know propositions about God. ‘In this life what God is is unknown to us [even] by graceful revelation; and so [by revelation] we are joined to God as to something unknown’S. Th. 1.12.12 ad 1. Revelation fulfils the task of showing that God is unknown because our natural knowledge of God is unable of showing this. If we knew God as we knew about triangles and stones we would not know that we do not know God. ‘That certain divine truths wholly surpass the capability of human reason, is most clearly evident… Wherefore, if the human intellect comprehends the essence of [God as if God were] a particular thing, for instance a stone or a triangle, no truth about that thing will surpass the capability of human reason’Summa contra Gentiles 1.2. ‘Again it is necessary for this truth to be proposed to man as an object of faith in order that he may have a truer knowledge of God. For then alone do we know God truly, when we believe that he is far above all that man can possibly think of God, because the divine essence surpasses man's natural knowledge… Hence by the fact that certain things about God are proposed to man, which surpass his reason, he is strengthened in his opinion that God is far above what he is able to think’S.C.G. 1.5. What then of the propositions of faith we receive from the church? Basically, we talk about God because God has already been talked about (pace Jüngel. God as the mystery of the World (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1983), p. 248). We receive the propositions of faith through the historical channel of the church. This is why theology is reflection upon the memory of the church through which Christ and the Holy Scriptures are mediated to us today as things we can know (and this does not deny that Christ is, as it were, unknowably mediated to people in other ways too). S. Th. 2a2ae. 6.1: ‘The things of faith surpass our understanding and so become part of our knowledge only because God reveals them. For some, the prophets and Apostles, for example, this revelation comes from God immediately; for others [i.e. us], the things of faith are proposed by God sending preachers of the faith’.
37 DDI 1.23.71.
38 DDI 1.23.72.
39 DDI 2.2.101–102.
40 DDI 2.5.118.
41 Deo abscondito 9. (Trans Bond, op.cit., p. 209–213).
42 ‘From the fact that our language gives us no hold on the distinction between the created and the uncreated, it does not follow that there is no distinction. Language fails to mark the distinction not because there is none but because the gulf is too wide. It is because there cannot be anything to distinguish the created and the uncreated as, it is because there is no conceivable standard of comparison to measure the created and the uncreated against, that we cannot utter the contrast between them, the distinction is unutterably great’. D. Turner, The Darkness of God, p. 161.
43 DDI 1.4.12.
44 DDI 1.12.33.
45 Since God escapes the dialectic it follows that it is impossible to say whether God exists or does not exist. The following is an extract from de Deo abscondito, 8–9:
CHRISTIAN: I know that everything I know is not God and that everything I conceive is not like God, but rather God surpasses all these.
PAGAN: Therefore, God is nothing.
CHRISTIAN: God is not nothing, for this nothing has the name “nothing”.
PAGAN: If God is not nothing, then God is something.
CHRISTIAN: God is not something, for something is not everything. But God is not something rather than everything.
PAGAN: You affirm marvels — the God you worship is neither nothing nor something; no reason grasps this.
CHRISTIAN: God is beyond nothing and beyond something, for nothing obeys God in order that something may come into being. And this is God's omnipotence, by which God surpasses everything that is or is not, so that thus that which is not obeys God just as that which is obeys God. For God causes not‐being to enter into being and being to enter into not‐being. Therefore, God is nothing of those things that are under God and which God's omnipotence precedes. And, consequently, God cannot be called “this” rather than “that”, since all things are from God.
This conclusion is representative of centuries of Christian theology. Its roots lie in the doctrine of creation from nothing that severed theology from Platonic ideas of emanation and onto‐theology and thereby made it impossible to conceive of any necessary relationship between the being (?) of God and the being of the world. On the importance of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo to orthodox theology in distinction to Neoplatonsim, see Louth, A., The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. xiii–xiv & p. 75–97Google Scholar. On uncertainty of the existence of God from Denys the Areopagite's Mystical Theology to Denys the Carthusian see Turner, D., ‘Cupitt, the mystics and the “objectivity” of God’ in Crowder, C. (ed.), God and Reality. Essays on Christian Non‐Realism (London: Mowbray, 1997), p. 114–126Google Scholar. On the non‐existence of God in the thought of Thomas Aquinas (i.e. the doctrine of divine simplicity) see Davies, Brian ‘Classical Theism and the Doctrine of Divine Simplicity’ in Davies, (ed.), Language, Meaning and God: Essays in Honour of Herbert McCabe OP. (London, Geoffrey Chapman, 1987), p. 51–71Google Scholar.
46 DDI 1.26.86.
47 DDI 1.19.57.
48 DDI 1.4.12.
49 De visione Dei 13.54. (Trans. H.L. Bond, op. cit., p. 235–289).
50 ‘Some critics have said that he had no sense of sin, that he experienced no change of heart, and that he was scarcely aware of the problem of evil’ preface, p. xvii. I suspect that a Lutheran theology of the cross lies behind such criticisms.
51 There is no pure tradition to which we can point and say all Christians have always and at all times believed these particular nonsenses and absurdities. Abelard demonstrated this in Sic et Non. Such irregularities in tradition have to be settled by careful disputation. Abelard introduced an unusual word to the West to describe this process of reasoning about God: he called it theology.
52 See Ramsey, I.T., ‘Paradox in Religion’ in Christian Empiricism (London: Sheldon Press, 1974), p. 98fGoogle Scholar.
53 1 Corinthians 1.19–25; 3.18–20.
54 DDI 3.6.220
55 M. Wiles, Letter to the Editors, Theology vol. xciv November/December 1991 no 762, p. 448. Wiles is reacting against Loughlin's statement recorded in note 7 above.
56 McCabe, God Matters, p. 61.
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