February
1, 2008
In my Christmas letter, I spoke of intimacy
with Jesus. In a recent reply, a friend
told me about a relationship in which her longing for an committed involvement
was cruelly abused. She added: “On the point of intimacy with Jesus, I
simply do not get it. How can you be
intimate with a concept?”
The
question took me back almost forty years, to an aching loneliness and
terrifying emptiness which revealed that I lived mostly by conviction. This shocking awareness was magnified when I
fell hopelessly in love with a recent widow.
Since she was still grieving over the death of her husband, there was no
question of marriage, but my involvement with her and her children had two
gifts for me. One, it forced me to
re-visit the commitment I made when I took vows of poverty, chastity and
obedience. Two, I experienced what it
was to be passionately, vulnerably, respectfully and faithfully involved with
another human being in situations which tapped every tangle in me. And as the difference between living a commitment
and living by conviction was brought home again and again, I discovered that
there is no transformation without insight and no transformation through
insight alone.
Since I process experience as a philosopher
of language, explosive insights came easily.
One insight showed me that I processed my involvement with Jesus through
a language provided by the catechetical indoctrination I received in childhood
and re-enforced by the theological studies designed to prepare me to function
as a priest. Over time, that insight led
to a five-fold realization, (1) that a language of redemption could not help me
learn how to integrate my longing to live with personal integrity in
person-to-person involvements, (2) that intimacy issues had haunted me since
childhood, (3) that the quest for personal integrity and a quest for intimacy
with others, though distinguishable, are inseparable, (4) that I unwittingly
wounded those I loved whenever I failed to identify the long-buried feelings
and acquired prejudices that triggered reactions rather than responses, and (5)
that, if I let it, the quest for integrity and intimacy would teach me how to
be honest with myself, with God and with loved ones about what I thought and
felt, real or imagined, since I could not tell the difference.
As my journey into the unknown progressed,
I realized that my theological sermons presented Jesus as a model to be
imitated, not a companion on my journey.
Even worse, my moral exhortations reminded people of their obligations
as Catholics or burdened them with prohibitions. I did not know how to tell them that Jesus
longed to be intimately involved with them in the cross-situations they
constantly faced in their everyday lives, and I did not know how to name
obstacles to such an involvement.
Now, when I prepare a sermon, I want
desperately to tell everyone how passionately Jesus longs to be with them in
everything they face. Sometimes, when I
do not know how to present the readings of the day as a living word, I envy the
smug certainty of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the members of the
hierarchy appointed by these Popes, young priests who identify themselves as
John Paul II priests, liturgical Nazis, and fundamentalist Christians of any
ilk. But the lapse is soon replaced by
outrage over the violence enshrined in the dualistic center of the theology
they seek to impose.
When I lapse into contemptuous judgments, I
remind myself that I was once captive to the formative power of the theology
they espouse. And to allow the upset to
become a transforming moment, I acknowledge that I am faced with a choice
between reacting judgmentally or responding creatively. From long experience, I know (1) that my
creative responses issue from my deepest feelings and wild imaginings, (2)
that, to allow the Spirit to move in my tangled depths, I must be willing to
work my way through tangled emotional reactions, (3) that, for me, this process
is set in motion through insights which provide a semi-detached perspective on
my inner turmoil, and (4) that I can only find my way out of the theology of
transcendence by critiquing it from many perspectives.
In my sermons, however, I try to resist the
temptation to contrast this theology with the incarnational theology I now
embrace. To get off the merry-go-round
in my head, I begin with personal experiences which might speak to honest
searchers in the congregation in a way that evokes a longing for an
ever-deepening involvement with Jesus.
Sometimes, the plea, “Jesus, what do you want me to say today?”, evokes
reflections on the ways that the Scriptures of the day have helped me to
discern the activity of the Father, Jesus, and/or the Holy Spirit in the
everyday events in my life. And I find
that homilies which bear personal witness to that activity proclaim the
gospel-message in a way that speaks for itself.
Such homilies emerge from a habit of
putting the judgments and agendas ingrained in me in childhood and in my
seminary years to the test of everyday experience. Almost always, the experiences in question
were ones which invited me to converse with Jesus about the difficulty I have
in letting him love me. In these
conversations, I do not and indeed cannot approach him as a mediator between
the triune God and me. And in them, the
movement of the Holy Spirit replaces the internalized voices of a committee in
my head with words from Jesus that erase deeply ingrained judgments which
reduce the gospel message to obligations and prohibitions.
Thus, in these conversations, I discover
that I was crippled by the rule of a committee whose “should’s” and “should not’s”
functioned as an internalized judge who assured me that, even when I did what I
“should” do, I did not do it well enough.
In effect, I dwelt
unquestioningly in a form of life which imposed a heavy burden of “good old
Catholic guilt.” Quite predictably,
then, my mid-life crisis tapped a veritable ocean of corrosive resentment
generated by pain and anger that was buried alive. I feared that I was becoming a bitter, angry
person. But I also learned that feelings
we bury in order to control them find hidden expression and that I had avoided
owning my deepest feelings because buried pain and anger provided me with many
targets for my resentful judgments.
In large measure, my insights into the way
that long-practiced judgments and strategies were woven into my emotional
reactions was indebted more to Sartre’s analyses of language and experience
than to any book on spirituality. My
adoption of Sartre as a conversation-partner began when I participated in a
seminar on Sartre’s works. Through that
immersion in his thought, I realized that, if I were to live with intellectual
integrity, I had to understand why I rejected his insistence that passionate
involvements between unique individuals inexorably degenerated into sado-masochistic
interactions. And since I had to dwell
within his version of the Exodus-theme before I could critique it, I had to
understand how he used the rationalist tradition to show that human existence
is absurd and love is an impossible passion.
In the end, I saw clearly that he indeed offered a penetrating analysis
of person-to-person interactions which reduced the quest for intimacy to a
quest for identity, and I saw with equal clarity that this same analysis
exposed the manipulative and capitulative agendas which socially acceptable
emotional reactions disguise.
In sum, since individuals usually react
rather than respond, Sartre’s analysis revealed commonplace ways that we
silence the elusive longing for intimacy and abort the quest it evokes. In a counter-factual way, however, it implies
that respectful interactions are quite impossible.
(This insight informed my readings of
contending theories of motivation offered by psychologists. Thus, in mid-life crisis, I hoped that
intense, if unsystematic readings of theorists of motivation written by recognized
authorities would provide me with an exit from a debilitating depression. But I could not resist assessing them from a
perspective encoded in a Sartrean critical apparatus which traced the
strategies accredited by socially sanctioned emotional reactions to suspect
judgments (prejudices). In the end, I
concluded that, to the extent that these theories pretended to offer
deterministic accounts of motivation, they erased the language of respect and trust
as decisively as Sartre’s analysis, since they, too, offered no hope that I
could trust that those I loved would to respond to even my most childish
self-revelations with respect, concern and care. (The underlying insight here: any strategy is
laden with judgments designed to disguise power-plays.)
This dawning awareness did not immediately
enable me to replace my long-practiced repertoire of emotional reactions with
vulnerable self-revelations. In some
sense, I had to become aware of a prohibition against such reactions before I
could recognize that a commitment to share a journey to deepening intimacy
calls for passionate, vulnerable, respectful and faithful interactions. But repeated (and sincere) efforts to obey
the prohibitions soon forced me to integrate this insight with my theological
beliefs. And that compulsion to live
with intellectual integrity soon led me to see that a belief-system which
depicts God as Lord, Lawgiver and Judge is radically incompatible with the
incarnational theology I espouse.
Wrestling with this issue complicates my
life. When I prepare a homily, I must
remind myself that I need not critique a theology of transcendence which
reduces the crucifixion to an act of reparation for the sins of humans and
thereby consigns Jesus to the role of mediator between God and sinful
humans. I try to focus on ways to evoke
a longing for ever-deepening intimacy with Father, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and
with other wounded individuals.
(AN ASIDE: Theological doctrines encourage preaching
designed to re-enforce the belief-system of a particular denomination or
community. On my part, I suggest that
preachers speak a living word if, and only if, they imitate Israel’s prophets
who dared to project metaphors whose reach exceeded their grasp as the only way
to show how God’s intensely personal involvement with individuals was at work
in hidden ways in traumatic events which provoked crises in faith in their
audiences. Otherwise, their
proclamations cannot communicate a language capable of transforming an elusive
longing into a realizable purpose.
From a literary perspective centered
in a distinction between preaching and witnessing, therefore, preachers who
pretend to offer authoritative commentaries on foundational texts are
apologists or polemicists rather than honest searchers. They are products of bible colleges intended
to indoctrinate rather than to learn how to read the foundational texts of the
Christian tradition as revelatory.
In this context, I remain puzzled by
Pope Benedict’s praise of the rule of the One in the secular academic arena in
his Regensburg Address, since he clearly refuses to engage in a genuinely
ecumenical dialogue. In this arena, he
insists that other Christian traditions have nothing substantive to offer to a
tradition which is entrusted with the fullness of the gospel message.
And lest I be accused of bias in my
readings of Pope Benedict’s Regensburg Address, his use of this academic
setting as the stage for yet another assertion of his conviction that an
interplay between the witness inscribed in the Scriptures and the conception of
reason forged by the western philosophical tradition was essential for a true
understanding of the Gospel message speaks for itself. In a way that any postmodernist must view with
bemusement and disbelief, he presumes that the use of a literary construct (an
abstract conception of reason which promised a detached, disinterested,
dispassionate, god-like perspective on language, experience and reality which
all reasonable beings could occupy interchangeably) can yield a language
capable of answering any and all questions, descriptive or evaluative. In so doing, he embraces a dialogue whose
polemical structure revolved distinctions (1) between orthodoxy and heresy and
(2) between Christianity, on the one hand, and Judaism and paganism, on the
other.
Note, however, that a polemically
structured dialogue assumes that one belief-system will eventually triumph and
that this assumption conceals the will to power exposed by Nietzsche’s critique
of rationalism. To disguise the will to
power inherent in his pronouncements, Pope Benedict must assume that the
Thomistic conception of reason encodes a critical apparatus which, by exposing
the flaws in all competitors, offers a belief-system which speaks timelessly to
all persons of good will. On my part, I
prefer Chesterton’s description of tradition as an historical process which
enables us to dialogue with our ancestors.
For this dialogue to be fruitful, however, it must be centered in the
narrative structure of the biblical tradition rather than the polemical
structure of a commitment to the rule of reason.
Protestant denominations pretend to
escape from the will to power by presenting their pronouncements as an
uninterpreted word of God. But the
conception of a self-interpreting and self-referential text is the product of
the rationalist strand in the western philosophical tradition. And since misplaced debates are, by
definition, irresolvable, the persistence of the debate is hardly
surprising. But it is surprising that
theologians ignore postmodernist critiques of the arbitrary foundations of the
literary stage which endowed the debate with a spurious legitimacy.
These critiques deconstruct the polar
oppositions on which the stage rests..
One pole can be found in the vehement rejection of the interpretative
role played by tradition in Protestant denominations committed to extreme
versions of “the inerrancy of the Scriptures,” with its correlative assumption
that the Scriptures speak unambiguously as the word of God. The other pole assumes that Popes (and Curial
officials) assume that, as guardians of Scripture and Tradition, they can bind
theological discourse for the future.
On this stage, Protestant preachers
who pretend to read the Scriptures literally carry the commitment encoded in
Luther’s dictum, sola Scriptura, to
its logical extreme. Historically,
Luther advanced this dictum to counter a traditional commitment to an interplay
between Scripture and Tradition. To
maintain Luther’s pretense, however, his heirs must deny that they have been
indoctrinated to read the Scriptures through a code fashioned over centuries of
controversy, ignore contemporary studies by Protestant as well as Catholic
biblical scholars, and condemn themselves to impoverished readings of the signs
of the times. And even then, one can
only wonder how they can insist that a literal reading of the Scriptures yields
Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone.
Cynics contend that Revival Meetings
use group dynamics to win adherents to this doctrine by convicting members of
their audience of a sinfulness from which only their version of the Gospel
message can save them. Though I am
sometimes tempted to agree, I am mostly saddened by the fact that inviting
sinners to stand naked before God if they hope to receive Jesus as one’s
personal Savior leaves no room for prophetic protests against the injustice
inherent in dehumanizing and depersonalizing social structures. And my sadness is heightened by the fact that
the doctrine of justification by faith alone makes no sense without Augustine’s
violent misreading of the biblical story of Adam and Eve as an historical
account of an original sin which has left all Adam’s offspring inherently and
inescapably sinful (i.e., self-centered).
Note well: the justification in question refers to the restoration of a
severed relationship between Creator and creatures, and the faith in question
is narrowly defined as the acceptance of Jesus as one’s personal Savior. Faith, then, requires that one believe that
the doctrine of justification by faith alone is revealed unambiguously by God
in and through a text which can be read literally. And I could never make such an act of faith.
This inner logic of the doctrine of
justification by faith alone is glaringly evident in the preaching of
Revivalists who call sinners to express their commitment to Jesus as their
personal Savior by answering an altar call.
In effect, they convict people of inescapable sinfulness in order to
save them from it. It is particularly troubling because it promises
that accepting Jesus as one’s personal Savior restores a relationship between
God and human beings severed by Adam’s sin and that this justification covers
one’s future sins as well. (Taken
literally, the doctrine implies that, once justified, one may “back-slide”
without ceasing to be justified.) For
many, that promise may be comforting, but it is hardly fruitful.
From a different angle, I cannot
understand how denominations which pretend to read the Scriptures do not make
divorce an issue. Rather, when they do
enter the political arena, they focus on issues which will evoke deeply
emotional reactions, such as the question of same sex marriages. On this point, I confess that I cannot
understand how anyone supposes that same sex marriages are more of a threat to
a purported “institution of marriage” than no-fault divorce. (I regard Christian marriage as a Sacrament,
not a “natural institution.”) But I am
heartened by the fact that evangelical pastors who share the Catholic tradition’s
insistence that social justice is a constitutive issue in the Jewish prophets
and the Christian tradition are finally challenging the gospel according to Dr.
Dobson.)
Catholic proponents of theologies of
transcendence (including Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI) occupy the
opposite pole supporting the stage of the misplaced debate occasioned by the
Protestant Reformation. But their self-presentations
as the guardians of both Scripture and Tradition devalue the operation of the
Holy Spirit in the lives of individuals and impoverish a tradition committed to
reading the signs of the times in a way indebted to the metaphors of intimacy
projected by Israel’s great prophets.
Note well:
These metaphors were designed to reveal how God was active in intensely
personal ways in all dimensions (personal, social, political, economic, moral
and religious) in the lives of each and every human being. They subvert the sort of closure claimed by
the doctrinal system which John Paul II and Benedict XVI invoke in their
efforts to impose their wills on the future of the Christian tradition. This will to power is glaringly apparent in
their insistence that Tradition forever forbids the ordination of women to the
priesthood and that homosexuality is an intrinsic disorder. It is more insidiously hidden in their
determination to silence anyone who explores an incarnational theology.
Consequently, I suggest that real
target of Pope Benedict’s caricature of Scotus in his Lecture at Regensburg was
Scotus’ incarnational theology. His own
theology of transcendence is grounded in a meta-narrative which describes the
Incarnation as the response of God to the sin of Adam that severed a natural
relationship between Creator and creatures and disrupted the entire natural
order. As a result, he shares a
meta-narrative with fundamentalist Protestants who reduce Jesus’ saving
activity to a response to sin and who also pretend to proclaim the only way to
be saved from an inherent sinfulness.
By extension, the teleological
structure which frames his insistence that homosexuals are intrinsically
disordered is meaningless without Aquinas’s baptism of Aristotle’s metaphysical
framework. In the final analysis, the plausibility
of this judgment rests on the assumption that human nature is endowed with a
teleological structure which order sexual involvements to the procreation of
children.
On a broader canvas, the Pope centers
the reference to natural law which he uses to justify his condemnations of
secularism and relativity in this same metaphysical system. In so doing, he perpetuates the depiction of
God as Lord, Lawgiver and Judge which is the centerpiece of the misplaced
debate between Catholic and Protestant theologians.
This depiction of God centers
theological inquiries in a power-structure and privileges justice and mercy
over love. But the form of life which
transforms the longing for intimacy into a realizable quest shows decisively
that exercises of power and/or judgment abort the quest.
Ironically, the intellectualism which
Pope Benedict contrasts with the voluntarism he attributes to Scotus centers
moral discourse in the will of a God who, as Lord, Lawgiver and Judge, is
beyond good and evil. In the Regensburg
Address, he implies that Scotus’ voluntarism led, logically, to Nietzsche’s
celebration of a will to power. From my
perspective, Nietzsche simply filled the hollow center of Aquinas’ formulaic
depiction of God with an all-pervasive will to power which would ultimately
generate supermen who lived beyond good and evil. If so, Aquinas rather than Scotus is largely
responsible for the voluntarism which Nietzsche secularized, At the very least, one can wonder who
advocates an abstract voluntarism.)
________
In earlier reflections, I sought to replace
the literary stage for the misplaced debate between Catholic and Protestant
theologians with a literary stage capable of supporting the incarnational theology
I espouse. To provide biblical warrant
for my argument, I invoked the hymn in the Prologue of John and Luke’s
wonderful story of the birth of Jesus.
To indicate why Luke’s story speaks to me so personally, I recounted my
first profoundly religious experiences.
These experiences occurred with some
regularity when, as a child, I spent summers on my aunt and uncle’s farm. On clear nights, I roamed the fields with old
Fritz, a Chesapeake Bay retriever who greeted me with delight, grieved with me
when I was sad, and accompanied me everywhere.
On these walks, the awe evoked by the vastness of the universe surely
approached a mystical experience. And
that experience was soon supplemented by an ineffable sense that the Creator of
this seemingly endless universe was aware of me, a lost child on a journey into
the unknown. And to this day, the sense
of God’s personal involvement with me prevents me from embracing a
transcendentalist or pantheistic theology.
Readings of Luke’s wonderful story of the
birth of Jesus never fail to evoke memories of these youthful experiences. To set the scene for his story, Luke placed
shepherds under a night sky that revealed the vastness of the universe. To magnify the dramatic import of his story,
he added angels who proclaimed the glory of God. For anyone who reads this story as literature
(rather than history), the hints of transcendence in this setting of the scene
dramatize the import of the awesome sign given to the shepherds by the
angels: “You will find an infant wrapped
in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger,” because there was no room in the
inn. As a sign which points to the
willingness of the Word to share our human vulnerabilities, it replaces the
meta-narrative encoded in the Deuteronomic depiction of God as Lord, Lawgiver
and Judge with a meta-narrative designed to voice God’s longing to be
intimately involved in the lives of all human beings.
Tragically, Catholics and Protestants who
advocate a theology of transcendence do not allow this sign to speak for
itself. Instead, they assign Jesus the
role of mediator between the Creator and creation. Clearly, however, the Prologue of John
locates the eternal Word at the center of the intimate life of the three distinct
Persons in the Trinity, the act of creation, the course of human history and
the lives of each and every human being.
In so doing, it echoes the sign proclaimed by the angels in Luke’s story
of the birth of Jesus.
As the Christian tradition strove to define
how God was present and active in Jesus Christ, the early Councils of the
Church inscribed the sign of the infant lying in a manger in the doctrinal
proclamation that Jesus is fully human as well as fully God. (This controversy fueled the movement which
insisted that Mary be referred to as the Mother of God. This formula was designed to protect the
belief that the Word Incarnate was fully human.
Consequently, I am not surprised that when those who seek to center
Jesus’ saving activity to a sacrificial death on a cross object that the
reference divinizes Mary. But it does
not.)
I suggest, therefore, that a theology of
transcendence is incapable of integrating the belief that Jesus is fully human
and fully divine in an holistic vision.
If anything, the misplaced debate fosters a seemingly unbridgeable
polarity. But an incarnational theology
erases the polarity by pointing out that the only way that God could share
fully, i.e., experientially, in the lives of human beings was to become fully
human. As an added bonus, it provides a
language capable of revealing the longing of the Father, the Word made flesh
and the Holy Spirit for intimate involvement with each and every human being.
In marked contrast, the language of
redemption generated by a theology of transcendence implies that incarnate Word
functions as a mediator in a hierarchically structured relationship between God
and sinful humans. And when that
mediation is further reduced to a sacrificial death which made fitting
reparation for human sinfulness, the theology in question cannot view the
Incarnation as the fulfillment of the intensely personal involvement of God
with individuals described in the early stories of the Hebrew narrative
tradition and in the metaphors of the prophets.
It must, instead, use the conditional formulation of God’s covenant with
Israel proclaimed by the Deuteronomic tradition to support its insistence that
a New Covenant sealed by the sacrificial death of Jesus on the cross fulfills
and abrogates an earlier Covenant of Law because Jesus embraced the work of
reparation which now enables us to be justified by faith alone.
An incarnational theology sees only one
Covenant. In this vein, it generates
readings of the Jewish Scriptures which privilege the categorical form of the
Covenant with Abraham over the conditional formulation of the Covenant espoused
by the Deuteronomic tradition, with its implications of exclusive election. In so doing, it implies that God has been
involved in intensely personal ways with all human beings from the beginning of
human history and that this involvement was fully revealed in and through Jesus’
passionate. vulnerable, respectful and faithful involvement with flawed
individuals.
From this perspective, doctrines of
exclusive election which present Jesus as the sole mediator exclude two basic
implications of an incarnational theology, (1) that Jesus’ love for us so often
comes to us through one another and (2) that
we are called to enter a story in which wounded human beings co-author, with
Jesus, a journey delineated by the command, “Love one another as I have loved
you.” Since these implications have
passed the test of experience in my journey with Jesus, I am convinced that no
one can define what it is to be fully human or to respond in uniquely personal
ways to those whom they let into their lives.
And I insist that a commitment to love each other as Jesus loves us will
continually voice calls for transforming conversions by exposing the myriad
ways that our self-created identities do not promote the passionate,
vulnerable, respectful and faithful interactions in and through which we learn
to discern the words of love spoken by the Holy Spirit dwelling in our tangled
depths.
In its own right, discernment of the
movement of the Spirit in our hidden depths enables us (1) to trust that the
Incarnate Word, fully human as well as fully God, will face with us whatever we
face and (2) to realize how Jesus’ love for us comes to us through one another
in graced moments in a shared journey. I
suggest, therefore, that Christians who long for intimacy with Jesus must
understand the implications of Jesus’ assertion, “Whatever you do to the least
of my brothers and sisters, you do to me.”
And though I seldom go there, I know that this understanding plays a
crucial role in evoking the concern with social justice in the Catholic
tradition.
____________
(Here, with malice aforethought, I view
Pope Benedict’s invocation of the conception of eros enshrined in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave as a futile attempt
to lend philosophical authority to a determination to silence the calls for
passionate, vulnerable, respectful and faithful involvement voiced by an
incarnational theology. Structurally,
Plato’s conception of eros inscribes
the structure of his Allegory of the Cave in a notion which depicts erotic love
as an urge to transcendence in a way that promises a metaphorical passage from
a world of flux to fulfillment in a realm of Ideal Forms. As such, it inscribes the profound suspicion
of passion and desire which allows the Pope to present erotic love as an urge
to spiritualize the sexual involvement between lovers.
Implicitly, the direction of this urge
implies that sexual intercourse between individuals committed to a shared quest
for intimacy is incapable of generating a more fully human and uniquely
personal existence. And to add insult to
injury, Benedict grounds his tortured fusion of theological and moral discourse
in the synthesis of faith and reason inscribed in Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, a text which grounds
moral discourse in an objective moral order implanted in a teleologically
structured natural order by a rational and purposive Creator.
From a less polemical perspective, I am
saddened by commentators on the Pope’s Encyclical on love who rejoiced because
its embrace of erotic love countered a tradition which characterized passion
and desire as inherently disruptive and inescapably self-centered. From my perspective, they were so pleased by
his dubious baptism of erotic love that they ignored the implication that, in
God’s “plan,” sexual involvement was an urge to transcendence, not a gift which
can foster more fully human involvements between lovers.
I suggest, therefore, that Benedict’s
Encyclical on love must be read through a code articulated in his Regensburg
Address. There, the Pope encoded the
Hellenistic suspicion of passion (and desire) and fascination with form in the
pretense that the wedding of faith and reason had already produced the
comprehensive and closed doctrinal system and the moral discourse he
proclaimed. From this perspective, I
insist that a closed belief-system cannot generate a language capable of
evoking a longing in everyone for deepening intimacy with an incomprehensible
God and the flawed individuals we let into our lives.
More extensive efforts to expose the
critical differences between a theology promising transcendence and an incarnational
theology can be found in Installments I and II of these Reflections, There, I explored a long-recognized
distinction between a meta-narrative which implies that the eternal Word would
not have become incarnate if Adam had not sinned and a meta-narrative which
places that Word at the center of creation, human history and the lives of all
human beings. As the framework for an
incarnational theology designed to voice the longing of each of the three
divine Persons for deepening person-to-person involvement with each human
being, the latter meta-narrative formulated the difference in terms of a
challenging questions: How do theologies
designed to evoke a sense of divine transcendence operationalize the doctrine
of the Trinity? By extension, are such theologies flights from the call for a
fully human and uniquely personal involvement with each of the three divine
Persons?
Reflections triggered by this question
convinced me that the inner logic of a language of redemption bears connotations
of Aquinas’ description of eternal life as a contemplation of the Beatific
Vision which cannot be erased. The
metaphor echoes the privileging of the detachment inherent in literacy in a way
that defines the human journey into the unknown as a search for a language
capable of presenting the whole of reality transparently. Logically, its use perpetuates the
traditional mystical theories which assume that an illuminative stage is
crucial in the passage to a mystical union with an infinite God. From my perspective, however, it privileges a
passive stance over endless dynamic interactions, and that privileging is
obvious in a theology of transcendence which insists that Jesus is the mediator
who bridges an otherwise unbridgeable gap between a God of power and judgment
and sinful offspring of Adam and Eve.
As I wrestled with these issues, my
involvement as a priest forced me to search for a theological discourse capable
of voicing the longing of each of the three divine Persons for intensely personal
involvements in the lives of each and every human being. The search reached a critical mass when I was
involved with the St. Joseph parish community.
There, I was seldom tempted to voice my outrage at the efforts of Popes
John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI and the Cardinals, Archbishops, Bishops and
curial officials they appointed to institutionalize a radical distinction
between clergy and lay persons. The
community welcomed homilies which helped them discern the activity of the
Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit in their lives. And when my involvement with that community
ended, I was deeply touched by the letter of a woman in the parish who thanked
me for my “humility and humanity.”
(Since I am well aware of my intellectual arrogance, I both welcomed and
wrestled with the characterization.) But
I was comforted in my loss by the renewed awareness that the people in this
community were the living Church which decrees from Rome could not destroy.
Nonetheless, when I lost this community to
a priest I could not respect, a recent graduate of the University who prides
himself on being a John Paul II priest, triggered an ocean of still buried
anger. This priest was present at a
Eucharist I celebrated on a TEC week-end.
Since this week-end is a time of faith-sharing, I spoke of transforming
moments which led me to embrace a passionate quest for an intimate involvement
with Jesus. In each instance, I pointed
out how the Lord came to me through others, including those I wanted to dismiss
from my life. I hoped that this homily
would free some participants to risk honest self-revelations as a call to
encounter a living Jesus on the week-end.
Afterwards, this blissfully inexperienced priest felt compelled to
accuse me of being a Protestant. With
insufferable arrogance, he informed me that I did not realize that Jesus came
to people through the hierarchy of the Catholic Church.
Like Paul, when I am stung by criticism of
my ministry, I often react with contempt.
In this instance, I rationalized my inability to invite him to dialogue
by a judgment that he would have been impervious to any response I might
make. To this day, when I grieve over
judgments I have passed on others, I am reminded that a contempt directed at
him blinded me to my own inadequacies, including the fact that I simply did not
know how to respond to someone who had never experienced the piercing pain, paralyzing
anxiety, suffusive shame, or angry eruptions that priests who become personally
involved with others cannot avoid. As a
result, I am also reminded that my contemptuous dismissal of him was as
arrogantly judgmental as his characterization of me and that my early
involvements with communities centered in the Eucharist had also been distorted
by the formative power of my indoctrination in the theology he espouses.
Sadly, the seminary training of this young
priest had also assured him that ordination raised him to a higher state of
existence. To this day, I can only hope
that biting my tongue was a better response than sneering at the supposition
that ordination had magically transformed him ontologically. To justify my contempt for that theological
monstrosity, I would ask why so many priests I know are so impenetrably
self-centered, and I might well have added that there is no way they image
Jesus. But this would have prevented me
from acknowledging that, as my many failures attest, my ordination did not
endow me with the willingness or the ability to be open to the movement of the
Spirit.
______________
Another theological aside: To counter my intellectual arrogance, I often
remind myself that I once accepted the distinction between a natural and a
supernatural realm of existence without question. Now, though I view the postmodernist movement
as a hollow voice of prophetic protest, I acknowledge my debt to its insistence
(1) that even the most astute critic (reader, interpreter, commentator, etc.)
cannot escape entirely from the formative power of everyday language on
longings, passions, desires, perceptions, imagination, motives, intentions,
actions and aspirations and (2) that, as a result, tangled moral issues
revolving around the will to power exposed by Nietzsche lie, inextricably, at
the core of all human actions and assertions.
Until I appreciated the way that this postmodernist insight echoed the
prophetic protests voiced by Israel’s great prophets, I had failed to see
clearly how distinctions accorded normative status legitimate a dualism of one
sort or another.
In this context, I now regard the
distinction between a natural and a supernatural realm as perhaps the most
pernicious distinction enshrined in Aquinas’ Summa Theologica. In that
text, Aquinas filled the distinction’s hollow center with the doctrine of
original sin which Augustine abstracted (with demonstrable violence) from the
Yahwist’s story of Adam and Eve.
According to this reading, Adam’s transgression disrupted a primordial
realm of nature and severed the natural relationship between Creator and
creature, but, given God’s mercy, this transgression was a “happy fault” which
merited a Redeemer who enables humans to dwell within a supernatural
realm. (NB: This is the theological
context for the recent proclamation that Ordination transforms priests
ontologically.)
Augustine’s distinction between a
natural and a supernatural realm bears the imprint of the dualism he absorbed
as a Manichean. In his appropriation of
Augustine’s distinction, Aquinas disguised this imprint by transforming the
prohibition through which Yahweh reserved authority over moral discourse to
himself into a natural law inscribed in the order of creation by a rational and
purposive Creator. From this starting
point, he could invoke the traditional slogan, “Grace builds on nature,” to
support a belief in the continuity between God’s creative and saving wills.
I have often wondered why this belief did
not lead Aquinas to question the meta-narrative which implied that the Word
would not have become incarnate if Adam had not sinned and its emphasis on an
interplay between justice and mercy rather than on love. After all, the plausibility of this
meta-narrative depended on a notion of justice which legitimated a divine judgment
that only the cruel crucifixion of the incarnate Word could make fitting
reparation for Adam’s transgression. And
the fact that it then implied that divine mercy went beyond making reparation to
ensuring that this sacrifice also merited the sanctifying grace that elevates
sinful humans to a supernatural level of existence is a poor substitute for a
love which longs to bring a fullness of life, here and hereafter, to all human
beings.
Lest I go too far afield, I merely note
that a disguised dualism lies at the core of the analysis of erotic love in
Pope Benedict’s Encyclical on love. The
text inscribes a two-fold distinction, (1) between body and soul and (2)
between a natural and a supernatural state of existence. Erotic love is supposedly grounded in natural
passions and desires (instincts) which, in person-to-person involvements, urge
couples to spiritualize their union (or to become soul-mates). To expose the dualism implicit in these
distinctions, I merely note that the sexual involvement between two human
beings is never merely two bodies “doing what comes naturally,” that sexual
intercourse can evoke both the most urgent self-assertion and the profound
yielding, and that it can therefore play a critical role in calling lovers to a
more fully human involvement with one another.
One more digression: The distinction between the natural and
supernatural is central to the understanding of the Sacramental system
inscribed in the Baltimore Catechism,
This text asserts that Jesus instituted the Sacraments as rituals which
confer sanctifying and actual graces and that these graces enable sinful humans
to dwell in a supernatural state of existence.
Its underlying metaphor defines sanctifying and actual graces as created
graces (stuff of some sort) won by Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross. And its sacramental theology supplements this
definition with the assertion that this created grace exists in a metaphorical
treasury and that Popes can dispose of this inexhaustible treasury through the
granting of indulgences.
With considerable shame, I confess that,
as a young priest, I repeated this understanding of the workings of the
Sacraments when I taught the Sacraments to grade school children. After Vatican II, however, I read Schillebeeck’s
effort to redefine the Sacraments as rituals designed to evoke a living
encounter with Jesus, the tremendous lover and wounded healer, not as channels
of created graces. To paraphrase Kant’s
acknowledgement of the debt he owed to Hume’s empirical critique of
rationalism, Schillebeeck’s text awoke me from a dogmatic slumber. Now, when I preach on the Sacraments, I
describe them as rituals designed to evoke an awareness of Jesus’ personal
involvement with us at critical moments in our journey into the unknown (the
Exodus-theme) and a call to commit ourselves to let Jesus face with us whatever
we may be facing (the Covenant-theme).
And when I am involved as a priest in these rituals, I seek to practice
what I preach.
In this context, I can only compare my
understanding of the commitment I made at my ordination with the commitment
parents make to the infants they bring to be baptized. Parents awed by the fact that God has entrusted this little mystery to
them know that they are parents. In
Baptism, they make the same commitment to this little one that they made to one
another in the vows they proclaimed before God and the community of faith,
i.e., a commitment to love a person with unfathomable depths and a mysterious
freedom as Jesus loves her or him. Pray
God, they submit to the revelatory power of their commitment to a process of
learning how to parent to the day they die.
And so it is with my priesthood.
Try as I might, I have never been able
to deny that God called me to be a Franciscan and a priest. (I had often hoped that I would be thrown out
of the Seminary, because that would have absolved me of responsibility for
leaving.) But I can only say: I do not know what the Father, Jesus or the
Holy Spirit will ask of me in my involvement with the next wounded person who
enters my life. And if Pope Benedict
assumes that he has the authority to dictate how I must respond, I can only
say: It is better to obey God than man.
As a result, I struggle constantly with
contempt for priests who no longer understand the journey to intimacy with
Jesus as a journey into the unknown. As
the story of my encounter with a young priest who believes that his ordination
raised him to a higher state of existence and set him apart from lay people
reveals, I want to scream: “For centuries,
the Catholic tradition has embraced the belief that Jesus, the eternal Word
made flesh, is fully human and fully God.
Does ordination dispense you from becoming involved with other flawed
human beings in ways that will call you to become more fully human? And does your role as an anointed representative
of a Lord, Lawgiver and Judge in an institutionalized power-structure absolve
you from the never-ending challenge voiced by Jesus’ assertion, `Whatever you
do to the least of my brothers and sisters, you do to me.’“?
________________
An aside which you do well to skip. Pope Benedict seldom misses an opportunity to
deplore the secularization of western culture.
As one who has dwelt almost exclusively in theological circles and
ecclesiastical forms of life, he sees secularism as the biggest threat to the
institutionalized power-structure he is determined to protect. In this, he perpetuates Pope John Paul II’s
determination to impose his convictions on future generations of
Catholics. But I must view the projects
of both Popes with suspicion. To present
an alternative, I had hoped to finish a book entitled Moral Discourse: The Anxiety of
Authorship and the Issue of Authority.
To frame that text, I began with an heuristic principle that has
enriched my life as an honest searcher: “The
way a question is formulated determines what will count as an answer and what
will count as evidence for the answer.”
To minimize the influence of my prejudices, I accepted the challenge
implicit in Nietzsche’s assertion, “Nothing is true; everything is permitted.” Though the emerging text was started several
years before Benedict became Pope, it took seriously issues which the Pope
devalues.
A basic difference: To frame his polemical stance, the Pope
targets the tie between two of Nietzsche’s aphorisms, “Nothing is true; everything
is permitted,” and “God is dead.” In his
Regensburg Address, he accuses Scotus of introducing a voluntarism whose inner
logic led to Nietzsche’s celebration of an unrestrained and uninhibited will to
power. In the framework grounded in the
conception of reason which supports his pretension to speak with authority,
these aphorisms encode the secularism he abhors. Rhetorically, he waxes eloquent in his
condemnations of materialism, hedonism, subjectivism, and especially
relativity. Implicitly, he assumes that
these -isms have taken on lives of their own.
In the work in progress that I will never
finish, the first chapter formulates the question as an interplay between the
anxiety of authorship and the issue of authority. Concretely, I approach the preparation of
each homily with a certain anxiety, since I am compelled to bear witness to the
intimate involvement of each of the three divine Persons in my life, not repeat
beliefs that I have not subjected to the test of experience. And I want to proclaim God’s love in a way
that speaks for itself, since members of the congregation identify with my
experiences. In these instances, I find
that Nietzsche’s nihilistic framework challenges me to explore the meaning of
the assertion attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of John, “I have come that you
might have life and have it more abundantly.”
And I cannot absolve myself of the call for faith-sharing by invoking
the authority of someone else.
In my writing, however, I too often allow
the polemical structure of Benedict’s critiques (e.g., of Scotus, or
secularism, or any other -ism) to set the terms of my responses to his pronouncements. I would like to be able simply to let what I
write speak for itself, lest I lapse into a polemical structure centered in a
will to power. I know, however, that
what I say is profoundly influenced by my personal history. Ideally, that awareness evokes in me a
sympathetic response to the way that the Pope’s personal history prevents him
from seeing the insidious ways that the issue of authority becomes entangled
with the issues inherent in any will to power.
But his writings seldom offer glimpses into his depths, and I must
protest against the way that he surrounds himself with members of the hierarchy
who will echo his beliefs.
Since Pope Benedict seems unaware of the
influence of his personal history on his theological biases, I am predisposed
to trust committed Catholics who suggest that the wounds he experienced in Bonn
and during Vatican II motivate his habit of confining his vaunted powers of
listening to listening to former students who regard him as their mentor and to
members of the hierarchy.
To absolve myself of the possible
accusation that I desire to play pope without the responsibilities which burden
a Pope, I can play the academic game as well as he can. I confess that I did so, above, when I argued
that the conception of reason which Pope Benedict canonizes is derived from a
foundational metaphor of power and judgment.
To that end, I have presented Nietzsche’s re-reading of the western
literary tradition and Sartre’s analyses of passionate involvements between
unique individuals as honestly as I could, since both lay bare the will to
power hidden in any promise to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but
the truth. And I do not hesitate to
indicate the influences and experiences which have convinced me that the Nihilism
celebrated by Nietzsche and Sartre provides an empty literary space which frees
individuals to search for a moral discourse capable of giving form and
direction to a never-ending quest for a more fully human and uniquely personal
existence.
In this context, any ethical theory which
grounds moral discourse outside of human reality (e.g., in the will of a
rational and purposive Creator) or in some purportedly definitive conception of
human reality (e.g., the autonomous individual) legitimates dehumanizing and
depersonalizing judgments. To escape
that fate, one must search for a moral discourse without foundations which can
speak for itself. To frame my search, I
situate my analyses of moral issues in an incarnational theology grounded in a
metaphor of intimacy. However, since the
structure of this theology is derived from the Exodus- and Covenant-themes
which lend coherence to the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, it presents human
existence as a journey into the unknown and reveals that moral issues lie,
inextricably, at the core of any human action or assertion. It does not generate judgments which
presumably absolve moral agents from being personally involved with all
concerned.
In sum, an incarnational theology allows me
to replace the Thomistic assumption that a rational and purposive Creator
inscribed his moral will in a teleologically structured universe with prophetic
metaphors. Those metaphors insist that God’s moral will speaks in and through
the cries of those whom the power-structures in a prevailing culture violate,
marginalize, or silence. These cries
call for responses informed by a sympathetic imagination, not objective
judgments, and for a sensitive assessment of consequences of practices designed
to realize a multitude of human purposes.
And they ensure that this assessment must not assume that a single
purpose can dominate all other purposes.
