The big challenge in loving God, and loving more generally -
Do you know where your heart is? Do you know where your love is? You're a lonely soul because you won't let go of anything you hold....
Monday, December 6, 2010
Saturday, December 4, 2010
Rilke on Irony and Patience
Letters to a Young Poet:
"Irony. Don't let yourself be controlled by it, especially during uncreative moments. When you are fully creative, try to use it, as one more way to take hold of fife. Used purely, it too is pure, and one needn't be ashamed of it; but if you feel yourself becoming too familiar with it, if you are afraid of this growing familiarity, then turn to great and serious objects, in front of which it becomes small and helpless. Search into the depths of Things: there, irony never descends and when you arrive at the edge of greatness, find out whether this way of perceiving the world arises from a necessity of your being. For under the influence of serious Things it will either fall away from you (if it is something accidental), or else (if it is really innate and belongs to you) it will grow strong, and become a serious tool and take its place among the instruments which you can form your art with."
"Patience. In this there is no measuring with time, a year doesn’t matter, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!"
"Irony. Don't let yourself be controlled by it, especially during uncreative moments. When you are fully creative, try to use it, as one more way to take hold of fife. Used purely, it too is pure, and one needn't be ashamed of it; but if you feel yourself becoming too familiar with it, if you are afraid of this growing familiarity, then turn to great and serious objects, in front of which it becomes small and helpless. Search into the depths of Things: there, irony never descends and when you arrive at the edge of greatness, find out whether this way of perceiving the world arises from a necessity of your being. For under the influence of serious Things it will either fall away from you (if it is something accidental), or else (if it is really innate and belongs to you) it will grow strong, and become a serious tool and take its place among the instruments which you can form your art with."
"Patience. In this there is no measuring with time, a year doesn’t matter, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!"
Monday, November 29, 2010
An Advent Portrait: The Three Ravens Ballad
I find this song so striking... what a beauty and tragedy there is in loyalty!
There were three ravens sat on a tree,
downe a downe, hay downe, a downe,
They were as black as they might be.
with a downe, downe, downe
Then one of them said to his mate,
Where shall we now our breakfast take?
With a downe, derrie, derrie, downe, downe.
Down in yonder dear green field,
downe a downe, hay downe, a downe,
There lies a Knight slain under his shield,
with a downe, downe, downe
His hounds they lie down at his feet,
So well do they their Master keep,
With a downe, derrie, derrie, downe, downe.
His hawks they fly so eagerly,
downe a downe, hay downe, a downe,
There's no fowl dare him come nie
with a downe, downe, downe
Down there comes a fallow Doe,
As great with young as she might go,
With a downe, derrie, derrie, downe, downe.
She lifted up his bloody head,
downe a downe, hay downe, a downe,
And kissed his wounds that were so red,
with a downe, downe, downe
She got him up upon her back,
And carried him to earthen lake,
With a downe, derrie, derrie, downe, downe.
She buried him before the prime,
Oh derrie
She was dead herself ere euen-song time.
God send every gentleman,
Such hawks, such hounds, and such a Leman
--------------------------------------------------------
Wounded, sacred Heart of Jesus, may I always have the loyalty and the love to stay close to you...
There were three ravens sat on a tree,
downe a downe, hay downe, a downe,
They were as black as they might be.
with a downe, downe, downe
Then one of them said to his mate,
Where shall we now our breakfast take?
With a downe, derrie, derrie, downe, downe.
Down in yonder dear green field,
downe a downe, hay downe, a downe,
There lies a Knight slain under his shield,
with a downe, downe, downe
His hounds they lie down at his feet,
So well do they their Master keep,
With a downe, derrie, derrie, downe, downe.
His hawks they fly so eagerly,
downe a downe, hay downe, a downe,
There's no fowl dare him come nie
with a downe, downe, downe
Down there comes a fallow Doe,
As great with young as she might go,
With a downe, derrie, derrie, downe, downe.
She lifted up his bloody head,
downe a downe, hay downe, a downe,
And kissed his wounds that were so red,
with a downe, downe, downe
She got him up upon her back,
And carried him to earthen lake,
With a downe, derrie, derrie, downe, downe.
She buried him before the prime,
Oh derrie
She was dead herself ere euen-song time.
God send every gentleman,
Such hawks, such hounds, and such a Leman
--------------------------------------------------------
Wounded, sacred Heart of Jesus, may I always have the loyalty and the love to stay close to you...
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Pondering Dual Membership
The other day, I was talking with a fellow student here at YDS who is studying to earn an MAR in Asian Religions who identifies as both Catholic and Buddhist. He was explaining his choices and I ended up explaining how I was baptized and confirmed Episcopalian, then prayed and worked for years at a TAC Anglican cathedral, and then was confirmed as an adult into the Catholic Church; and so then my classmate asked me: "So are you Catholic, Anglican or both?"
At first I was inclined answer only Catholic, since my entry into the Catholic church was an important development for me and I certainly consider myself to be first and foremost Catholic... but then I paused because I actually don't know - from either a technical or spiritual sense - whether the shift to Catholicism also marked a shift away from the Anglican Communion.
After all, in a technical sense, I never signed an exit paper or did anything to separate myself from the Anglican Communion (unless the Episcopal church considers my Catholic confirmation to be a cancellation of my Episcopalian one, though such an exclusion would be theologically a little suspect since the Anglican church, like the Catholic, considers its sacraments to involve a real transmission of grace and a real transformation of state; sacraments by definition can't get undone, can they? Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong about that. I may be interpreting Anglican sacraments through a Catholic sacramental theology, simply on account of not knowing the Anglican theology as well.) Moreover, whether it's theologically true or not, I'm still on the books at St. John the Divine and St. James Episcopal churches as being a baptized and confirmed member of the church. Thus I don't know whether I confirmed myself out of the Anglican Communion or whether I am and always will still be part of it.
Spiritually speaking, I've realized here at YDS just how eclectic my theological informants have been. I certainly identify most with Catholic theology (and have especially enjoyed reading Rahner because his work resonates so well with my experience of God in life), but that doesn't mean I ever set out to reject the various emphases I learned as a child in Baptist Awana, Lutheran Sunday School, Episcopalian confirmation class, or Anglican liturgy. I've simply been adding all of these perspectives, layering them all into my spiritual basket and carrying them all around together, glad to have more rather than less.
In the end, I am and always will be first and foremost deeply Catholic - but I hope there is some theological way of understanding it in addition to the other identities that are floating around inside of me. My friend in Asian Religions joked in our conversation yesterday, "I'm fully Catholic and fully Buddhist. After all, Jesus didn't just do things one hundred percent - he was fully divine AND fully human." I laughed because I don't have a clue what theology would say about dual religious citizenship, but I do know what he means about feeling somehow more than merely one or the other.
At first I was inclined answer only Catholic, since my entry into the Catholic church was an important development for me and I certainly consider myself to be first and foremost Catholic... but then I paused because I actually don't know - from either a technical or spiritual sense - whether the shift to Catholicism also marked a shift away from the Anglican Communion.
After all, in a technical sense, I never signed an exit paper or did anything to separate myself from the Anglican Communion (unless the Episcopal church considers my Catholic confirmation to be a cancellation of my Episcopalian one, though such an exclusion would be theologically a little suspect since the Anglican church, like the Catholic, considers its sacraments to involve a real transmission of grace and a real transformation of state; sacraments by definition can't get undone, can they? Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong about that. I may be interpreting Anglican sacraments through a Catholic sacramental theology, simply on account of not knowing the Anglican theology as well.) Moreover, whether it's theologically true or not, I'm still on the books at St. John the Divine and St. James Episcopal churches as being a baptized and confirmed member of the church. Thus I don't know whether I confirmed myself out of the Anglican Communion or whether I am and always will still be part of it.
Spiritually speaking, I've realized here at YDS just how eclectic my theological informants have been. I certainly identify most with Catholic theology (and have especially enjoyed reading Rahner because his work resonates so well with my experience of God in life), but that doesn't mean I ever set out to reject the various emphases I learned as a child in Baptist Awana, Lutheran Sunday School, Episcopalian confirmation class, or Anglican liturgy. I've simply been adding all of these perspectives, layering them all into my spiritual basket and carrying them all around together, glad to have more rather than less.
In the end, I am and always will be first and foremost deeply Catholic - but I hope there is some theological way of understanding it in addition to the other identities that are floating around inside of me. My friend in Asian Religions joked in our conversation yesterday, "I'm fully Catholic and fully Buddhist. After all, Jesus didn't just do things one hundred percent - he was fully divine AND fully human." I laughed because I don't have a clue what theology would say about dual religious citizenship, but I do know what he means about feeling somehow more than merely one or the other.
Protestant Perspective on the Knowledge of God
Protestant Orthodoxy
1. God is known only by God
1.1. God is the only real subject of the knowledge of God (CD II.1, 179)
1.2. Humans participate in God’s self-knowledge, knowing God by God’s word
1.3. Barth: If you look at our knowledge of God, it looks like regular human knowledge but in fact we are made to participate in the self-knowledge of God, which is not ordinary at all!
2. Trinitarian Conception of God
(Read ‘The Psychology of the Redeemer’ by Nietzsche, who assumes that you must have eyes to see, and that you must have some affinity with what you observe in order to understand it)
2.1. The father addresses us in the Son and the Holy Spirit receives that address in us
2.2. Why? There must be affinity between that which is known and the one who knows
2.3. Human beings have no affinity with God, since God is God and humans are humans
2.4. Therefore we need the Trinitarian structure for an affinity through the Holy Spirit:
2.4.1. 1st Person of the Trinity is the source of knowledge about God, who makes himself known as God
2.4.2. 2nd Person of the Trinity is the object, whom we encounter
2.4.3. 3rd Person of the Trinity is the receptor of the knowledge of God, through whom we know God
3. Karl Barth’s Concerns
3.1. The Nature of Truth
3.1.1. Pre-Barth Protestant theology assumes God reveals truth about himself in the form of propositions, that the content of truth is information about God
3.1.2. Barth: Truth is not a matter of encounter rather than cognition, an event rather than a concept
- You never know persons as you know things
- You cannot have truth about God apart from God’s presence
3.2. The Nature of Human Beings
3.2.1. Protestant Theology: The knowability of God cannot be made intelligible as the predicate of a human being
- Knowing God is not something we can achieve, given that we have no innate capacity to know God
- “Total depravity” means that all aspects of humanity, including our reason, are impaired
- Just as a drop of ink in water spreads and tints the entire substance without making it all ink, so too our depravity makes our thoughts, intellect, ect. stained
3.2.2. Barth: We have absolutely no capacity (not just a severely impaired capacity) and thus any capacity to know God is in fact God’s capacity to know God
- Barth is echoing Kant in this argument for radical categorical difference, along with the impairing impediment of sin
- We have a two-fold impediment of categorical difference and sin
- Thus if we know anything about God, it is only because God knows and is somehow making us participate
4. The Event of Revelation
4.1. God is in fact knowable because God is known
4.1.1. Where actuality exists, there is also corresponding possibility
- Rahner isn’t trying to justify the possibility of knowing God, but is working entirely within a Christian faith that knows God as knowable and can thus assume it is possible
4.1.2. Revelation is the miracle of God making Godself knowable
4.2. Revelation must involve an indwelling encounter of some kind
4.2.1. Whereas classical Protestantism would point to the Bible and say it is the Word of God, Barth would regard the speaking of God as true revelation and the Bible only as its record
4.2.2. Just as the Word dwelt in the body of Jesus, so also God indwells in human language
4.3. God is coming but never staying, like a line tangent to a circle
4.3.1. Barth differs from Catholicism in which sacraments really are infused with God’s presence through a permanent transformation of state
4.3.2. Barth: God comes and goes when he chooses, and the only sacrament is Jesus Christ because Jesus Christ was God
4.3.3. In all other spheres where God comes to be known in non-permanent ways, revelation is an event
– God can speak through the reading of a Bible
– God can speak through the hearing of a Mozart concerto
– God can even speak through the seeing of a dead dog*
* Al Ghazali’s “99 Names of God” - Forgiveness makes manifest that which is beautiful. Jesus is walking with disciples down the street and they see a carcass of a dog; the disciples make a big effort to avoid it, but Jesus says, what beautiful teeth he has!)Monday, September 27, 2010
The Fleeting Mediations of Modernity
I am currently taking a course on St. John of the Cross, and we are reading both his poetry and his commentaries in which he elucidates his various understandings of the dark night. He argues that spiritual seekers must go through a 'night of sense' in which they purge themselves of tangible or bodily consolations, and 'night of spirit' in which they forego any attachment to spiritual consolation. The point of all these nights and purgings is to emerge less reliant on the mediations through which we know God and more attuned to Godself alone.
I have been thinking a lot about what these arguments meant for people of John's time and what they mean for us today. On the one hand, from the most obvious perspective, the modern world is in more need of a sensory and spiritual 'stripping down' since our culture so easily makes idols of the material goods that are so prevalent and of the self-help benefits which we are supposed to receive from spirituality; clearly, John of the Cross can provide a corrective to these distractions in shaking us from our material and spiritual accretions and pointing us, through nothingness, to God alone. On the other hand, however, I wonder if our society's modes of busyness, distraction, and virtual reality have already taken us out of the grasp of human experience and enacted a kind of 'stripping down' that might or might not leave us bare before God.
After all, I sometimes suspect that modern humans are not as thoroughly in the world as earlier people used to be. The lives and imaginations of John's Spanish contemporaries were vitalized and filled deeply with the tangible world surrounding them: the striking beauty and gruesomeness of medieval Catholic art, the gritty realities of toil and work experienced on a visceral level, etc. The reality of the medieval world in its colorfulness, drabness, richness, dirtiness, luxury and depravity left no doubt as to the captivating force of human experience.
Today, however, we are somewhat less captivated by reality because we have fewer tangible experiences and spend less time in them. A Spanish Catholic of John's time might have spent a morning curing leather in the shadow of a gargoyle-decorated Cathedral, becoming deeply familiar with the feeling of the leather and the roughness of the cathedral's stone, steeped in the experience of the work and that particular setting. I, on the other hand, spend the morning skimming through pdf documents, which do not really exist apart from the pixels of a computer screen which I hardly ever recognize as a tangible object since it is useful only as a kind of window through which intangible ideas can be processed. Sometimes I am vaguely surprised when something makes me aware of the world again - perhaps a computer key gets stuck, or my stomach growls, and I am surprised to find that I am in the world and the world does have certain claims on me. I wonder if, instead of being too much enamored with the immediacy of the world, we moderns (or at least we graduate students) struggle with the opposite problem of forgetting that we do in fact belong to an immediate world.
John of the Cross warns spiritual seekers away from becoming too attached to experiences which are only mediations of God and not Godself, but I suggest that we now need guidance for the next step. Modern humans are increasingly already detached from experience, only touching it fleetingly due to the distancing effects of technology and busyness. But whereas John of the Cross assumed that once humans were stripped of experience (as he was in the prisons of Toledo) then true knowledge of God would come, I don't see the divine as automatically coming to fill that space in our realities. We are certainly detached, which John regards as a positive receptivity to God, but I don't know if this particular detachment has indeed cleared our eyes to see God.
I have been thinking a lot about what these arguments meant for people of John's time and what they mean for us today. On the one hand, from the most obvious perspective, the modern world is in more need of a sensory and spiritual 'stripping down' since our culture so easily makes idols of the material goods that are so prevalent and of the self-help benefits which we are supposed to receive from spirituality; clearly, John of the Cross can provide a corrective to these distractions in shaking us from our material and spiritual accretions and pointing us, through nothingness, to God alone. On the other hand, however, I wonder if our society's modes of busyness, distraction, and virtual reality have already taken us out of the grasp of human experience and enacted a kind of 'stripping down' that might or might not leave us bare before God.
After all, I sometimes suspect that modern humans are not as thoroughly in the world as earlier people used to be. The lives and imaginations of John's Spanish contemporaries were vitalized and filled deeply with the tangible world surrounding them: the striking beauty and gruesomeness of medieval Catholic art, the gritty realities of toil and work experienced on a visceral level, etc. The reality of the medieval world in its colorfulness, drabness, richness, dirtiness, luxury and depravity left no doubt as to the captivating force of human experience.
Today, however, we are somewhat less captivated by reality because we have fewer tangible experiences and spend less time in them. A Spanish Catholic of John's time might have spent a morning curing leather in the shadow of a gargoyle-decorated Cathedral, becoming deeply familiar with the feeling of the leather and the roughness of the cathedral's stone, steeped in the experience of the work and that particular setting. I, on the other hand, spend the morning skimming through pdf documents, which do not really exist apart from the pixels of a computer screen which I hardly ever recognize as a tangible object since it is useful only as a kind of window through which intangible ideas can be processed. Sometimes I am vaguely surprised when something makes me aware of the world again - perhaps a computer key gets stuck, or my stomach growls, and I am surprised to find that I am in the world and the world does have certain claims on me. I wonder if, instead of being too much enamored with the immediacy of the world, we moderns (or at least we graduate students) struggle with the opposite problem of forgetting that we do in fact belong to an immediate world.
John of the Cross warns spiritual seekers away from becoming too attached to experiences which are only mediations of God and not Godself, but I suggest that we now need guidance for the next step. Modern humans are increasingly already detached from experience, only touching it fleetingly due to the distancing effects of technology and busyness. But whereas John of the Cross assumed that once humans were stripped of experience (as he was in the prisons of Toledo) then true knowledge of God would come, I don't see the divine as automatically coming to fill that space in our realities. We are certainly detached, which John regards as a positive receptivity to God, but I don't know if this particular detachment has indeed cleared our eyes to see God.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Karl Rahner's Theological Project
Theology's Task for the 20th Century Catholic:
- make theology intellectually respectable in the modern world by honestly confronting the difficulties posed by modern philosophy and science
- place theology at the service of the larger concerns of Christian faith
- do these together, as the success of one depends on the other
- thereby avoid unthinking pietism on one hand and false intellectualism on the other
- this unity is rooted in the unity of the thinking, believing subject
Karl Rahner's Approach:
- Human experience is the starting-point for Rahner's theology because it is the one common ground to which we all have direct and immediate access:
1. If human existence and our experience of it can be analyzed to discover categories in which God can be spoken of intelligibly by the strictest canons of knowledge and truth, then theology has at least a starting point to begin speaking of God in the contemporary world.
2. If human existence offers framework in which the history of Jesus and the history of what Christian tradition has said about him makes sense, then theology also has a starting point for speaking about Jesus Christ.
3. If theology can discover its roots in human existence, then it can also stay close to human life and to all who are seriously trying to live it.
The Primacy of Experience from Within:
1. Experiential knowledge
- We acquire experiential knowledge/ pre-conceptual knowledge/ un-thematic knowledge/ original knowledge not from without but from within existence
- This knowledge is original not in the sense that no one had it before, but in the sense that it wells up from the origins or depths of our own selves in our lived interaction with the world
- for example, an adult is in existence in a deeper way than a child for having a lifetime of making decisions, of joys and sorrows, and all the other things that make up the stuff of adult human life and the stuff of theological reflection; for example, anyone who has tried to be faithful to conscience even when it cost something, or tried to love unselfishly, has touched human experience in ways that another might now, and thereby come to know it in a way that the other cannot
- One must be in experience before one can reflect on it
2. Conceptual Knowledge
- Conceptual knowledge gives expression to our relationship to the world, rather than creating it
- To express our experiential knowledge on a social level of reflection, expression and communication, we must objectify it
- Explicit/ thematic/ conceptual knowledge embodies experiential knowledge in concepts and words that others can hear and understand
- This objectification of experience only symbolizes experience and never constitutes it*, and thus it is necessary to relate concepts back to their sources so that they do not become empty abstractions
(*Note: I wonder if this is really the case.... I think it is quite possible for conceptual expressions to form our experience of the world, similar to the way in which language not only expresses but forms and dictates thought. Is Rahner establishing an artificially sharp distinction between first order substance and second order description?)
The Experience of Transcendence: Our Infinite Subjectivity
- All of our experience of the world is also simultaneously an experience of the self precisely in this world
- In knowing something else, we are also aware of ourselves in this process of knowing, not as an explicit object of our attention, but in the sense that knowing is a conscious process or activity
- Just as we are aware of ourselves as walking or talking even though we are are not explicitly thinking about it, so too we are aware of ourselves in the process knowing
- This self-awareness always present in our knowledge is our capacity for being present to ourselves, and that is the basic characteristic which makes human existence spiritual existence (Note: Rahner is a genius!!)
- We exist in the world as spiritual beings because our existence is not completely absorbed by or immersed in the world as object, for we simultaneously retain and possess ourselves int his capacity for self-presence
- All of our knowledge always gives rise to further questions: When pushed far enough, all of our clarities trail off into obscurity; the chain of scientific logic hangs loose at both ends, and we transcend our knowledge
- Hence Rahner begins at transcendent experience as a basic starting point of being the mysteries that we are!
The Philosophical Moment: Reflecting on General Human Experience
- "Existentials" - the general structures which necessarily characterize all human existence and which therefore can constitute the philosophical foundations upon which theology can build
- For example: self-presence, freedom, and transcendence (and Rahner's fourth: grace, the 'supernatural existential')
- The philosophical moment is necessary in theology in order that theology have a 'public' language, a language that is intellectually justifiable before the public canons of knowledge and truth, and to connect our today with our past
- Rahner invokes tradition, a cross-fertilization of Plato-Aristotle-Augustine-Aquinas and Germans-Kant-Heidegger:
1. Humans can know what is beyond the finite and sensible world, can know the metaphysical beyond the physical (Rahner: we exist in finite world as material existents and transcend it as spiritual existents, "Spirit in the World")
2. By turning theology, like modern philosophy, to the subject and showing this ever-receding horizon of knowledge, Rahner demonstrates the absolute openness of the human subject in its unlimited transcendence, mystery
3. Mystery is not an unsolved problem but something positively unknowable
4. The very essence of being human is to be open and undetermined in being and knowledge
5. Human beings experience themselves as those to whom ultimate meaning must come through history if at all
6. Humans by their very nature are listeners for and possible hearers of the word of salvation and grace
7. Human existence is transcendent existence, able to be known and loved by what is beyond the finite world and can therefore know and love in return (Note: Are we missing a few linking steps here?)
- Thus Rahner establishes a philosophical basis for doing Christian theology and provides a contemporary framework within which Christianity can make sense
The Theological Moment: Reflecting on Lived Faith
- Theological reflection on human existence cannot become a closed system because human existence is not a closed system
- Christianity is a historical religion in that it talks about contingent, particular events, about events which happened in time, calling the expression of this salvific significance a history of revelation:
1. We must know the historical Jesus by whatever means possible (biblical studies and exegesis, etc)
2. We must express the theological significance of his life, to formulate Christologies in such a way that faith in him makes sense in new historical and cultural situations
- Transcendental Christology:
1. We must keep one eye on the past, on the history of Jesus and the history of what has been said about him in scripture and tradition
2. We must look to the present in order to develop conceptual framework within which this past can speak to the present and actually be heard and understood in it.
- transcendental because it focuses on those necessary or universal structures within which all concrete human history takes place (transcendental as undergirding the categorical)
- transcendental Christology an express the universal significance of Jesus' particularity
- Jesus is the fullest actualization of that meaning which comes through the actualities of history, and the fulfillment of the human potential for self-transcendence
- The real potentialities of human existence are actual and known because they have been actualized in a concrete, historical person.
A Theology of Grace: The Supernatural Existential
- Rahner posits a 'supernatural existential,' a supernatural general structures which necessarily characterizes all human existence
- The essence of concrete human existence involves being called to what transcends our existence, to life iwth God
- All people were created from the very beginning for grace; it belongs to the very essence of concrete human nature to be called to grace, to be able to find God in the particularities of all history (Note: Is this supernatural existential the orientation towards God which is part and parcel of being human?)
- History of salvation/revelation is coextensive with history of the human race
- So the history of the Jewish and Christian peoples can also be known through the history of all people, however different their way of conceptualizing and expressing this knowledge may be
Intrinsic and Therefore Universal Implications
- Human nature is understood as transcententally open to self-transcendence in history, not as a closed or static structure given from the beginning of human history
- History of salvation/revelation is the realization of human nature's deepest potentialities, not an extrinsic add-on to human history from the outside
- Grace/salvation/revelation/human history are all one history, not separated between a natural/secular history and a particular and exclusive Judeo-Christian salvation history
- By making the offer of grace intrinsic to human nature, it makes a universal offer
- This offer is the ground and horizon of all experience and is integrated into the whole of existence in all its dimensions; everything that is really human can be a "channel of grace," a finite mediation of our relationship to God
- Rahner unites 'secular" and 'religious' moments into one human experience
Balancing the Transcendental with the Historical:
- Transcendental structures of knowledge and freedom must be actualized int he world and in history
- (There is no music in the potentialities of sound, but only when a Beethoven creates his music from them)
- There is no actual knowledge of God and no free response to him except when actualized in the world and in history
- Humanity's transcendental essence achieves actuality in time and space and has no existence of its own apart from the concrete world and concrete history
- Humanity is indeed transcendence and spirit, but only in and through the particularities of our individual and social world and our individual and collective history
- It is of the very nature of human existence to express itself in order to be itself (Note: So here are we getting an answer to my question about the formative role of expression in constituting experience?)
- The transcendental possibility of revelation must become actual by coming to expression in concrete, particular revelations
- Jesus is the concrete historical person in whom God's offer of grace and human response to this offer became flesh, became visible, audible, and tangible in the world
- Jesus is a real symbol, sign or sacrament of this grace
- The Church is a sacrament or real symbol in that it its sacramental activities are activities in which there is expressed and made explicitly religious a relationship to God which can be mediated by all finite reality.
- Understanding church and sacraments as real symbols means that we do not encounter God for the first time in a church or in explicitly religious activities, but in human life
God as Mystery
- If the world is comprised of symbols of human transcendence, then the ultimate reality symbolized lies ever beyond all the symbols nad remains a mystery
- This mystery we can never grasp, the mystery we call God, the mystery of the life and death of Jesus and the mystery of all human living and dying are one and the same mystery
- being a Christian dn responding to this mystery in faith and hope and love is the fullest way of being human
(Dych, William. 'Theology in a New Key." A World of Grace: An Introduction to the Themes and Foundations of Karl Rahner's Theology." Ed. Leo O'Donovan. New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1989)
- make theology intellectually respectable in the modern world by honestly confronting the difficulties posed by modern philosophy and science
- place theology at the service of the larger concerns of Christian faith
- do these together, as the success of one depends on the other
- thereby avoid unthinking pietism on one hand and false intellectualism on the other
- this unity is rooted in the unity of the thinking, believing subject
Karl Rahner's Approach:
- Human experience is the starting-point for Rahner's theology because it is the one common ground to which we all have direct and immediate access:
1. If human existence and our experience of it can be analyzed to discover categories in which God can be spoken of intelligibly by the strictest canons of knowledge and truth, then theology has at least a starting point to begin speaking of God in the contemporary world.
2. If human existence offers framework in which the history of Jesus and the history of what Christian tradition has said about him makes sense, then theology also has a starting point for speaking about Jesus Christ.
3. If theology can discover its roots in human existence, then it can also stay close to human life and to all who are seriously trying to live it.
The Primacy of Experience from Within:
1. Experiential knowledge
- We acquire experiential knowledge/ pre-conceptual knowledge/ un-thematic knowledge/ original knowledge not from without but from within existence
- This knowledge is original not in the sense that no one had it before, but in the sense that it wells up from the origins or depths of our own selves in our lived interaction with the world
- for example, an adult is in existence in a deeper way than a child for having a lifetime of making decisions, of joys and sorrows, and all the other things that make up the stuff of adult human life and the stuff of theological reflection; for example, anyone who has tried to be faithful to conscience even when it cost something, or tried to love unselfishly, has touched human experience in ways that another might now, and thereby come to know it in a way that the other cannot
- One must be in experience before one can reflect on it
2. Conceptual Knowledge
- Conceptual knowledge gives expression to our relationship to the world, rather than creating it
- To express our experiential knowledge on a social level of reflection, expression and communication, we must objectify it
- Explicit/ thematic/ conceptual knowledge embodies experiential knowledge in concepts and words that others can hear and understand
- This objectification of experience only symbolizes experience and never constitutes it*, and thus it is necessary to relate concepts back to their sources so that they do not become empty abstractions
(*Note: I wonder if this is really the case.... I think it is quite possible for conceptual expressions to form our experience of the world, similar to the way in which language not only expresses but forms and dictates thought. Is Rahner establishing an artificially sharp distinction between first order substance and second order description?)
The Experience of Transcendence: Our Infinite Subjectivity
- All of our experience of the world is also simultaneously an experience of the self precisely in this world
- In knowing something else, we are also aware of ourselves in this process of knowing, not as an explicit object of our attention, but in the sense that knowing is a conscious process or activity
- Just as we are aware of ourselves as walking or talking even though we are are not explicitly thinking about it, so too we are aware of ourselves in the process knowing
- This self-awareness always present in our knowledge is our capacity for being present to ourselves, and that is the basic characteristic which makes human existence spiritual existence (Note: Rahner is a genius!!)
- We exist in the world as spiritual beings because our existence is not completely absorbed by or immersed in the world as object, for we simultaneously retain and possess ourselves int his capacity for self-presence
- All of our knowledge always gives rise to further questions: When pushed far enough, all of our clarities trail off into obscurity; the chain of scientific logic hangs loose at both ends, and we transcend our knowledge
- Hence Rahner begins at transcendent experience as a basic starting point of being the mysteries that we are!
The Philosophical Moment: Reflecting on General Human Experience
- "Existentials" - the general structures which necessarily characterize all human existence and which therefore can constitute the philosophical foundations upon which theology can build
- For example: self-presence, freedom, and transcendence (and Rahner's fourth: grace, the 'supernatural existential')
- The philosophical moment is necessary in theology in order that theology have a 'public' language, a language that is intellectually justifiable before the public canons of knowledge and truth, and to connect our today with our past
- Rahner invokes tradition, a cross-fertilization of Plato-Aristotle-Augustine-Aquinas and Germans-Kant-Heidegger:
1. Humans can know what is beyond the finite and sensible world, can know the metaphysical beyond the physical (Rahner: we exist in finite world as material existents and transcend it as spiritual existents, "Spirit in the World")
2. By turning theology, like modern philosophy, to the subject and showing this ever-receding horizon of knowledge, Rahner demonstrates the absolute openness of the human subject in its unlimited transcendence, mystery
3. Mystery is not an unsolved problem but something positively unknowable
4. The very essence of being human is to be open and undetermined in being and knowledge
5. Human beings experience themselves as those to whom ultimate meaning must come through history if at all
6. Humans by their very nature are listeners for and possible hearers of the word of salvation and grace
7. Human existence is transcendent existence, able to be known and loved by what is beyond the finite world and can therefore know and love in return (Note: Are we missing a few linking steps here?)
- Thus Rahner establishes a philosophical basis for doing Christian theology and provides a contemporary framework within which Christianity can make sense
The Theological Moment: Reflecting on Lived Faith
- Theological reflection on human existence cannot become a closed system because human existence is not a closed system
- Christianity is a historical religion in that it talks about contingent, particular events, about events which happened in time, calling the expression of this salvific significance a history of revelation:
1. We must know the historical Jesus by whatever means possible (biblical studies and exegesis, etc)
2. We must express the theological significance of his life, to formulate Christologies in such a way that faith in him makes sense in new historical and cultural situations
- Transcendental Christology:
1. We must keep one eye on the past, on the history of Jesus and the history of what has been said about him in scripture and tradition
2. We must look to the present in order to develop conceptual framework within which this past can speak to the present and actually be heard and understood in it.
- transcendental because it focuses on those necessary or universal structures within which all concrete human history takes place (transcendental as undergirding the categorical)
- transcendental Christology an express the universal significance of Jesus' particularity
- Jesus is the fullest actualization of that meaning which comes through the actualities of history, and the fulfillment of the human potential for self-transcendence
- The real potentialities of human existence are actual and known because they have been actualized in a concrete, historical person.
A Theology of Grace: The Supernatural Existential
- Rahner posits a 'supernatural existential,' a supernatural general structures which necessarily characterizes all human existence
- The essence of concrete human existence involves being called to what transcends our existence, to life iwth God
- All people were created from the very beginning for grace; it belongs to the very essence of concrete human nature to be called to grace, to be able to find God in the particularities of all history (Note: Is this supernatural existential the orientation towards God which is part and parcel of being human?)
- History of salvation/revelation is coextensive with history of the human race
- So the history of the Jewish and Christian peoples can also be known through the history of all people, however different their way of conceptualizing and expressing this knowledge may be
Intrinsic and Therefore Universal Implications
- Human nature is understood as transcententally open to self-transcendence in history, not as a closed or static structure given from the beginning of human history
- History of salvation/revelation is the realization of human nature's deepest potentialities, not an extrinsic add-on to human history from the outside
- Grace/salvation/revelation/human history are all one history, not separated between a natural/secular history and a particular and exclusive Judeo-Christian salvation history
- By making the offer of grace intrinsic to human nature, it makes a universal offer
- This offer is the ground and horizon of all experience and is integrated into the whole of existence in all its dimensions; everything that is really human can be a "channel of grace," a finite mediation of our relationship to God
- Rahner unites 'secular" and 'religious' moments into one human experience
Balancing the Transcendental with the Historical:
- Transcendental structures of knowledge and freedom must be actualized int he world and in history
- (There is no music in the potentialities of sound, but only when a Beethoven creates his music from them)
- There is no actual knowledge of God and no free response to him except when actualized in the world and in history
- Humanity's transcendental essence achieves actuality in time and space and has no existence of its own apart from the concrete world and concrete history
- Humanity is indeed transcendence and spirit, but only in and through the particularities of our individual and social world and our individual and collective history
- It is of the very nature of human existence to express itself in order to be itself (Note: So here are we getting an answer to my question about the formative role of expression in constituting experience?)
- The transcendental possibility of revelation must become actual by coming to expression in concrete, particular revelations
- Jesus is the concrete historical person in whom God's offer of grace and human response to this offer became flesh, became visible, audible, and tangible in the world
- Jesus is a real symbol, sign or sacrament of this grace
- The Church is a sacrament or real symbol in that it its sacramental activities are activities in which there is expressed and made explicitly religious a relationship to God which can be mediated by all finite reality.
- Understanding church and sacraments as real symbols means that we do not encounter God for the first time in a church or in explicitly religious activities, but in human life
God as Mystery
- If the world is comprised of symbols of human transcendence, then the ultimate reality symbolized lies ever beyond all the symbols nad remains a mystery
- This mystery we can never grasp, the mystery we call God, the mystery of the life and death of Jesus and the mystery of all human living and dying are one and the same mystery
- being a Christian dn responding to this mystery in faith and hope and love is the fullest way of being human
(Dych, William. 'Theology in a New Key." A World of Grace: An Introduction to the Themes and Foundations of Karl Rahner's Theology." Ed. Leo O'Donovan. New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1989)
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Karl Barth on Revelation
Theological Approach
- Revelation is possible because where there is actuality there is possibility
- The sole basis and intention of theology must be God's sovereignty and freedom in his grace and revelation, including his freedom over faith, the recipient mode of revelation
- Barth refuses to take concept of revelation from philosophy, the universal history of religion, or any general idea of revelation
- Barth's concept of Christian revelation assumes the Word of God is the source, basis and criterion for theology; Christian revelation is a unique revelation that cannot be compared with any other kind of revelation.
Christian Revelation
1) "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us"
2) The Word of God addressed to humanity through particular, concrete and rational event of Jesus' incarnation, life, teaching, passion, death and resurrection
3) The coming of Godself to Humanity
4) A divine action initiated, execute and consummated by the sovereign and free grace of God
Triune Revelation
1) Revealer: God the Father decides in His eternity before the creation of the world to reveal Himself to man in His Son Jesus Christ
2) Revelation: God the Son, in obedience to this eternal decree of His Father, objectifies this revelation in His own person and work in that He assumed human nature in the man Jesus of Nazareth , living and dying as a man among His fellow men and for their salvation to accomplish the work of reconciliation.
3) Revealdness: God the Holy Spirit consummates this revelation by making man open and ready for it so that man is capable of receiving it and actually receives it.
Revelation: Reality and Reception
- Barth does not dispute that God does reveal Himself in nature and in history but contends that this objective revelation does not and cannot get through to fallen man and is therefore not revelation
- Revelation is only revelation if it is recognized, acknowledge and accepted by man
- Objective aspect: Jesus Christ in the unity of His person and work
- Subjective aspect: Holy spirit enabling man to receive this revelation
- Hence Barth's concentration on Jesus Christ as one and only revelation of basic importance for theology
- Hence Barth's rejection of a general revelation in nature or in history as other sources of revelation
Rejection of General or Natural Revelation
- Barth argues against general revelation in creation because:
1. It is not supported in the Bible
2. Creation does not and cannot reveal anything (God, world, man) as it really is because it needs the knowledge of God's reconciliation in Jesus Christ and knowledge of Jesus Christ himself
3. We only truly know who God is, how man is, and what world is for through Jesus Christ and his work of reconciliation
4. So true knowledge (of God, world, man) is not possible about from knowledge of God's work of reconciliation in Jesus Christ
5. Anything apart from the truth only revealed in the persona nd work of Jesus Christ can therefore only lead to knowledge of idols
- And thus Barth's theology leaves no room for revelation(s) prior to that one which has taken place in Jesus Christ
- For Barth, Christ is THE revelation (to which the Bible and proclamation of the Church bear witness but do not themselves constitute)
Revelation is Not:
- doctrinal, since the propositions of the Church communicate ideas rather than Godself
- tradition, since the Church is under the authority of Scripture
- abstraction, since revelation is content is Christ
- surprise, since God in Godself is God as self-shown in Jesus Christ
Conditions of Revelation:
- Humans can only partly know God
- Man's finite man and sinfulness prevent humanity from knowing God fully
- Primary objectivity of God: God as He is in Himself
- Secondary objectivity of God: God as known by man
- But what we can and do know is in faith and thus by the grace of God
(Hartwell, Herbert. The Theology of Karl Barth. London: Gerald Duckworth and Co. Ltd., 1964, 67-73)
- Revelation is possible because where there is actuality there is possibility
- The sole basis and intention of theology must be God's sovereignty and freedom in his grace and revelation, including his freedom over faith, the recipient mode of revelation
- Barth refuses to take concept of revelation from philosophy, the universal history of religion, or any general idea of revelation
- Barth's concept of Christian revelation assumes the Word of God is the source, basis and criterion for theology; Christian revelation is a unique revelation that cannot be compared with any other kind of revelation.
Christian Revelation
1) "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us"
2) The Word of God addressed to humanity through particular, concrete and rational event of Jesus' incarnation, life, teaching, passion, death and resurrection
3) The coming of Godself to Humanity
4) A divine action initiated, execute and consummated by the sovereign and free grace of God
Triune Revelation
1) Revealer: God the Father decides in His eternity before the creation of the world to reveal Himself to man in His Son Jesus Christ
2) Revelation: God the Son, in obedience to this eternal decree of His Father, objectifies this revelation in His own person and work in that He assumed human nature in the man Jesus of Nazareth , living and dying as a man among His fellow men and for their salvation to accomplish the work of reconciliation.
3) Revealdness: God the Holy Spirit consummates this revelation by making man open and ready for it so that man is capable of receiving it and actually receives it.
Revelation: Reality and Reception
- Barth does not dispute that God does reveal Himself in nature and in history but contends that this objective revelation does not and cannot get through to fallen man and is therefore not revelation
- Revelation is only revelation if it is recognized, acknowledge and accepted by man
- Objective aspect: Jesus Christ in the unity of His person and work
- Subjective aspect: Holy spirit enabling man to receive this revelation
- Hence Barth's concentration on Jesus Christ as one and only revelation of basic importance for theology
- Hence Barth's rejection of a general revelation in nature or in history as other sources of revelation
Rejection of General or Natural Revelation
- Barth argues against general revelation in creation because:
1. It is not supported in the Bible
2. Creation does not and cannot reveal anything (God, world, man) as it really is because it needs the knowledge of God's reconciliation in Jesus Christ and knowledge of Jesus Christ himself
3. We only truly know who God is, how man is, and what world is for through Jesus Christ and his work of reconciliation
4. So true knowledge (of God, world, man) is not possible about from knowledge of God's work of reconciliation in Jesus Christ
5. Anything apart from the truth only revealed in the persona nd work of Jesus Christ can therefore only lead to knowledge of idols
- And thus Barth's theology leaves no room for revelation(s) prior to that one which has taken place in Jesus Christ
- For Barth, Christ is THE revelation (to which the Bible and proclamation of the Church bear witness but do not themselves constitute)
Revelation is Not:
- doctrinal, since the propositions of the Church communicate ideas rather than Godself
- tradition, since the Church is under the authority of Scripture
- abstraction, since revelation is content is Christ
- surprise, since God in Godself is God as self-shown in Jesus Christ
Conditions of Revelation:
- Humans can only partly know God
- Man's finite man and sinfulness prevent humanity from knowing God fully
- Primary objectivity of God: God as He is in Himself
- Secondary objectivity of God: God as known by man
- But what we can and do know is in faith and thus by the grace of God
(Hartwell, Herbert. The Theology of Karl Barth. London: Gerald Duckworth and Co. Ltd., 1964, 67-73)
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