Always in theology "our reach exceeds our grasp," but what we gain in the reaching is worth it!
Everyone is a theologian because theology most basically is simply thinking about what matters most, what is ultimate. Or as the philosophers have it, the summum bonum: “greatest good.” Everyone deals with this concern. Another way to put it is from the late Methodist theologian, Dennis Kinlaw, who said, “Consider an idea long enough and you push it to philosophy; keep at it and you wind up in theology.”
As I think on theology I readily acknowledge my lack. I am happy and joyful to delve in and continue to learn, and those who have pursued years of rigorous study have my utmost respect.
Among the various theologians I read in Seminary was one Colin Gunton, a noted British scholar who died in 2003 at the age of 62. I understood he was a specialist in Trinitarian theology – that particular area of thought that is impossibly difficult while being deeply significant because dealing with the intrinsic nature of God. Our teacher, the much-loved and deeply-learned Dr. Bill Ury, shared with us from his own work a line by a 17th century divine: “As he that denies [the Trinity] may lose his soul so he that tries to understand it may lose his wits.” Indeed.
I enjoyed reading Gunton. He wrote with clarity, and he was not stuffy with terms and jargon. The title that caught my mind the most was from the 1992 Bampton Lectures entitled The One, the Three and the Many, which I will briefly peruse for this Theology Thursday.
But first, my own sense of things regarding Trinitarian thought is most helped by thinking on a fundamental problem of life: finding unity in diversity. This is a problem in civic life – striking an ideal and leading in a way that all can follow. It is illustrated in education by the very name “University.” How does one tie all the fields of study together? How do they relate? In other words, How do we unify this diversity? Ironically (or not) the classical answer gave theology itself as the queen, the unifying point. And that makes perfect sense if theology is understood to be the highest possible study.
But the main display of the problem of unity and diversity is relational – how on earth do we get along with all of our differences dividing us? And this very real problem finds its most basic ground of understanding in the way the Church has tried to understand God as Trinity: “Being in Communion." This means the very being of God is defined in terms of the relations among the persons of the Trinity. Each is distinct, and each distinct person is understood or defined in terms of relationship to the others. This is community at the most fundamental level and because it is the very nature of God by which our own natures are indelibly stamped.
Is there time to look at Gunton? A bit. One of the things I loved about Dr. Ury was his use of selected portions of texts or articles, refusing to assign the whole book if a chapter here or there was most helpful to the issue at hand. With this text of Gunton's the table of contents was choice. I am not an academic theologian so if this kind of order is normal I am unaware. I just loved it for the descriptive layout of what was at hand. So helpful, so delicious. Have a look:
Tying in Havel, for example, drew me in. I didn't know about Heraclitus but would find out.
“Disappearing other” and “loss of the particular” seemed exactly right and ripe for discussion. I was hooked. What must he mean by all of this – a total of eight chapters progressing through? It must be a feast of inquiry and meaning.
For now, one subheading will do “Gnosticism renewed,” beginning in page 94 in my edition.
In reading this portion I renew my love for the writer and learn what I can. Among others, he cites Polanyi's seminal work Personal Knowledge, and makes the case that modernity is giving us a new gnosticism: it denies intrinsic goodness in the spatio-temporal order and overplays confidence in the “possibilities of free human action towards it.”
Further he says modernity “equates temporality with meaninglessness,” an idea that seems to echo the central complaint of the Preacher in Ecclesiastes. The answer of modern ideologies, Gunton says, has been to elevate rationality and human freedom as actual or tantamount creators of reality.
A split arises something like this: rationality cannot avoid connection to the body, unless we imagine ourselves as essentially minds propped up by bodies. But a dualism is required and the bodily reality of human persons is, in effect, blanched out or denied. This is per se gnosticm.
Can any of this make sense to real life for people?
Of course it can and does, for it deals with reality. Do our bodies matter, or don't they? If they do, what intrinsic nature do they have? Does the obvious delineation of male human bodies and female human bodies have real bearing in reality, or is it subject to the mind alone? Making it subject to science alone is no complete answer because in Polanyi we see the central role of intellectual tradition in reaching and maintaining sound understanding.
Tradition, in that brief portion of the chapter, is thus a hedge against error. The too-easy disdain of tradition as being anti-freedom is a folly oft repeated.
Gnosticism will always tempt us with its elixir which, when drunk, makes us know we have the answers in our head, forgetting such heads have a history and present reality rooted in that which we are, and what we are must have a voice necessarily intrinsic to reason and thus impossible to be denied.
Happily considered. That is all.
