Christian Doctrine, Chapter 3

Before reading on, think about this passage from Isaiah. What does the author of this passage condemn, and what does he praise? What implications might this polemic have for Christian attempts to witness appropriately to God?

In the previous chapter, I argued that freedom and faithfulness — God’s freedom to transcend any definitions arrived at by God’s people, and God’s faithfulness to the promises declared to those people in the past and in the present — are constitutive of God’s self-identification. That continues to be true in this passage from Isaiah. At first sight, it presents us with two sets of people. On the one hand there are the people of Israel, directly addressed and declared to be God’s witnesses; they know God as the rock upon which they stand and as their Lord, their King and their Redeemer. They know God’s identity ‘from of old’, and may trust God to be true to it.

On the other hand stand the idolaters or false witnesses who are not addressed but described with biting sarcasm. They do not know God; they substitute for the true God things made with their own ‘merely human’ hands. They worship mundane realities that they can control and use for their own benefit; their gods are in their power.

In one corner, then, we have the true witnesses who rest in the hands of their God; in the other, the false witnesses who hold their god in their hands. There is a twist in Isaiah’s oracle, however. God says to those who are being addressed directly and comfortingly as true witnesses, ‘I have swept away your transgressions like a cloud, and your sins like mist; return to me, for I have redeemed you.’ Having been addressed as those in the right, it becomes clear that they are no strangers to the wrong, and perhaps have not yet abandoned it. Tug on this thread and the passage, with its commendation of true witnesses and condemnation of false, unravels to reveal a plea to Israel to repent, to turn away from false witness and from idolatry, and to become the true witnesses that they are not. The problem of idolatry is not somebody else’s problem — it is theirs.

This passage was, of course, written in a specific historical situation, and addressed to a people involved in various very specific forms of idolatry. Nevertheless, it is a tributary of one deep stream of Jewish thinking that was eventually to flow into a more radical interpretation of idolatry. Idols were eventually abjured not because they were representations of the wrong god, nor because they were the wrong kind of representation of the right God, but just because they were representations, and God was held to be beyond all representation. This God is held not to be the kind of God who can aptly be depicted ‘in the likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth’ (Exodus 20.4). No particular part of creation — visible or invisible, natural or artificial, animate or inanimate, human or animal — can be an adequate representation of the God who is the source of them all.’

Many theologians in both Judaism and Christianity have wrestled with the snares buried in any human description of God because they have been all too aware that human beings are perennially tempted to tame God, to remake God in their own image, or to slip God into their pockets. They have known that all descriptions that human beings might be capable of deploying are finite, because they are built from words whose everyday applicability is to finite things in the world, and because they are painted with imaginations all of whose colours come from life in the midst of that world. To use these descriptions of God is always to describe God in terms more normally applicable to things that are not God. Any talk about God — any picture, any image, any account, any story, any name, any description, any theory, any hypothesis ~ therefore presents believers with the temptation to absolutize something finite, something made with human hands (or human voices or human minds). That is, any talk about God presents a temptation to take a finite description not as a hand gesturing towards a God who is always more surprising than any description allows, but rather as a tool that enables the believer to grasp hold of God, to delimit God, to make God out as finite — to define God, and so to limit and define the demand that is made by knowing God.

Consider the following descriptions of God:

Rock: It is not difficult to see that this is a metaphor, describing God in terms appropriate to something that is not God. It is (or was, when the metaphor was fresh) a striking way of helping people to glimpse God’s faithfulness and dependability, but the limit to how far one can take the metaphor is obvious; it is a limit that one would find oneself beyond were one to ask what God’s mineral content was. for instance. Christians know that God is not a rock, so to describe God as one presents little temptation to idolatry.

Wise: What about this one, though? It too is a word whose meaning we learn first through ordinary human examples — from which we gather that it means something like ‘able to judge appropriately, on the basis of long experience’. But what can one make of the idea of God having ‘long experience’, or even of God weighing up possible courses of action and judging appropriately?’ There are clear limits to how far this description goes, too — even though, as we shall see below, descriptions of God as wise or goed or loving don’t work in quite the same way as the description of God as a rock.

Infinite: This might seem to be a good, abstract word, free from inappropriately material or human associations. But it, too, is a word whose meaning is learnt in particular contexts, as part of particular practices. It is possible, after all, to give a human (social, material) history of the contexts and practices and forms of imagination that have surrounded this word’s emergence and development. If one thinks that the word directly describes some characteristic of God (instead of being, say, a comment upon the inadequacy of all finite descriptions) one will eventually find that it too has smuggled in contraband assumptions or illegal connotations — material that properly belongs only on the creaturely side of the border.

Return to the liturgy that you looked at in preparation for this chapter. Would you now assess differently any of the names or descriptions of God that you found in it?

God says ‘I am who I am’ and ’I am the God of your ancestors’ to the same people, at the same time. It is not that one category of people, the idolaters, need to be reminded that God is beyond their false definitions, while another category of people, true witnesses, can be told to rest content with the proper definitions that have made it into their possession. This passage from Isaiah suggests, rather, that there might be an ongoing interplay between the two messages. On the one hand, the Israelites are told, ‘Here is how God has defined Godself’; on the other, they are told, ‘The God who has done this is, and remains, a God who is beyond all definition’ God makes Godself known — but God cannot be known.

This will seem like a direct contradiction until one realizes that the word ‘know’ has more than one meaning. If, by ‘God can be known’, we mean that God could be grasped and understood, defined and explained, or that human beings could gain intellectual mastery over this subject matter, then Christian theology denies that God can be known even by Christians, even by those to whom God has revealed Godself. God is, in that sense of the word ‘know’, radically and inherently unknowable.

For Christians, I said in the previous chapter, the word ‘God’ names the source of the life of the Christlike love and justice into which they believe they are being caught up. The relation in which they stand to that source will not be that of knowing subjects facing a known object, able to define it or to gain some kind of intellectual mastery over it. Rather, they will stand as those who are themselves in the process of being mastered by the one they face, and the forms of language appropriate to this will not be calm descriptions or abstract definitions, but expressions of praise, thanksgiving and penitence — language squeezed out of them as they find themselves grasped by God.

Consider someone illuminated by a bright light. The light shines on him and on everything around him, and enables him to see himself and his surroundings in new ways, and so to live in new ways in those surroundings. He can see the quality of the light by attending to how it shines on the different surfaces around him, and by paying attention to the way the shadows fall he can learn from where in the sky above him this light streams. In one sense, therefore, he can ‘know’ the source by seeing what and how it illuminates. But if he turns upwards, to face the source itself, the light will be blinding. He won’t be able to see the source itself directly — not so as to see how it works, or how the light is generated in it. The light outstrips the capacity of his eyes, and they become useless, even though the searing blindness that he experiences is itself a sign that he is looking in the right direction. One ancient Christian writer described this as a ‘brilliant darkness’: a light so bright that it is tantamount to blackness.^[1] Look directly at it and you can see no more than if you were left wholly in the dark.

This, too, is a metaphor that will only roll so far. Nevertheless, Christian theologians have often stressed that alongside the kind of knowing of God that I discussed in the previous chapter, a proper account of the knowledge of God must include this radical unknowing - this affirmation of the abiding unknowability of the source. ‘No one has ever seen God’ (John 4.12; John 1.18); ‘no one shall see me and live’ (Exodus 33.20). And this is no abstract conclusion forced upon Christians by speculative philosophers, denying something that Christians would otherwise have cheerfully affirmed, it is, rather, something that God is believed to have taught and to go on teaching. In the burning bush, in the prophecies of Isaiah, on the cross, God is weaning Christians from forms of knowing that have the nature of God all wrong.

Yet, Christian theologians have affirmed, God does indeed make Godself known. God reveals Godself, and God’s freedom does not trump God’s faithfulness or promise. The knowledge in question is the kind of knowledge that I discussed in the last chapter: the knowing that is like knowing a piece of music; the knowing that consists in participation in what God is doing; the knowing that finds its object most clearly displayed not in an abstract definition but in an ensemble of lives being made holy. The negative declaration of God’s unknowability is nothing more than the declaration that this kind of musical, living, participatory knowledge is the only kind of knowledge of God available. God makes Godself known, and in that very process makes known God’s unknowability outside of this provision. God cannot be known in anything other than the ways in which God makes Godself known.

The question remains, however, whether this form of knowing leaves Christians any kind of speech about God? Does this kind of knowing allow Christians any direct description or definition of God’s nature? Perhaps appropriately, in a discussion that focuses on forms of language other than direct, literal description, I am going to begin my answer to that question with an extended parable.

The American theologian George Lindbeck has suggested that Christians be thought of as analogous to a people who have a distinctive culture, and who speak a distinctive language. Think of an anthropologist visiting a remote island tribe whose language and culture are uncharted. The theologian’s job, Lindbeck suggested, is like the job of this anthropologist: he must get to know this people’s culture and language, trying to reach the point where he can understand both the language and the patterns and rules that govern the culture in which that language is embedded — discerning the cultural as well as the linguistic ‘grammar’ that shapes this people’s life. Doctrines, for Lindbeck, are not primarily statements of theories about God’s nature; they are ways of stating some of the rules by which this people governs its behaviour. It is only, he says, the lives that are governed by these doctrinal rules that should be thought of as making a claim about the nature of God.*

The second kind of language I am calling ‘imaginative’. The prospective counsellor referred to the stories and metaphors that enable the workers in the field to pass on their understanding of life in the sun. This richly varied, extravagantly imaginative language is not mere decoration that could be abandoned without real loss to the substance of their understanding; it is a necessary part of how their understanding is shaped. In fact, the use of this imaginative language is one of the practices by which they relate to the sun: it is one of the practices that pragmatic language about them will describe. A pragmatic description will focus on their saying of these things, and the role taken by that saying in the overall shape of their lives. The imaginative language itself is the content of what they say: the stories and images and metaphors and parables that place in a communal store their wisdom about the sun.

The case with Christian language about God is similar. Christianity boasts a lush and extravagant growth of imaginative language about God. Such language is not dispensable; it is not mere decoration, or a sop for the hard of thinking. It shapes the imaginations of those who use it, and so shapes the lives that they live — and so it plays an indispensable role in sustaining and shaping the way that their lives respond to God.

Human beings are, after all, imaginative creatures, and inhabit the world by imagination. To be active in the world requires us to see the stuff around us not simply as a bewildering variety of pure sense-impressions, but to see it as a world of objects or circumstances with which we can interact. This ‘seeing as’ is a matter of imagination, and that imagination is shaped by metaphors and parables and stories more powerfully than by apparently direct, literal description. Staring in front of me now, I see a patch of grey with a strange, luminous patch of blue within it, and within the patch of blue a white rectangle speckled with black marks. Or rather, that’s not what I see, unless I take my glasses off: I actually see a computer monitor, with a blue desktop pictured on it, and a white document on that desktop, covered with writing. I see it, in other words, as something I can understand and work with — as containing possibilities for action. My ability to see it in this way, and so my ability to engage with it, is shaped by my having learnt various metaphors, similes and stories: I see the blue desktop as being like a physical desktop, a space on which I can arrange my work; I see the white patch as a piece of paper on which I am typing ~ and so on?

In just the same way, one could think, for instance, of Rowan Williams speaking of God loving ‘the reflection of his love within creation; he cannot bear to be separated from it and goes eagerly in search of it, hungry to find in the created “other” the reality of his own life and bliss’. Eagerness, hunger, inability to bear separation ~ these are words fit for finite human lives, words that are clearly inadequate when applied to God; and yet this inadequate, extravagant image is one that enables the reader to see the love of God in a new light, and so to respond to it and live with it in a new way. By making possible a richer lived response to God, it enables truer reference to God.

The third kind of Janguage I am calling propositional.” It is the kind of language that tries to set down in unambiguous language clear statements of fact about God. Its statements can then be subjected to careful logical analysis to see what does and what does not follow from them.

You will have noticed — and, after the last chapter probably not have been surprised — that the prospective counsellor is rather evasive about using this kind of language. There are direct statements in what she says, however, and they are direct statements that say something about the sun. What she says is, in fact, full of such statements.

On the one hand, she makes clear claims about what the sun is not, saying for example that ‘it is not a fire in any sense we understand’. Yet she uses such language to ensure that the king will not be tempted to look for the wrong kind of statement about the sun. Her propositional statements both warn against thinking that there are direct, positive ways of speaking about the sun, and warn against taking imaginative language as if it were literal description. Nevertheless these statements do convey something, however indirectly, about the sun itself.

On the other hand, she spends a lot of time making the more positive claim that the king himself in minor ways, and the workers in the fields in richer and more complex ways, are genuinely responding to the sun. Her explanation of that is full of direct statements: she says things like, ‘the sun is the source of the heat and light that you feel and see with, and that those people are working with’, As the king points out, however, what she says simply ‘gives the name “sun” to what the people in the field know, and it is really a statement about their knowing of the sun …​ not a statement that tells me directly what the sun is’. Even though her propositional statements do make claims about the sun, and do so quite definitely and in one sense informatively, the claims are once again made indirectly.

You may recognize some of what I said in the last chapter and earlier in this as belonging squarely in this propositional camp. Most obviously, there was my claim that ‘God’ is the name of the source of the Christlike love and justice that flows through people’s lives. That is a positive propositional claim, and it is definitely a claim about God, but it is not itself a direct description of God, It is a statement about where one can find something like a description of God: look to the lives of those caught up in God’s life.

On the other hand, there is my negative propositional claim that God’s own love is beyond human imagination and understanding, like the sun whose light we can see when it shines on the world around us, but which blinds us when we look towards it. That is equally clearly a kind of claim about God, but it is a negative one: it says who or what God is by denying that one’s normal ways of naming and understanding realities in the world work in God’s case.

In the kind of theology I am exploring in this book, propositional language is most at home in these indirect modes, talking about God by explaining why in God’s case one should not look to one’s normal ways of grasping and explaining reality but instead should look elsewhere ~ to the lives described in pragmatic language and to the imaginative language employed in those lives.

Some theologians, of course, believe that propositional claims can do a great deal more than this. They hold that it is possible to speak much more directly and much more fully about the nature of God’s life in a propositional idiom, setting down clear definitional statements about who and what God is. The philosophical theologian Richard Swinburne, for instance, at the start of his book on The Existence of God, states:

I take the proposition ‘God exists’ (and the equivalent proposition ‘There is a God’) to be logically equivalent to ‘there exists necessarily a person without a body {i.¢., a spirit) who necessarily is eternal, perfectly free, omnipo tent, omniscient, perfectly good, and the creator of all things.’

Chapter 2 has already shown what I think of this. I believe it makes better Christian sense to see this kind of apparently direct, positive claim about God as in fact a commentary upon or summary of that deeper Christian knowledge of the love of God that is found in Christian lives.

Let me give an example. if Swinburne is asked to expand on what he means by ‘omnipotent’, he says:

By God’s being omnipotent, I understand that he is able to do whatever it is logically possible (.e., coherent to suppose) that he can do.

Later in this book (in Chapter 10), when i expand on what I think ‘omnipotent’ means, I say:

if I say, for instance, that ‘God is omnipotent’, I won’t understand what that means by trying to come up with an abstract definition, and then arguing about what God must be able to do. I will discover what those words mean as I iearn what it means to live with the trust that there is no situation in which God’s love fails, no reality or extremity in which God’s love is extinguished or finally defeated.

That is, I take this sort of apparently direct, positive proposition ‘God is omnipotent’ as no more than a convenient shorthand for something more complex: a ‘pragmatic’ description of a pattern of Christian life and imagination, coupled with the propositional claim that this aspect of Christian life truly ‘responds’ to God. To treat it as a straightforward definitional claim as Swinburne does is, I believe, to mistake the kind of knowing of God that is available to human beings. ---

So, there are at least three different kinds of language at work in Christian theology: pragmatic, imaginative and propositional. Pragmatic language describes lives; imaginative describes the imaginations of the people living those lives; and propositional claims comment on the other two, making direct claims about what those lives and imaginations amount to.

Try putting this threefold division to work. Either keep it in mind as you read through another chapter of this book, or read some other theology book, asking whether you can distinguish these three kinds of discourse — pragmatic, imaginative and propositional — and whether it helps to do so.

There are two different uses of the word ‘immanent’ in theology, and they should not be confused. On the one hand, there is the usage I am sketching at the moment: ‘immanent’ is used in contrast to ‘economic’ to speak about I what is true of God in and for Godself. On the other hand, ‘immanent’ can also be used in contrast to ‘transcendent’ to talk about God’s presence in and to God’s creation — God’s closeness or intimacy to the worid. It is particularly important not to confuse these two meanings as they are almost direct opposites, one having to do with God considered in abstraction from any relation I ship to the world, the other having to do precisely with the intimate quality of that relationship.

In my story, claims about the heat of the sun are both economic and immanent. On the economic side the heat of the sun is something that the people experience, that they know and work with in their daily lives. Yet on the immanent side the astronomer claims that the people experience this heat from the sun because the sun is itself hot. The heat that the people experience and the heat that the sun has in itself might be of vastly different orders of magnitude, and the sun’s inherent heat might be impossible to imagine properly (no one, after all, could ever experience it because to experience it would be to die); nevertheless, the two are intimately connected. The sun’s immanent heat produces the economic heat that the people feel, and because of that connection, the economic claim that the sun feels hot can become the immanent claim that the sun is hot.

Claims about the sun rising and setting, however, are only economic. The people can rightly claim that the sun rises and sets — but what they are talking about is only the sun-as-seen-from-their-vantage-point, the sun-as-theyexperience-it. The economic claim ‘the sun rises and sets for us’ cannot be turned into the immanent claim ‘the sun itself inherently rises and sets’. Someone who lived not on a rotating planet but on a planet that always turned the same face towards the sun would not experience the sun as rising and setting: it would be a constant presence, always in the same quarter of their sky.

Alongside this talk about the sun that is only economic, and alongside the talk that is both economic and immanent, could one have talk that is only immanent? That is, could one have talk about what the sun is inherently like that was not at the same time talk about some aspect of how the sun appears in human lives? One might think, perhaps, of the theories of the astrophysicists, which declare that the sun has an inner core taking up about one fifth of its diameter, that this core has a density of some 150,000 kilograms per cubic metre, and that it is powered by a fusion reaction that converts hydrogen to helium. Even these, of course, are claims based on empirical data, and so claims that have their roots in some rather refined aspects of how the sun appears in our lives. The chains of analysis and disciplined speculation involved in developing these claims from that data are so long and tangled, however, that there remains very little direct sense in which claims about the size, density and nature of the sun’s core are also claims about how we relate to and experience the sun. The economic base of these claims has been left so far behind that they have almost achieved pure immanence.

Of course, no one uses the words ‘immanent’ and ‘economic’ when talking about the sun: they are theological terms used when talking about God. ‘Economic’ refers to God’s ‘economy of salvation’ — the arrangements that God has made for God’s world, and the knowledge that God’s people have in that economy of who God is for them: how God appears to them, from their vantage point (a position or vantage point that God has given them). ‘Immanent’, on the other hand, refers to what God is in Godself; God’s inner or essential nature ~ what God is like not just when seen from one particular vantage point, but absolutely.

On page 58, I asked whether Christian theology allows any kind of direct description or definition of God’s nature. I can now rephrase that question. Most of what I said in the last chapter was focused on the economic level, in that it had to do with who God appears to be in the lives of believers, or how the lives of believers constitute a kind of claim about who God is for us. I have also, in that chapter and this, been insisting on the unknowability of God — that is, the idea that direct, clear statements about God’s nature are deeply problematic. In other words, I have been denying that God’s immanent life is a reality that one can easily or straightforwardly talk about. So, the question that faces us now is, ‘Does Christian theology allow one to say anything about who God is immanently ~ or does it abandon the attempt, and allow God’s imrnanent life to remain wholly swathed in mystery?’ I may say, economically, that to learn to know God is to learn to know oneself and one’s world as bathed in God’s love, and that to know God is to learn to recognize oneself and one’s world as called to participate in that love. But can I go further, and say that God is love, immanently - that this love characterizes God’s essential nature?

There is another reason for insisting on the link between an economic understanding of God and God’s immanent life. it is that link that ensures that the understanding of God found among ordinary believers — the workers in the fields, who know how to live with and respond to God’s love — is a knowledge that gets to the heart of who God is. There is not some different kind of knowledge available only to theological experts who have got beyond the economic level, a knowledge that leaves behind the naive level of ordinary believers and grapples with the real nature of God. The love of God that ordinary people know goes all the way down, and the only ‘experts’ are those who know most deeply that they are loved, and love most deeply themselves. Those are forms of knowledge that do not necessarily go with academic prowess or ecclesiastical preferment.

‘To insist that God is love, that God is Christlike, ‘all the way down’ - that to learn at Christ’s hands the love of God is to learn the immanent heart of God — is to believe that one need have no hesitation about making a lifelong commitment to this way of learning God. This is a pathway, Christians trust, that goes all the way into the heart of God, and travellers along this path will never reach a time or a place where it peters out and leaves them stranded. To bind oneself to this pathway, to make the lifelong investment of time and energy and attention that is involved in taking it with utmost seriousness, is not to keep oneself to the economic shallows: it leads on, Christians believe, into the immanent depths.

Learning the meaning of love involves a journey into the resources and probjems of our culture. We are surrounded by images of love in books and films and television programmes and adverts and posters and songs. Some of them are good and some of them are dreadful; some of them are profound, and some of them have ~ to use a wonderful phrase from J. K. Rowling — ‘the emotional range of a teaspoon’.® The journey on which Christians learn what ‘love’ means is a journey into discernment about all these images — a slow learning to differentiate between the help and the hindrance that each can offer. The field of ‘theology and culture’ (theological explorations of films and novels and television programmes and computer games) is not, as is sometimes suggested, a less-than-serious distraction from the real business of theology: it is an unavoidable part of learning the meaning of the word ‘God’.

The statement ‘God is love’ certainly looks like a direct propositional statement about God. And to a certain extent, it does work like one: it conveys a kind of true information about God. But if my analysis of the nature of this analogical claim is right, it is not a statement that can be extricated from the Christian lives and imaginations that are its context. The claim ‘God is love’ cannot be separated from the kinds of reality spoken of in pragmatic and imaginative Christian language. This is a statement about God’s immanent life only because it remains a commentary upon that economic reality.

Traditionally, a distinction has been made between ‘communicable’ and ‘incommunicable’ attributes of God. Love is a classic communicable attribute: as I have been emphasizing, it is an attribute that can in some sense be shared by God’s creatures. The same would be true for wisdom, justice, faithfulness and goodness, among many others; all of these work in the same way that lL have been suggesting ‘love’ works. On the other hand, an incommunicable attribute would be something like ‘omnipresence’ — an attribute that can’t be shared by God’s creatures. That does not mean that to speak of God as omnipresent is somehow to capture Ged more directly. God’s omnipresence is just as thoroughly unimaginable as God’s love, and claims about that omnipresence are no less bound up with Christian lives and imagination. To say that ‘God is omnipresent’ is best thought of as a commentary upon Christian lives lived in the faith that there is nowhere one can go to evade God’s presence, howhere one can find oneself where God’s love is not at work. There may be no meaningful sense in which Christians are called to become omnipresent themselves,” but even an incommunicable attribute like this is something that is best understood by looking to the patterns of Christian life.