Dancing With Diana 3 -- A Multi-Faceted God (Bruce Epperly)
Who is God? What is God's nature? That is the question that Bruce Epperly takes up in response to his reading of Diana Butler Bass's Christianity after Religion. The stern, angry, distant God, seems to be going by the wayside. The question is -- how do we envision this God we seek to encounter? Take a read, offer your thoughts.
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Dancing with Diana
– 3
A Multifaceted God? Part One
Bruce Epperly
My dance
partner Diana Butler Bass notes perceptively “God as Stern Father is going away
and is being replaced by a multifaceted divinity open to invention and
interpretation.” (Christianity after
Religion, 50) While there are a lot
of Stern Father God’s still out there, many of them in the most conservative
sectors of the religious and political worlds, a more fluid and accessible God
is emerging not only among seekers but among mainstream, progressive, and
evangelical Christians. As Thomas Jay
Oord argues from an evangelical perspective, our best images of God place love
rather than power and relationship rather than domination at the heart of God’s
nature.
I want
to explore in a few paragraphs the possibility of imaging God at all, and then
in subsequent pieces, describe one vision – a process-relational vision – of a
multi-faceted god.
Historically,
theologians have used the terms kataphatic
and apophatic as ways of describing
the delicate balance between accessibility and idolatry in imaging God. The kataphatic
way focuses on words and images. If
we speak about God at all – including God’s revealing itself in mystical
experiences – what we say or experience comes to us as humans, using our
language, cultural symbols and biases, and imaginative hymns and poetry. Accordingly, almost any positive words – and
sometimes negative words – have been used to describe God from the stories of
Zeus and Krishna and their dalliances with mortals to the Plague Sending Yahweh
and Plato’s artistic world-creating reason and Jesus’ dear and intimate
parent. Our poetry, hymnody, and
theology speak of God in words such as: dove, rock, wind, spirit, love, power,
energy, fortress, light, shepherd, Sophia/wisdom, father, mother, lover, and
child.
The kataphatic way is grounded in the
sacramental nature of life, reflective of divine omnipresence. If God is active everywhere and in all
things, then all things are, as Meister Eckhardt says, words of God. “Cleave the wood and I am there,” the Gospel
of Thomas proclaims. Matthew 25 asserts
that “as you have done unto to the least of these, my brothers and sisters, you
have done unto me.” Of course, the
incarnation of Jesus is the most compelling image of divine omnipresence: fully
human, fully divine, fully reflecting God’s vision for human life.
We need
images and hymns and intimacy with God.
Yet the kataphatic becomes
idolatrous when we claim that God’s nature is exhausted by our symbols,
rituals, and images, or holy books. While we need to respect the holy books of
every tradition, they are always fingers pointing at the moon and not the moon
itself, as the Zen Buddhist maintains.
Clinging too tightly to our images and words – and to our holy books –
leads to parochialism, excommunication, intolerance, and inability to grow in
relationship to an evolving world.
It leads
to fighting any changes in the cultural and scientific worlds that threaten our
literalist interpretations.
In
contrast, the apophatic way asserts
that no image fully describes the divine.
God is always more than we can imagine.
The finite can never fathom the infinite. All words, images, and symbols are
provisional, limited, and conceal while they reveal. The God of 100+ billion galaxies always
remains mysterious, sharing divinity with humankind in ways we can understand
and interpret, yet always leaving much in reserve simply because we cannot
fathom it.
Historically,
the silence of the apophatic has been
the greatest source of humility in the spiritual journey. It encourages doubt, questioning, and
confession of limitation. Sadly, some
proponents of the apophatic way have
not taken their own theology to heart.
The God you cannot fathom, they assert, is best described as impersonal
and unchanging. Yet, impersonal and
unchanging are also words and represent a bias against the personal and
changing. Perhaps, divinity includes
some sort of multiplicity that embraces both personality and impersonality, and
intimacy and universality.
While my
personal spiritual bias is toward kataphatic
way, it is clear to me that these are essential aspects of theological
reflection. We need both the yin and the
yang; sacraments and iconoclasm; words and silence, to understand who we are
and the Reality in whom we live and move and have our being. Truly theology is an adventure of the spirit
(Whitehead’s description of worship) that lures us to frontiers and worlds
beyond our imagining. Let’s dance!
Bruce Epperly is a theologian, spiritual guide, pastor, and author of twenty two books, including Process Theology: A Guide to the Perplexed, Holy Adventure: 41 Days of Audacious Living, Philippians: An Interactive Bible Study, and The Center is Everywhere: Celtic Spirituality for the Postmodern Age. His most recent text is Emerging Process: Adventurous Theology for a Missional Church. He also writes regularly for the Process and Faith Lectionary and Patheos.com. He may be reached at drbruceepperly@aol.com for lectures, workshops, and retreats.
Comments
"Kataphatic theology is positive theology, describing what and who God is. Apophatic theology is negative theology; it describes who and what God is not. This is another difference between East and West in the doctrine of the Trinity. Kataphatic theology is the way that the West uses; apophatic theology is the method of the East."
From: http://greenbaggins.wordpress.com/2006/11/06/kataphatic-and-apophatic-theology/