So wrote Meister
Eckhart, a German Dominican friar born in 1260, in his Opus Tripartum.
For him, ‘Esse est Deus’ – ‘God is Being.’ That for him was the Naked God,
stripped of all verbal, religious and cultural clothing.
Every generation puts ‘clothes’ onto God to help
their understanding; but the underlying reality of God – God as Being – still
lies behind those garments. Each generation has to clothe God anew. If we go on
clothing God only with garments that are suitable for medieval Christendom, or
any other age, then we can hardly expect that God will be understood in the
twenty-first century.
Religion’s Embarrassing Affair with Clothing God
The Christian Church in its institutions, designed to make available the mysteries of God, has, I believe, succeeded rather in locking them up. Too often, Christian faith is presented as believing the impossible in order to practise the unknowable for a goal that is a fantasy. All of my life, as both an historical theologian and a priest, I have felt myself to be in the business of ‘decoding’. One of the problems for twenty-first-century people exploring Christian religion is that we have not made available to them the key to the codes. Both the concepts and language of religion, as well as its rituals, are heavily encoded by the culture in which they emerged. In order to understand what is being said, we have to do some code cracking, and then some re-clothing of God for our times, while recognising that it is our clothes that we are placing on God’s reality.
We come to that process of re-clothing with resources; in the Christian tradition we have images and language that can arrest the attention of the future age of the church, even in its very different cultural context. That is the power of Eckhart’s work: he brings to light something that is eternal, and catches our attention with it. In particular, it can often be the ‘subterranean’ resources that bring us to an awareness or revivification of a sense of the Divine – and that often happens in spite of the official histories and official language of the church. And when it does happen it can shock some in the pews.
Take, for example the
publication of John Robinson’s (in)famous book Honest to God. In 1963, I
was sub-Warden of Kelham’s Theological College and Tutor in Church History. The
decade of the 1960s was unveiling huge changes in society, with Carnaby Street,
The Beatles, Dr Who and a new sense of freedom and adventure. It was in this
year that John Robinson, an Anglican New Testament scholar, wrote a little
paperback book entitled Honest to God. As a Lecturer at Cambridge
University and Fellow and Dean of Clare College, Robinson had written many
academic books, but in 1959 he had moved from academia to become Bishop of
Woolwich. Now, following an accident and while recovering in hospital, he wrote
a popular book exploring ideas about God, the church and worship. Attempting to
use non-theological language, he wrote of God as ‘the ground of our Being’ and
Jesus as ‘the man for others.’ Drawing on the German biblical scholars with
whom he was so familiar, he made an attempt to share the way God had become
‘mythologised’ in the language of the church, and by presenting what lay behind
this process, he suggested that readers could think in less confined terms
about the church and what it is for; about worship and its nature and purpose;
and about what might be proposed as a ‘new morality’ arising out of this.
Robinson drew on the work of the German Lutheran Dietrich Bonhoeffer (killed by
the Nazis towards the end of the Second World War). In Letters and Papers
from Prison Bonhoeffer had written of ‘Religionless Christianity’. Robinson
admitted he was not sure what Bonhoeffer meant by this, but I think Bonhoeffer,
who had visited Kelham in March 1935, had picked this up from Father Kelly, on
the basis of Kelly’s distinction between God and Religion. In a letter from
Tegel prison in 1944, Bonhoeffer asks ‘How do we speak “secularly” about God?
How can we be “religionless-secularised” Christians?’1
This immediately rang a
bell. I was very familiar with what Kelham’s founder Herbert Kelly had written
in his book The Gospel of God that he was concerned to talk about God,
not religion; and that it was important that these two things were not
confused: they are not the same thing.2 Time
and again he would ask: What does God do? Does God do anything or is God just a
name for our ideals? In 1963, having been formed by Kelly’s distinctive
questions, I felt I was on familiar ground and embraced Bonhoeffer’s thinking
on ‘Religionless Christianity’ with some excitement, thinking (unlike Robinson)
that I knew what it meant. It was to be concerned with our experience of
God in the world, on the streets, in the everyday; it was ‘to be there for
others.’3 Religion with its
intellectual formulations about God is necessary; but people also need pointers
to the God whom they can experience. Over the next few years at Kelham,
we hosted many gatherings of university students, youth clubs, and other groups
of young people who were excited by thinking through the issues the book had
raised. As in the wider world, the Society was divided. The Sub Prior wrote a
hymn, which caught on, and appears in many hymnbooks today:
We find Thee Lord in
others’ need
We see Thee in our
brothers
Through loving word,
and kindly deed,
We serve the Man for Others.
Of course there were
those in the community who were shocked by it and what was happening. In that
sense, we were a microcosm of the church at large; but it was four years later,
in 1967, that I discovered evidence of the link with Bonhoeffer. As a visiting
chaplain at Dartmouth College in the USA for the best part of that year, I
attended a talk by Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer’s former student, and later
biographer. Afterwards he sought me out and spoke to me, and said that on his
visit to Kelham, Bonhoeffer had attended Kelly’s lectures, and that they
informed his theology when he set up the seminary at Finkenvelde with its
monastic pattern of community life, silence, and work in the community (very
similar to the St Anselm community that Justin Welby has established at
Lambeth, but in a much more dangerous context).
We are at a strange crossroads now across the generations. There are those of – approximately – middle age and above, who know the language and garments of the God of their youth and their years of growing up. They know about religion; they have questioned the sense of God that is familiar to them, and they have sometimes got cross about it; but they know the basic God language. A few of them remember John Robinson’s Honest to God, and for some it was liberating; for others anxiety-producing. For Robinson took off God’s clothes and said look: here is God! God is existence. He echoed Eckhart’s words of some seven centuries earlier.
And then there are the generations below them, who know nothing (or very little) about religion, and its possibilities. In that sense the younger generations have no God to wrestle with; they have spent little if any time considering whether God’s garments are any longer suitable; and they certainly cannot crack the codes. They therefore have little (if any) sense of the history of Christianity, and therefore no or few resources upon which to draw.
In presenting God to
the world, then, the Church has to speak to people with very different
experiences, including many for whom the past is an unknown country; and that
has never before been the case in the particular way that it is now. That is
why we are at a distinctive crossroads moment.
We may not all have the resources of the tradition to draw upon, but we do all have experience upon which we can be invited to reflect. I have seven grandchildren and, with more space and time in retirement, I have delighted in watching each of them as babies and then as toddlers and then as children notice people and things, and learn how to relate to them or use them.
What part does experience play in the ways in which we understand and practise our religion?
Experience and
Contemplation
In the Christian tradition, the starting point for understanding ‘Being’ is not the Bible but experience; and then comes reflection on that experience and contemplation. The three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, offer stories of interpreted experience in their sacred texts, which become part of the followers’ reflection as they attempt to understand their own experience. Learned knowledge about the world (science broadly writ) becomes part of this reflection, and may change the followers’ understanding of the story. It is a continuous and fluid process.
Eckhart encourages us to empty our minds of all
concepts of God. If you have an ‘idea’ of God, forget it, he says. God is
primarily and fundamentally just essence. This reminds us that God is beyond
understanding. The un-knowableness of God is a strong theme across the
religions: the great twelfth-century Jewish rabbi and philosopher Maimonides is
believed to have said: ‘If anyone tells me they know what God is, let him be
thrown out of the synagogue.’ Judaism puts questions at the very heart of its
faith. Christianity has tended more towards certainties.
At the very end of the
twentieth century, the Anglican theologian John Macquarrie wrote in his book, On
Being a Theologian, ‘We are not looking for an entity at all, or anything
that can be conceived as an object among others.’ He continues, ‘We must be
highly suspicious of the traditional formulation of the question of God, a
formulation which runs “Does God exist?” For this question contains implicitly
the idea of God as a possible existent “entity.”’4
God is not an entity but Being. Macquarrie therefore suggests if
God is ‘Being’ then we might re-formulate the question ‘Does God exist?’ to
‘Can we regard “Being” as gracious?’
If God is Being rather
than entity, that also means that we have to rethink theological activity as
serious exploratory play rather than ‘truth,’ for we are always in search of
ways of expressing the Being that is God, knowing that God is ultimately beyond
our understanding. That serious exploratory play has, as its starting point,
being open to God. We can choose to give hospitality to God.
It is to Etty Hillesum that we owe the wonderful
phrase ‘giving hospitality to God’. Hillesum (1914–43) was a young Jewish woman
living in Amsterdam who began to keep a diary after the Nazi invasion of
Holland; when she was taken to a local ‘holding’ or transit camp for Jews, she
began to write letters which were later published with her diary.5 She was part
of a bohemian and intellectual coterie; she was bright, energetic, restless and
always positive. She had no formal religious commitment but she was one of
life’s explorers. At first, Hillesum was on the Jewish Council set up by the
Nazis to ‘manage’ the gradual displacement and extermination of the Jewish
community – although at the time the Jewish community was not aware of their
ultimate fate. Hillesum’s awareness of the inhuman treatment of her
compatriots, and gradually her friends and family, brought her to the decision
to join the group in the camp, which led finally to her deportation and
death in Auschwitz.
As Hillesum both witnessed
and experienced the hatred, cruelty and brutality of her captors, she recorded her
thoughts and feelings. Those who were religiously observant asked questions
about the absence of God: Where was He? Why did he not intervene? It was in
Auschwitz that some of them put God on trial. Hillesum, who did not believe in
the ‘religious’ God, nevertheless began to have conversations with – what?
Let’s call that conversation partner God. She came to the conclusion that God
is only real and visible when a human life offers God hospitality. ‘When in our
being we reject hatred, refuse anger, continue to forgive both ourselves and
others, God is born again and is present in our compassion.’
Was this merely a
conversation with herself, using the concept of God? Perhaps it was to begin
with, but then she records that she ‘learned to kneel,’ the traditional
attitude of worship for Christians, but one which she had to learn as a Jewish
woman. She wrote: ‘That is my most intimate gesture, more intimate even than
being with a man. After all, one can’t pour the whole of one’s love out over a
single man, can one?’ This description of prayer, as both a pouring out of love
and an embracing of life with love, is striking. Hillesum was exhibiting a
gracious hospitality to God, and a graceful humanity.
I have told Hillesum’s story because it is (for
me) movingly powerful, and it comes from experience. We can find a similar call
upon such experience in the traditions and doctrines of the Church, but we may
find they require a bit of code-cracking.
The Communion Code
The Greek Orthodox
theologian, John Zizioulas writes, ‘The being of God is a relational being:
without the concept of communion it would not be possible to speak of the being
of God – it is communion which makes things “be”: nothing exists without it,
not even God.’ There, in theological language, is what Hillesum said more
plainly, and in a way with which we might more easily identify. Zizioulas
contrasts the dogmatic theologians of the Western Church, tending to explain
belief in terms of statements about God, with the Eastern Fathers, who (like
Eckhart) spoke of the ‘Being of God’; but they developed this by saying ‘God
becomes real only in communion, because it is communion that makes things
“be”’. ‘Nothing exists without it, not even God.’ For them ‘the being of God
could be known only through personal relationships and personal love. Being
means life, and life means communion.’6
In his article on ‘The
Holy Spirit’ in the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, Colin
Gunton quotes Zizioulas as saying that the Church is not just an institution
but also a mode of being. ‘While the Son institutes the Church, it is
the function of the Spirit to constitute it ever anew in the present as the
body of Christ.’
The Christ of Faith is
a corporate personality; ‘not the one who aids us in bridging the difference
between Christ and ourselves, but he is the person who actually realises in
history that which we call Christ, this absolute relational entity, our
Savior.’ Zizioulas says ‘If the Church is to be truly Apostolic, she must be
historically and eschatologically oriented.’7
This may seem very
complex, but it is simply theological code for: We must know and interpret our
history, but we must also judge that history and evaluate it in the
light of the mysterious purposes of God for his creation.
So joining (or
re-joining) the Church is meant to be experiencing a different ‘mode of being’,
nourished by the Eucharist in a community of love, where like the bread, we
offer ourselves to be taken, blessed, broken and shared.
Many of us – perhaps
most or even all of us – have moments of perception, when the possibility of
this new ‘mode of being’ seems a possibility. Some do not know how to evaluate
them. Some ignore them. Some try to relate them to ‘God,’ and sometimes with
frustration for – in terms of these more chance experiences – it seems like
this God reality plays hide and seek with us.
There is, of course, in Christianity (and indeed in other religions) a tradition of waiting on God, offering hospitality to God in a regular way, in order to prepare ourselves more systematically. This is often called the mystic way: the belief that knowledge of God can be gained by 'contemplation'.
There is, of course, in Christianity (and indeed in other religions) a tradition of waiting on God, offering hospitality to God in a regular way, in order to prepare ourselves more systematically. This is often called the mystic way: the belief that knowledge of God can be gained by 'contemplation'.
The Christian Naked God
Where do the particularities of the early Christian story fit into this scheme of the Naked God? We read in the written Gospels of a Jesus who experienced God as Being and ready to be experienced at any moment. He announced ‘The kingdom of heaven is here’ and then he said to his followers, ‘You must help them see.’ Between those two verses are the sayings known as the Beatitudes, each saying beginning with the phrase ‘Blessed are those…’8 Those who are blessed are those who are aware of the reality and presence of God in the world; they become so by making sense of and responding to the variety of experiences that make up their lives; not just the happy ones, but the sad and unfairly dealt with ones as well. Through this awareness, they – we – are drawn into a relationship with God, which we will know to be real.
So Jesus was always inviting his followers and the crowds to pay attention to their experience: Consider the lilies! Look at the fields! If we do so, we open ourselves to an awareness of a reality that is not apparent on the surface. It is a way of knowing that is at the heart of the real meaning of faith. ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God,’ wrote the nineteenth-century Jesuit and poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and ‘The Holy Ghost over the bent world broods,’ capturing the connection between experience and theology.
After Jesus’ death, the disciples reflected on
what had happened, and first of all they shared their experience, which was of
their involvement in a story, and also their reflection on its meaning
(theology) as they put into practice what Jesus had taught them. This is
expressed clearly in the opening of the First Letter of John in the New
Testament:
We declare to you
what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our
eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of
life — this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and
declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us
— we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have
fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his
Son Jesus Christ. (1 John 1:1)
The whole thrust of
this is that what the writer and the other Jesus followers are
talking about is not an idea but an experience; and it is an experience that
they were committed to sharing. That experience is interpreted by theology: so
experience and theology, based on the Jesus story that those followers had been
a part of, go together for Christians as their way of living life in the world.
This was a dynamic recipe that changed lives, culture, religion and politics
for many centuries. But if it doesn’t seem like that to so many people now,
then it is time to get back to experience and start up the process again. And
that restarting, that recipe, is a process that has happened over and over
again in Christian history, as new garments have been found for God to make
sense of the experience and reality for the times. I will be discussing that in
more depth in a later chapter when we look at the Church. But for the moment,
let’s take the example of Denys in the sixth century.
For a long time, Denys was thought to be the Denys who appears in the New Testament as Denys (or Dionysius) the Areopagite. When it was discovered that it could not have been he, his writings became known under the name of Dionysius the Pseudo (or false) Areopagite, which is a bit of a mouthful. So let us just call him Denys the Syrian.
Like many Christians at the time, Denys was conscious of the time that had been spent on constructing the Creeds, summary statements of beliefs that would guide Christians. Furthermore, he was writing at a time when the books that now constitute what we call ‘the Bible’ had been agreed upon (towards the end of the fourth century) but there were constant conflicts over how Jesus was to be understood, and how God and his presence can be sensibly talked about.
Denys the Syrian believed that our reality rests in our one-ness with God, and that talking about him, and speaking in analogies – that is, saying that ‘God is like…’ – could be distracting and misleading. He believed that we can more easily say what God is not. So our best plan is to recover the experience of one-ness with God, and we do that by purging all the distractions and misleading thoughts and doings that in our lives have smothered this sense of union.
In this crossroads moment, in which we are currently living, some of us are engaged in purging those distractions to come back to that raw experience of the Naked God. Yet others of us have the experience of one-ness with God, the Naked God, but do not have the language to put to that experience, and cannot in any way relate to the language of the Church. Yet others of us might have the experience but have not got to the point of beginning to reflect on it, and may never do so.
In the invitation to follow Jesus, in the Imitatio Christi, we may find the desire and purpose to live out the love that Jesus showed in his life – what is often called communion – in our daily lives. It will be our experience that initially guides us there. It is an inner compulsion to plumb the depths of consciousness. It was in Jesus and it is potentially in us. It can burst out, as it did in Jesus. Meister Eckhart calls this ‘uzbruch’. This is unlocking the code of Incarnation, the Christian word for the release of God into the everyday. It comes from within – us.
The Naked God: Wrestling for a grace-ful humanity by
Vincent Strudwick with Jane Shaw is out now in paperback, £12.99.
1. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Who Is Christ for Us? , Craig L. Nessan and Renate Wind, eds (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2002) p. 41.
2. Herbert Kelly, The Gospel of God (1929). (New edition with a memoir by George Every, SSM; London: SCM Press, 1959.)
3. Bonhoeffer, Who Is Christ for Us? p.79.
4. John Macquarrie, On Being a Theologian: reflections at eighty (London: SCM Press, 1999) p.51.
5. See An Interrupted Life: The Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum 1941-43 (London: Persephone Books, 1999)
6. John Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985) p. 17, 16.
7. Zizioulas, Being as Communion pp. 178-81.
8. Matthew 5:3 - 12; cf. Luke 6: 20-22.
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