Jesus and the Gospel Movement: Not Afraid To Be Partners

(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006)

by William Thompson-Uberuaga

CHAPTER ONE

—supplements—

(1) different approaches to faith and reason; (2) more on the theme of participation;

(3) recommending Irigaray and Levinas.

Mapping the Different Approaches

Readers will likely know that Jesus studies and Christology, like other fields of study,

exist within an intense conflict of approaches, stemming from the social and historical vectors

noted in the first chapter. Those interested might benefit from the following map. Like all

maps, it leaves much out; too much detail, and the roadways will not appear. Since our

participative approach works from a certain commitment to how faith and reason are related,

and even from a certain understanding of what they are, our map will roughly chart various

options one might take to these.

Writers involved in our areas of thought may opt for some kind of working relationship

between faith and reason, although a rather wide spread exists as to just how faith and reason

might be understood. On the other hand, they may think that legitimate inquiry in our area is

only an issue of either faith or reason, understood obviously in a certain way. We can then

suggest the following grid:

(1) reason only –> (3) some combination of faith and reason <– (2) faith only

In terms of the grid, the reason-only (1) and faith-only (2) perspectives are on the outer

edges. They are “extreme,” so to speak, in that sense, and deliberately so. The central position

(3) opts for the combination. The arrows indicate that the lines between these options are leaky,

which should become evident as we move along. My impression is that combinative

approaches have been more common in the historical tradition, and remain so, but I am not

aware of careful sociological studies of the matter, so I may be mistaken.

Reason Only

Traditionally, whether in the area of religion and theology or beyond it, thinkers opting only

for reason might be called “rationalists.” But that seems rather unfair, for there is much

diversity in this camp as to just what constitutes reason, ranging from a rather narrow view that

only data based on sense experience counts as reasonable on to a wider view allowing for

insights stemming from experience more broadly interpreted (moral, aesthetic, mathematical,

even religious). “Faith” for these reason-only types takes one beyond what is reasonably

knowable, and so faith’s alleged insights might be viewed more negatively as dangerous or at

least unreasonable, or perhaps more neutrally as simply matters of personal taste. Reason,

however understood, is thought to exist in a faith-free zone, and can get along quite well

without it when all is said and done. It seems fair to suggest that at least the western form of

modernity has generated a good number of thinkers who hold that the reasonable should be

faith-free in some meaningful sense. We can always debate examples, a fact which illustrates

the limitations of maps like the one I am sketching here. Reality is always more complex. In

any case, I think Hegel would be a fair example of the reason-only type in religion and beyond,

but reason-only in a wider, more than sense experience view. For more narrow experience

examples of reason-only types on matters religious, perhaps the philosopher Bertrand Russell

or the scientists Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins.

Are there reason-only types in the area of Jesus studies and Christology? It would seem so.

A good historical example for us U. S. Americans would be Thomas Jefferson’s attempt to

rewrite the Gospels in a “reasonable” way, which in his case meant eliminating just about

anything not “provable” according to the scientific standards of the Enlightenment.1 The

Enlightenment generated several well-known attempts to rewrite the Gospels along “rational”

lines (e.g., Herman S. Reimarus, D. F. Strauss), and late modernity did too (e.g., Freudian Erich

Fromm and Marxist interpretations). The trend continues among some of the more severely

reason-only types of the celebrated Jesus Seminar today.2

Faith Only

Faith-only types hold that their insights and convictions stem from faith, understanding

“faith” sometimes rather broadly as any anthropological form of trust (or “belief”), or more

narrowly as a religious trust, Judaic, Muslim, or Christian trust, etc. These types may employ

reason as an instrument (or “tool”) of their faith, for some kind of thinking and understanding

cannot be avoided, but the only valid source of truth is faith-conviction. Quite apart from

currents in the culture at large inclining in this direction (those radically skeptical of reason’s

claims), in the area of Christian thought and Jesus studies the goal is a form of Christian faith as

uncontaminated as possible by the claims of human reason. Usually this means that one

believes one is privy to a divine revelation that does not need to be tested against the bar of

human reason.

Typically in grids like this one the third century Christian writer Tertullian is trotted out

as the classical example of the fideist (the shortened term for the faith-only type). “What has

Athens [i.e., reason] to do with Jerusalem [i.e., faith]? What harmony can there be between the

[philosophical] Academy and the Church?” It is hard to know how to read him, for perhaps he

represents a young Christian Church growing surer of itself against the narrowness of

perspective of the surrounding cultural elites. When he writes, “The Son of God died; it must

1 See Dixon W. Adams, ed., Jefferson’s Extracts from the Gospels: “The Philosophy of Jesus” and “The Life and Morals of

Jesus” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). I was originally stimulated to work out this faith-reason grid by

a similar grid sketched in Robert C. Monk and Joseph D. Stamey, Exploring Christianity: An Introduction, 2d ed.

(Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1984), 128-57. 2 See N. T. Wright, “Quest for the Historical Jesus,” The Anchor Bible Dictionary, 6 vols., ed. David Noel Freedman

(New York: 1992), 3:796-802, for an overview of the terrain. See Erich Fromm, The Dogma of Christ and Other Essays on

Religion, Psychology and Culture (Greenwich: Fawcett, 1963), 15-93, for a Neo-Freudian view. For the Jesus Seminar, let

the reader judge: See Robert W. Funk and the Jesus Seminar, The Gospel of Jesus according to the Jesus Seminar

(Sonoma: Polebridge, 1999).

needs be believed because it is absurd …,” does he mean that the more insulting to the claims of

reason beliefs are, the more credible they are? Or does he more modestly mean that believing in

a Savior condemned to die on a cross is something of a “scandal” to our usual way of thinking

of saviors?3

Today rather typically one hears the charge of “fundamentalist” being hurled at Christians

who are not particularly bothered by the need to demonstrate the reasonableness of their faith

convictions. Perhaps at the extreme edge these might well be inclined to think that the more

“irrational” one’s faith convictions seem, the more credible they are (because thus thought to be

God’s gift, and God is way beyond our feeble reason). Thus, for example, a virgin birth and a

bodily resurrection are, precisely because they seem to assault human reason’s capacity to

verify, credibly divine. We can surmise that a culture loaded with reason-only types will likely

generate in reaction a response from faith-only types. Something as emotionally arid and

unsatisfying as reason-only, particularly when it is a narrow sense-empiricism, is calculated to

generate the counterposition of faith-only.4

Combinative Approaches

Although contestable, the author holds that combinative approaches are more common,

likely because human experience leads us in that direction. A more soft combinative approach

would be that which holds that some forms of collaboration between faith and reason can at

times be mutually beneficial, both on the wider level of reality as a whole, and certainly in the

areas of religion and theology. For example, there are times when we need to rely upon (trust)

the testimony of the historical record or of the community of scientists, if we are to make much

progress in historical or scientific studies. Or in specifically Christian studies, the insights

derived from revelation regarding the incarnation or the trinity, for example, might receive

some helpful elucidation from insights derived from human reason. The area of science and

religion is another fruitful one, in which much mutual collaboration can occur. Some Big Bang

3 Tertullian, On the Prescription of Heretics, 7; On the Flesh of Christ, 5 (The Early Christian Fathers: A Selection from the

Writings of the Fathers from St. Clement of Rome to St. Athanasius, ed. and trans. Henry Bettenson [Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1956], 14); see Against Praxeas, 5-7 (Bettenson, 188-20), however, for a defense of reason. 4 See Ernest R. Sandeen, The Origins of Fundamentalism, Facet Books, vol. 10, Historical Series (Philadelphia:

Fortress, 1968)

theories of cosmology certainly seem congenial to, even if they do not prove, some Christian

doctrines of creation. The anthropic principle, in either its hard or soft form, seems to be

congenial with the Christian notion of a cosmos planned and guided by a benevolent deity.

Moving into the political, the Christian teaching about the God-given dignity of the human

person made in God’s image is congenial with the western human rights tradition.

But the congeniality can be more critical, in the sense that insights derived from one side can

alter and refine the insights from the other. The growing insight into human historicity can

cause Christian scholars to take more seriously and appreciatively the historical fabric of the

Bible and Jesus’ own historical and cultural formation, not to mention that of the doctrinal

teaching of the various Christian churches. The numerous quests for the historical Jesus are a

good example of how historical science can impact and broaden Jesus studies. We have noted

in the first chapter the various challenges which can broaden our understanding of the claims of

faith, from modernity on to postmodernity. But openness counsels that the challenge comes

from the side of religion as well. Openness to the divine Ground is for many the sine qua non

of avoiding the fall into rationalistic hubris or premature closure in one’s viewpoints, for

example.

Robert Monk and Joseph Stamey suggested that Thomas Aquinas would be a representative

of this more soft form of combinative thinking in theology. He employs the insights of Aristotle

to help him think through the traditional teachings of Christian doctrine. He would, however,

transform them to some extent as well. Coming to our more contemporary context, one might

think of theologians drawing upon U. S. American process philosophy, or the American

pragmatic philosophical tradition, or the ever influential European continental philosophy, to

name a few.

The “harder” form of combinative thinking is that which keeps the relationship between

faith and reason more tight and intrinsic, holding that on a deeper level, inasmuch as we can

pierce through to it by way of common sense and various forms of quasi-phenomenological

analysis, faith at least in the broad sense as the fidelity to reality’s appeal, which is itself a form

of trust in the meaningfulness of reality, is the ground of our questioning reasoning. The word

“ground,” taken from the German mystical writers (Grund), means originating and ever present

sustaining and drawing source. We question and so find our reasoning capacities aroused

because we are drawn to do so by the attractiveness of reality. Reality exhibits a drawing

power. To put it in Aristotle’s terms, reality displays a final cause, and the final cause is not off

in the distance, but present within the seeker, as source, sustainer, and lurer. Voegelin once

suggested that our attunement toward this Ground was neither an argument nor the result of

an argument, but the presupposition for being able to enter into any argument at all.5

Plato, at least on some readings, seems a representative example of this. His exploration of

the questioning mind, if we think of the celebrated cave parable of the Republic, 7, or of the

“Ladder of Ascent” spoken of by Diotima in the Symposium, roots the philosophical endeavor in

an originating mystical experience of the Ground. The cave in which we find ourselves opens

out onto the light of the sun, “the cause for all things of all that is right and beautiful, giving

birth in the visible world to light, and the author of light and itself in the intelligible world

being the authentic source of truth and reason, and that anyone who is to act wisely in private

or public must have caught sight of this … their souls ever feel the upward urge and the

yearning for that sojourn above.” Diotima, for her part, says “every lovely thing partakes of

[the beautiful],” which [subsists] of itself and by itself in an eternal openness.” While we mount

“the heavenly ladder” on our way to it, note that we are already participating in it, and upon

reaching it, we become “the friend of god.”6

Plato then teaches that all our questioning and reasoning emerges from a primordial

participation in the divine Beauty. The category of Beauty is suggestive, for it evokes the

experience of being caught up outside ourselves in the beautiful reality, the ecstasy which is our

side of the Other drawing us. Art of all kinds, for example, immediately becomes relevant as a

source of such ecstasy and potential religious experience and insight. Hans Urs von Balthasar,

for example, has made much of aesthetic experience, along with the corresponding experience

5 Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis: On the Theory of History and Politics, Collected Works, vol. 6, trans. M. J. Hanak and

Gerhart Niemeyer (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 353. 6 Republic, 514a, 517c-d; Symposium, 211a-d, 212a (The Collected Dialogues of Plato: Including the Letters, Bollingen

Series LXXI, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982], [Republic, trans.

Paul Shorey; Symposium, trans. Michael Joyce]).

of human love, as an analogy for the Christian experience of grace, which is a similar

intersection between divine drawing and human response.7 Some earlier followers of Thomas

Aquinas also sought to rehabilitate an appreciation for his “participation metaphysics of essence

and existence,” which was able to combine Plato’s insight into participation in the divine

Ground with Aristotle’s stress upon the role of our senses in coming to know.8 The Basque

philosopher-theologian Xavier Zubiri, for example, was indicating this when he spoke of the

need in our time to study more deeply how “St. Thomas affirms that ‘knowing God in a certain

confused and general way is something naturally implanted … but this is not to know

simpliciter that God exists; just as knowing that someone is coming is not knowing Peter,

although it may be Peter who comes.’” This implicit but confused knowledge is the paticipation

metaphysics: We participate in God through our existence. This more basic foundation is what

makes it possible for the so-called demonstrations of God’s existence, which Aquinas goes on to

give, to actually illuminate our experience. What seems more vaguely distant although dimly

present, takes on more clarity upon closer study. But there is no hope of greater clarity without

the grounding experiential participation. As Zubiri suggests, “in our moment of history, this

prior [fact] has gained sufficiently in importance to deserve treatment by itself as the primary

way of intellectually discovering God; to the man of today it is not obvious that someone is

coming.”9

This same tight relationship between faith and reason, then, holds all the more when we

come to consider its working in the area of Christian revelation. Whatever theological

knowledge be forthcoming, it will be by way of the interchange between faith and reason. No

“faith-neutral” theological knowledge of Jesus, for example, is available. Faith’s venture will

always be present, as our response to the arousing, sustaining, and luring Ground. And in this

author’s opinion, some elements of hope and love (which forms community) will also be

present, and along with these, a reason affiliated with imagination, language, feeling, and

7 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone, trans. Alexander Dru (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969). 8 Gerald McCool, The Neo-Thomists, Marquette Studies in Philosophy, vol. 3 (Milwaukee: Marquette University

Press, 1994), 12. 9 Xavier Zubiri, “Introduction to the Problem of God,” in his Nature, History, God, trans. Thomas B. Fowler, Jr.

(Lanham: University Press of America, 1981), 308-9. The reference is to Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1, 2, 1.

willing. But here we come to something of a parting of the ways, or at least a family quarrel,

about the more precise nature of this grounding faith.

Some maintain that only explicitly Christian faith gives access to Jesus and the realities

of Christian revelation strictly so-called. The thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Karl

Barth of his final period in which he wrote his Church Dogmatics are typically thought to be

representative of this viewpoint. Others, obviously, take a “softer” view, suggesting that faith

in the broader, anthropological sense is initially adequate, this serving as the medium by means

of which deeper levels of luminous participation may develop. For these latter, and the author

is among them, all have the capacity in varying degrees of formation, to access Jesus and the

claims of Christian revelation, if they will but go along with the flow of their fidelity to reality’s

appeal in hope and community-forming love. A more compact faith affiliated with reason can

become a more differentiated faith, in other words. This need not be thought to be a purely

autonomous achievement by humans, for the divine Ground present within is luring,

sustaining, and forming community. If you will, what Christians name “grace,” that is God’s

gift of invitation to personal and social interchange, is at work. The thought of Friedrich von

Hügel and Karl Rahner and perhaps Wolfhart Pannenberg, for example, would be

representative of this perspective.

General Tendencies toward Jesus

Painting with a broad brush, we would expect faith-only types to develop a very exalted

view of Jesus, stressing the suprahuman traits of divinity, miracles, and the humanly

extraordinary, like Jesus’ sinlessness. Faith-only types tend to disparage human reason,

preferring the certitude of the gift of faith. We might say that they tend to hold a very

suprahuman view of faith: It is very transcendent, verging on the docetic (not really human or

bodily). Reason-only types, the mirror-opposites of the former, would tend to develop very

humanistic views of Jesus. As the faith-only types hold a very suprahuman view of faith, so the

reason-only types hold a very religiously neutral view of what it is to be human and of human

reason.

Combinative approaches (faith and reason in various forms of collaboration) would tend

toward honoring in varying ways the claims coming from both faith and reason. We might

venture the hunch that for those holding the soft view that faith and reason can occasionally

complement each other either by way of enrichment or critique, the tendency in Jesus studies

and Christology would be toward approaches that seek something of a balance between the

claims of faith and reason. Neither possesses an hegemony theoretically, although in practice

this might well tend toward the claims of reason setting the limits of what faith might find

palatable. Much would depend, it seems, upon the sociohistorical climate of opinion. It is not

uncommon for Christian thinkers of this orientation to hold that Jesus is a special representative

of God’s presence in history, who preached a sublime message of radical, selfless love, who did

extraordinary deeds of healing (miracles in this sense), and whose death on our behalf

continues to be an inspiring act of hope to the rest of us.

Those opting for the tighter relationship between faith and reason would likely tend to

think of faith as the hegemon, so to speak. Faith grounds and sustains reason. Reason and faith

are not equal partners, although they can and should be mutual partners, for faith is not a

tyrant, but an attunement to the loving, divine Ground. Faith, when properly attuned, should

be able to practise the discipline of listening to reason and submitting to its purifying critique,

but the hegemonic, guiding role of faith should lead reason to expect that it will not erase the

Mystery of the divine Ground nor the need to trust in a reality far more vast and complex than

reason’s ability to fully decipher.10

In terms of Jesus studies and Christology, this perspective would tend to be open to some of

the more exalted claims of a “high” Christology, namely, virgin birth, bodily resurrection, the

unique personhood of Jesus (the “hypostatic union”), universal salvation by the one Savior

Jesus, miraculous deeds, God as Trinity, the sense of being called into community as the Church

and the desire to witness to this, for example. But this does not mean that the challenges

coming from reason do not bring their own hesitations, need to rethink, and so on.

10 I borrow the terms “purifying critique” from John Paul II, Fides et Ratio: On the Relationship between Faith and

Reason, encyclical letter, no. 123 (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 1998). My impression is that this letter displays

elements of both the soft and the tight combinative approaches in a somewhat undifferentiated way.

Is Mysticism another Way?

Monk and Stamey suggest that the mystics’ claim of a direct knowledge of God provides us

with yet another route to follow.11 Without entering into a prolonged discussion of this, let me

suggest that Christian mystics live out of a faith perspective, and their approach to reason runs

across a large span of possibilities. We have noted Teresa of Avila’s suggestion, for example,

that at times reason needs to be stilled as it follows the stirrings of love. My perspective is that

mysticism is not an alternative to faith and reason but a radical expression of their combination.

Each has achieved a purifying and transparent relationship to the other, although the

implications of this may not always have been thought through with adequate differentiation.

But I realize this is contestable, and it is only a suggestion. Particularly attractive to this writer

is Eric Voegelin’s suggestion that the mystics’ inner tendency, when thought through, is toward

a doctrinal minimalism, inasmuch as they are aware of the immense complexity of the divine

Ground and the corresponding limitations of all symbols and concepts for it. Doctrinal

maximalists are rather more like rationalists, exaggerating reason’s capacity to articulate the

Mystery. But while the mystics might well lead us in the direction of a doctrinal minimalism,

they also lead us toward a maximal form of participation in the divine Ground. They are

participative maximalists. That is what makes a mystic a mystic.12 In terms of Christological

claims, such mystical tolerance would lead in the direction of honoring roughly equivalent

views of the Christ, simply because this kind of mysticism has learned to relativize or

perspectivize both our understandings and our linguistic formulations of the divine Ground.

Beyond Faith and Reason?

I suppose one might argue that faith and reason, of all stripes, are the path to be taken

by ordinary humans and Christians. However, one might then go on to claim that some

extraordinary types have been lifted above such pedestrian pathways, and have a kind of

knowledge (“gnosis”) which eliminates the need for a humble trusting in reality’s mysterious

drawing of us, or for the corresponding questioning use of our reason in the exploration of

11 Monk and Stamey, Exploring Christianity, 144-45. 12 William M. Thompson, “Eric Voegelin: A Pre-Nicene Christian?,” The Ecumenist 38 (2001): 10-13.

reality’s dimensions. Mockingly, early Church father Irenaeus wrote of these “gnostics” as

people who “treat God like a book to be opened and act as if [they] had already found the

unfindable.”13 As we read of Irenaeus’ description of the gnostics, we are easily led to think of

Nietzsche’s notion of being able to rise beyond good and evil. Those categories are for ordinary

mortals; the extraordinary see beyond such limited perspectives.

Today gnostic studies are in a state of reevaluation, given the recent discovery of gnostic

manuscripts from Nag Hammadi in 1945, which has complicated our knowledge considerably.

We know, for example, that some gnostic texts do speak of faith with considerable respect, even

if we note a corresponding tendency to associate a nearly perfect form of knowledge with it in

the gnostics of highest attainment. The Gospel of Truth, for example, speaks of faith as bringing

“the warm fullness of love” and as being “unity of perfect thought” (7.28, 33).14 Thus, our

scholarly language is in a state of flux as we seek to sort through the new materials. Irenaeus

may be directing his attack against only one, very extreme form of gnosticism, or he may be

exaggerating. Scholars are divided on these matters.

On a practical level, however, even if one continues to use the category of “faith,”

should this be thought to bring one beyond the need for humble trust in reality’s mysterious

drawing and the corresponding need to search through disciplined reason, then it would seem

to land one in a position equivalent to Irenaeus’ gnostics. The Gospel of Thomas, for example,

is instructive from a Christological point of view. There is no narrative; it seems to be a series of

mysterious utterances from the risen Jesus. The absence of narrative makes knowledge of Jesus

a matter of inner inspirations, unable to be tested against historical reality. It also has a

tendency to lift one above the limited perspective coming from a location in space and time.

Who is this “Thomas” who has written down these utterances? The name means “twin,” and

does this indicate that Jesus’ own historical particularity is removed by the gnostic who “twins”

13 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 2.28.7 (trans. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Scandal of the Incarnation: Irenaeus against the

Heresies, trans. John Saward [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990], 35). 14 Bentley Layton, ed. and trans., The Gnostic Scriptures (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1987), 261; see index,

s.v., “faith.”

Jesus through this knowledge?15 This would be rather solipsistic too, and not particularly

formative of community. In fact, the normal “laws” of history and nature are so transcended

that the female gnostic “makes itself male,” because “females are not worthy of life” (GTh

114).16

From the point of view of our grid, we would suggest that only the most extreme forms

of either reason-only (option 1) or faith-only (option 2) would likely transmute into forms of

gnosticism (in Irenaeus’ sense) given the right set of historical and social circumstances. The

fideist turned gnostic would resemble the more traditionally religious kinds of gnostic found in

early Christian history. They would think that they have attained to perfect gnosis through

some kind of special assimilation to the deity. The rationalist turned gnostic, on the other hand,

would tend to be a more modern (or late- or post-modern), secularized gnostic, claiming a

theoretical or practical recipe unlocking reality’s secrets.17 What kind of circumstances would

cause such transmutations? The most obvious would be situations of extreme alienation from

historical existence, leading one to seek to rise beyond it through assimilation to the

transcendent deity or through the kind of perfect know-how enabling one to change one’s very

“nature.”

Problems of Evaluation

Again and again we will come to this question of evaluation, for the complex pluralism

of perspectives forces it upon us. Simply to list these various perspectives heightens our sense

of the pluralism, and at a minimum moves us toward that “second naivete” suggested by Paul

Ricoeur. But can we actually get there? And how do we know we are there? The reader will

quickly understand that differing answers to these questions will come from the various

options we have just surveyed, for implicit in each of them is a view of knowledge and its

sources. If this be so, then it would mean that ultimately one’s perspective is a matter of

spirituality, that is, a matter of one’s fundamental life orientation. We will hazard the

generalization that we always do our thinking from within our spirituality, basic forms of

15 Ibid., 376-99. 16 Ibid., 399. 17 See Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 66-74, for the inspiration here.

which we have sought to typify above in our options. The issue would seem to be, not whether

we do so, but what form of spirituality are we working from? In fact, our thinking is an

expression of our spirituality, namely, that spirituality in its mode of thinking. And this can

range from a very compact, unanalytic form all the way to more differentiated forms of

thought.18 And like our lives, our thought can be quite inconsistent, surprising, subject to the

luck of circumstance, and always able to be shocked by the divine Ground.

Writers at times have written of the historical separation of theology (and philosophy)

from spirituality, I among them. I now think, given what I have just written, that this is not a

sufficiently differentiated way to put it.19 What this formulation was perhaps evoking was a

form of thought severely detached from the matrix of experience amply viewed. In other

words, a rather severely cerebral-rationalistic form of thought. And that not surprisingly tends

to foster its opposite, a severely emotive form of “thinking.” And so on. And so we get the idea

that theology, for example, is a very abstract, theoretical pursuit, while spirituality is a more

pious devotionalism geared toward satisfying our emotional needs. Spirituality would then be

a fuzzy-wuzzy sort of thing, while theological thinking would be good, hard thought!

Are there grounds for preferring one of these options (forms of spirituality) over the

others? That is the question we are struggling with here. Note that the reason-only and faith-

only options claim, or at least imply, an Archimedean space beyond history. Reason-only need

not submit to history’s mystery; it does not need faith. Faith-only claims to have transcended

the need to patiently think through as best we can the perplexities of the historical process.

Each of these implies a totalistic perspective. The combinative approaches would seem to be

willing to submit to the in-between space of being within history, with no ability to perch on an

18 We might borrow the language used by some liturgical theologians, namely, theologia prima (primary theology)

and theologia secunda (reflective, second-order theology). The categories could be applied, mutatis mutandis, to

philosophy and other areas of thought. Our basic life orientation is primary theology; this way of living always

involves some form of knowing, if it be human. It may or may not become varyingly differentiated into a more

reflective mode of thought (theologia secunda). Liturgists speak of liturgical celebration as always expressing a form of

primary theology, with elements of the more reflective kind as well. See Aidan Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology

(Collegeville: Liturgical Press, A Pueblo Book, 1992), index, s.vv., “theology, primary, secondary.” 19 In other words, there is in actuality never a separation of spirituality from theology, or theology from spirituality,

for all forms of theology are expressions of spirituality, ranging from theology in its “primary” to its “secondary”

forms. What we actually have are forms of spirituality and theology of varying levels of quality. At times the quality

can be rather problematic.

Archimedean vantage point. The faith dimension expresses a fidelity to history’s mystery, a

willingness to follow it without pretending to master it. It also joins us in community with

others, who are likewise following the appeal of the Mystery drawing all. The reason

dimension expresses the arousal of our wonder and interest within history, and our desire and

need to pursue that with as much care as possible in dialogue with others. We would not need

to do this were we above rather than within history.

So, if you will, combinative approaches attempt to do their thinking, feeling, and acting

from within history. They are “empirical” in this broad, historical sense, according to which

“experience” embraces the full range of human possibilities. Human experience is not less than

sense experience, but it is always more too. These combinative approaches trust that while

history offers us many challenges, it will supply us with whatever guidance is available for us.

The option, then, for the combinative form of spirituality is, like all such basic options, a pre-

scientific, common sense judgment arising from one’s living experience with others. This

“chosen” spirituality expresses the shape of our experience more or less adequately, and takes

on greater differentiation through the testing provided by historical experience itself. To return

to something noted in our first chapter, historical experience is a mixture of familiarity and

strangeness. Too much familiarity, and we would neither need to trust, nor to search, nor to

dialogue, with others. Too much strangeness, and we would find it impossible to achieve any

light whatsoever. Dialogue would also be impossible. But we are in-between. That in-between

space is a place of luminosity, sometimes great, sometimes less. One would need to presuppose

this space and at least performatively dwell within it to be able to deny it, which would

illustrate the contradictory nature of such ultimate skepticism.

Obviously there are family quarrels among the combinative types, and they can be both

strident and yet quite fruitful. Perhaps the most significant has to do with whether faith and

reason are fully equal partners which might collaborate with one another from time to time (our

“soft” combinative type), or whether faith is the mutual yet guiding ground of reason (our

“hard” combinative type). The attraction of the former is that it seems truly inclusive and fair.

Why should faith and reason not be equal partners, “who” may or may not choose to

collaborate? There may well be times when faith needs the guidance and critique of reason, and

vice versa. Would not according a hegemony to faith end up choking reason (and imagination,

etc.), for example?

The response from the hard combinative type might be the traditional one of

distinguishing between fides qua creditur (the faith by means of which we believe) and fides quae

creditur (the faith which is believed). The first may be said to be our faith-as-fidelity to the

drawing of reality, while the second would be the propositional articulations, so to speak, of our

faith journey.20 One might then suggest that only the fides qua is hegemonic, which would thus

allow maximally free play to the questioning reason as it seeks to articulate the “truths of faith.”

On the other hand, is it possible to sever so completely the fides qua from the fides quae? Would

not this tend to make the former into an empty abyss, which could always justify delaying any

commitments whatsoever (other than to one’s own preferences)?21 The fides qua is our response

to the drawing of reality, and we could not make the response did we not have some familiar

yet strange awareness of the nature of this reality. Much, then, depends upon the nature of the

reality which is drawing. Is the divine Ground a lovingly drawing reality? Does the divine

Ground guide us in such a way that the legitimate claims of reason will not be thwarted? Does

the divine Ground know how to lead our faith to take a pause, so that our faith may open itself

to intellectual dialogue and critique, undergo the purifying dark night of maturation, and

emerge all the stronger? Obviously these are questions that can only receive a more luminous

reply from attentiveness to history’s disclosures. Clearly, however, the traditional view of the

Incarnation is that the divine Ground knows how to practise such humility.

For More on “Participation”

As our first chapter sought to illustrate, faith, hope, and love, as well as reason, along

with imagination, language, feeling, and willing, are participative phenomena. Fidelity to

reality’s drawing calls us out in love and hope to question, explore, and understand through

20 For a range of ways in which these distinctions can be used, see Avery Dulles, The Assurance of Things Hoped For:

A Theology of Christian Faith (New York: Oxford, 1994), 63, 148, 150, 173. 21 Irenaeus thought this was one of the tactics of the gnostics, whose god was always too profound to come within

our reach. See his Against Heresies, 3.24.2 (The Anti-Nicene Fathers [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979 (= ANF)], 1:458).

imagination, reason, image and language, feeling and deliberative doing, all in the context of

dialogue. Reality, of which we are a part, draws us into participation. We are not spectators,

but participants. But at times we can be rather spectator-like participants. This book is seeking

to explore as fully as it can what occurs to us as we do participate, but particularly in our case,

as we participate in the phenomenon of Jesus, his companions, and their effects within history.

Not all the options listed above necessarily agree with the weight we are placing upon

participation. Some may agree that it is present, but prefer to stress other dimensions within

the faith and reason exchange. That is fair enough, although this book wants to argue that

participation is an inclusive sort of thing that would open the participant to whatever

dimensions reality itself calls for. Minimally this book suggests that participation is present in

the exchange of faith and reason, whether admitted by others or not, and that we are following

in a venerable tradition by attending to it as carefully as possible.

Readers interested in more on this theme may consult the writings of political

philosopher Eric Voegelin, at least as a starting point. His magnum opus, Order and History, is

introduced by a suggestive vision of God, world, society, and humans constituting a

“primordial community of being.” This community “is knowable only from the perspective of

participation in it.”22 He proposed that our participative knowledge of the four partners of this

community ranged from the more compact to the more differentiated, and that this achieved

and continues to achieve articulation through language symbols in a complex historical and

multicultural process that knows regressions, parallel and equivalent breakthroughs,

revolutions, stasis, and much more. Over the years, Voegelin refined his understanding of this,

as he worked through an immense range of historical materials. He did propose that critical

moments of differentiation have occurred here and there, whose luminosity is still fundamental

for the rest of us.

Voegelin came to speak of the noetic differentiation of the Greek philosophers, in which

the dimensions of human intelligence were impressively articulated, typically through the

symbol of the nous or the “soul.” He also wrote of the pneumatic differentiations of Israel,

Jesus, and the early Christians, in which the loving descent in grace of the divine Ground

22 Voegelin, Order and History, 1: Israel and Revelation, ed. Maurice P. Hogan, 39.

achieved a stunning symbolization, and in the Christian orbit the human site of this descent in

Jesus and his companions as representative of us all was most clearly differentiated. Missing in

his earlier volumes was much attention to the non-western world, but in his later work he paid

much more attention to the parallel but unequal differentiations of China and India, a rich mix

of the noetic and the pneumatic. Throughout it all is the view that the divine Ground is guiding

the entire process, and that history mysteriously displays great varieties of human response

thereto. Voegelin also deeply appreciated the earliest, primary experiences of the community of

being, which were more compactly expressed in the various myths of humanity, inasmuch as

we can get to them. We never simply leave the myth behind; it remains as the matrix out of

which our later differentiations may occur.

Voegelin’s philosophical vision, which accords so much prominence to the themes of

participation, history, the four partners (God, society, world, and humans), language symbols,

and human consciousness and imagination as the “central” point of the historical

differentiations, has greatly guided and inspired this author. His work is not everyone’s cup of

tea, to be sure. For some it seems too ambitious; for others, too western and limited. In a

postmodern period which is suspicious of syntheses and totalistic visions, Voegelin’s work can

seem offputting. I think it can stand up to all these charges relatively well, but this is not a book

on Voegelin, and the reader can consult the literature. I recommend his work here as a more

sustained, philosophical study of the key dimensions of our approach. Where appropriate, we

can consult more of the “details” in the pages to follow.

Before leaving Voegelin, however, perhaps one final observation prompted by his last

volume in his magnum opus will be helpful. We have spoken of participation as yielding

knowledge, along with Voegelin, Plato, and others. Yet this can seem vague. In the earlier

writings of Order and History one could almost get the impression that, for Voegelin, any

formulation of our participation in the community of being was a derailment and distortion. In

any case, by the time he reached his final, posthumously published volume, Voegelin

introduced a clarifiying set of distinctions. He spoke of “It reality” and “Thing reality.” The

former refers to our participation in the community of being (the “It”), which is always the

more comprehensive experience of us humans in history and society. Here knowledge is from

within, and never from some Archimedean point outside of the community. In other words,

our knowledge is real yet perspectival and not totalistic. What we know (truth) takes the form

of luminosity here. The appropriate language term corresponding to participative knowledge is

“symbol.” Thing reality is Voegelin’s term for a less comprehensive moment within the more

comprehending It reality, namely, our experience of being subjects who seem to go out in

search of objects to know. Here our experience is not so much one of union with others, but of

separateness, and of trying to bridge a gap.23 This is how Voegelin interprets what philosophers

call “intentionality,” namely, the experience of subjects intending objects. The appropriate

language term corresponding to intentionality is “concept.” Note that intentionality, while real,

is but a moment of the much more comprehensive It reality. The point is that we do

conceptualize and objectify; we cannot escape that, being embodied as we are. And the

physical sciences likely tend to emphasize intentionality more than the humane sciences,

although there is no final wall between the two. However, the more comprehensive knowledge

of luminosity, to the degree that we remain aware of it, keeps our concepts relativized, such that

we understand them more comprehensively as moments within the more comprehensive world

of symbols.24

A Hesitation (Irigaray, Levinas)

Let us end this supplement to chapter one with something of a troubled conscience. If

participation is going to work for us as a mode of access to Jesus, his companions, to ourselves,

23 Very helpful on how our primary experience is not that of the gap between subject and object, but of a united

matrix, see, besides Voegelin, Karl Rahner, Hearer of the Word, trans. Joseph Donceel (New York: Continuum, 1994),

esp. 31-32, 43, 51, 96, and perhaps most extensively yet, Xavier Zubiri, Sentient Intelligence, trans. Thomas B. Fowler

(Washington, D.C.: The Xavier Zubiri Foundation of North America, 1999), esp. part one, on the “primary mode of

intellection” (11). Obviously this issue of a “gap” has been at the center of western philosophy since at least Kant,

and Rahner, Zubiri, and Voegelin are only some of the more notable attempts to rethink the matter. Heidegger

deserves credit in this regard too. But I have not come upon a thinker who has thought it through more extensively

than Zubiri in the work noted. Its “philosophy of intelligence” is on the level of Bernard Lonergan’s Insight in its

sustained analytic power. 24 See Voegelin, Order and History, 5: In Search of Order, ed. Ellis Sandoz, esp. 27-62, 109-10, 119. For helpful

Voegelin primers: Eric Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State

University Press, 1989); Glenn Hughes, ed., The Politics of the Soul: Eric Voegelin on Religious Experience (Lanham:

Rowman and Littlefield, 1999); William M. Thompson and David L. Morse, eds., Voegelin’s Israel and Revelation: An

Interdisciplinary Debate and Anthology, Marquette Studies in Theology, vol. 19 (Milwaukee: Marquette University

Press, 2000).

and to others, it must not simply project more of ourselves onto others, but really bring the

other before us. If we think in terms of “the same” and “the other” as a pair, we seek not simply

the same (ourselves), nor the other of the same (simply a further projection of ourselves), but

the other of the other. The middle option here, the other of the same, is the difficult one. I want

to know myself, following Socrates’ advice, or Augustine’s, for that matter. Do I really own the

“other” of myself, its dimensions, attributes, etc., which await appropriation rather than denial?

Or do I project onto myself more of the same old self with which I am comfortable? We may

repeat this mental experiment with our friends, our acquaintances, those about whom we read,

all possible “others.” Even Jesus, even God. Each of these may simply be more of the same old

me, that is, projections of what I think they should be, rather than what they truly are. The

writings of the spiritual masters are replete with warnings about this danger of illusion. Teresa

of Avila even invented a colorful word (in Spanish) for this, namely, abobamiento, the state of

falling into boobishness, as distinct from arrobamiento, the state of genuine religious ecstasy.25

The way I have just formulated the problem is influenced by the thought of philosopher

Luce Irigaray. “For if the other is not defined in his or her actual reality, there is only an other

me, not real others: the other may then be more or less than I am, might have more or less than

me.” But in this case, she is suggesting that we are the measuring norm of the other. “And so it

may represent (my) absolute perfection or greatness, the Other: God, Master, logos; it might

denote the most insignificant or the most destitute: children, the ill, the poor, the outsider; it

might name the one I consider to be my equal.” But no matter: “It is not the other we are really

dealing with but the same: inferior, superior, or equal to me.”26 The preposition “to” in the title

of her book, “i love to you,” attempts to express the space within which I and you can meet, a

space which is not immediate, thereby abolishing difference.27

Irigaray thinks the man-woman relationship is perhaps the great relationship in which

our ability to encounter difference is tested and experienced. She creatively translates the “holy

spirit,” who is traditionally thought of as the bridge or linking reality between Father and Son,

25 St. Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle, 4.3.11 (333, 490 n. 13). 26 Luce Irigaray, i love to you: Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History, trans. Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 1996),

61. 27 Ibid., 109.

as the “ventilation,” the “breath” that enables communication. We need a symbolic of

ventilation, if we are to encounter rather than abolish the other. She reimagines Mary’s

Annunciation, for example, as an example of this other-protecting breath. “In my view,

respecting Mary’s virginity does not mean forcing a Father-logos upon her whose son she

conceives outside of her female body, as is all too often taught; rather, it means not touching her

body without asking her if it is what she wishes or desires.” In other words, we are celebrating

“in the name of the Annunciation … the time of shared words between a man and a woman

prior to any carnal act or conception.”28

Somewhat similar in sensitivity to the other is philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who

might well be considered the philosopher of the other par excellence.29 Like Irigaray, in

postmodernist sensitivity he distrusts projects of totalization, that is, constructing or implying

the reality of final schemes and syntheses. Such finalities abolish the in-between spaces in

which we truly find ourselves facing the other, with all the new challenges that entails.30

Totalizers, despite their contrary claims, always sneak themselves onto the Archimedean perch

from which they can dominate and so suppress the other. Levinas seems somewhat more

radical than Irigaray in some ways on these matters.

Irigaray does not seem to object to the word “participation,” if it is understood to mean

the space of non-immediacy in which companions can truly meet.31 Levinas, however, suggests

that participation, a category going back to Plato and traditional western philosophy of being,

presupposes the totalizing project. For participation sneaks in the notion of being part of the

whole, and so it implies a totality, in the light of which one defines one’s place and the place of

the other. That “whole” is the Archimedean perch from which we define one another. Levinas

does not mean that we are not in relations with one another. But he is seeking a form of relation

in which one is not “defined by something other than oneself” (“being,” for example).32

28 Ibid., 121, 122, 123. 29 See Colin Davis, Levinas: An Introduction (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996). 30 Irigaray, i love to you, 105, 107; Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, Duquesne Studies,

Philosophical Series, vol. 24, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), passim, esp. 21-

30. The critique of totalization continues in his Otherwise than Being: Or beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis

(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1997), 29, 95, 171. 31 Irigaray, i love to you, 139. 32 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 61, 109, 276.

“Essence, the being of entities, weaves between the incomparables, between me and the others,

a unity, a community (if only the unity of analogy), and drags us off and assembles us on the

same side, chaining us to one another like galley slaves, emptying proximity of its meaning.” In

the end, using Hegelian words like Irigaray’s, Levinas writes, “As disclosed the other enters

into the same, and the experience of transcendence immediately becomes suspect of artifice.”33

These are difficult waters, and if the reader is somewhat confused, take courage.

Levinas especially seems to seek to challenge and disorient, but so does Irigaray. After all, they

are seeking to uncover (deconstruct) what is hidden in the very structure of our western

thought. Levinas, for example, does not seem to argue that we can simply escape the language

of “being.” His books are full of it, and he seems to argue that some form of metaphysics is still

needed (not ontology!), albeit in second place to what he mysteriously terms “ethics.” In any

case, he seems to seek a form of thinking rooted in the ethical relationship, in which the other

person (“neighbor” in his beloved Hebrew traditional language) can truly “assault” me, in

which one finds oneself exposed to the neighbor, in proximity and face to face. Levinas piles

one paradox upon another, to bring home the experience of how this proximity is really

“other.” We are there in the relation, but as an “accusative that derives from no nominative.”34

One has to use one’s imagination here, as one thinks of the neighbor accusing oneself, and so

the experience of selfhood is indirect, mediated by the neighbor and beyond our ability to

dominate.

Irigaray and Levinas will accompany us on our participative journey, as we seek to be

challenged by Jesus, his companions, and neighbors. We are seeking a form of participation

with maximal ventilation, a space of true reciprocity and not just more of the same old self

projected onto everything and everyone else, including the divine Ground. And we have no

intentions of claiming that we can ever simply be satisfied that we have adequately listened to

the viewpoint represented here by Irigaray and Levinas. We will, however, ask whether they

have fairly enough put a good word in for the middle term of reference, the “other of the

same”? We recall this as the middle term, between the same and the other. Irigaray, and

33 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 182. 34 Ibid., 11.

Levinas even more, are suspicious of such middle terms, in their writings. But are all forms of

the otherness of the same projections in the pejorative and destructive sense? And if we do

admit that we somehow know some sameness shared with the other, why is this necessarily

subordinate in quality to the radical otherness or difference so prized by Levinas and perhaps

by Irigaray too? How would one know this, without somehow succumbing to that

Archimedean perch of totalization?

Perhaps in the end it is a matter of what we each seem to find within history. The

Christian, following the Gospel of John, believes that the Word has become flesh. The divine

Ground is, in a way, the Other who shares some sameness (the flesh) with us. It is not simple

sameness, nor simple otherness, but other-sameness that lies at the heart of reality. Is this

something of a difference, too, between a more Judaic, expectant form of philosophy and

theology, and a more Christian, incarnational form? And was Plato, for example, close to this

incarnationalism in his participation thinking? I notice that both Irigaray and Levinas will write

of the flesh becoming word, which is something a Christian could say too. But it is not the same

thing as the Word becoming flesh which we find in the Gospel of John (1.14).35 A God-Word

becoming flesh is strange, perplexing, scandalous, assaulting, very different from our

expectations, to be sure. Here we have “otherness” in heaps. But if it be God’s Word, in whose

image we are made, it is in some way our word too, in which we share. Here we would seem to

have some shared sameness.36 By becoming flesh, it remains in history, and does not seem to

thrust us into a totalizing space beyond history. But of course we must take precautions to help

us remember that we cannot escape the in-between of our history. We will return to this theme

of historical precautions here and there.

35 Irigaray, i love to you, 124; she will use the Johannine formulation too, but her more or less nontheistic view of

reality would seem to reduce it to the equivalent of the former. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 94: “In the approach of

a face the flesh becomes word, the caress a saying.” 36 This is the basis of metaphor, analogy, and philosophies of being, all greatly contested.