Look who’s talking

Thom Brennan - Another Time and Space, Pt. 1

A conversation with me is more informative than one about me. Likewise, a conversation about God is less informative than a conversation with him, even if the same words are spoken. The Word is the ultimate relief to the anxiety beneath all other anxieties that we mistakenly treat with temporary balms like aesthetics (i.e., art appreciation). Seeing and loving beauty in anything other than the Word is like scratching the itch around our wound that is the anxiety of separation from God. Some philosopher-theologians are so in love with the maze of fissures they treat around the wound that they sometimes forget what ails them.

A purely rationalistic blind alley search for wisdom or for God speaks about God only in theory, self-consciously referring to what we discover as only being true by analogy. Talk about God never speaks a word to us. The Scriptures carry the message of Christian freedom in the Spirit of Christ and teach that alienation is self-imposed slavery to the spirit of the world. This is a message that does not require individuals to do the work of imagining ourselves implicated by its content, but instead speaks to us directly. If the heart of all anxieties is alienation from God from a lack of faith and hope, then the message that “God loves people in general,” while true, answers that question about as well as answering someone’s fear that I don’t love them with, “I love all people.”

The same principle that is at work above with regard to the Bible can also be applied to philosophical theology. For example, I’m never going to read an account of the doctrine of justification and think, “I finally found it! This must be the perfectly correct way to explain justification, and knowing this will change my life!” Sadly, the ordo salutis is emphasized by many Protestants as their reason for separation from the Catholic Church (out of their fear of being prideful and perhaps in blindness to the fact that pride is already a deadly sin in Catholicism). Similarly, there’s a felt difference between saying with total confidence that « God sanctifies believers » rather than boasting in Christ that « I am becoming like God ». The former is a philosophical musing about people in general, whereas the latter is a confession of faith.