Now, as the mention of Kierkegaard, father of existentialism, suggests that what lies at the heart of the apophatic tradition is the insistent sense that where living realities are concerned, fullness of human comprehension and definition is ipso facto impossible. That is why, as Augustine’s luminous phrase shows, this tradition has application first of all to the deity, for God defies containment or codification. Indeed, much of the negative theology of the mystics draws quite specifically on the biblical text, in Acts, where St. Paul addresses the Athenians on Mars Hill using as his point of contact with them the concept of “the unknown God” (Acts 17:16–17). God for biblical faith is above all a living God—a God whose presence—not the idea of God’s existence but the experience of God’s presence—is the crucial factor. God for the whole tradition of Jerusalem transcends all else, is unique, beyond compare; as Anselm of Canterbury put it in a famous phrase, Deus non est genere (God is not one of a species). Therefore God remains the unknown one, even when God reveals Godself—no, especially then! For, as Luther insisted, it is the revealing God (Deus revelatus) who, precisely in revealing conceals, precisely in manifesting hides, precisely in self-giving remains unpossessible (Deus absconditus). The living, self-revealing God of biblical faith transcends all our preconceptions of deity, shatters our idols and images of divinity, even the highest and most philosophically sophisticated of them, and is simply present as Thou, defying objectification, defying every attempt of ours to define and describe and specify and so (in Buber’s famous language) turn this Thou into an It. It should not be forgotten that the most sacred name for God in Hebrew faith is not a proper name at all but almost a conundrum—the tetragrammaton YHWH (Yahweh), which seems to mean “I am who I am,” or “I will be who I will be.” Strictly speaking, this means that theology, a doctrine of God, is impossible!
To speak autobiographically for a moment, I remember when that insight first struck me with full force. I had just begun my seminary teaching career, and the insight nearly stopped me in my tracks! If God is truly God, if God is “not one of a species,” but absolutely unique, unnameable, absolutely transcendent; if we, who cannot even describe our own spouses and children without falling into graven-image making, set out to describe God, then have we not committed the ultimate blasphemy? (It was about that time, in fact, that Ursula Niebuhr said to me quite earnestly, “Theology always walks close to blasphemy.”) I began to think, then, that I had chosen the wrong profession! But fortunately a second insight came to me. I wrote it down on a four-by-six index card, and stashed it away in the midst of a whole boxful of such cards in my study. I suppose it is still there to this day. I never look for it, but I know it is there. In fact, I remember it better than any of the other hundreds of index cards I’ve filed away over the years. It reads, “God permits theology.” As a discipline, a science, theology is impossible, for its object is no object but a living Subject. Yet God—with great condescension and forbearance—permits it . . . for the time being. So long as we know that it is not possible, only permitted, we may try our hand at it. It’s when we start thinking we are really quite good at it that we had better watch out!
What I mean to say in this homely autobiographical way is this: there must always be a prominent element of modesty, or even tentativeness and hesitancy, in what we profess concerning the knowledge of God. The Creed (any Christian creed!) should be whispered, not shouted. What prevents this modesty from becoming sheer agnosticism and devolving into theistic relativism is that, knowing and trusting God as those who sometimes feel themselves to be caught up in God’s presence, we may at least identify false gods, idols, demons, and unworthy images of the divine. We may not claim for our positive statements about God anything more than awkward and hesitant attempts to point to One whom we do not understand and can only stand under; but we may (not arrogantly, not self-righteously, yet with a certain confidence) sometimes say, No, this is not God, and neither is this . . . nor this . . . nor this . . . And if we do this consistently, and especially with regard to our own ideas and wishful thinking and fond, familiar images of God, it may be that the Spirit who is God will now and then come to us and whisper to us reassuringly . . . (Or was it only the wind?)
So theology via negativa is made necessary first of all because it feels impelled—is indeed “under necessity” (1 Corinthians 9:16)—to speak of God. And God—the God who at last allowed Moses to see his back—permits us to look for words that, transformed by the divine Spirit, can perhaps—perhaps!—bear witness to the great and holy silence evoked by God’s presence to us. It is to protect and honor the Word that names that silence that we who would be theologians are under necessity to take the greatest care about our words—“For the ear trieth words as the mouth tasteth meat” (Job 34:3, KJV).
But while theology by way of negation applies in this special sense to the deity, the apophatic tradition extends itself also to all other aspects of theological inquiry, for it understands the whole of reality to be characterized by an aura of wonder that cannot be reduced to words, formula, description or, doctrine. Alfred North Whitehead, the father of process thought, spoke of the “livingness of things,” and this fits rather precisely, I think, the mindset of this tradition. If what strikes one most about the experienced world is the life force within it—its livingness, its organic and always-moving nature—then one is likely to be less than absolute in one’s descriptions and depictions of it; one will find oneself drawn to the way of negation because one realizes how little trust one can put in one’s feeble attempts to do justice to “the livingness of things.”
One of the (relatively few!) developments that gives one hope today is the manner in which the public perception of the world—of nature, certainly, but also of human life—seems to be moving away from the wholly materialistic, objectifying mentality of the technological society to a more organic, more fluid, more animate conception of reality. Not that the technocratic, managerial mentality has disappeared—far from it! But more of us today than was the case even two or three decades ago, I think, have em-braced a worldview that looks with a certain awe upon the natural order, including ourselves within that order. Partly because we have experienced great and abiding threats to nature and all life, we have learned to look upon the world with different eyes. Trees are not just lumber, and polar bears are not just cute big fuzzy creatures for zoos, and the Precambrian shield is not just a barren place for mining, and the oceans are not just for fishing, and people are not just statistics! James Lovelock, instigator of the so-called Gaia Theory, believes that the planet itself is a kind of living organism, and not just a rather amazing ball of substances and processes that we may get to understand and use as we please!7
This new public awareness, so far as it is able to conquer or at least counter the materialistic, technological approach to reality, is where I think religious faith must turn for human dialogue today. For faith—certainly Christian faith—shares with this mentality, even when it is driven by nontheistic or secular impulses, a sense of the great mystery of all reality as the good creation of an omniscient God. And wherever that sense of mystery is entertained among men and women, there is an opening for dialogue with faith.
That faith, however, must itself be true to the depths of mystery that it confesses. That faith must not devolve into sight, into brave religious pronouncements, into propositions and doctrines and dogmas and ironclad fundamentals. When it does that, it betrays the very Source of wonder to which it is supposed to be bearing witness.
This means that theological modesty is required today, not only where our statements about God—our theologies in the narrower sense—are concerned, but in all things.