It should not be either embarrassing or surprising to us that the human experience of the nearness and graciousness of mystery would often come to expression in a religious language heavily loaded with personalistic imagery. Although the mystery is not exhausted by its representation as a “person,” the disclosure of its intimacy to human subjects endowed with intelligence, will, and feelings could scarcely be possible unless it were itself presented to them as having analogously personal attributes. It is doubtful that something less than personal could inspire us deeply to trust and surrender. To persons the mystery must at least be personal itself. It is difficult to find precise language with which to interpret the relationship of divine personality to divine mystery. Is the mystery really personal, or is personality merely one of the projective ways in which we creatively go out to meet the mystery that summons us toward itself? We have already admitted that our religions are inevitably imaginative, projective, and that there is always some level of illusion in our actual religious consciousness, owing to the infantilism of desire that we can never completely eradicate. Is the propensity to think of God as personal still perhaps more a manifestation of our immaturity than a realistic appreciation of the inexhaustible mystery of reality?
Without denying that our images of a personal God always have a projective aspect to them or that these images do not exhaustively represent the mystery of our lives, we may still view “divine personality” as an indispensable symbol of the proximity to us of mystery. All of our language about this mystery necessarily has a symbolic character. Because of mystery’s unavailability, we cannot discuss it directly or literally. We tend to speak of it, if we speak of it at all, in terms of those places and events where it breaks through to us most decisively and intensely. For most of us, the most intense disclosure of mystery probably occurs in our encounter with other persons. The child’s earliest encounter with mother and father, for example, is an experience of such overwhelming “numinosity” that it remains a permanent layer of all of our involvements. And the meeting with a truly accepting and caring person is often the occasion for our experiencing the depth and graciousness of life’s mystery in a decisive way. The human face itself has often been experienced as deeply mysterious, as causing us to turn away in fear or as attracting us with its enchanting power. Human personality is often the occasion for our experiencing the mysterium tremendum et fascinans.
Inasmuch as human personality is especially transparent to the horizon of mystery and its graciousness, it is not surprising, then, that personalist imagery would cling to our discourse about God. Since we often perceive the mystery most clearly as it shines through the lives of other persons, we can never completely separate our experience of God from the experience of personality. To do so would again be an unnecessary reduction of the mystery. The freedom and unmanipulability of other persons gives us a sense of the unavailability of the mystery that is their depth. To remove the personal face of mystery is to lose access to it. Through the medium of personality, the depth of reality is “revealed” in such a complete way that we must speak of God as personal. God is the depth and ground of all personality.64
54. The following text is an excerpt. Previously published in Haught, What is God?, 115–131. Reprinted with permission.
55. See Otto, Idea of the Holy.
56. See Bacik, Apologetics, 3–64.
57. See Smith, Beyond the Post-Modern Mind, 83, 88, 114, and 134–35.
58. Skinner, Beyond Freedom, 54.
59. On the distinction between problem and mystery, see Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having, 117.
60. Haught’s discussion of limit questions was especially influenced by Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order, 91–118. The original notion of “limiting questions” comes from the philosopher Stephen Toulmin, Examination, 202–21.
61. See Rahner, Theological Investigations, 67–73.
62. Rahner speaks of three central mysteries in Christian faith. Speaking of religion in a general sense, Haught believes it is consistent with Rahner’s thought to only speak of two.
63. See Rahner, Theological Investigations, 67–73.
64. This formulation is, of course, a Tillichian one.
7: Religion65
“There is communion with God, and communion with the earth, and communion with God through the earth.”
—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin66
If nature is not all there is, then what else is there, and how do we know about it? Religions are convinced that there is more, indeed infinitely more, but they tell us we can know about it only if we are disposed to receive it. The infinitely “more” cannot be known in the same way that ordinary objects are known. In fact, religion is less a matter of knowing than of being known. It is a state of being grasped rather than of grasping. Not every person is ready for religion, and even self-avowed religious believers cannot truthfully claim to be ready for it most of the time. Indeed, much of what we usually call religious life consists of avoiding or running away from the demands of religion. Religious understanding—as most theologians see it—is impossible without surrender, worship, and prayerful waiting, along with struggle and frustration. Yet, to those who wait, the rewards can be peace and joy, as well as profound intellectual satisfaction.
Religion, at least in any conventional sense, cannot get along with scientific naturalism, but it can get along quite well with science. Science deals with what can be sensed or, at least, what can be inferred from sensation. Religion is based in experience too, but of a different kind from science. Religious people testify to having felt, beneath all sensible appearances, the very real presence of an elusive mystery that takes hold of them, invites them, sometimes unsettles them, and often reorients their lives. They profess to having been carried away, as it were, by something “more” than nature. Their sense of a mysterious presence beyond the world, beneath the surface of life, or in the depths of the universe, evokes responses of vague anxiety sometimes mixed with overwhelming excitement and the impulse to worship. Religion often also involves the encounter with unseen agents, powers, and personalities, but these are experienced as emerging out of the background of a more fundamental transcendent mystery. Religion, taken here in a very broad sense, is a conscious appreciation of and response to the mystery that grounds, embraces, and transcends both nature and ourselves. There are other ways of defining religion, of course, but the issues raised by scientific naturalism have to do especially with religion’s bold claims that there is more than nature. A good name for this more is “mystery.”
Religion, therefore, means that the universe available to science and ordinary experience is not all that is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be. To most religious persons, there is something other than the physical universe. This mysterious presence is not separate from the universe, but it