Here Professor Torrance lays claim to a venerable Christian teaching on the
nature of God—that his transcendence places him beyond human gender,
thought and speech—connecting this to our own happy discovery of the
transcendence of gender as touching pastoral ministry.
I think that Dr. Torrance and Mr. Foster (who really has joined the battle)
have erred, but precisely how have they done it? The difficulty in explaining
the error as an error arises from the fact that what they affirm is correct;
it is what they deny or will not profess consequent to their affirmation that
causes the problem. They are as right as the Arians who insisted that Jesus
was a man, as right as the Docetists who claimed that he was God, as right
as the feminists who confess that the woman is the man’s equal. In the
same sense, those who are invoking apophaticism on feminism’s behalf
are right: it is true that human language and conceptualization cannot define
or contain God. The attempt to do this is idolatry. One cannot, however, leave
it at that. To be half right on such matters is to be wholly wrong.1
Apophaticism, the theological method associated particularly with the mystical
theology of Eastern Orthodoxy, emphasizes that God in his uncreated essence
lies beyond categories we can entertain, that the symbols through which his
life is conveyed to us—whether they be words or other elements of creation—must
be understood as provisional, standing for the Divine Life into which we are
called to enter in an ever deeper and more intense way, but ultimately unable
to hold it in its fullness. This being the case, the most accurate statements
that we can make about God are not to say what he is (kataphatic theology),
but what he is not (apophatic theology).
Apophatic theology, however, cannot stand alone. It can never become, to
use Dr. Torrance’s word, “independent.” To express the fullness
of the faith, negative theology must be accompanied by the positive. The dark
rays of the Light beyond light may fall upon the mystic, but what they touch
and affect in him is the flesh and blood and senses of someone who exists
in a human body, and will for eternity. When mystical theology thinks to slip
its moorings in creation, when kataphatic theology—the theology of icon,
Scripture, confession and creed—is replaced by an apophatic theology
that claims to leave it behind, something is amiss. It is, I think, no accident
that Eastern Orthodoxy preserves alongside its mystical element a devotion
to iconic, “material” theology so dogged and emphatic that to
the Western eye it appears to verge upon idolatry. (And one should wonder,
if apophatic theology teaches us what is being alleged here, why the Eastern
Church—which, after all, named it to begin with—remains the part
of Christendom most implacably opposed to all these new revelations!)
Mystical theology denies no tenet of confessional theology. In Christian
mysticism “negation” is supercession, not variance or deletion,
a point which must be eliminated or made ambiguous by those who are using
the mystical to obscure the iconic. Positive theology is fulfilled (in the
same sense that the gospel fulfills the law), not exterminated, in the negative.
The transcendence of gender is not its destruction, but its perfection. We
also need to understand this clearly: something that uses the language of
apophaticism, and can pass for it among those who are not sufficiently alert,
may be actually anti-Christian and must be tested by observing its response
to the Christian confession, that is, in accordance with what it does when
turned loose in the realm of kataphatic theology. If apophaticism “moves
toward God by asserting that he is not, in fact, any of the things he is called”
(R. C. Bondi), and in doing so cuts itself loose from the positive theology—the
theology of word and symbol, of earth, water, body, and blood—that must
accompany it in order for it to be true, then it must be rejected.
Here again is one of those perils in which something true falls from grace
when it denies or destructively assimilates that which must stand with it.
When the humanity of Christ is used to overcome his deity, when gender equality
consumes and digests the hierarchy in which it rests, when “divine darkness”
is employed to eclipse “that which we have heard, we have seen with
our eyes, felt with our hands and preach to you,” it is no longer true.
When it is forgotten that even in his final beatitude redeemed man remains
man, and contemplates the glory of God with senses and categories still those
of the creature—this being his peculiar glory!—then Christian
doctrine has been corrupted.
Proclamations declaring the inadequacy of human language to express the being
of God must be given close scrutiny, for they are analogous to assertions
of the inadequacy of human flesh to contain him. On one hand it is true (this
we dare not forget) that there is a radical separation between Creator and
creature, and from this point of view the incarnation of God, the salvation
of men, the inspiration of humanly produced Scriptures, or the application
of human categories of understanding to God, are indeed impossible. On the
other hand, however, the great Paradox of our faith is that all these things
are not only possible with God, but have actually happened through the Lamb
who was slain at the world’s foundation,2 and by happening open the way for human conceptualizations and metaphors
about God to partake, in accordance with their nature, in the truth of their
divine object.
What we are hearing from people who wish to advance feminism in the churches
is, however, the insinuation that because metaphors are “merely”
metaphors, they must in some sense be false—that if “Father”
is a metaphor, God is not “really” Father. But true words about
God (or anything else) are never “merely human” in the sense that
my interlocutors imply here, for the very possibility of human discourse,
that is, of the interchange of true words, words that have meaning, is based
upon the incarnation of God. The divine act that makes it possible for human
words to contain truth is the same one that made it possible for human flesh
to contain God, and is dependent upon it. And yes, this is to say that semantics
rests upon a Christological basis, and that philosophies of language may ultimately
be judged on the clarity of their consciousness of how this may be.
No true word is merely human, but partakes truly in the Truth of God, who
is Christ. And this is true a fortiori of divine titles like “Father” given by
God through the mouth of his Son. They have the character of their giver and
are therefore also both human and divine. From a “merely human”
point of view, they are indeed inadequate to express their object, but no
merely human point of view is under consideration here, for we are charged
to speak as the oracles of God—that is, to speak the truth, to speak
every word as a symbol in which heaven and earth are bound together. Words
given to man by God, or procreated by man made in God’s image in obedience
to the divine command, have a sacramental character, partaking fully in both
the human and divine nature, thus incorporating and relating, through the
person of Christ himself, what we can and cannot say about God and his creation—that
is, apophatic and kataphatic theology. Will anyone dare say that even to redeemed
humanity in the glory of its final blessedness, God will no longer be “Father”?
Or is it more likely that instead we will be entering more deeply into the
inexpressible mystery of what the metaphor means? Does all this patriarchal
imagery, Dr. Torrance, become false in statu beatitudinis? And if not, might it be among the irreplaceably important
things given by God to connect us to eternity while we will dwell here among
the tombs?
If male gender terms as applied to God in Scripture are both meaningful and
true, then the invocation of apophatic theology (and with it the God we are
assured is beyond gender) to relativize them out of existence is clear
case of the defeat of the confessional, the iconic, the sacramental, and the
symbolic aspect of the faith, and hence a defeat, in the character of docetism,
of the enfleshment of the God whom the heaven of heavens cannot hold. Thy
mystics should be consulted with caution on these matters, for the claim,
such as that of Pseudo-Dionysus, that kataphatic theology is a primer that
leads one to superior levels is, if presented by itself, ambiguous. If it
points to the destruction of positive theology in the negative, teaching that
only once we abandon the merely human we can begin to reach into the truly
divine, then it cannot be allowed, for this is a Gnostic, not a Christian,
idea. Believers, when they become divine, become new creatures, not un-creatures.
They do not leave their humanity (and all that entails with regard to words,
conceptualizations, and so forth) behind them. Philip Schaff’s Terentian
epigram comes to mind here as a truth of the faith that abides on both this
and the other side of eternity: Christianus sum; nihil humani alienum me
puto.3
Who can deny that mere creatures cannot contain or express God? Here we speak
apophatically. And yet, the heart of our life and confession as Christians
is that the creature did, does, and can contain and express God in Christ
Jesus and the power of his resurrection. Here we speak kataphatically. Hold
them together, brothers—hold them together.4 The argument against feminism and for the traditional
doctrine of ministry I have put forward against Dr. Torrance in the pages
of this journal depends on the belief that human gender terms applied to God
are icons that serve as open windows, not closed doors, upon the reality they
depict. Diaphanous they are, but one cannot use their “see-through”
character to dissolve them into non-existence by declaring them independent
of the reality they represent. It is the uncreated light which, passing through
them, partakes in creation and formed these words within us to begin with,
as true descriptions of what cannot be described.
Notes:
1. In describing the relationship between what God is and the thought and
language we use about him, Dr. Torrance does soften what he maintains about
their independence by saying the former are to be considered “diaphanous”
rather than illusory, and that our problems lie in having to employ “ordinary
mundane usage” rather than in the inherent inadequacy of human thought
and language. At the end of the day, however, his argument for the ministry
of women is based upon the independence at the expense of the connection.
If the words and concepts we use for God are diaphanous (which I think is
an accurate way to speak of them), then they must in some way partake of the
reality they describe. If they are independent, then they cannot. One may
have both at once only by accepting a paradox in which human words and concepts
are both equal and not equal to the task—something I think orthodox
theologians do instinctively. But if one does this he must play fair and not
attempt to claim that in one theological instance this is the case while in
another it isn’t. You cannot say that the language of theology may be
true and meaningful (this is implied by Dr. Torrance’s willingness to
write theology in the first place), and then turn around and claim that in
the case of using Father and Son to describe God we must suspend the rules
for a bit to make theological terminology independent of the reality it portrays.
2. In the Odyssey the shades in Hades
cannot speak with Odysseus until they have drunk of the blood of the animals
he brings. Perhaps the intuition that discourse is a gift gained through sacrifice
is deeply fixed in the heart of the race.
3. “I am a Christian, therefore discard nothing human.” Terence’s
original: “Homo sum . . . .”
4. Utterances of a professedly apophatic theology should be treated with
profound suspicion, bearing intense scrutiny for Gnostic elements before they
are “passed” for Christian use. I would suggest that they very
point at which they show themselves false is where the symbols in which the
greater theology must reveal itself are destructively subsumed. Dionysius
says that “In the humanity of Christ the super-essential was manifested
in human substance without ceasing to be hidden after this manifestation,
or, to express myself after a more heavenly fashion, in this manifestation
itself” [cited in Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern
Church (Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary
Press, 1976), 39]. This, to my mind, is a nearly perfect example of formally
correct apophatic and kataphatic superimposition. The solidly iconic persists
(“manifested in human substance”), within the greater sphere of
the “super-essential.” I do not know of an aspect of theology
where the theologian must exercise greater care in thinking or caution in
articulation. The “essential” and the “super-essential”
must both be put forward, yet without erosion of one by the other.
—S. M. Hutchens
