GETTING READY FOR a new church year, getting ready for the year of reading and thinking about what Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, I've been listening to his lectures - unfortunately most of them very low-fi - and his interviews and what other people who knew him or studied his books said about him. One of the most credible of those is his daughter, the wonderful scholar of not only Judaism but also Christianity, Susannah Heschel. I learned a lot more about the crisis of 20th century Christianity from her than I did from most Christian writers.
During a sleepless night I was thinking about what she said about how, when he came to work in the United States that he was among a faculty of highly systematic scholars who didn't take him seriously because he wrote in long, flowing sentences that didn't necessarily follow in a clear, straight path as modern scholarship does. My first reaction was that considering the importance of the Prophets to his scholarship, the topic of his Doctoral dissertation and one of his most important books, it's fitting that he might use a more poetic and less academic form of discourse. I don't remember if it was she or another one who commented on that who pointed out that today he's the one who gets read as the more academically prim and respectable scholars of his time, not so much.
That has matched my attempts at reading theology, systematic theology is both unrewarding to me and the most problematic of all because it is folly from the start. The idea to encapsulate God into a system guarantees several things.
First, the failure to do so because God cannot possibly be captured in any human being's OR ALL HUMAN BEINGS' thoughts and imaginings. If God or even one aspect of God's thought is the subject matter of any theological program, the intention to encapsulate it in "a whole" and exhaustive system is certain to fail. The same thing for physicists claiming to be able to find a "theory of everything" and all of the various totalistic ideologies, materialism being one of the worst of those.
Second, any description of God arrived at will not be God, it will be an idol. The non-physical idol will be worse than a graven image because while few would be foolish enough to take an object as God, many more will pretend that they've got God nailed down. That anyone who takes the Scriptures seriously would make that attempt is remarkable because if there's something made clear in those that cannot be done.
Third, real life will be mostly squeezed out of consideration because real life cannot be contained in any system, no matter how complete it is imagined to be. Poetry doesn't cover it all, in its meandering, insinuating methods of expression which academic totalism cannot begin to match in its inclusiveness. The academic method inevitably ignores or puts aside things that can't fit into its schemes or which is beside the point of the one using it. There are good reasons that memorable prophesy is written in poetry and that's one of the bigger ones. This problem is far from a merely academic one, it damages real lives of real People and it discredits those who attempt it. One glaring example is the Catholic hierarchy's attempt to straight-jacket peoples' sex lives and reproductive lives into a misguided attempt to apply patriarchal, sexist classical Greek philosophical systematic beliefs, distorting the Scripture to fit it, resulting in a very large majority of Catholics ignoring what those celibate males declare about it. Something which will, increasingly, be forced by the Supreme Court and Republican-fascists on to the rest of the country. Something which I hope will prove their downfall once and for all.
Fourth, the claims of that theology, if adopted by a church or a large number of people, the system, itself will gain far more importance than the lives of people and the experience of real life. The system becomes an idol. That is and has long been one of the idolatries of the Catholic Church but not only the Catholic Church. The same thing happens in secular, "civic religion" and certainly in legal systems. And people die as a result. That's especially the case in the moralistic monotheistic religions. It would be good to know how many people died for some unimportant aspect of medieval theology that is contradicted by the Gospel of Jesus, the apostolic letters, etc. That there are a number of those which could be counted proves what a bad idea it all was.
I will say that I am glad to be going with Heschel this year instead of the other philosophical theologian I'd first considered, systematic theology seems to me to be generally misguided. The useful content of it is too often sacrificed to the overall systematic scheme. I should have realized that when I first looked at Aquinas, there's good stuff in some of it, some pretty bad stuff, too, much of that inspired by pagan Greek philosophy, but the good stuff gets distorted if you take his scheme into account. It reportedly took a profound mystical experience to show Aquinas the folly of his ways, that all of his previous work was mere "straw." Didn't keep the post-reformation Council from making that pile of straw into the hard and fast law of the Catholic Church. And now several members of the Supreme Court belong to a pseudo-religio-political cult that wants to impose an oligarchy enabling form of it to be the civil law of the United States. At least I strongly suspect that might figure into the excuses they give to do evil unto others. It will have nothing to do with The Law, the Prophets, the Gospel or the Epistles.
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