The Paradox Is This . . . What God Does Is Both Determinate And Free

IN DOING SOME RESEARCH for my little series on addressing Abraham Joshua Heschel's essay No Religion Is An Island, I listened to an always fine and informed, well thought out and well articulated talk by The Reverend Rowan Williams on Revelation and Interreligious Dialogue.   I wasn't expecting to hear something right off that impinged on the topics of my recent dialogues with the irreligious, especially about the limits of human understanding of the material world and its relationship with the human minds that are the only possible means of us knowing and addressing the material world OR OUR OWN MINDS, THEMSELVES, and that whatever the relationship of the one or the other was, the materialists trying to force their ideological view on that had the paradoxical effect of debunking, discrediting and destroying the very things they claimed to be doing that on behalf of, the science that they deify in their scientism, the material world that the insist is the limit of existence but which is knowable to them only through the mind they just got done debunking and the atheism which is the real motive for them doing both which, if honestly addressed is certainly not supported by what they claim.   

One of the self-defeating tactics used by them is certainly their insistence on the foundations of science being able to address their task, logic, itself known to imperfectly mesh with that other foundation of science, mathematics.  Logic can't even support their primary claims made about science because the claim that science is the only method of us knowing the truth cannot be demonstrated scientifically.  Nor can the other members of their blasted trinity in the SAM religion be supported within the limits they set for reality. 

I transcribed the first few minutes of Rowan Williams' talk because it is stunningly honest, stunningly modest and stunningly relevant to the brawl I'm having with the SAMians who are not honest, modest or prone to the kind of self-reflective rigor that is found entirely more often among theologians than it is among even materialist philosophers.

When we think about revelation in the context of inter-faith dialogue an immediate problem seems to present itself. Surely, claims to revelation are claims that here, and here exclusively is the act of God and elsewhere a whole series of human attempts to reach God.  Here is God being active, the God of the Scriptures the God of the creeds. The God who makes decisions and commits God's Self to courses of action in the world.  And there is the world of religious striving.  For which, if you wanted to be unkind, God sits with His arms crossed, waiting for something to happen.  What I want to do in these reflections this evening is to work out with you why that is not a helpful or a truthful paradigm if we look at what we mean both by revelation and divine action. And there is one point that might be made right at the start of this reflection about revelation and divine action.

The paradox is this.  To speak of a God who reveals God is certainly to speak of divine action, to speak of divine freedom.  And, thus, what God does is both determinate and free. The God who acts out of freedom is also the God who cannot be contained in what God says or delivers.  And there's the paradox.

If we're serious in talking about divine revelation, we are surely talking about the revelation of what cannot be completely and definitively possessed.  The tightrope between those two poles of paradox has been walked with varying degrees of elegance by theologians, philosophers and contemplatives for quite a few thousand years.  But it doesn't do to forget that tension is built-in as soon as we begin to associate revelation with the act of God. 

The first thing to say is that this is the best explanation of something Walter Brueggemann constantly talks about and which I admit I hadn't much consider, the Freedom of God and its surpassing of our expectations of what God will do and has done.  I have a far better idea of what he means by that now than I did before I listened to Rowan Williams, for which I am very grateful.   I also understand now that it is impossible for any humanly understood revelation to be entirely satisfactory because it is a revelation of something far larger than human understanding can encompass.  Just as I believe the material universe can never be anything like totally understood by even all of human beings considered as a mythical whole.

And if anyone knows of any scientistic, atheistic materialist who has been as honest about the central issues of their faith, let me know so I can read what that marvelous, completely atypical  oddity has said on it. 

As an Irish Catholic (now Catholic +) who in my late middle aged study of the English Poor Law and the English domination of the Irish and others became even more opposed to the BBC romantic view of the Tudor and Stuart crime families and the Anglican religion that started with them and such disreputable thugs as Thomas Cranmer,  getting over my prejudices in that regard to come to a sheer and enormous respect and affection for Church of England members such as Rowan Williams has been a lot of hard work.  I can't claim that it's the prejudice that was hardest to overcome but it's up there with the one against Calvinists and white evangelicalism and Catholic integralism.  In light of what Rowan Williams said, modest self-reflection is always correct when dealing with the fragility of our grasp of revelation and its complete inadequacy in light of the Freedom of God.