'My personal idea of God'

SHANNON

So the next Sunday when I climbed into the pulpit and looked down over all of those smug, disapproving, accusing faces uplifted, I had an impulse to shake them—so I shook them. I had a prepared sermon—meek, apologetic—I threw it away, tossed it into the chancel. Look here, I said, I shouted, I'm tired of conducting services in praise and worship of a senile delinquent—yeah, that's what I said, I shouted! All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent and, by God, I will not and cannot continue to conduct services in praise and worship of this, this . . . this. . . . 

HANNAH

[quietly]

Senile delinquent? 

SHANNON

Yeah, this angry, petulant old man. I mean he's represented like a bad-tempered childish old, old, sick, peevish man—I mean like the sort of old man in a nursing home that's putting together a jigsaw puzzle and can't put it together and gets furious at it and kicks over the table. Yes, I tell you they do that, all our theologies do it—accuse God of being a cruel, senile delinquent, blaming the world and brutally punishing all he created for his own faults in construction, and then, ha-ha, yeah—a thunderstorm broke that Sunday. . . . 

HANNAH

You mean outside the church? 

SHANNON

Yep, it was wilder than I was! And out they slithered, they slithered out of their pews to their shiny black cockroach sedans, ha-ha, and I shouted after them, hell, I even followed them halfway out of the church, shouting after them as they. . . . [He stops with a gasp for breath.] 

HANNAH

Slithered out? 

SHANNON

I shouted after them, go on, go home and close your house windows, all your windows and doors, against the truth about God! 

HANNAH

Oh, my heavens. Which is just what they did—poor things. 

SHANNON

Miss Jelkes honey, Pleasant Valley, Virginia was an exclusive suburb of a large city and these poor things were not poor—materially speaking. 

HANNAH

[smiling a bit]

What was the, uh, upshot of it? 

SHANNON

Upshot of it? Well, I wasn't defrocked. I was just locked out of the church in Pleasant Valley, Virginia, and put in a nice little private asylum to recuperate from a complete nervous breakdown as they preferred to regard it, and then, and then I . . . I entered my present line—tours of God's world conducted by a minister of God with a cross and a round collar to prove it. Collecting evidence! 

HANNAH

Evidence of what, Mr. Shannon? 

SHANNON

[a touch slyly now]

My personal idea of God, not as a senile delinquent, but as a. . . . 

HANNAH

Incomplete sentence.

—Tennessee Williams, The Night of the Iguana (1961)

Is it not enough to believe?

It is often said: Why philosophize about the divine matters; is it not enough to believe in them and feel them? Certainly, it is enough ... in the absence of intellectual interest on the part of him who believes and feels. It is equivalent to saying: Is it not enough to believe that the sun exists, and to delight in its light and warmth? Why should we have any physical or astronomical theories about the sun or the solar system? They are not, of course, necessary for those who have no scientific interest. But on what grounds should the limitations of some people be made a law for all? If man has faith in the divine matters, and if at the same time he has the capacity as well as the need for thinking, then of necessity he must think about the objects of his faith ...

—Vladimir Soloviev, Lectures on Godmanhood (1878)

the real vocation of a theologian

For Balthasar, challenging misremembering is essential to the contemporary theological task. Challenging Hegelian thought is absolutely crucial, since this discourse represents the most powerful act of misremembering that Christianity encounters in the modern world....Still, important as the enterprise is, it is not on a par with the real vocation of the theologian, which is remembering the live voices of the tradition as they witness to the mystery of the triune God revealed in Christ, and as they attest to the logic of love.

—Cyril O'Regan, The Anatomy of Misremembering (2014)

Myth, History, Theology

[Ian] Davie has an interesting section where he talks about the nature of mythological and poetic writing—which is the genre of the Vedas and other early Hindu scriptures on which the later, more philosophical commentaries were based. Having distinguished the vertical (ontological) dimension from the horizontal (historical, empirical), he explains that the "vertical" is always best expressed in poetry and myth. This leads him to deplore the "demythologization" of religion. In a theological context, he says, the word "mythology" means "the horizontal (i.e., spatio-temporal) representation of a vertical (i.e., eternal) truth: when there is no vertical dimension, I would want to say we are dealing, not with theological myth, but with theological fable."

The theological method... is neither one nor the other; neither mythological nor historical, but a combination of both. Thus it uses history as a critique of myth, and myth as a critique of history; for the whole theological purport of myth is to indicate the limits of history, to elicit from the mythological language (which it necessarily uses in speaking of events which are transhistorical, in the exact sense that they are limits of history) a sense of what lies beyond history, the "beyond" of all time.

—Ian Davie's Jesus Purusha, quoted in Stratford Caldecott, The Radiance of Being: Dimensions of Cosmic Christianity (2013)

The Vocation of a Systematic Theologian

I took the pieces you threw away and put them togather by night and day. Washed by rain, dried by sun, a million pieces all in one.

—Howard Finster, Folk Artist (20th Century)

'absolute dependence upon the spirit of the times'

No one perhaps has said it better than Karl Barth who observed with pointed irony that the more a theologian wishes to be considered a pure biblicist, disdaining the Church, her dogma and tradition, the more surely he ends "in absolute dependence upon the spirit of the times."

—Henri de Lubac, A Brief Catechesis on Nature & Grace (1980)

Theology's proper concern

For theology's proper concern is with the supernatural mystery of "things divine as they are in themselves" (res divinae prout sunt in se). This is not to say that theology is able to make the supernatural mysteries of faith comprehensible, that it succeeds where philosophy fails. On the contrary, for Przywara, following Augustine, theology is precisely a reductio in mysterium, "an entry into the mystery of God in order more deeply 'to grasp his incomprehensibility as such.'"...theology is, properly speaking, a reduction to the Deus tamquam ignotus of Aquinas and to the "superluminous darkness" of the Areopagite. And so, while theology is always already positively "in" philosophy, it is always also "beyond" its grasp; hence Przywara's succinct formula "theology in-and-beyond philosophy."

—John Betz, "After Barth: A New Introduction to Erich Przywara's Analogia Entis (2011)

theology means...

At the very least, theology means 'watching one's language in the presence of God.'

—Gerald O'Collins, Jesus Our Redeemer (2007)