Last week a piece by Stanley Hauerwas appeared on ABC’s Religion and Ethics about ‘naming God’. Hauerwas opens by commending to his readers a quotation from Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology: “God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead, having before raised Israel from Egypt.” Such a claim, he suggests, “requires that we discipline our presumption that we know what we are saying when we say the word ‘God.’” The article unfolds from here, as Dr. Hauerwas explores the dangers of and biblical checks to the human inclination to name God.
He also, however, threw in some remarks about the popular atheist writers and thinkers of our day:
Indeed, one of the ironies of the recent spate of books defending atheism is the confidence these “new atheists” seem to have in knowing which God it is they are sure does not exist. They have forgotten that one of the crimes of which Romans accused Christians – a crime whose punishment was often death – was that Christians were atheists… depending on which god or gods the new atheists think they are denying, they might discover that Christians are not unsympathetic with their atheism.
If one only read the online comments on this article, one would think that this was the heart of the piece–which it is not. However, the comments also reveal how easily Hauerwas’s position is misunderstood. For instance, one commenter wrote:
I am confused. What is a God? What properties must a concept have before it is safe to proclaim it a God?
How about: “omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent”. Is that not sufficient? If so, I suggest that all atheists do not believe in such a God.
This person, like many others, has missed the point… and I think people are misunderstanding Hauerwas here because they do not know Barth.
In his essay “The First Commandment as an Axiom of Theology,” Karl Barth emphasizes again and again the dissimilarities between this ‘axiom of theology’–You shall have no other gods before me!–and the axiomatic presuppositions of the other scientific disciplines. One key distinction is the first commandment’s character as “words addressed by one person to another.” These words were addressed first to the Israelites at Sinai and are today addressed to any and every hearer. An address is fundamentally relational; it binds the hearer in relation to the speaker as ‘the one for whom this word is meant’. So the commandment, addressing all, calls all who hear it into relation to God as those for whom this commandment is meant.
What is the point of all of this? For Barth, theological truths are never independent, “abstracted from persons and from time.”
Stanley Hauerwas is a intellectual grandchild of Karl Barth. (Entering Perkins library at Duke University, one might notice a “Duke Reads” poster hanging on the wall, with a shot of Hauerwas holding a volume of the Church Dogmatics.) If you do not get this point, you will not understand Barth, nor will you understand Hauerwas here.
Any “concept” of God that one can posit–for example, “a being that is omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent”–is not the God we meet in Jesus Christ. This is because God is not a concept, to be known and appraised abstractly. God is only known relationally. Terms like ‘omnipotent’ may have their uses, but as soon as this or any other word is used to define our God, you are talking about some other god. The “Unknown God” (Acts 17:23)–a phrase Barth uses often–is never determined by language or ideas. Instead, for the clearest and truest descriptions of God, we must look back to the point where Hauerwas began, to those works through which God reveals something of himself, where God is found in relation to the world: “God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead, having before raised Israel from Egypt.”
In Jesus Christ, we see the theological truth “God.” In Christ we meet God in relation to persons and time. In Christ we know the God who claims us with Lordship. If the atheist will confront the Christian God, they must begin by looking at the man on the cross. If they look anywhere else, to something “called the highest being or the absolute spirit or even God” then they might discover that Christians are not unsympathetic with their atheism.
Great post, Nance!
Explains how there can be Christian Objectivist and Leftist Libertarians. Polar complements are not contradictions but the tension that exists at the edge of chaos. Christ is real and no abstraction, however circumspect and problematic our relationship. Such a God speaks in a voice that can be heard by those able to hear. We are not excused from studying to show ourselves approved nor to neglect reason, history, and science.
I am reminded of the beginning of Apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, as he corrects the behaviour of the Christians in Corinth. It seems they were setting up a concept, that appeared wise to them (i.e. Paul is better than Apollos, or Cephas); an ‘idea’ or ‘thought’ that instantly brought division among them. Paul appeals to the stupidity of God: his Son crucified in weakness and failure; to remind the believers that God is unlike their ideas of him.
Can we approach God, as though we are able to somehow comprehend his mind?
Reading Barth’s commentary on Romans – it seems a good starting point for an academic is to wipe the board clean… and wait. Perhaps we can cautiously gravitate towards perceiving God’s man of revelation: Jesus the Christ. Yet even then we must hope rather than possess; encounter rather than presume; be shocked and shattered rather than confirmed.
We depend on God to appear to us; this is His way.