Sarx

ONG TIME Friend and reader of these pages, Fr E, in his current post on Scripture, Tradition, and Ecumenical Councils (Part 5 of a series that is informed by our reading of Clement) contains this line:

In other words, our definition of Christ is composed of four negatives without confusion, without change, without division, without separation. The reason for the four negatives was that there was no way to express who Jesus is using a “positive” description.

This Apophatic approach – negative rather than positive – is one of the key tactics of the Church Fathers and Mothers of the undivided church and continues to be used by (I think) smarter folks in both East and West. Still, it must be admitted that, for the majority of us, the usual experience of the Church is, essentially, a positive theology and a negative morality.

Back in the spring of 1983, Ms Minka Sprague (as she then was, a Doctoral Fellow at General Seminary – now the Rev Dr) did a programme with the Province II Youth. In that weekend-long, multi-part discussion was this line: “In the old creation we said ‘No’ unless there was a good reason to say ‘yes’. In the New Creation we say ‘yes’ unless there is a good reason to say ‘no’.”

To which Fr E replies (via his post) that we can’t point at what Tradition is but we can point at what it is not.

In the readings from The Roots of Christian Mysticism I was struck by Clement’s idea that even modern Atheism could (should?) be seen as an apophatic cleansing of our theology. How many times have you listened to one of the smarter Atheists speak about some religion called “Christianity” only to discover that it had nothing to do with what you believed? Or, even more to the point, how many times have you heard one of the folks who have left the Church (for some other religion or path) explain why they left… only to discover that what they are talking about has nothing to do with Church?

How often are they running away from a religion that became so overly defined, so picky, so minutely detailed in the description of it that they had no room to grow, to live, even? Mind you – I know that often these folks have no theological idea about Church, Incarnation, etc. That’s the point. What they were fed, usually, is a petty morality that passes for religion in the modern world, rather than the idea of a living Tradition that is, in fact, Freedom to those who partake of it rather than oppression.

But it is a tradition generally defined in the negative – not by what may not be done, but by what is not.

And that negative proceeds up to and including God. We say God is all these things: but we need to be able to say God is not these things. Modern Atheism can or even should be seen as a challenge to a sort of theological Spring Cleaning and an invitation to Rest in the God who is at once unknowable and one of us; at once the transcendent Creator God of all that is and as close to us as a babe laying in a crib, wrapped in warm towels or at his Mother’s breast or in his Daddy’s arms.