Being a summary of the first part of Divine Teaching: An Introduction to Christian Theology. Mark A. McIntosh. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008.
Preface
ix-x Christians think that God is the ‘real teacher of theology, that we are trying to learn directly from God when doing theology.
Part I Becoming a Theologian
Ch 1 How God Makes Theologians
3 God is beyond our grasp. Theology, like the study of art or music, is not meant to replace God but to sensitise us to her. Astonishment is a virtue for theologians because God is surprising. Other ‘research virtues’ (5) are required, as doing theology leads to ‘a new way of being, new habits of existence that fit you for your study encounters.’ 6 Faith, hope and love are the essential research values. As you are changed in order to better understand your object of study (God) you end up being taught by God. Aquinas says these virtues ‘are the way God’s life re-creates a human life as that human life partakes in God’s life.’ The ‘transformations of their own lives’ may be the best way to express the God they try to communicate about.
God’s impact on the early church community was seen as an expression of Jesus’ ongoing life, brought about by the Spirit and directed to the Father. These three are the source of theology.
A commentary on Rom 6.3-11 offers ‘clues about what it’s like to encounter God’ (7). Christ’s death and resurrection are seen as sharable. The Father’s glory appears in history as resurrection: a death to old patterns and a raising to new ones. A commentary on Rom 8.9-11, 14-17 furthers this: it is Jesus’ pattern of life that becomes the basis for ours. The Spirit is sent by the Father to enable this just as it was for Jesus, so the community stands in some sense in relation to Father as Jesus did.
13 ‘theology is really a form of prayer or communion with God, in which, ultimately, the thinking of the theologian about God comes to life as God’s presence within the life of the theologian.’
13-15 McIntosh then discusses whether you can study theology without believing. His answer is yes, but you won’t really understand it if you do not realise that Christians think they are doing theology out of an experience of encountering God. Theology should not be reduced to the terms of other disciplines. Theology pursues ‘an aspect of reality that some other disciplines may not’ handle so well.
Ch 2 Strange Calling: Theologians as Adventurers, Pirates, Mystics, and Sages
Adventure as the ‘continuing conversion of the theologian’ because God is beyond what we can grasp, we must ‘escape the tidy prison of [our] small certainties’ (16).
Piracy as the doctrine of analogy: we ‘commandeer’ language ‘from ordinary speech and use it to explore into a reality beyond our imagining.’ (19). According to Thomas (20) God herself is the ‘very “thinking” by which’ we think about God, and our language for naming God is somehow more alive than we expected, ‘perhaps suggesting that God is the self-naming, self-disclosing activity which is the hidden source of human naming of God.’
In the section entitled ‘Mystical Life: Interpreting Reality in Terms of God’, McIntosh uses the analogy of being a character in a play who manages to meet a person that is the living voice of the author, to suggest that being with Christ ‘leads to the conversion of people towards the truth of the author’s desire for them all.’ (22). But given our distortions as people the ‘rediscovery of one’s true identity…will entail a death’ and then a resurrection. Here he provides commentary on Col 2.20-3.4 to flesh this out.
‘It is not so much thinking about theological topics that really constitutes theology; for distinguishable from this is the means by which the theological mind reflects. And a truly theological mind…is a mind that has begun to be shaped and attuned to God’s way of thinking and living.’ (24). This involves sensing the hidden presence of God in all things. It is not that things do not have their own reality, they do and can be studied in terms of chemical composition or cultural significance or whatever, but ‘theology wants to consider all these things, indeed everything, precisely in terms of each thing’s mystical identity as a character in the play of the universe, or, to use standard theological language, as a creature that is ceaselessly spoken by the Creator.’ (25).
This approach was developed in the early church partly in following ancient philosophy (he references Hardot): ‘what is essential is the way of life and spiritual exercises by which a person grows and deepens in his or her character and becomes capable of more profound understanding.’ (25).
We encounter the divine speaking in things as their ‘meaning or truth’, their ‘inner logic’. This was called natural contemplation in the early church (see, e.g. Evagrius in the Philokalia vol. 1), hearing the Logos through the logoi of creatures. In our age we would hear these at first as an economic principle or a chemical formula, but if we can sense their createdness we will begin to see traces of God in the world.
Natural contemplation is training for what the early church called ‘theology’: contemplating God directly. The meaning we see in a creature becomes open to the divine thought/Logos; the light in which we see is ‘God’s own radiance.’ (26). McIntosh explains this with an analogy of visiting an art gallery: he enjoys the paintings and he has some vague ideas about what they might mean, but he’s quite limited in understanding. But suppose one day he visits with a painter and art historian who explains to him how she thinks about art. He would see things he’d never noticed before, even though he’s looking at exactly the same physical objects. Through the new ideas and approaches shared with him by the painter, eh could understand and perceive much more than before, by thinking after or with her.
28 Theology is constituted more by its form – thinking ‘by means of God’s own thinking’ (27) – than its content/matter – which could be any subject at all. The universe has a kind of rational structure, it is understandable, and our minds share in that, and all of this is a mirror of the divine reason and truthfulness. God is trying to draw us into the full vision of truthfulness in the universe. Sharing God’s thoughts, in the limited way we can, is called wisdom. Wisdom enables one to be so imbued with understanding of a particular matter that one can get to a particular truth almost intuitively. McIntosh uses the example of a great teacher who can walk into a class and after observing for a little while and talking to the teacher and students, sees things that other people miss. ‘Christians believe that God, in many and various ways, has been able to share with humanity some of the fundamental principles or ideas God has – including, especially, Jesus as the incarnation of the eternal Idea or Word in which everything is “thought” by God. Christian theology attempts to clarify what God’s teaching is, what the divine ideas are, and then tries to use them to think with – as the principles of wisdom by means of which to understand things…Thus the goal would be to become so intuitively formed by the divine teaching that one is able in a new way to see its implications, i.e., what light it sheds, in any given circumstances.’ (29). [c.f. Louth on the tradition as tacit knowledge]
32 McIntosh summarises the skills of the theologian as ‘risking reality beyond the neatly knowable (adventure), thinking into the unthinkable by way of analogy (piracy), transformational attending to the hidden presence of God (mystical life), and discerning the truth of everything by means of God’s ideas about it (wisdom).’
Ch 3 Divine Teaching and Christian Beliefs
McIntosh distinguishes between the faith a community accepts (its beliefs) and its act of faith. He concentrates on the latter in this chapter. He claims that (1) Christian beliefs are a ‘training or apprenticeship while human understanding of God is growing, (2) that they are pedagogical tools in the hands of the master teacher, namely God, (3) that they therefore have a most peculiar quality of working in the mind like the ideas of a more informed teacher or friend – ideas that one doesn’t yet completely grasp but which nonetheless being (as one “tries them on”) to make sense of things, and (4) that while one might attempt to demonstrate the intelligibility of these beliefs (i.e., show that they’re not nonsensical), they are not primarily intended as a means to prove the truth of faith to a rational certainty but rather as a means for sharing more and more in the life of God.’
Since God is not a creature, but language and all it refers to are, so what we say about God is either an inadequate idea that we mistake for the reality of God, hence idolatry, or an inadequate concept that we use humbly to point to God who is completely beyond us, and therefore an analogy.
So theology, apart from its divine source, is weak. The danger is that we take things into our own hands and close off our language from God. We must be open about theology’s inability to really explain or grasp God – theology doesn’t really know what it’s on about – but that very inadequacy can be the means by which ‘human speech about God is transfigured into God’s speech.’ (34). This is what happened supremely in the incarnation and can still happen now.
Christian beliefs are a ‘training or apprenticeship while human understanding of God is growing’. We lean on God’s ideas as we begin to understand them more and think by means of them. The church’s life, reading of scripture, worship and teaching are the medium for God’s meaning to teach us. He uses an analogy of visiting a students room: at first you see shoes, pictures, dust, but it doesn’t mean much. Later, when you know her much better, you know that picture was of a holiday her family took before her dad died, the shoes are one she won races in last summer, the dust is there because she spends so much time at the library and homeless shelter rather than a result of indolence. When you know her, that knowledge changes how you see her room. Theology is looking at the world with knowledge of God. Theology is ‘an undergoing of the divine, an allowing of one’s own thinking to be addressed and re-schematized by the divine thinking.’ (37).
47f discusses Locke and modernity’s idea that faith must be assessed by reason to know if it’s correct. But theology is mean to break us out of our reason where it is oppressive. A better test of theology’s ‘legitimacy and integrity that does not predetermine the forms of thought in which theologians venture out’ would ‘examine the kind of persons’ theology made of people. This requires a unity between theory and practice (again he cites Hardot).
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