Theology, the attempt to make sense of reality on the assumption that God exists, is both a task to which we are inwardly driven and a ridiculous impossibility.

Drivenness

Our drivenness arises from the fact that we are incurable systematisers. From infancy we order and re-order our experiences of life. This compulsive mapping of reality, while highlighting one source of our creative genius, is also a revelation of the major pathology from which we suffer, an endemic insecurity. It fuels what Karl Rahner described as our "mental concupiscence."¹

An Impossible Task

The fact that theology is ultimately an impossible exercise is obvious from a number of factors.

The Process

The first relates to the way we know.

Due to the influence of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, whom de Bono has cheekily dubbed "the gang of three,"² theology, or making sense of reality, has been an almost exclusively mental exercise. Furthermore, theology, as mental reflection, has been dominated by Aristotelian logic, a formal, analytical, discriminating, truth-testing procedure. While logic challenges our woolly thinking, our self-justifying ideologies, our scientific hypothesis, and, as mathematics, offers tentative models of our intuitive hunches, it has its shadow side. There is a tacit arrogance in its claim to be the final arbiter of what is real.

The problem for theology is that, while it has argued that experience contributes significantly to the theological enterprise, experience does not come to us uninterpreted. There is no sheer experience. That which accosts us, from within or without, is interpreted in the process of being experienced. Interpretive frameworks shape the experience. Different people experience the same phenomenon differently. A healthy extrovert and a psychotic will react differently to the approach of a distant figure.

We have inherited a tradition of theology that has been dominated by what C.G. Jung has called the 'thinking function,"³ and particularly by Aristotelian logic. As a consequence, when we reflect theologically about life, the experiences that we bring to be processed, the interpretative framework into which we try to integrate them and the method of analysis [1] that we use to determine validity, reliability and internal consistency, bias the exercise in favour of cognitive inputs and outcomes.

Knowing is not an exclusively mental exercise, as Jung and the Feminists remind us. Feeling, sensation, intuition, bodily apperception all play a critical role. Mental cognition, particularly logic, is an indispensable analytical tool. However, when it assumes the guise of an ideology, reducing other ways of knowing and verification to subservience, it becomes presumptuous, fatuous and demonic. Furthermore, there are other approaches to discernment that suggest that reality is beyond our capacity to map and that the either/or stance of formal logic leads to perceptual distortion.

The apophatic tradition of Christian mysticism, which seeks God in forms of contemplative prayer that avoid the use of imaging, urges us to release reality from the false categories we impose upon it. Instead of trying to control it by mapping and naming it, we need to surrender ourselves into its control, a control that, paradoxically, engenders freedom. It is a matter of knowing reality in the disconcerting experience of its knowing of us, its embrace of us, an embrace that constitutes us.

We encounter reality, not as detached observers, but in the context of flux, of movement, in the experience of becoming. As the Johannine Jesus indicated to Nicodemus, the Spirit, like the air, is experienced in its movement. There is a sense in which the knowing is destroyed when the experience begins to be reflected upon, when it is taken apart, when the petals are torn from the flower for dissection. The "Suchness" of reality is beyond the duality, or false separation of object and observer. Zen seeks to help us experience the seamless texture of this Suchness by bombarding our paradigms of reality with unanswerable questions. It is this ultimately imponderable Suchness that frustrates our cognitive knowing.

Theology is often described as a second order activity, that is, as a reflection on first order experience. The problem with much theology is that it has arisen, not from unrestricted human experience, but from reflection on reflection. Perhaps, if it could recover its original essence as prayer, or divinity, it would come closer to reflecting the reality it purports to map. Instead of being a matrix of limit statements, it would open out to embrace plurality, multiplicity and mystery.

Because of the complexity of the process of knowing, we need to approach the impossible theological task with humility, recognizing that, in spite of our knowledge and academic competencies, the result will appear crude and amateurish.⁴ We will never fully understand human nature. It is even more difficult for us to fathom the secrets of the universe. It is utterly impossible for us to come near to understanding the abyss of potentiality that is God.⁵ [2]

The Object of Knowledge

The impossibility of the theological task relates, not only to the process of knowing, but also to the nature of what we seek to know.

When we speak about knowing we are usually referring to cognitive mapping. This definitive mapping is a sophisticated process of naming. By naming we seek control over the unknown. If we cannot identify, or put a name to an illness, we are more insecure than we would be if we could name it, even where the condition is terminal.

Theological definition is an exercise in naming, an exercise that seeks control over what is named. Reality, or God, however, cannot be named, in the sense of being controlled. We have some control over our images of God, as cognitive constructs, although even they are elusive, slippery. However, when we attempt to manipulate, and, therefore, control the God we imagine inhabits our images, through theological sleights of hand or appeasing or flattering behaviours, the reality that is God ultimately escapes our grasp.

I have talked about experiencing God. But how do we know that what we experience is the God we talk about? Can we be certain that there is a reality beyond our subjective experience? If we could determine that there was such a reality, could we prove that this reality is what we seek to identify as God. Is there any way of measuring God against our images of God? Ultimately, the answer to all these questions is "No!" We cannot know for certain that there is a God, nor can we know what God is like. This is what the mystics of all traditions have always known. Such an admission, however, is not equivalent to saying that there is no God.

These questions have been raised with fresh insistence by Post-structuralism, by new hermeneutical challenges represented by Derrida, Foucault, Lacan and feminists, like Chris Weedon. They question the notion of essence, challenge the claim to ultimacy of all truth systems and ask, somewhat rhetorically, whether the concealed opportunities for self-definition, hidden, like viruses, within the rhetoric of all colonising ideologies, do not render philosophy and theology innocuously relativistic, if not inane. The challenge is real, even if Deconstructionists can themselves be charged with myopic reductionism, with claiming ultimacy for a system that challenges all claims to ultimacy, with parasitism and with excluding Deconstruction, as a total anti-system, from the need to be deconstructed.

The Inquirer

I have argued that theology is an impossible exercise because of the nature of our knowing and because of the nature of that which we seek to know. The situation of the knower also makes it impossible.

Apart from what brain researchers tell us about the different ways in which the circuitry of men and women's brains are laid down, and therefore the different ways in which they attend to phenomena and image what is perceived, account has also to be taken of familial and cultural factors that [3] impose pre-fabricated interpretive grids on our perceptions and reflections. Theology is informed and bedevilled by these schemata. It is never free of pre-emptive bias.

The process of knowing God is further complicated by psychological factors within ourselves. Our images of God are burdened with our projections. We read in God's face our silent judgements on ourselves. We transfer to God positive and negative responses we have developed towards our parents.

Until we identify these projections and transferences as part of ourselves, until we own them as our distortions, we cannot begin to experience God as God is in God's own self. This re-owning, if it occurs, is slow and progressive, and involves simultaneously the gradual integration of the diverse elements of our inner reality. These are not merely two parallel developments, however. There is also a circularity about them. The more we are in touch with God, the more we are centred in our subjective and social reality. The more grounded we are in our essence, the more capable we are of experiencing the divine.

However, in spite of our commitment to identify and re-own our projections, our experience of God can never be entirely free of these overlays. This means that our theologising, even where theology resembles the sort of contemplative prayer that is a soaking in of Presence, can never be pure science or unalloyed art.

The Impossibility of Knowing Everything About Everything

If it were possible, as Rousseau erroneously suggested in Emile, to be completely free of social, and, therefore, personal bias, prejudice and distortion, it would still need to be stated that no single individual could know everything about everything. To put this statement in the form of a question, we could ask, what would it take to know absolutely? Or, how would we know that we finally knew absolutely?

If theology has always been an inherently impossible task, over recent years, the degree of difficulty facing the theologian has increased significantly.

The sheer range of material to be digested and integrated is overwhelming. Theology, defined broadly, is comprised of a plethora of sub-disciplines, each with its own methodology, which it holds in common with cognate secular disciplines. These methodologies differ from each other with respect to presuppositions, to what is allowed to count as evidence, to what is considered legitimate content, to semantic conventions, to linguistic norms, not to mention more minor scholarly pre-requisites, such as methods of footnoting. Edward Farley drew attention to these centrifugal energies in Theologia.⁶ Most theologians admit to little more than some competency within a narrow focus in the context of a single sub-discipline. This does not prevent them, however, from seeking a tentative resolution by a reductionism that privileges perspectives they consider important, such as [4] that related to traditional orthodoxies, to psychotherapeutic insights or to the current fascination with an orthopraxy focused almost exclusively on social justice.

Allied to the difficulty posed by the diverse range of theological sub- disciplines, is the paralysis induced by the presence of a bewildering range of secular disciplines with which theology, if it is to be true to itself, is obliged to dialogue. This paralysis was hinted at by Rahner, who argued that we are overwhelmed with a plethora of partial insights that no one has the ability to integrate.⁷ All we can do, as Tony Kelly has argued, is to "make connections."⁸

Recapping

Theology is an inherently impossible undertaking because of the nature of knowing, the nature of that which is to be known and the ambiguous stance of the knower. It has been made even more difficulty over recent years as theological sub-disciplines have diversified and as the range of secular disciplines with which theology needs to dialogue had expanded exponentially.

Openness to Mystery

Theology is, in one sense, an openness to mystery. This is scary. The individual standing on the threshold of this adventure is faced with two choices, committing themselves to the unknown or else retreating to the safety of their limited understandings.⁹ Paradoxically, however, as Rahner argues, to trust oneself fearlessly to this infinite mystery is to experience peace.¹⁰ In relinquishing the desire for ultimate answers, and in living our questions, we find ourselves embraced by a Presence that renders answers superfluous. This is one aspect of what the Taoists meant by the instruction that we should flow with the Tao.

Despite these overwhelming odds, however, theology is an inevitable and necessary task. It is inevitable in the sense that meaning-making is an irrepressible activity of the human spirit. It is necessary because, if we are to work together as a human society to address the personal and social ills from which we suffer, we can only do this as each of us stands within a universe of meaning.

A Confession of Bias and Inadequacy

From a Christian perspective, theology is about loving God and one's neighbour with our whole being. In this tentative exercise in reciprocal loving, I do not want to be backward in confessing that the vantage point from which I view reality is confessedly Christian and is related to personal experience. However, the fact that I was nurtured in a Christian environment within which I made a faith commitment, does not mean that I [5] intend to deny the validity or reliability of other religious or secular commitments.

This brief exercise is offered as a personal perspective that makes no claim to ultimacy. It has meaning for the writer and it is hoped that it will make a small contribution to a burgeoning understanding of what we are increasingly confessing we do not understand. [6]

[FOB 1-6]