99 - Praising and Knowing God

Praising and Knowing God
By Daniel W. Hardy and David F. Ford
Philadelphia, Westminster, 1985. 218 pp. $12.95.

Current disputes about Christian faith are preoccupied with the ethical. This is true for the so-called "social agenda" of the right, and for the programs of transformation urged among liberals. Faith should be "useful" for getting something done in the world. It is even better if that usefulness happens to cohere with the purposes of God (though this latter qualification is not indispensable). Against such pragmatism, this book is a thoughtful insistence that the core and center of Christian faith is a relation with God that focuses on praise of God that "perfects perfection" of God and transforms the one who praises. The one who praises is engaged, in the act of praise, with the goodness, abundance, and generosity of the one praised. In such a vocation, all calculation and meanness of spirit are overcome by the "overflow" of God's person and God's good inclination toward the world.

The writers (father-in-law and son-in-law) are lecturers in theology at Birmingham University. Their orientation is in a classical philosophical direction that is aimed at the objective reality of God in God's self. Thus they speak about "perfection" in God. My own biblical orientation would be to speak about God's fidelity as the center of our life with God, but it is precisely perfection rather than fidelity that belongs to the heart of the argument, for they want to make a statement about the sheer reality of God, apart from those who are invited to praise.

This is not an easy book. At times, the argument seems disjointed, perhaps because the book tries to do too much. And the themes are treated in rather odd configurations, so that there is not a sustained cognitive argument but rather the presentation of a mosaic in which the argument is pieced together from a rich and surprising diversity of materials. It is not a book that can be read, but it must be studied and pondered. The argument is that praise is the decisive mode for relating to God, and, therefore, the decisive way of knowing God (this against the assertion of Calvin that knowledge comes from obedience). The authors pay attention to the practice of praise in the Bible (the Psalms, Mark, and especially Philippians), but seem most at home in the classical tradition of theology. Thus, they appeal to the lyrical theology of Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine and the high objectivity of Anselm and Aquinas, who are shown to be not only rigorous thinkers, but believers whose intellectual power is submissive to the overwhelming graciousness and generosity of God. These teachers of the church practice a coherent mode of life that is rooted in and oriented toward the praise of God.

100 - Praising and Knowing God

Though it is not at the center of their argument, repeatedly Hardy and Ford offer hints of a critique of modernity. In ways that parallel Robert Cushman, Faith Seeking Understanding, they are aware that a commitment to functionalism, which wants faith to be useful, and an overriding appeal to subjective experience, in fact render genuine praise marginal if not impossible. In terms of American church practice, their critique applies to the managerial tendency to control and the psychological reductionism that tempts us all. In our context, the basic choices made by our society make praise a most problematic enterprise. And if that is problematic, then the entire matter of faith is in turn problematic.

The core of the argument in this book is that God is powerfully objective, decisively real. Human life involves coming to terms with that objective reality. The "quality of the object" is decisive for the interaction, and for the one who praises. Acknowledgement in trust of that "object" changes everything decisively for the one who praises:

What does merit praise is the presence of that excellence-in-itself in the object or person; this is the sole source of the excellence which justifies praise. Imagine the freedom from anxiety which would follow if this were taken seriously! If life is the process of the self-refinement which occurs in praise, and if the condition for this occurs when the excellent- in- itself is present, it can be said that the praise of God actually constitutes the life which we live.

The book is staggeringly rich in its insight. There is focus on Dante's Divine Comedy as a pilgrimage of grace, consideration of the Chalce-donian Formula and the Trinitarian revolution as the substance of the God to be praised, reflection on evil and theodicy, appeal to the poignant phrases of the Irish poet, Patrick Kavanaugh, and a forty-page bibliographical essay that will provide focused reading for a very long time for most of us.

A book on praise might appear to be a book on liturgy. Indeed, it is. But it is a statement that presses Christian believers back to basics. Worship is scarcely possible in the categories of modernity that are Stoic and generate only cynicism, hatred, and ridicule. The book presses back to basic questions, forces us to re-decide, asks us to critique our intellectual life-world. Finally, it invites us to the "jazz factor" of God's freedom, which becomes our true joy and our proper being. The program of the book is a tall order. It demands hard work. But I am convinced it is now the proper work of serious believers. It has been a long time since I have read a book that so displaces the categories of my thought and work. The depth of the crisis dealt with here is only outdistanced by the God celebrated in a new "laugh of faith." There is a chance in this rendition of our life that we will become who we have always been destined to be, creatures of God's praise.

Walter Brueggemann
Eden Theological Seminary
St. Louis, Missouri