229 - Faith in the Mystery of God

Faith in the Mystery of God
By Maurice Wiles
Philadelphia, Fortress, 1982. 146 pp. $6.95.

In this compact straightforward essay, the author, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University, undertakes to set forth "the experienced content of Christian belief " (vii). Acutely aware of the diversity of belief and symbol in the Christian world and of pervasive skepticism about any kind of religious truth, Wiles is convinced that the role of theology is secondary in and for the great task of giving creative expression to the faith. For this purpose the prophet outranks the academic theologian (vii). In this country, we might add, the prophet attracts a much larger audience as well.

It may come as a surprise, accordingly, to find that Wiles proceeds to

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lay down some philosophical-theological foundations for his enterprise (chaps. 2 and 3). The first of these is anthropological (in the traditional theological sense). He points to a unique pervasive and putatively constitutive human experience: the ineradicable and fundamental sense of contingency, finitude, mortality. This he identifies as "the basic religious conviction" (8). He asks whether this conviction might be "delusive, an aborginal error perpetuated in human history ever since." Does this basic religious sense have a certifiable reality-conveying power-does it tell us anything indispensably true about the non-human and the more-than-human world?

Wiles believes that the fundamental religious experience-conviction is authentic and in some important sense true. Proper reflection on it, he says, "opens the way to a deeper awareness of the all-pervasive nature of the divine, of its fundamental bearing upon the whole range of human experience" ( 12).

The theologian realizes that he has his work cut out for him. Can critical reflection do more than intensify conviction; prima facie a different matter from showing how a conviction is reality-grounded? The wrong sort of reflection can unseat or at least unsettle conviction that any set of particular beliefs about God and human existence is even plausible, let alone true and worthy of all acceptation.

Wiles' second philosophical-theological foundation is indispensable for dealing with such questions. It consists of a theory about religious language: "It takes hold of certain images that are basic to our experience of life and extends their meaning so that they point to what is ultimate" (18). Thus in religious language, and in the religious life expressed in it, images and symbols lord it over concepts and propositions. For religious images have an essential creative function, not primarily to register or replicate given objective reality, but to enrich experience and help to create a world (22-23). In this view, imagination is a high-priority candidate for the post of supreme reality-conveyor; at least for religion, if not altogether.

The task of the theologian, in study and pulpit, is thus defined: to interpret the symbols, assist the faithful to grapple with creative possibilities rather than with mere givens (29, 110).

Wiles is as good as his word. Throughout the rest of the essay he offers striking construals of cardinal symbolic beliefs, such as "You are the body of Christ," Incarnation, Resurrection, the church and the purpose of God, God as Spirit. In all these interpretations the theological-anthropological standpoint is clearly registered; nowhere more clearly than in "God as Spirit (chap. 8). He says, " 'spirit' is roughly equivalent to the human capacity for self-transcendence, that power by which we not only exist as finite human beings but also in our consciousness of ourselves may be said to transcend our finitude" (119).

Since Wiles raised at the outset the question about the truth of any version of the Christian faith, it is both fair and important to ask where he comes out in the end. I should say what emerges early and late is a

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suggestive variation on a pragmatic theme: religious truth is, or fairly promises, life-enrichment for self and beloved community. Christian faith aspires to this end through and with distinctive person-enbancing symbols. Truth in any preemptive sense (this, not that; ours, not yours) is sturdily denied. And consistently, I suppose: the logical principle of Excluded Middle does not apply to symbols, only to propositional claims. Arius and Athanasius cannot both be right in doctrinal dispute about the Incarnation. But perhaps neither is right, in some traditional sense of true-or-false. Perhaps the real question for faith and for theology, the handmaiden of faith, is, "What interpretation of the symbol has the richest and deepest grasp of human existence-and-possibility?"

Given such views of truth, together with his largely consistent view of the severe limitations of any knowledge of God, a title equally revealing would have been Faith and the Mystery of Human Existence.

Julian N. Hartt
Charlottesville, Virginia