Bishop’s Office
February, 2012
In response to an open invitation, fifteen of our clergy and laity gathered one evening last month to discuss how we as Episcopalians can better engage those of other faiths.
Talk quickly focused on our undergoing – through technologically driven globalization – a painfully uncertain and anxiety ridden period of deconstruction, if not collapse, in which old norms and traditions are being challenged, abandoned, and erased.
In subsequent email exchanges one of the participants, the Rev. Timothy Griffin, our priest at St. Luke’s, Bustleton, and St. Andrew’s, Somerton, pointed out that Eastern Orthodoxy’s doctrine of “apophaticism” – a fancy word for “negative theology” or the via negatia – interprets deconstruction positively as an appropriate avenue to God because God is ineffable, and we can only say what God is not, not what God is.
He wrote: “One of the central tenets of negative theology is that God is fundamentally unknowable from within human categories of thought. No doubt this may seem problematic to some. But the point is not that ‘God is absolutely unknowable.’ Rather the point concerns the limitations of our categories. In fact, a case can be made, and has been made, by mystics from all religious traditions, that we cannot ‘know’ God conceptually, but we can ‘know’ God in the biblical sense, if you will, through union with God.”
The Bible claims that it is God, in fact, who wills and effects deconstruction. Seeing that the builders of a brick tower at Babel were attempting thereby to “make a name for themselves,” God “confused the languages of the earth’ … and scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth” (Genesis 11:9).
What happened on Pentecost in an upper room in Jerusalem did not reverse God’s deconstruction and linguistic diversification at Babel, but rather made available God’s Spirit wherewith amidst our diversity we can “hear” through translation, other tongues as our own, communicating the good news of “the mighty acts of God” (Acts 2:7-12).
Similarly for the Apostle Paul, diversity, not uniformity, in every aspect of human life and language and culture, characterizes the unity and catholicity of the church (1 Corinthians 12:12-31). His own speech, he admits, is “not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power” (1 Corinthians 2:4).
“Interestingly,” Tim writes, "for purposes of both ecumenical and interfaith discussions, this approach of humble shared ignorance provides a basis of shared experience. We can begin to see that the categories from which we, as Christians and as Episcopalians, have expressed our understanding of the Holy are limited and provisional. When we acknowledge that, we may be more willing to “listen and listen” and hear, to paraphrase Isaiah. And we will no doubt be more willing to show radical hospitality when we acknowledge that our practices are simply ways of clothing the mystery."
“Apophatic” derives from a word that means “to say no” or “to deny.” As the Church invites us this month “to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial,” the practice of an apophatic theology commends itself to each of us in those particular places where we would do well to deny ourselves, say no, and listen.
The Rt. Rev. Charles E. Bennison Jr.
Bishop of Pennsylvania
