Parker Palmer once obsessed about defending God – until God said to him, “Parker, I can take care of myself.” I remember a similar transition in my own understanding: that God seeks not the defense of an apologist but the response of a lover.
It was during the early 1960s when I studied theology in Rome. My professor for the course on Revelation shifted the traditional focus of the course from a defensive attempt to prove how reasonable it was to believe in God to a powerful reflection on the mystery of God, on the mystery of God telling God’s secrets, on the mystery of God seeking/inviting relationship.
He led a quiet revolution. I discovered one practical effect within the next ten years while teaching religion at a local Catholic high school. The sequential structure within Roman Catholic school religion textbooks had been reversed. The traditional sequence had been: teach the commandments first (what must I do?) then the sacraments (relationship with God).
Think about the significance. What does each sequence say theologically?
In French-accented Latin, my Jesuit professor lectured about God’s revelation as an act of love: that God should speak to me, lifting the veil of transcendence, telling God’s secrets, inviting me into the mystery of divinity is in itself an act of love beyond all telling.
Beginning his first lecture, he paced along the long length of a raised platform in a large lecture hall. He stared at a blackboard that took up much of the wall behind him. With hardly a sound, he made one tiny dot on the blackboard. He paused, dramatically. “The white dot is what we know about God,” he said. “The blackboard is what we don’t know. What we know about God is little – but the little we know is precious.”
God’s self-disclosure, he said, is first of all an interpersonal act, not the communication of a fact or of a law. Revelation is God's gift of self-disclosure.
In his Theology and the Arts: Encountering God through Music, Art and Rhetoric (Paulist Press) Richard Viladesau wrote that revelation, as received by us, "is first of all a consciousness of an excess of meaning beyond every content, an orientation to absolute mystery."
God's self-disclosure is mediated incarnationally through ideas, persons, events, acts, institutions and symbols, even words. We receive this transcendent gift as a limited embodiment.
The clearest embodiment to me has been Christianity. This does not, however, put God's self-gift in a box. It has been communicated also in the entire history of human culture. Someone once said that when God tired of waiting for the church to move on segregation, God sent Jackie Robinson to major league baseball.
The human side of divine revelation is conversion, our acceptance of God's self-gift. Intellectual, moral and religious conversion.
This week, we celebrate God’s mercy, God’s loving kindness, God’s compassion and the possibility of doing all things in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God’s one great Mediator.
Ask this week, “What is God like?” Then, consider that God is like Jesus.
Beginning his first lecture, he paced along the long length of a raised platform in a large lecture hall. He stared at a blackboard that took up much of the wall behind him. With hardly a sound, he made one tiny dot on the blackboard. He paused, dramatically. “The white dot is what we know about God,” he said. “The blackboard is what we don’t know. What we know about God is little – but the little we know is precious.”
God’s self-disclosure, he said, is first of all an interpersonal act, not the communication of a fact or of a law. Revelation is God's gift of self-disclosure.
In his Theology and the Arts: Encountering God through Music, Art and Rhetoric (Paulist Press) Richard Viladesau wrote that revelation, as received by us, "is first of all a consciousness of an excess of meaning beyond every content, an orientation to absolute mystery."
God's self-disclosure is mediated incarnationally through ideas, persons, events, acts, institutions and symbols, even words. We receive this transcendent gift as a limited embodiment.
The clearest embodiment to me has been Christianity. This does not, however, put God's self-gift in a box. It has been communicated also in the entire history of human culture. Someone once said that when God tired of waiting for the church to move on segregation, God sent Jackie Robinson to major league baseball.
The human side of divine revelation is conversion, our acceptance of God's self-gift. Intellectual, moral and religious conversion.
This week, we celebrate God’s mercy, God’s loving kindness, God’s compassion and the possibility of doing all things in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God’s one great Mediator.
Ask this week, “What is God like?” Then, consider that God is like Jesus.
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