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mccarthyism

"memory takes a lot of poetic license. it omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart." :tennessee williams, "the glass menagerie"

5.16.2012

Found this paragraph in Marilynne Robinson’s essay on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in the collection The Death of Adam, which Caela got me for Christmas a couple years ago. I’m quoting it here apropos of my entry on Torrance a while back. “Great theology is always a kind of giant and intricate poetry, like epic or saga. It is written for those who know the tale already, the urgent messages and the dying words, and who attend to its retelling with special alertness, because the story has a claim on them and they on it…It earns its authority by winning assent and recognition, in the manner of poetry but with the difference that the assent seems to be to ultimate truth, however oblique or fragmentary the suggestion of it. Theology is written for the small community of those who would think of reading it. So it need not define freighted words like ‘faith’ or ‘grace’ but may instead reveal what they contain. To the degree that it does them any justice, its community of readers will say yes, enjoying the insight as their own and affirming it in that way.”

Theology has to be done, as Torrance puts it, “in the most cautious and reverent way and with much prayer.” “It is in our actual apprehending of God that we realise that we cannot comprehend him.” It is both a definition and a participation. In contemplating the divine mystery, theology teaches us things we did not previously understand, but already believed, since we have already apprehended by faith the fullness of the divine mystery. It happens in the arena of faith, the space marked out beforehand by the Church as sacred, but which still contains great mystery. Participating in theology in the right spirit, running on the rails preordained for us and within the boundaries of orthodoxy, is the only way to discover new doctrine (“new” only in the sense of a new application and illumination of what has been nascent in the Scripture all along), even as it inevitably affirms and avows the old doctrines. 

Vladimir Lossky is referring to the same thing when he writes that “Authentic gnosis is inseparable from a charisma, an illumination by grace which transforms our intelligence. And since the object of contemplation is a personal existence and presence, true gnosis implies encounter, reciprocity, faith as a personal adherence to the personal presence of God Who reveals Himself.” Thought of this way, theology is all of life, and theological truth is intuitively recognized by the faithful, through the Holy Spirit, not only on printed pages but in actions, institutions, and lives. It's a convicting paradigm of truth, one with no loopholes, in which ethics and epistemology are inseparably linked. Theology is prayer. Lex orandi, lex credendi.

posted by ethan  # 5/16/2012 06:44:00 PM

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