Abstract
This book starts with a simple question and ends with a simple answer. The question is this: in our secularized, consumer-driven, technologized world, can we still experience the mystery of God? The answer rests in the mystery of God’s love which, as Walter Kasper phrases it, “is the answer to the mystery of the world and human beings, the answer to the deepest human longing for acceptance and love.” (vii)
Accompanied principally by the thought of Walter Kasper, Anthony Godzieba guides us on the adventure of God’s love through a careful and well-informed analysis of the historical development of Christian theology. The faith principle that guides these reflections is God’s will to save us by sending his Son to redeem us. The presence and the absence of God strives to “maintain the delicate balance between God’s transcendent otherness (which prevents us from reducing God to our terms) and God’s presence (which touches our lives with the emancipative force of God’s love)” (30).
To retrieve this dialectic based in the biblical view of God, G. first examines how God became a problem in western culture. He maintains that there was a “momentous shift” from the predominant dialectical view (until the late Middle Ages) to the “extrinsic view” beginning with the nominalism of Occam that became the dominant factor from the Renaissance to the present day. The living God of the Bible became distant, marginalized, privatized, and eventually for many nonexistent or, at best, extrinsic to human experience and concerns. The masters of suspicion (Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche) gave us a hermeneutics of the past but neglected the affirmation of the future where only the living God can save us. G. offers a twofold Christian response: first natural theology and then the link between natural and theological theology. Natural theology does not prove faith by reason but seeks “the natural ‘access-point’ of faith” (104). This citation from Kasper is used frequently throughout the book and is intended to affirm the reasonableness of faith based in human experience and the openness of faith to transcendent experience. Absolutely crucial to the basic claims here is that natural theology affirms “the dialectical presence–absence structure that is fundamental to our encounter with the reality of God, who is available yet uncontrollable, knowable yet mysterious, immanent yet transcendent” (172). Kasper’s view that our encounter with God is personal based in personal relationships leads to the center of Christian faith: “the trinitarian confession of one God in three persons” (174).
God must take the initiative to make the divine Self known through revelation. The fundamental paradox is expressed at John 1:18: “No one has ever seen God. It is the unique one of a kind Son (monogenes), always existing in the bosom of the Father, who has made him known” (trans. mine). And further (John 14:9), “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” As G. develops it so well, employing “phenomenality” and “performance”: “The mystery of the ineffable ‘singular event’ that is the triune God is revealed in the events instigated by Jesus of Nazareth, the accessible phenomenality of that event” (282). We experience God’s love in Christ when we incarnate that love in our own time-bound lives. “God’s absolute, infinite, unfailing love is never graspable as such, but only in particular, fallible performances” (309). It is the Holy Spirit that enables the community to have a continuing personal share in the reality of Jesus, and so Christology is always trinitarian in character. In the course of the book, G. offers a rich and insightful summary of a number of theological views. His treatment of Anselm is particularly helpful for his basic thesis. The book affords a good review for those knowledgeable in the field and a wonderful introduction for students exploring these matters. I have only one question. In his treatment of the conciliar developments, he ends with Constantinople I. Yet Cyril of Alexandria’s second letter to Nestorius (Council of Ephesus) seems crucial for a correct interpretation of Chalcedon. Nonetheless, the origin of trinitarian doctrine surely lies, as G. emphasizes, in the concrete and specific experiences of faith and worship. The constructive retrieval of person as free, intentional, and relational (Kasper) with the addition of “the crucial and inescapable element of performance-in time” (313) enables us to counter social acceleration (“now-ism”) and to explore time and meaning. Painting, architecture, and music are aesthetic ways to experience the presence and absence of God. I highly recommend this book as an intensely practical way to access the mystery of God’s salvific love.