Remembering Krister Stendahl
Convocation 1984: To Think and To Pray, or
The Language of Theology and the Language of Worship, or
To Speak about God and to Speak to God
Thou eternal wisdom,
whom we partly know and partly do not know,
Thou eternal justice, whom we partly acknowledge but never fully obey,
Thou eternal love, whom we love a little but fear to love too much,
Open our minds that we may understand,
Work in our wills that we may obey,
Kindle our hearts that we may love Thee and all that is thine.
Amen.
to speak about God is a rather arrogant thing, bordering on the ridiculous. Perhaps that is why the Jewish tradition gravitated toward doing it by telling stories, preferably with a humorous twist to make sure that they did not claim to be equal to the subject.
To speak about God is wholly arrogant and holy arrogance. It is to think about what cannot be thought. Thinking relates one thing to another, that is, it is relative. But if God is anything, God is absolute. And to think is to grasp, to hold in one's mind, to possess. But the sin of sins and the flaw of flaws is to think that we can possess God. A god comprehended is by definition no god.
Yet it seems Epictetus had it right when he said, ''Were I a nightingale, I would do what is proper to a nightingale, were I a swan, what is proper to a swan. In fact I am logikos [endowed with reason, a rational creature]: so I must praise God." And out of such praise grows theology. Rather, theology is the praise that reason utters in its own styles—critical in order to be pure and genuine and in order to have the power to transform and reform.
It seems that the Apostle Paul is on the same track when he admonishes the Christians in Rome to present themselves as a living sacrifice when he calls ''your rational worship" (logike latreia, Rom. 12:1). Through the Revised Standard Version and other modern translations we have become used to the reading ''our spiritual worship," but the quotation from Epictetus gives the right key: the worship which is proper for people endowed with reason. Actually, when the King James Version spoke of ''our reasonable service," reasonable in 1611 did not mean some kind of bourgeois reasonability of ''not overdoing things." It meant that of which reason is capable.
To render logike as ''spiritual" is a trivializing and a misleading translation. It goes against the grain of the text, which admonishes spiritual folk to sharpen up their minds in order to help them discern what is right. The twelfth chapter of Romans is strikingly dominated by the Greek word nous (mind) and its derivatives. But enough of teaching!
Anthropomorphic Language
How to speak about God? By necessity we have to speak in human terms, or, as it is called in ''learned" circles, anthropomorphic language, language shaped by how one thinks about human beings. There is great irony in the fact that the biblical tradition, perhaps most intensely but not exclusively in its Christian editions, has maximized the anthropomorphic language, speaking about God as a human person.
In the interest of stressing that God is personal and in the interest of protecting the understanding of the faith as a relationship, the precious I-Thou, what else could happen but an intensified expression and experience of God in human terms—the Lord, the Father, the Judge, and much more? But all of them are personal and, it seems, all male. The terms are personal by some inner necessity, male by habit and often without much thought and out of the cultural dominance of us men.
The irony lies in the fact that, as we all know, the Ten Commandments insist that it is wrong to make for ourselves images of God. And the prophets can get rather funny, so superior do they think themselves when thy ridicule the graven images. There might be good reason, especially in more fundamentalist climates, to apply the commandment against the images not only to images of stone and wood and metal, but also to the mental, theological, and intellectual images with which the tradition lives. But theologians always have known that it is, so to say, equally true to say about God that he is white as it is to say that she is black. And exegetes know full well that when in Genesis we are told that we are created in God's image, we are not permitted to turn it around and picture God in our image. We who live in Cambridge should know the importance of one-way traffic—an important rule of hermeneutics and interpretation of Scripture. And yet the irrepressible desire and need for personal language causes the anthropomorphisms to intensify and excel.
The need for an inclusive God-language, which transcends implicit and explicit sexism, is only one instance, but perhaps one of the most intense and now most urgent. It may even be the issue that finally will force us out of the overly anthropomorphic language of our tradition.
My own feeling is that we have overdone anthropomorphism in the interest
of I-Thou-ing ourselves through life and into eternity. And, I take it,
we will be surprised. I take it that there is nothing wrong in also
thinking about God in a dialectical way as Energy, Wisdom, Light,
Justice. The prayer with which I began is one I learned in the Student
Christian Movement prayer group sometime in the '40s in Sweden. I do not
find it strange or de-personalizing in a wrong way to pray like that:
''Thou eternal wisdom . . . Thou eternal justice . . . Thou eternal
love . . ." That
prayer opens up possibilities. We need God-language that is not only
covenantal or forensic, that is, dealing with relationships and dealing
with judgment, but also what you might call a more biological language,
one in which we experience God not only as the Son but as the sun—the
source of energy and the joy and warmth of everyday life.
Biblical Images and Worship
I have come to love more and more the Trinity, not as a statement by which people increase the tensions in Christendom or measure the orthodoxy of the other, but for the very simple reason that the Trinity plays fast and loose with the three ''persons"—one of which is only loosely a ''person," for, in the Greek language, the Spirit is it. And think of the risky stretching of monotheism that is involved in the trinitarian language.
Or think of that dynamic vision of the Trinity which caused the Eastern churches to resist attempts by the orderly and hierarchical West to add the filioque. For the East had it right when they thought of the Spirit as God's creative energies which permeate all. I think I see all this somehow as Paul does, when he writes those words to which I return again and again as I ponder how to think and how to pray: ''And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit" (2 Cor. 3:18).
The nature of biblical language helps us, so that no language and no image is allowed to harden into ''a graven image" which could encourage intellectual idolatry. That is why Harvard Divinity School's biblical departments have such a great gift to give to us all. For here we sure are strong in demonstrating the diversity of the various theologies within the Bible.
And for me it seems quite clear that it is wonderful to have four gospels, provided that you are not made uptight by that apologetic stance that kills most religion. That is to say, if you get defensive, the variations become embarrassing. But to be defensive for God is a pitiful thing. Who defends whom? Rather, I think of the diversity as enrichment, and thereby, when I look at the four gospels I do not like to make a transparency of each of them, put them on top of each other, and throw the light through them. That becomes blur—perhaps holy blur, but still blur. No, I look at one gospel, one image at a time, let it sink in, and the variations become an enrichment. The variations also protect God, Christ and the Bible herself from idolatrous use, because there will always be kaleidoscopic changing. And somehow one image puts the other in check, counteracting an image from hardening into more than it is: one image among many.
Biblical language is often a quick, light, and delightful language, which cannot bear the superstructures that have been built upon it. It will always suffer from our greed when we try to squeeze more out of this holy orange than was ever meant or is ever possible. One of the ways of avoiding such greed and misunderstanding is to learn from the Jewish sages—and perhaps Jesus also was on that wonderful trajectory—from Hillel to Woody Allen. Perhaps sometimes we must perceive the twinkle in Jesus' eye as we listen to his words. We have to find the right nature of this word so that we do not overuse it in our desire for knowing and believing more and more. Jesus' speech is far less pompous and far more humorous than we think. In those days if any shepherd left the 99 in the wilderness and went after one, that shepherd would be fired if he was found out. And what farmer was ever so dumb as to spread the seed equally on his patch, regardless of paths and roads and all? So let us lighten it up. It may well be that he said much of his words with a smile. Joy is closer to God than seriousness. Why? Because when I am serious I tend to be self-centered, but when I am joyful I tend to forget myself.
And Now How to Speak to God
Just a few observations. I should have started with this topic, because I think it is true to say that the way one thinks and certainly the way one defines the faith grows out of the way one prays. The first Christology in the New Testament is found in the hymnic constellations of wonderful titles and names for God and the Messiah. And so one plays around with the 52 names for Jesus—in adoration. Only afterwards do the theologians bring order and system as they work out the Christologies. Yet it all started, as all real prayer does, with what I like to call caressing language. Of course, we are not like the heathen. We do not take out the gods in the morning and wash them and feed them and things like that. Of course not. We are logikoi; we are rational beings. Still, in a way we are like those worshipers of old, because what we do when we pray is express our love and our gratitude to God. It is true, as Jesus said, that we do not really need to serve God—God doesn't need it—by singing hymns and things. But it is a rational thing for us to do, to express our wonderment and gratitude. The language of prayer is caressing language. And that is why liturgical language is so repetitious. ''Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy." Those who follow free church traditions try to be a little more inventive, but that just turns into a more mushy form of the same repetitiousness. Repetitious, as is all love language. When a man and a woman make love, if you had a tape recorder and recorded what they said to one another and played it, you would find it rather boring and repetitious. But not for them. Likewise, caressing language is the essence of the language of prayer, a pure way of speaking one's love and gratitude to God.
And all true prayer is Godward. I have heard preachers who pray, so that one really wonders whether God is even allowed to overhear the prayer. It seems to be rather a roundabout way to instruct the congregation, especially when the prayer is introduced by the formula, ''Teach us, Oh Lord"—followed by a sermon in prayer format. But all true prayer is Godward, and it will never be anything else than Godward, especially when prayer moves toward meditation. As I leave for Sweden, I shall speak again that language, where the word for meditation is ''the act of looking at" (betraktelse). That is what meditation is. To look at an image of Jesus. There are many images of Jesus, and no one has ever seen God; but for me, when I look at Jesus, I see God.
To see is the chastest of all the expressions of relationships. It is not an embrace, it is not an intensified personal encounter. It is to see. There is distance in seeing, and yet there is intensity. I take it that in the Hindu tradition worship is call darshan, which means to see and to be seen. It is the act of seeing that is the blessed and divinely pregnant act. At the World Council of Churches Assembly, when people came with their offerings, they then took the offerings back home. God had seen, and thereby the essential gift had been made. To see, what a wonderful way of expressing the nature of the faith. For it is also the way that most easily leads into the intellectual tasks of thinking.
And so, friends, dear one and all, generous, everything, as I now bid you farewell, and say thanks to Harvard University, whose Divinity School has been by far the major part of my life and my days for 30 years, I guess I just wanted to bear witness to that fascination with God which by grace has been, and I pray will remain, my life. May such fascination be richly bestowed on many, for it is wonderful. And may it have a special space at Harvard Divinity School.
