Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Progressive Christian
It’s Hard to Talk About God

It’s Hard to Talk About God

Last updated on: May 18, 2023 at 6:00 am by Vance Morgan

0 Comments

It’s Hard to Talk About God 2023-05-16T11:53:00-04:00 Vance Morgan

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

In our recently completed “Faith and Doubt” colloquium, my Dominican priest colleague and I filled the syllabus with authors who have shaped our own perspectives on and continuing lives of faith. I have written about mine many times over the decade of this blog’s existence; Anne Lamott, Michel de Montaigne, Simone Weil, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Iris Murdoch, and Rachel Held Evans all made important appearances during the semester.

My colleague’s influences included several who also are on my list, including Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, all of whom have been fellow companions on my faith journey for years. The author on my colleague’s list who captured my imagination most, however, was someone whose work I was completely unfamiliar with until we taught this course for the first time a year ago: Czech Catholic priest, philosopher, theologian, and psychologist Tomáš Halík.

Halík made his first appearance ever on this blog a week ago; I suspect he’ll be showing frequently throughout the summer as I read Night of the Confessor, my colleague’s favorite of Halík’s many books, a second time.

Various Ways of Saying “Hello” to God

Halík’s theological insights are striking, and I’ll get to a few of them, but I must admit that one of the first things that attracts me to his work is his curmudgeonliness (spell check says that isn’t a word, but it should be), a feature that matches up to the same quality in me on certain matters. For instance, Halík apparently hates academic/professional conferences as much as I do. He describes one clergy conference he was forced to attend as follows:

I have the feeling . . . that I have been catapulted into Sartre’s play No Exit, where, after a while, the auIdience realizes that all the protagonists are dead but behave as if nothing has happened. One Czech priest compared the Church to a mill that still clattered away but no longer ground anything.

Tell me about it, Father. One of the many blessings of being a full professor is that I no longer need to pad my resumé with attending such gatherings for which Dante should have assigned a special circle in hell.

Halík also shares my constitutional aversion to what he calls “clappy-happy religion.” “Discreet Faith,” my favorite chapter in Night of the Confessor, is shaped by Halík’s refusal to accept the invitation of a couple of enthusiastic young people to attend a Christian mega-rally that they are very excited about. “No, I’m sorry, I really won’t come,” Halík replies. Why?

I myself came to faith slowly through a process of doubt; I find it hard to imagine being suddenly infected by collective piety at some mass rally with banners reading JESUS LOVES YOU and cheerleaders with unbearably fixed smiles. . . Naturally I respect the fact that there are those who feel the need to be crushed in a crowd of like-minded people to strengthen their faith. My faith would more likely be lost in a throng like that.

Halík knows, as I do, that at least some of his resistance to such worship and expressions of faith is simply a reflection of his basic personality.

His real issue, though, is with “the brazenly casual way that people there trumpet out the great words of our faith. Halík quotes Nicholas Lash favorably, who writes that ““it is the tragedy of modern Western culture to have fallen victim to the illusion (widely shared by believer and nonbeliever alike) that it is perfectly easy to talk about God.” Such overfamiliarity with the transcendent leads to any number of “idols,” models of the divine that have been crafted out of human projections with little respect for the mystery and “otherness” of God.

Halík advises that “when someone is introduced into the faith they need to be told clearly that they are being introduced into a world of mystery and depth.” It is occasionally helpful in the life of faith to list the various models of God that have over time proven to be insufficient—the gods that one does not believe in. I did this not long ago in this blog.

How Many of Your Gods are Dead?

Halík provides us with his personal list of Gods that he does not believe in:

The enlightenment’s god of reason, its “Supreme Being”
The deist’s “Great Watchmaker”
The ancient Greeks’ immutable Fate or the Muslims’ kismet
The Gaia goddess or Mother Nature and her objective laws
The law of karma and the cycle of birth and rebirth
A private god, who would be an utterly private light of my conscience and my heart
A romantic god that would offer itself solely as a “religious sense” or “the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”

So what does Halík believe in? He claims that “my faith is ordinary: a universal, catholic, Christian faith,” nothing exceptional or special.

In my experience, though, the totality of what he is describing is anything but “ordinary” from the perspective of nominal Christians. That’s because Halík always is careful to remind us that “[God] remains fundamentally incomprehensible, and it is impossible for all [our] natural capacities to recognize and see [God] in this life face to face. Accordingly,

A touch of skepticism, irony, and commitment to critical reason as a permanent corrective to any tendency to superficial religious enthusiasm is, in my view, not only a necessary condition for mental and spiritual health, but also a prerequisite if we are not to drown out the real voice of God with our own whooping and shouting.

The Christian story is that God is both immanent and transcendent, both intimately with us and ontologically “other.” Because this is clearly paradoxical, the tendency is often to focus exclusively on one aspect or the other, on either making God so “here” that all mystery is dissolved into familiar human categories or so “other” that God becomes so remote and disconnected from human beings as to be non-existent.

Halík’s insight is to embrace the paradox and recognize that “God’s place is in the ‘kingdom of the impossible,’ in the ‘kingdom of absurdity,’ somewhere where a totally different logic applies that in ‘this world’—the logic of the paradox.”

People’s attempts to penetrate the mystery of God’s essence inevitably go astray; maybe there is only one path where we might conceivably encounter the ever-astonishing kingdom of the impossible, that is coming. That path is the path of paradox.

Previous Post

May 16, 2023

What Freedom Amounts To

Next Post

May 21, 2023 Thoughts on Discernment and a Blessing for the Graduates

Recent Comments

0 | Leave a Comment

"Mary did have a choice. And she was able to make it before the Holy ..."

madalyn baumstark

Mary Got To Choose

"i cannot read beyond your recommendations for the books since i like to have a ..."

madalyn baumstark

A Doubting Faith

"AI will never be able to utter with honesty, feeling, or humility, the greeting: "Namaste".It ..."

madalyn baumstark

AI and Human Dignity

"They do. I'm sure you could find discussions of the same topic from any of ..."

Vance Morgan

AI and the Life of Faith

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category abortion Advent AI Angels Artificial intelligence atheism attention baptism Baptists beauty belief Benedictines Bible bicycling Big Bird books Bovina Camaldoli hermitage Canada Catholicism cats certainty change Christianity Christmas Collegeville Covid-19 creativity Development of Western Civilization dogs doubt Easter Enneagram Epiphany Episcopal ethics Eucharist evil extroverts Facebook faith family fear flowers forgiveness freedom friends God goodness grace happiness heaven hell history Holy Spirit Holy Week hope human nature humility humor idolatry incarnation introverts irreverence Islam Jeanne Jesus Joe Biden joy Judaism justice Kamala Harris knowledge Lent listen literature liturgy love Marsue Memorial Day miracles movies music mystery mythology NPR Old Testament optimism paradox peace Penguins philosophy piano podcast politics power prayer Protestantism Providence College Religion Rhode Island sabbatical sacrament science seeing silence Simone Weil Socrates soul sports St. John's College stories suffering tattoo teaching technology television theology thinking time tolerance transcendence travel trees trust truth Uncategorized Vermont wisdom wonder writing

Select a Month May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz