Finding Faith ... in the early Christian mystics

Editor's Note: I am currently enrolled in seminary class called “Moments in Ancient, Medieval, and Postmodern Mysticism.” The course is designed to explore writings about mysticism found throughout the ancient, medieval and postmodern worlds, with a focus on the underpinnings of mysticism in the contemporary church. Through a theological survey spanning centuries, the course explores rich, sophisticated and compelling literature which has helped to shape Christian life and theology in every century to the present. And it attempts to answer the following question: Can today’s modern Christian understand the religious mysticism that was prevalent in ancient and Medieval times, or has the Western church obliterated any chance of resurrecting this theological gift? ... Here is essay No. 2 from that course.

Relevant Readings:

"The Weakness of God" by John D. Caputo

"No Man is an Island" by Thomas Merton

Oh, if I could only get Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and theologian, and John D. Caputo, the philosopher/theologian, into a room for one discussion, I would propose to them the question: Who is weaker, man or God? … And then I would sit back to enjoy the show.

Caputo would no doubt fire out immediately that based on God as an event rather than a name, a rational person could only conclude that any God was the weaker of the two, and maybe even further is unstable and barely functional. Which, no doubt, would inflame all of the good Christians in attendance for such a prestigious occasion.

And eventually, after the flames in the crowd were doused, I sense that Merton would thus waggle a finger at Caputo and rebut that on the contrary the only rational conclusion is that it is man who is the weaker of the two, which I imagine would draw roaring applause from the faithful in attendance.

Ever since 313, when the Roman Emperor Constantine issued his Edict of Milan, which decreed tolerance for Christianity in his empire, and then fueled by the leaders of the European states during the Medieval period, Christians have been in search of their all-powerful, omnipotent God. Their worship and their very belief in the universe relies on the myth of one infinite creator gifted with the ability of all knowledge of all time and the ability to change the course of life and time anywhere in the universe.

Caputo, of course, in his treatise on the very nature of God’s power, argues that God is nothing of the sort, and rather that God was weak. Weak in the sense that once he created the universe, he was powerless to keep it under control, and in fact relies upon the good nature of his created beings to be in relationship with him rather than controlling them from the get go.

“The kingdom of God is the rule of weak forces like patience and forgiveness, which, instead of forcibly exacting payment for offense, release and let go. The kingdom is found whenever war and aggression are met with an offer of peace,” Caputo writes on Page 15 of “The Weakness of God. “The kingdom is a way of living, not in eternity, but in time, a way of living with out why, living for the day, like the lilies the field–figures of weak forces–as opposed to mastering and programming time, calculating the future, containing and managing risk. The kingdom reigns whenever the least and most undesirable our favor all the best and most powerful or put on the defensive. The powerless power of the kingdom prevails when ever the one is preferred to the ninety-nine, whenever one loves one’s enemies and hates one’s father and mother while the world, which believes in power, counsels us to fend off our enemies and keep the circle of kin and kind, of family and friends, fortified and tightly drawn.”

And this of course, would stand in direct contrast to the position held by Merton, who is his subservience to this savior, argues that it is rather we men who are the weak ones.

“The power that manifests itself in our weakness is the power that was the strength of Christ’s weakness -- the love of the Father, Who raised Him from the dead,” Merton writes on Page 211 in “No Man is an Island.” “Jesus went down into the dust of death in order that the power of His Resurrection might be manifest in our own lives. This power is seen, not in our natural gifts, not in talents or human wisdom or in man’s strength. It is made evident only in the contest between what appears in us -- what is human and our own -- and by what does not appear: the secret power of grace.”

Interestingly, reading the works Merton and Caputo alongside each other, one can wonder if they are talking about the same Christian God at all! … But, alas, we know that they are, but from very different vantage points, seemingly worlds apart.

Read Caputo, and he’ll tell us about an infinite God who isn’t so infinite and from the very beginnings of the creation of the universe has needed a relationship with his creation. And despite eons of watching his creation run amok, he is powerless both to end his wild experiment, nor influence its ultimate end. In other words, God needs creation as badly as creation needs God.

And Merton, based in the much more recognizable Western model of Christianity, tells us that the relationship is very much the inverse, that God’s secret grace is the very engine that drives creation, and that is creation’s hope in God that fuels that very engine.

“The will of the Lord is not a static center drawing our souls blindly toward itself,” Merton writes on Page 53. “It is a creative power, working everywhere, giving life and being and direction to all things, and above all forming and creating, in the midst of an old creation, a whole new world which is called the Kingdom of God.”

I certainly admire Merton’s work and appreciate his boldness to embrace early Christian mystics, but it is at this point that I see my own theology parting from his and moving toward Caputo. And thus, I find the center of my struggle with the church today.

I think that Caputo’s views on God’s weakness mirror more closely the mélange that most postmodern faithful feel, and allows us to embrace the concept of a monotheistic triune God without throwing out the bathwater that includes science and math and medicine and technology. After all, who can embrace an all-powerful, omnipotent God who created a universe exactly to his own design, only to play out as a movie God’s already seen.

No, I believe that many of us postmodern faithful belief in a God who does need us as much as we need God. We can accept that he put in motion creation, but then once in play, God becomes much more an agent at play in the mix of human imagination, creativity, drive and ambition. Or, as Caputo so famously describes it: God does not exist, but rather insists.

The deeper I dive into the study of Christian mysticism I am beginning to find that even the modern mystics are too confined by the modern age Westernized God to allow for the more nuanced God that I have come to know, and that Caputo does such a fantastic job of describing in his work.

Now, the challenge that faces me, I suppose, is how to continue to honor the church I serve, which on the whole believes in the former description of God much more than I do. That will be the real work, and that lies ahead.