The editor emeritus of this journal has crafted an excellent text that offers finely honed arguments sharpened over more than two decades of teaching, research, and discussion.
Godzieba begins with the question of God in contemporary culture. Even in its present thoroughgoing secularity, it has Christian experience and belief buried in its roots. But the question is not “what” is God, but “who” and “where” is God.
Yet, bluntly, God is not so much consciously rejected as ignored. Why? In chapter 2, “How God Became a Problem in Western Culture,” Godzieba masterfully develops the thesis that with the ascendency of nominalist-based categories, modern concepts of God lost their balance and tipped, finally, into deism (or pantheism). The recognition of God as present and available through the divine self-gift while yet absent and incomprehensible was lost. The “extrinsic” God of modernity, whether “wholly other,” dead, an illusion, or packaged in comfortably enclosed Christian packages, is an idol! How can we retrieve belief in the living and true God?
His initial response is to do some natural theology. Natural theology can provide no proof or demonstration, but rather is “the search for the natural access points of faith” (177). This workmanlike chapter discusses Anselm's ontological argument, Aquinas’ five ways, and Küng's fundamental trust. Each of these show possible ways to faith. This segues into an insightful discussion of the post-Heideggerian moves of John Dominic Crossan and Jean-Luc Marion. The analysis finally turns to Walter Kasper's theology of the infinite mystery which/who is the background of our everyday experiences (163). God is the absent One who is yet incomprehensibly present. Natural theology shows where God can be found, places where we might encounter the Mystery.
Godzieba then moves from natural to “theological” theology. He roots his extensive discussion of the Trinity in the Scriptures. He explores the patristic traditions as lucidly as anyone writing this sort of book, focusing on Origen and the Cappadocians. He uses some Christological controversies to propel his narrative. After surveying the medieval synthesis, he reviews and evaluates contemporary issues. In this section, Godzieba keeps his eye on the liturgical and practical roots of doctrine. In brief, theology is serious reflection on the Christian life, a practical response to encountering the Mystery.
The final chapter is the most distinctive and powerful. How is the eternal Mystery available to us in our corporeal, temporal lives? By a divine self-gift to us, the Eternal One has made and makes the eternal “‘fit’” humanity (280). The clues to understanding this are in the practice of Jesus as portrayed in the gospels: preaching, healing, teaching (the Beatitudes are important here). Followers of Jesus engage in his practices, gracefully shaping themselves into the sorts of folk who can realize that the triune God is already behind, with, and ahead of them on their life's journey.
Godzieba then extends the challenges adumbrated in chapter 1 with an analysis of the “acceleration of time” in contemporary culture: we have no time for anything and so we become in fact subject to “de-temporalization” (288). We live in hectic moments without connection. We certainly have no time for God.
What we need is to recover a sense of duration, of the narrativity of our lives. Utilizing a series of his recent studies on art, architecture, and music, he explores ways to realize that there is a time for us and for the always present and absent God. Performance is key. Music exists only in performance. Each performance is distinct and different. There can be no “uninterpreted performance” even of the most rigidly notated music. So Christianity exists only in performance. “But our ways of performance do recognize [the divine reality] by generating a distinct and discreet ‘revelation’ of their own, disclosing what we have called the ‘porous boundaries’ of the visible and the invisible, time and transcendence, materiality and timeless beauty” (301). Because performance takes time and is rooted in the desire to perform well, it is the antidote to detemporalization. Performance takes time. As disciples who practice the faith, we can find time and space for encountering the God who is love.
My enthusiasm for this book is tempered only by a few quibbles. Godzieba ignores the collapse of multiple forms of secondary causality in early modern science and the complete loss of primary causality. Hence, he does not address the other part of contemporary culture, the authority of science, which, though methodologically correct but metaphysically unwarranted, ignores God. He also could buttress his final section with a reflection on duothelitism. Christian orthodoxy finds two wills in Christ, finite human and infinite divine. These are incomparable, but if Christ's human will is always aligned with and realizes in time the eternal divine will, then that shows that performing divinely is a real possibility for Christ's human disciples, even if we cannot be perfectly transparent to God as Jesus was. Such reflection can enhance a practical, spirituality-based theology, like Godzieba's.
Highly recommended for graduate classes on God and for theologians wanting a refreshing and rather comprehensive exploration of territory mapped all too flatly in much modern theology.
