This book asks us to consider if we really know what we think we know. It then goes one step further, asking if whether we know why and how we know matters for what we know. Most of Christian history has not insisted that the answer given to the ‘why and how we know’ be ‘yes’, but has tended to want an affirmation of the confidence of the ‘what we know’ part, at least. Carl Hughes demurs, asserting that certitude in revelation has ‘silenced women, denied LGBTQ people their full humanity… endorsed racism, and generally glorified [those who know “revelation”] at the expense of any number of marginalized “others”’ (p. xvi). Better by far, Hughes argues, is the kind of knowledge the mystic has. That is, one can know that one knows without insisting that the reasons one gives, or the way in which one knows, be completely clear to self and others. To assist him in arguing this thesis, Hughes employs two thinkers influenced by, but not always readily associated with, the mystical tradition: Martin Luther and Søren Kierkegaard.
Hughes makes a punching bag of a Luther caricature: the devotee of sola Scriptura who deigned to know all kinds of things about God’s Word and God’s ways, whose certainty about key matters of doctrine was cognitive as well as existential, who is a ‘Luther of the Light’ (pp. 6–12, and passim). Luther as a caricature is a predecessor of Barth’s ‘positivism of revelation’ in Bonhoeffer’s trenchant critique. This Luther conceives of revelation, in Hughes’ words, as ‘a set of timeless facts’ that renders it unable to adapt to new contexts and priorities (p. 7).
Hughes puts this Luther on the stand and excoriates certain of his writings (‘Exhibit A: Bondage of the Will’, p. 53) finding him guilty of excessive confidence. Hughes prefers the ‘Luther of the Cloud’ (p. 44), whose chief categories are apophatic and aesthetic rather than doctrinal and rational. The ‘Luther of the Cloud’ is a hidden advocate of the via negativa in late-medieval mystical texts (although the ‘cloud’ of the book’s title comes from Exodus 24 rather than the medieval Cloud of Unknowing). Hughes raises an interesting paradox: his iconoclastic reading of Luther is done in service of the ‘icon’ or image to which the word points, rendering the believer unable to settle on a once-for-all knowledge of what God has revealed.
Kierkegaard likewise is held up as an apostle of uncertainty. Chapters 3 and 4 are paeans to Kierkegaard-cum-Goldilocks, whose Christocentrism is not so apophatic as to be evasive, nor so pious as to be positivist. Hughes’ preferred texts from Kierkegaard are Practice in Christianity and Philosophical Fragments taken as a pair, and Point of View for My Work as an Author. From the first pair, he derives an approach to theology akin to critical reflection on praxis. Practice advocates finding Christ by doing as he did, living among the suffering, and Fragments undermines attempts to conclude anything proscriptive on the basis of such practice. ‘The purpose of this Christological apophasis is not to deliver a set of propositional truths’, but rather to ‘undermine every effort to objectify the truth of Christ’ (p. 81). Climacus wrote Fragments, and Anticlimacus wrote Practice. Thus, in Point of View, Hughes sees Kierkegaard’s pseudonymy as regularising a posture of non-commitment. The would-be knower knows that he does not really know, and so remains at arm’s length from any particular doctrinal formulation. The more we read Kierkegaard as he wants to be read, the more he disappears: ‘All that will remain is a pane of polished glass: a mirror in which we… see ourselves’ (p. 130).
The book concludes with a short re-interpretation of Job and its whirlwind, read along Hughes’ Luther and Kierkegaardian lines, and a jeremiad against ‘official Christianity’ with its putative propositionalism and problematic certainties.
I found the portions of the book pertaining to Luther far less convincing than those from Kierkegaard, and the historical reconstructions in general less satisfying than the constructive proposals. For example, in Bondage of the Will, Luther uses the term ‘assertione’ in a narrow and well-defined sense emerging from Quintilian’s theory of rhetoric. It is not meant to be a cudgel against allowing ambiguity, but rather a goad to greater conviction in the face of competing truth claims. Hughes hints that Luther has, but does not show, a kind of phenomenology of the process of unknowing and then relearning that is the point of reading mystical works. For Luther, such texts are pedagogical in bringing the believer to a Christocentric faith, not propositional. And, Luther’s beef with Bock-Emser was not about certainty but about technical biblical translations, so the points Hughes tries to score from their exchange are oblique to Luther’s real aim. Going from ‘certainty’ to unknowing cannot merely be a welcoming of ignorance, nor a coarse Tillichian ‘justification by doubt’.
‘Luther of the Cloud’ and ‘Luther of the Light’ could be an acceptable and even helpful heuristic, perhaps like the antinomies of Gerhard Ebeling’s Luther approach (flesh/spirit, law/gospel, kingdom of Christ/kingdom of the world). But, insufficient attention is given to the relationship of the terms to each other. If Hughes resists a formal principle that would enable a full theory of how Luther’s corpus makes sense (viz., systematising tendencies), a way is needed to consider it as a coherent whole, not just a concatenation of mutually exclusive contradictions. David Fredrickson’s fascinating recent study of Paul, The Promise of Not Knowing: A New New Testament Reading (Fortress, 2022) provides one such way forward, emphasising (as its title suggests) both the unavoidable not-knowing and the attendant promise. Susan Schreiner’s careful work differentiating securitas from certitudo offers another.
A last observation: there is a kind of shadow polemical partner here, as though Hughes is thinking of a particular person or group of people who draw his ire. Kierkegaard did the same, and Luther, too, so Hughes is in good company, but it is harder to see who his disfavoured other is. He references those who claim certainty as using their grasp of revelation ‘at the expense of those suffering in the here and now’ (p. xv) which suggests the fundamentalist of past decades in America. But, the critical task of theology in the USA since the 2024 election has so totally changed that we will need even newer and nimbler categories for unlearning errors and admitting unknowing than Hughes provides.
