Autor: Murray, John

Buch: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Titel: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Stichwort: Namen Gottes; Paradoxie: Wissen und Nicht-Wissen bezüglich Gott

Kurzinhalt: onomastic question; How, then, can they be names of God, who does not belong to this terrestrial order? biblical paradox

Textausschnitt: 63b There was then the further inevitable onomastic question, the issue of the many names of God that designate what we call his attributes. Does each name singly, and do all of them together, express some sort of true conception or understanding of God, or are they simply the projection onto God of man's understanding of himself and of his world in such wise that, when man undertakes to articulate his complex conception of God, he is merely fashioning an idol with the techniques of human intelligence? The problem is clear. The many names of God are taken from the order of human experience. How, then, can they be names of God, who does not belong to this terrestrial order?

64a The Fathers found a clue to the answer in the source through which they were continually searching. The Scriptures say that God is totally unlike his creation and absolutely outside of it because he is the Holy One. "I am God, not man" (Hosea 11:9). But the Scriptures also say that the creation is somehow like God and he is not wholly outside of it because it is the work of his hands and his glory dwells in it. By the glory of God the Scriptures regularly mean God himself as he is present in the world and with his people, manifesting his power, and to that extent himself, in his mighty acts, creative and redemptive. (Fs)

64b This was a small clue indeed, but it was enough to put the Fathers on the track of the doctrine that was later known as the analogy of being. It also put them on the track of the intellectual technique that was later called the three ways of knowing God. They did not systematically elaborate the doctrine or exploit the technique. They did, however, clearly distinguish the two radically different modes of being, uncreated and created, finite and infinite, each of them real and both of them therefore somehow united in the notion of being. And they laid down the essential structure of the three ways, the dialectic movement of intelligence from the created to the uncreated order of being. There is the moment of affirmation or position. I affirm that God is or that he is good (and so on for all his attributes). There is the moment of negation or removal. I deny that God is or that he is good in the mode of being or of being good that is proper to the created order whence my notion of being and of being good was derived. There is also, supporting and pervading the dialectic of affirmation and negation, the sense of the divine transcendence. I am conscious, as I affirm and deny, that God is, and that is he what he is, in a mode of being that is infinite and, in the end, incomprehensible. (Fs)

65a Thus, the Fathers carried the answers to the noetic and onomastic questions beyond the point where the Scriptures had left them. As a piece of systematic thought, however, their theology of the divine names was only inchoate. They did not fully explain how and why it is that the pale similitude between the world and God which is so completely overshadowed by the greater dissimilitude between God and the world can be made the starting point of a dialectic of understanding whose term is a true, though altogether imperfect, knowledge of the Unknowable. At that, their theology was adequate for its purpose, which was polemic and defensive rather than speculative or systematic. The patristic concern was to defend the scriptural faith not simply by reaffirming its paradoxical affirmations but also by seeking a deeper understanding of them so as to bring them into harmony. Until this latter, characteristically patristic, task was accomplished, the scriptural affirmations could indeed still be made, but in a vacuum of understanding that was dangerous, as the Eunomian impiety had demonstrated. In the things of God it is perilous to misplace either one's agnosticism or one's gnosticism. The risk is the loss of one's God, who is lost both when he ceases to be God, because no longer unknown, and when he ceases to be our God, because not known at all. (Fs)

65b Only inchoate as a systematization, the patristic theology of the knowledge and names of God was nevertheless a complete achievement in the order of religious thought. The achievement consisted in the transformation of one paradox into another, with the result that each of them illuminated the other and both of them together cast light on the common truth that sustained their paradox. The biblical paradox, that God is at once unknown and known, was transformed into the theological paradox, that the knowledge of God is an ignorance. Cyril of Jerusalem summed up the patristic insight when he said: "In the things of God the confession of no knowledge (agnosia) is great knowledge (gnosis)." The transcendent truth that both paradoxes brought sharply into focus was that God is uniquely an object of knowledge because God uniquely is. "I am God, not man."