Tag: Holiness

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Does theology have anything to do with holiness?

In this post and in the next few posts, I want to explore some of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s reflections on the relationship between theology and spirituality, or what he tends to call the relationship between theology and sanctity, what we might now call the relationship between theology and holiness.

Now these two words, theology and holiness, might seem a curious pairing to us, and this is precisely the issue Balthasar hopes to address. Theology/holiness, contemplation/action, believing/living—we tend to see these more as dichotomies and dilemmas rather than as dynamically related and mutually informing realties. But the two absolutely belong together, and the fact that they aren’t seen as belonging together is for Balthasar a story of decline and a story of divorce. Their separation is therefore grievous and unnatural. To illustrate Balthasar offers this striking image in the essay “Theology and Sanctity”, saying that theology without sanctity is “bones without flesh” and that sanctity (spirituality) without theology is “flesh without bones”.

Taking this image of the body, we might say that what results from the separation of theology and sanctity is a kind of formlessness, something incomplete and not wholly itself. As he concludes, “Only the two together (corresponding to the prototype of revelation in scripture) constitute the unique ‘form’ capable of being ‘seen’ in the light of faith by the believer, a unique testimony, invisible to the world, and a ‘scandal’ to it.”

Thinking of scripture as offering the prototype, I was put in mind first of Paul, and the way the opening prayers in his epistles are so often road maps to his theological reflections, and the ways, like in Romans 8, that his theological reflections are transposed into prayer and doxology.

I was also put in mind of Augustine and how so much of his work is either actually prayer or is suffused, surrounded by, steeped in, prayer. The Confessions are of course a famous example of this, but you can see it throughout his work. Here is a portion of a prayer from the end of The Trinity that nicely captures Augustine’s deep desire not simply to understand something, or to explain something, but rather to see and be transformed by what he has sought to understand:

“Do Thou give strength to seek, who has made me find You, and has given the hope of finding You more and more. My strength and my infirmity are in Your sight: preserve the one, and heal the other. My knowledge and my ignorance are in Your sight; where You have opened to me, receive me as I enter; where You have closed, open to me as I knock. May I remember You, understand You, love You. Increase these things in me, until You renew me wholly. “

The Trinity, XV.28, taken from http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/130115.htm

As another example, I think of Anselm who calls his work the Monologium “an example of meditation on the grounds of faith.” In other words, to use a more famous phrase of his, he is engaged in “faith seeking understanding”, and this prayer from the Prosologium illustrates how central prayer is to that larger quest of knowing God:

“I pray, 0 God, to know you, to love you, that I may rejoice in you. And if I cannot attain to full joy in this life may I at least advance from day to day, until that joy shall come to the full. Let the knowledge of you advance in me here, and there be made full. Let the love of you increase, and there let it be full, that here my joy may be great in hope, and there full in truth. Lord, through your Son you do command, nay, you do counsel us to ask; and you do promise that we shall receive, that our joy may be full. I ask, O Lord, as you do counsel through our wonderful Counsellor. I will receive what you do promise by virtue of your truth, that my joy may be full. Faithful God, I ask. I will receive, that my joy may be full. Meanwhile, let my mind meditate upon it; let my tongue speak of it. Let my heart love it; let my mouth talk of it. Let my soul hunger for it; let my flesh thirst for it; let my whole being desire it, until I enter into your joy, O Lord, who are the Three and the One God, blessed for ever and ever. Amen.”

Prologium, CHAPTER XXVI. https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/anselm-proslogium.asp

In these prayers both Augustine and Anselm assume not only a relationship between theology and holiness, meaning that what they believe ought to have some effect on how they live, but also the relationship between love and knowledge, that what they know of God moves them to deeper love of God, and deeper love moves them to deeper knowledge. The divorce between love and knowledge is the deeper issue faced by theologians today, and in my mind it is only in restoring that relationship that we can then heal the divide between theology and holiness. This is why Sertillanges and Griffiths are both such important voices in their respective descriptions of the intellectual life. They both understand the vocation in terms of love and desire. I pray that the same would be true for me and for a whole generation of theologians who hope to serve the church with theology.

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The Heart of a Rebel

“All the congregation are holy…” (Num 16:3).  These are the fatal words of Korah, the leader of a rebellion against Moses’ and Aaron’s leadership.  He argued that if all were holy, then Moses and Aaron weren’t really that special.  That is, Korah the Levite wanted to be Korah the priest.

In a sense, though, Korah was right.  All the congregation was holy.  Israel, after all, were the people of God, they were all set apart, marked by covenant.  Delivered from slavery, led through sea and desert, fed and nurtured in wilderness, they all came to the foot of Sinai, and all were made the people of God.  They were made holy by God’s gracious covenant and set apart in their accountability to the law.

But in the truest sense, Korah’s words weren’t right at all because a priest is a priest, and a Levite is a Levite.  Here is Paul’s metaphor of the people of God as a body writ large.  Korah is like a foot that rages because he is not an eye.  Then as now, God had decreed different functions and callings within the covenant community.  As people of His presence, who possessed the Tabernacle, Korah and his rebels had failed to learn one of the primary lessons of that tabernacle–all holiness is not equal.   Indeed, there is the holy place, but then there is the most holy place.

For this reason, Korah’s rebellion was ultimately against God, not against Moses and Aaron because holiness is ultimately a statement about God, not about us.  If holiness means set apart, then we as creatures, wandering and weak, must be set apart.   We do not set ourselves apart.  We do not declare ourselves to be holy.  He who is holy must make us holy.  He must set us apart.  And if we are in Christ, we are set apart.  To strive for position, to look at another’s calling and burn for it is to rage against what God has set us apart to be.  Korah and his rebels could swing their censers and chant their prayers but that did not make them priests.  They were forever and always Levites.

In our time, we must embrace the times and places God has called us to and set us apart for.  It is God who raises up and casts down.  It is God who sets the boundaries and hours of our days.  And to say with David that the lines have fallen for me in pleasant places, is ultimately a statement of faith in the goodness of God more than it is a statement of actual position or actual wealth.

In the economy of grace, whatever we are or whatever we might be never comes from striving.  We must remember this–we all nurse the heart of a rebel, a rebel that looks at grace and makes law.  In the end, the ground swallowed Korah and his rabble whole.  We could see in this simply God’s judgment, or we can see in it the end of all striving in the economy of grace.  If we do not embrace our position in Christ, if we do not celebrate not only our redemption, but the place and the time we will all be swallowed whole in our striving.