ABSTRACT
This quest to imagine divinity in more richly present terms than the logic of the One has ever afforded has brought us to the nitty-gritty: to the proposition-making center of the project. Here we attempt to ‘‘speak in stones’’ which means weaving together the necessary skepticism of the metaphoric exemption with the equally necessary claim-staking description of experiential confession. The metaphoric exemption demands caution whenever we attempt to say anything direct or descriptive of God while experiential confession demands that we say something specific and fleshy about the incarnate divinity embedded in Christian stories of faith. Porous exchange between skepticism and affirmation-between words and stones and stories and bodies-leads to divine multiplicity. In Re-Imagining the Divine, I argued strenuously for a methodology in
constructive theology that takes both metaphoric exemption and experiential confession utterly seriously as counter-balancing correctives in theological construction.3 It is good to remember that thought alone cannot encompass the divine in reality, just as how-to manuals cannot, in the end, achieve alone the ends that they illustrate. This is the metaphoric exemption: everything we think or say, teach or proclaim, believe or catechize, is not God, not the Deep, not multiplicity, not enough. Everything, ‘‘Ground of Being,’’ ‘‘Tehom,’’ ‘‘God,’’ ‘‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind,’’ ‘‘Logos,’’ ‘‘One,’’ ‘‘Divine Multiplicity,’’ misses the mark in some way. All are incomplete; each is a metaphor. And, yet, something that so many call God comes. Divinity responds and shifts into shape, is born under stars of longing, is washed in rivers of connection, touches a wounded body here, a shredded heart there, walks, thirsts, and learns, rises up, is broken like bread, slips through the open door of death, returns. What are we to do with this God,
these Gods, who come? The metaphoric exemption, I have argued, is a step toward multiplicity because it refuses, finally, to say. It refuses dogmatism and militates against the hubris of canonical control. It reminds us of our place in the vast flux of what is. It is the metaphoric exemption that reminds us that we, theologians and dreamers of God, are not God just because we are a noisy dream of God. But the metaphoric exemption alone cannot abide the thereness of Gods who come: the intimacy and reality of them. And, so, the metaphoric exemption is only part of the story. Experiential
confession is also, at the very same time, true as flesh. We cannot know the depth of the divine that comes, we cannot ever grasp it. And yet we are met on the dusty road by divinity itself, prosaic and thirsty, and may even come to know that we have met God. How can this be so? How can God-‘‘that than which nothing greater can be conceived’’ as Anselm so grandly phrased it in the twelfth century-be here, intimate and dismissible as the touch of fog, poor and prosaic enough to mistake for a city gardener in a cemetery? How can human beings come theologically to understand this apparent contradiction? As I suggested in the introduction to this book, it is this question that
exposes the metaphoric limitations of the logic of the One. At the same time, the Christian claim of incarnation goes to far greater depths than the architects of Christian empire could allow. There is really no contradiction between God and gardener, not if divinity is freed from the conceptual constraints of Pythagorean stasis, shored up by patriarchal exclusivity. There is no contradiction, in other words, if we can imagine God to be big enough to break the laws of the theologians, to incarnate freely, to respond, again and again, in the flesh of the world. And so, what are the characteristics of such divinity, if not the traditional negative exile of infinity, otherness, stasis, and absolute oneness? With the proper caution of the metaphoric exemption, we cannot declare a thing but, with the urgency of experiential confession, we can gesture, take up a swimmer’s posture of buoyancy and openness, begin the story . . . again. It is experiences and stories of the world and cosmos itself, of star showers, wind, rain, rock, life, and death that give clues to the divinity that comes, creates, and dares trespass on the theologians’ negations with its buoyant ‘‘nevertheless.’’ What follows are therefore positive gestures that dare an ontological brush stroke of kataphasis, a limning of advent.
