Poetics of theology

The heart, rather than the brain, is for biblical tradition, the seat of understanding. Even the unbeliever cannot say there is no God except in his heart. God is no monopoly of the believer. The heart is common to both.

The heart of the matter, God, is a matter of language. Exiled from language, by the rivers of Babylon, the children of Israel wonder how they can sing the God who is lord al all. Centuries later, Pascal attempts an answer to a similar question.

Seeking to bridge the contrast of two Gods he claims the heart has reasons of which the reason knows nothing. Unwittingly, he drives a wedge between the God of philosophers and the God of Jesus. Opting for the latter he retains the idea of God as a matter of language — of a medium common to both the divine and the human.

A wedge was driven. The traditional approach to God as mystery gives way to God as problem, as many a book title would show. Dismissed is a superfluous God taken for granted, a stopgap. Transcendence is levelled-down to immanence. Still, left looming is the Bible (Nietzsche), a witness to that ineffable language whose matter is God rather than some highest being of some anthropomorphic universe; whose trace is “buried” in the secular empty tomb of orphaned vernacular tongues, including those sacralized by churches.

Kierkegaard and Schleiermacher notwithstanding, God-talk becomes a science of its own (Barth). Voices are heard suggesting that, in relation to God, talk seems today to be condemned to impropriety (Ebeling). It widens the gap between Pascal’s two Gods. In biblical thought, both transcendence and immanence ignore it. They even overlap (Braun).

But, as Bultmann suggested long ago, more significant is the fact that atheism is not a consubstantial prerogative of immanentism — whether religious (Buddhism) or scientific (Russell). It is weaned off on language (of which advocates of intelligent design have no idea) whose role is not to fill gaps: we speak not in order to say something but in order not to say nothing (Augustine). The Tetragrammaton is the closest to naming God and yet essential to it is that it is unpronounceable (Ian Ramsey). It serves to encode a language that is no longer spoken only because, having lost track of its code. we’re unconscious of it -- a state worse than that of Nietzsche’s madman.

A code? You cannot personify it as you did mountains. You can only be lured to “break” it as you do a symbol. Poets do that, or anyone concerned with the Great Code of language (Beckett, Wittgenstein). “The fact that Jesus spoke of God not in dogmas but in poems should be the starting point of all our efforts to speak of God” (Gerd Theissen).