Emergent & Rahner

As I am reading my way through Rahner I increasingly feel that Rahner and Emergent go together - so I was having a Google on this basis and came across this article here on Prodigal Kiwi(s) blog.

Prodigal Kiwi is quoting from a paper by Declan Marmion titled “Theology, Spirituality, and the Role of Experience in Karl Rahner,” Louvain Studies, 29, 2004, 49-76 and I particularly liked a couple of quotes; Rahner

...transposes questions of God into the transcending adventure of human freedom rather than speaking of faith as primarily an ascent of truth... This means helping people to accept and recognise an immediate closeness of God within the ordinary and extraordinary drama of their own life…

I also liked this quote which ties the spirituality of Rahner back into lived theology and social justice;

...The contemporary focus on spiritual experience ... can easily fall into both the “despotism of the sacred” and the “narcissism of the self”, whereas what is needed is a genuinely personalised religion that unites affectivity, intelligence and social responsibility in the light of faith...

I really like this so I must get back to Google and see if I can find the article. Oh yea, and I think that if I were one for labels I would now officially be a post-evangelical emergent Christian

Part 2: Lived Theology

For people who don't know - I'm a Street Pastor. The most common question we get asked is "What is a SP?" Well there are 20 of us from different churches in the town. We undertook a 12 week training course covering CPR, counselling, sociology, rape crisis etc. etc. We have 2 teams of 3/4 people out every Saturday night in the town between 10 pm and around 3 am (sometimes it can be a bit later depending whether we're involved in a conversation or an incident). We are on rota every 3 weeks. We carry space blankets, flip flops for girls who take off their incredibly high heels and try and walk home barefoot, often there is broken glass so it can be dangerous. We hand out spikeys which girls can put in the tops of their bottles to stop them getting their drinks spiked. We have sharps containers and heavy gloves for picking up glass. We put any bottles or glasses we find into the bins so they can't be lifted in the heat of the moment and maybe used to assault someone. We are there to help, and to create a safer atmosphere in the town and we're there to listen to anyone who wants to talk to us. We're not there to talk about God, although if people do want to talk about God and faith and raise the subject with us, then we are happy to do this.

It's been 6 months since Street Pastors started in Dunfermline. I haven't blogged much about it because I'm conscious that we are talking to all sorts of people and they tell us all kinds of stories about themselves and I wouldn't want to compromise anyone's confidentiality. The response from people on the streets is overwhelmingly positive we could probably count on the fingers of one hand how many negative comments we've had (all of us) in the last 6 months. Women are really pleased we are there because we're someone safe and if they need us we're here. We get hugs and banter and they tell us about their night and thank us for the flip flops and when we hand out spikeys they tell us about times they or their friends have had drinks spiked. Sometimes they have things they want to speak about and we listen and we care. They sometimes split up from boyfriends and cry on benches and we make sure they're safe and listen. Sometimes they get comprehensively drunk and need someone to lean on so they get to a taxi and safely home. Young men are interesting because they too, randomly shout to us that they think it's great or give us the thumbs up when we pass by, but we've been struck recently when we've reflected back over the time, about how many young men want to talk about things that have happened or things they are worried about. Some of them are a bit taken aback at how much they open up to a stranger. We have serious conversations, nonsense conversations, deeply spiritual conversations, conversations which break your heart.

When I think about why I do it - it's about connection. Karl Rahner talks about everyone having a "pre-apprehension of being", the mind reaching out beyond any given object towards infinite being and therefore God. That infinity which we experience ourselves exposed to also permeates our everyday activities. He calls this transcendence. "A person can of course shrug his shoulders and ignore this experience of transcendence. He can devote himself to his concrete world, his work, his activity in the realm of time and space ...a person also has the experience of emptiness, of inner fragility and ...of the absurdity of what confronts him. But he also experiences hope, the movement towards liberating freedom". People might be so caught up with the everyday that they do not reflect on this at all, or they might be aware of it but decide never to explore it. We're not there taking God to people, because as I've said before, he is already there; but I think if I'm about anything at all - it would be to prompt through an action or a word people asking the bigger question of what exists beyond the horizon of the everyday.

Part 1: Philosphical Theology

We had a discussion at the housegroup last night after listening to some inputs on "faith". So, OK, honestly I really struggled with it. I wasn't wilfully mishearing the thing - I just couldn't get it. How it sounded to me was "this is the way to get God to give us stuff" (I know guys - that's not how you hear it) how do I build faith, how do I get healing - for myself and also for others. But really it felt to me like "if you can see that the supernatural world is more real than the natural world then you can ask God for anything". I worry that this is about trying to commodify God, if only we can reduce him to a set of formulae, then everything will be fine. The trouble is God doesn't think like us. He just doesn't obey our rules and we cannot cannot cannot put God in a box.

I think my head is just in a different place ("as usual" I hear my friends shout!). One of the places my head is in is with Karl Rahner. Reading him has been interesting. It is slow going because I don't seem to have had too much time recently but also because it's not the easiest read. It is brilliant and requires quite a bit of thought and concentration, but he has taken me further down the whole philosophy track. The way Rahner sees things is just different. He talks about God in terms of holy mystery and that makes sense to me.

So I found myself listening to a podcast by Emergent Village (you can download it free on iTunes) - a discussion involving John D. Caputo and Richard Kearney, 2 pre-eminent philosophers and people of faith. Some of the comments they made were really interesting to me, here are some highlights:

80% American teens self identify as Christians but their understanding of God is as a cosmic butler, there when you call, it's a hyper individualised experience, "me and God - we talk, we have an understanding", the "fix all" God – if we call loud enough he’ll come to the rescue. They talked about how this traces its roots back to Greek philosophical thought not Jewish or Christian. God as patriarch, emperor, caretaker of the world - a god that one isn’t really involved with most of the time just, when you need him – distant and abstract – don’t think about it till you need a fix “god was born for me”, and is deeply embedded in our liberal individual tradition so prevalent in the west.

But to think about ourselves not as an autonomous individual but someone who is “laid claim to” by something that had us before we had it, then our faith becomes not about rights but about responsibilities; not about individuals but about community, about ‘the other’, the least of these.

Richard Kearney talks about Etty Hillesum – ‘An Interrupted Life ’ who eventually died in Auschwitz. When asked how God could allow the death camps to happen she replied “We must help God to be God". "One should want to be a balm on many wounds." We need to preserve within us the dwelling space for God to be and to enter the world even in the midst of hell. This is the God of the constant call – unless we open the door the messiah can’t enter. Answer evil in terms of vanquishing it – not individually but by seeing God in “the least of these” Christ enters, the humble and broken God. We need to treat each moment in time as a portal through which the messiah is trying to enter. I understand through Jesus, the vulnerable God, a God who calls modestly and incessantly.

I think that's why I struggle with both a simplistic view of God and, what feels like, a liberal individual view of God.

Now I know this is tricky and I probably haven't explained it that well and you might just think that this is some kind of intellectual exercise, but in all honesty all this grounds itself for me in my experience out on the streets on a Saturday night as a street pastor. It might seem philosophical but actually this is really about "lived" theology.

Things I'm Reflecting On

I've been on an interesting spiritual journey for a number of years now - very influenced by Ignatian spirituality. This forms around some ways of living my everyday life and being open to

• Discovering who I really am
• Directing myself towards God
• Noticing God's actions in my life
• Responding to the movements of my heart
• Discovering the nature of my deepest desire
• Seeking God's will
• Becoming free of all that distracts me from my deepest desire
• Making choices in line with my truest self
• Connecting my lived experience with the life, death and resurrection of Christ
• Responding to God's love for me
• Finding God in all things

I'm hoping to do something called 'making the exercises' later this year when the liturgical year turns. But all of this coupled more recently with my experiences on the streets as a Pastor has led me on a theological journey. It's to do with lining up my theology and my 'felt experience' of God. I'm not where I was in my understanding of God, of how The Creator works in the world. So I'm asking some big questions - I know they might not be the things that other people might grapple with but they are real for me;

• Does God really have 'a plan' for our lives? Don't have any problem with God having a purpose.
• How transcendent is God and how immanent? What level of involvement does God have in my life?
• How much is God working and active in the world and what does that look like, how does it feel to people and how do God and I co-create?
• Is God really sovereign? How does that fit with 'free will' does God set self-imposed limits (which I will come back to in a subsequent post)
• How do I reconcile the God of the Old Testament to the God revealed in the New Testament?

In all of this the incarnation is the touchstone, the place I anchor myself - Christ, God making himself as vulnerable as any one could possibly be, born as a human infant, subject to torture and a harrowing death.

At my meeting with my Spiritual Director as I discussed all of this particular theological journeying, she suggested I read the theologian Karl Rahner. Did the 'google' thing and came across this;

"Rahner believed that the polarity between "transcendence" and "immanence" was false, being imposed upon Christianity by secular world views. Human experience is unintelligible unless it is interpreted in light of the transcendent mystery of God... Humans transcend themselves in every act of questioning and thinking, by which they demonstrate themselves to be both part of the natural world and yet simultaneously oriented towards the mysterious horizon of being that Christians know as God, the infinite horizon of hope and love. The dilemma of immanence or transcendence of God must thus be overcome without sacrificing either. Due to the ability of humans to discern the transcendent element of their situation, there is an implicit knowledge of God latent within humanity, which it is the function of transcendental reflection to identify. The sense of relation to God, a natural knowledge of God, he terms "transcendental revelation," but is inadequate in itself and needs to be supplemented by a supernatural knowledge of God, or "categorical revelation." This revelation reaches its climax and fulfillment in Jesus Christ."

That pretty much sums up where I'm at, but much more articulately, and I've bought the book - the really big thick one called "Foundations of Christian Faith: Introduction to the Idea of Christianity" and now I'm really looking forward to reading it.

Here's another quote from Rahner

"Emptiness is only a disguise for an intimacy of God's, that God's silence, the eerie stillness, is filled by the Word without words, by Him who is above all names, by Him who is all in all. And his silence is telling us that He is here.”