A Dance of Head and Heart

It you’ve known me for any length of time, you know there are a handful of topics that are difficult to shut me up about once you get me going: music theory, tennis, coffee, Vincent van Gogh, and of course, theology. Christian theology has such a rich library to plumb, spanning over 20 centuries of thought and debate. Many Christians think that the principles of their faith were cemented with the creation of the scriptural canon. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our faith has continued to develop of two millennia of logic, scriptural interpretation, historical criticism, science, reason and just plain old lived experience. Theology continues to expand our concept of God because it is impossible to contain God in any single philosophy, even those contained in scripture. God is constantly overflowing the boundaries we place on them, eluding definition, expanding our concepts of the divine and breaking down our rigid systems of thought and belief. As the United Church of Christ so aptly put it, “God is still speaking.” If you believe in a loving God, that is present through Christ, through sacrament, through the body of believers, present to us as Jesus says in our interactions with the poor, hungry and the immigrant, then you must believe God has more to reveal in every moment. It’s not that you believe God isn’t still speaking new ideas to us, it’s that you’re not listening.

But how do we listen to that voice? I love the rich intellectual legacy of theology that helps us hone our language about God. But I also cherish the rich legacy of direct spiritual experience that is available to us through Christian mysticism. Mysticism gives us a direct and experiential union with the triune God. Mysticism reminds us that God cannot be contained in thought and language, that at best, thought and language are near misses. The greatest of our theology is like a haiku, small yet multivalent, ending on a paradox or riddle that coaxes us further into thought. But theology cannot describe the wild, mysterious God who is the creator of all existence. Mysticism reminds us that our theology, while beautiful, is limited. Mysticism reminds us that our relationship with God is not just in what we think or believe, but in what we experience directly in the divine. God seeks relationship and sometimes our concepts of God get in the way. We must put our knowing aside and escape into unknowing if we are to experience God.

Luckily, I don’t have to choose between theology and mysticism and neither do you. They balance each other, they help us integrate our heads and our hearts. They help us embrace this great mystery that we worship a God who wants nothing more to be known yet is ultimately incomprehensible. We can study the unfolding revelation through the history of our faith, and we can be shaped by the immediate encounter of God through mystical practice.

Our Language for God

I appreciate that Christianity gives me a language to talk about God. This language, theology, is our collective best effort over the centuries to best articulate who God is, how God acts and how we are to live in response. But like all language and culture, those ideas can get stuck in anachronistic and outdated ideas and need to be freed through new thought. We no longer think the earth is flat even though most if not all of the biblical writers did. The sky is not a dome. There was never any global flood because such an event could only make sense on a small, flat earth with a sky dome. The Bible completely supports the practice of slavery, and we find that abhorrent today, along with stoning and polygamy. Theology can never remain static, it must be continuously shaped by our own new and emergent understandings of history, culture, language, science and context. God isn’t contained in any one box, even if you call that box, “scripture.” God invites us to deeper relationships that expand beyond the bounds of anything ever written about God.

We are limited, fallible beings in a constant evolution. What we think today about God will change as our capabilities and knowledge expand. What we think we experience of God today, even in our most profound mystical experiences, must later expand because we are always trapped in our private lens of personal experience. So together, we can expand our language for God, our theology. If you’ve been limiting yourself just to Bible reading in trying to reach this God, you are missing out. It’s like trying to program an AI bot by using an old Commodore 64 manual that teaches Commodore Basic. Yeah, Basic will help you understand some key ideas about how logic works and how we once approach computing, but it’s also always time to move forward.

The Bible cannot be a complete or even an accurate view of God because our knowledge and language and culture constantly expand and evolve. Our concepts of God must also expand. God is infinite, so this process never ends. Why and what do we believe today in light of our current culture? How do we respond to new questions and challenges that didn’t exist when the Bible was written? How do we continue to shape our liturgy and communal life in a world of international live streams? What is heresy and how do we carefully reason through these changes? How does faith connect with new ideas like quantum physics, stem cell research and bebop?

The Bible is not at all systematic. It represents ideas from many different authors and editors and often those ideas contradict. Likewise, the systematic attempts of theology are tempting, but problematic. In a post-Enlightenment world, we want to be comforted by a deep intellectual satisfaction that we believe, “the right thing.” We want a sense of clarity and order. But in our post-Modern sensibilities, we also understand that we will never be able to name that, “one right thing.” As with any system, the danger we face is in mistaking our language and current culture for reality itself. We risk claiming that we figured out God and in so doing reduced the Infinite to a mildewed set of doctrinal claims, formulae of philosophical adventures.

All Knowledge is Limited

I just made you read four paragraphs to say one thing: Our theological knowledge of God, even in scripture, is necessarily limited by the constraints of language and cultural context. But if the history of Christian thought is perilously limited, how do we even move forward in faith? It won’t surprise to read that I think the answer is in total humility.

Our language for God, and our knowledge of God, must move toward greater revelations and insights. God will always be more than we can comprehend. St. Augustine once said, “Si comprehendus, non est Deus,” which means “If you understand, it is not God.” All our doctrines point to something beyond. Everything we’ve thought about God is ultimately provisional.

Just look at Jesus and Paul, they both fearlessly corrected old ideas of God. Suddenly, you should love your enemy, forgive each other and stand up for the poor and the immigrant. God is now a loving parent, not a distant tribal war leader. Jesus showed us that we should include everyone and not follow ritualistic ideas of purity and separation. Paul taught us that God lives inside us through Christ – quite a mystical idea, indeed – and not in a temple. Paul taught us that the law no longer holds us, but a God of love saves us. We get to carry on in their examples.

Ideas and language are powerful. Becoming married to those ideas and the limits they contain is utterly dangerous to your faith. For example, I currently enjoy thinking about the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) as a basis for logical belief in God. It suggests that everything has a cause, therefore all of existence must have an ultimate ground of being. Yet, while I disagree with their arguments, many quantum physicists would argue that randomness does not imply a cause. So PSR can nurture my faith in some ways, but if I base my belief in God on PSR and become convinced that quantum randomness contradicts PSR, my faith is doomed. Belief in any other dogma – young earth creation, eternal conscious torment, biblical infallibility, simply two-gender polarities, baptism by immersion, worshipping on certain days – may enhance your faith or one day, may be a danger to your faith as you grow as a human being. Holding our ideas with great humility is our only option.

Humility Through Mystical Encounter

Theology is language and language must change and evolve. Mysticism on the other hand is opening ourselves up to an encounter with the infinite and unchanging God. Mysticism shows us that there is always more to God than we can ever contain in words or concepts. Dogma can lead to hubris, then mysticism is the corrective call to humility and wonder.

If you are uncomfortable moving beyond scripture, at least know that both Jesus and Paul were mystics. But I hope I’ve convinced you that your faith didn’t calcify in the late 4th century CE with the creation of the biblical canon. Mysticism has an amazing historical tradition with the desert fathers and mothers, to Teresa, to John of the Cross, Saint Hildegard and the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing. They all share a paradox that we’ve always known deep in our hearts, that God is at once closer than our own breath and yet radically transcendent. And this God wants to share our experience. Mysticism keeps us humble because it reminds us that God is more than we can ever fully grasp. Yet it invites us to experience God, not as an idea, but as a living, dynamic, loving Prescence.

Keeping Heart and Mind Together

I think some Christians fear mysticism because they think it means abandoning reason, or tradition, or scriptural authority, or anything else they think is important for pure emotional reaction. They think that mystical experience is dangerous because it is irrational. After all, we can’t just let everyone run around and have their own private experience of God, can we? In reality, Christian mysticism is about an integrative dance between the head and the heart. They are two ways of knowing God. They inform each other.

Mystical experience is not irrational, but transrational (I think I got that word from either Richard Rohr or Pete Enns, but no matter, you should read them both). Reason can provide many great things, but it comes to an end. Mysticism is not about rejecting those great, reasonable things, it is about moving beyond. We fall silent before God, acknowledging that God can only ever be more mysterious than defined, and we surrender all knowledge. We seek an understanding that cannot be expressed through thought and word.

Theology and mysticism are not opposites but are both a necessity. We need words to shape our concepts, and we need to leave the words behind, so we’re not trapped by them. Mysticism keeps us humble and allows us to experience God beyond our words and culture. It teaches us that paradox, contradiction and the limitations of our language are just a natural part of our humanity to embrace and dance along with. It reminds us that ultimately our faith is about living our most human purpose in relationship with God and not about believing the right things to get into a secret club.

Ultimately, mysticism is about a mature faith. You’re not choosing a particular systematic theology because you understand that no single theology can contain the whole of God. In mysticism, we allow God – the fully triune God of creator, Christ and spirit – to shape us. That doesn’t mean we continue to read and reflect and argue and write and grow. But it means we keep the mystery of God in our heart as we do the fun and difficult work of theology. God isn’t a problem to be solved but a loving presence to be experienced.