Curious Christian

As someone who started practicing meditation years before I started practicing Christianity, learning to meditate as a Christian was a core struggle in my early discipleship experience.

Given the scarcity of evangelical resources to aid me in my journey and the importance of this process for me I was forced look back to the Orthodox mystics as much as the Protestant reformers as I struggled to find my feet. As a consequence I was never fully enculturated into the evangelical tradition and instead forged my own hybrid path – never taking either tradition at face value.

But because my journey into evangelicalism and Christian mysticism were simultaneous, in an ironic sort of way I often find myself advocating a far more evangelical approach to the exploration of the Christian Mystics than many Evangelicals in the Emerging Church today. For me the deconstruction of the Eastern Orthodox tradition is just as much a priority for me as the deconstruction of the Western Evangelical tradition. I am not running away from one tradition to embrace the other but critique and embrace both.

And when it comes to the Christian Mystics I am more interested in what inspired their traditions in the first place than how these traditions actually panned out. I am not interested in recovery and imitation but contextualization and extrapolation. More than anything I want to know – if there is a biblical source behind their apophatic-mystical theology – what was it? In this respect I would like to draw attention to some comments in “Eastern Orthodox Christianity” by Daniel B. Clendenin:

Eastern theologians base their apophatic orientation in a series of Old and New Testament texts. They point to texts in the Old Testament that remind us that no person can see God and live. Though acknowledging that God spoke to Moses face to face, as a man speaks with his friend, they point out that when Moses asked to see the glory of the living God, he responded, “You cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.” So it was that as he passed by, God covered the face of Moses, so that Moses would see only his back and not his face.” (Exodus 33:11, 18-23)

Other examples include Isaiah, who feared death because of his vision of God; even the seraphim shielded their eyes from his very presence (Isa. 6:1-5). Isaiah also saw a radical abyss between the mind of God and our minds: as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are his ways and thoughts higher than ours (55:8-9). Gideon and Manoah feared death at the sight of God (Judg. 6:22; 13:22). And when God appeared to Elijah, the prophet covered his face with a mantle (1 Kings 19:13). The Psalms, Eastern thinkers point out, are filled with references to the utterly transcendent God. “Clouds and thick darkness surround him” (Ps. 97:2), a theme that perhaps recalls the experience of Moses at Sinai. The very name of God is majestic and wonderful (Ps. 8:1), causing Gregory of Nyssa to observe that “God’s name is not known; it is wondered at…

…The Spiritual Homilies of Macarius of Egypt (300-390); To the Shepherd by John Climacus, who in fact was a monk who lived in the desert of Mount Sinai; and Clement of Alexandria’s Stromata (c. 150-215) – all draw upon the Mosaic accounts of blinding light and cloudy darlness to describe the apophatic knowledge of God…

 

…Like the Old Testament, the New Testament emphasizes the radical incomprehensibility of God. No person can see God (John 1:8; 1 John 4:12). He dwells in unapproachable light (1 Tim. 6:15-16). On the Damascus road Paul, like Moses, encountered God in a blinding light. In recounting his vision of God (2 Cor. 12:2-4), Paul twice tells us that he does not know, but only God knows exactly what he experienced. Caught up into paradise, he had a vision of God that was beyond words; it was “inexpressible” (v. 4). In the majestic doxology at the end of Romans 11 Paul draws upon Isaiah 40:13 and Jeremiah 23:18 to remind us that God’s ways are unsearchable, “his paths beyond tracing out.” No one can know the mind of the Lord, Paul says. For the Corinthians Paul draws a distinction between God’s transcendent wisdom and the frailty of all human thought (1 Cor. 1:18-31; 3:18-23). Thus in both the Old and New Testaments there is a solid basis for the eastern understanding of theology as an apophatic task. The entire Eastern tradition of unknowing, of learned ignorance, is rooted in Scripture.

In a sence all theology is mystical in that it deals with the data of revelation. The West has its own tradition of Christian mysticism, of course. Indeed it is not uncommon for theologians of the West to take some note of the apophatic boundaries of theology. We can cite passages in Augustine or Aquinas, for example, that affirm apophaticism, and we can study Western mystics like Meister Eckhart or Jakob Bohme. But in the West acknowledgements of apophaticism tend to be just that – acknowledgements, a tip of the hat, an introductory admission limited to theological prolegomena before long and rigorous intellectual abstractions. The West – Protestantism more than Catholicism – also tends to relegate the mystics to sectarian extremes. In the East, by contrast, apophaticism and mystery are not just passing admissions of theology, nor even characteristics of theology; in the East apophaticism and mystery are theology. Orthodoxy removes all boundaries that would separate theology and spirituality.