Faith and the Mystery of God by Maurice Wiles (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Faith and the Mystery of God. By MAURICE WILES. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982. Pp. 160. $6.95 (paperback). The Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University in this slim volume sets forth a personal account of his central beliefs as a reflective, critical theologian. He begins by calling attention to the problems caused for Christians by contemporary awareness of the multiplicity of differing faiths, all of which merit consideration and respect. In his modest style Wiles is prepared to claim, as a Christian, that we do have glimpses of something beyond relativity and that personal language about the divine is "not wholly inappropriate." Many disagreements, he contends, are occasioned by a false understanding of religious language, which is intended to be disclosive of the transcendent and, even more importantly, to stimulate creative responses. Language about God acting in history, accordingly , cannot be taken as literally describing God's active intervention , but it can significantly shape our ideals and patterns of behavior. The divine causality is more felicitously understood in terms of final rather than efficient causality-a proposal which Wiles, with his distrust of metaphysics, leaves rather undeveloped. This imaginative view of religious language is for Wiles the key to many crucial theological problems. The "real presence " of Jesus in the Eucharist can now be understood as symbolic rather than literal and thus (against Paul VI) as a matter of trans-signification rather than transubstantiation . The church can be understood as the Body of Christ not in a literal, biological sense (the view here attributed to E. Mascall and J. A. T. Robinson), but in a metaphorical sense, pointing the way to a new intimacy with God built upon personal relations to other Christians and to Jesus himself. Still more centrally, Jesus may be understood as one with God not in a metaphysical sense (J. N. D. Kelly) but in a figurative and inspirational sense. The gospels, according to Wiles, are intended to communicate a way of looking at Jesus in the light of the divine glory rather than to provide factual information about him. The important thing about Jesus, it would appear, is not what he actually was but what he means for faith. Having established these principles, Wiles attempts to summarize the new possibilities opened up by the gospel story. Exemplary in his own personal life of faith (pace Aquinas), Jesus arouses in his followers a confident reliance on God's graciousness so that they are, in a sense, "jus116 BOOK REVIEWS 117 tified by faith.'' The cross should not be taken as vicarious suffering (W. Sunday) or even as a vicarious penitential act (R. C. Moberly) but as a parable of God's engagement in the costly struggle against evil. The resurrection accounts, correspondingly, need not be taken as affirming a real change in the dead body of Jesus, but as a confident affirmation of God's eventual victory over evil. As parables, the stories about Jesus create new possibilities in our own lives. From Christology Wiles passes on to ecclesiology. He depicts the church as a community called to foster freedom and universal openness. While institutional structures are indispensable, no specific church order can be imposed as mandatory without detriment to freedom within the church and to ecumenical harmony among churches. For the church to define itself against any other group is for Wiles a serious deviation, at variance with the goal of universal human fellowship-the aspect of the church's task which Wiles, following Charles Davis, most strongly emphasizes . The quest for specific identity on the part of the church is a delusion. " To put it very sharply,'' writes Wiles, "it is only the church which does not much care whether it is one which is one. By that standard churches are hard to come by" (p. 89). In his reflections on worship Wiles returns to his themes of symbol and evocative language. The language of worship, he insists, is radically different from the language of belief. The same is true of prayer. We do not pray beause we believe that God acts in answer to our petitions but because we find ourselves impelled to pray and because, in praying, we experience...