The Experience of God: A Postmodern Response

Chapter 2: Experience of God

2 Experience of God A Response to John D. Caputo M I C H A E L J . S C A N L O N , O . S . A . In the seventh chapter of his epistle to the Romans, St. Paul tells us how he wants to do good—how he wants to follow Christ, but confesses that it is impossible for him to do so. Then comes the eighth chapter, and he finds himself able to do the impossible, and now he writes that he has been empowered by the divine Dynamis,1 the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, to do the impossible. What was impossible for Paul while he lived kata sarka (in the blood, that is, on his own) is now more than possible because he lives kata pneuma (in the Spirit). What an exhilarating experience as Paul proclaims us freed by the Spirit from sin, death, and the Law. This Pauline experience of liberation from impotency is repeated, of course, by Augustine, who never tires of telling us that we cannot —we cannot even will, never mind do the good without grace. Augustine would interpret Paul’s ‘‘I want to do what is good’’ in Romans 7:21 as a mere velleity, a totally inefficacious, half-hearted bit of conation that we often refer to with a ‘‘that would be nice’’ sigh. For Augustine, as long as we live ‘‘on our own’’ the posse (the ability), the velle (the willing), and the agere (the doing) are impossible.2 This is a summary of the Augustinian theology of grace (gratia operans, or operating grace, ‘‘what God does in us without us’’), which became church doctrine (doctrines always begin as somebody’s theology) when it was received against the Pelagians by the Council of Carthage in 418 with subsequent papal approval. In many ways this is 42 ‘‘good news’’—it tells us that God saves us. A later Augustinian theologian , Martin Luther, was so delighted with this good news that he added another sola to his list of solas (God alone, Christ alone, grace alone. . .): ‘‘experientia sola facit theologum.’’ Not only the Christian but also the theologian must experience this liberating delivery from being ‘‘on his own.’’ Luther no longer needed the extra ‘‘work’’ of being an Augustinian friar; he was freed from the burdens of ‘‘the religious life’’ (the ‘‘higher way’’) to join his fellow Christians in their freedom in ‘‘the congregation of the faithful.’’ But shortly after the time of Augustine, some monks in Provence were dissatisfied with the Augustinian form of the good news. Here they were, trying to live the life of asceticism, and there seemed to be no way to give a positive theological evaluation to human works. Yes, Augustine had provided another description of grace as gratia cooperans (‘‘what God does in us with us’’), but it was his teaching on gratia operans that had received doctrinal status. So some of these monks modified this doctrine to find some place for what we do for our salvation ,3 and they came up with the heresy we now call ‘‘Semipelagianism ,’’ a heresy attacked vigorously by some Augustinian theologians who had it condemned by the Council of Orange in 529, again with papal approval.4 Augustine himself had anticipated this new Pelagian heresy in his theology of ‘‘prevenient grace,’’ which provided the orthodox answer Orange used against Semipelagianism . The lesson taught by Orange is clear—divine efficacy and human efficacy are never to be placed on the same level; divine primary causality is always the ground of creaturely secondary causality . However, the development of the notion of ‘‘cooperating grace,’’ which is based on this distinction, had to wait for another day. That day came centuries later with the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. Commenting on Israel’s discovery of history in relation to the faith of Abraham, Mircea Eliade claimed that ‘‘it must not be forgotten that, if Abraham’s faith can be defined as ‘for God everything is possible ,’ the faith of Christianity implies that everything is possible for man.’’5 Caputo quoted the New Testament text that gives a solemn pledge to this impossible possibility: ‘‘For truly I say to you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; nothing will be impossible for you’’ (Mt 17:20–21). In the Catholic tradition (and Eliade was an Eastern...