In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 22 ‫ﱾﱻ‬ Mystery All of reality—not just antimatter or distant galaxies, but familiar things we take for granted—is deeply mysterious. Light, for instance, is notoriously mystifying, but we succeed sufficiently in handling it if we treat it sometimes as waves and sometimes as particles. When it strikes our eyes and impulses reach our brain, there results, somehow, a spangle of colors (reds, greens, browns, purples, etc.), but we have no clue how such a transmutation from neural stimulus to sensible appearance takes place. The genesis of sweet and sour, soft feel and hard, violin notes and blaring horns—all this is equally mysterious, as is the brain’s ability to store the persons, scenes, and events of a lifetime, available for conscious recall. To be sure, we accumulate ever more physiological and neural information about ourselves, but such data do nothing to bridge the gap between the neural and the experiential. In the other direction, from the experiential to the neural, we decide to walk and, lo, in some mysterious fashion, our intention gets translated into motion: our legs obey. As for our legs and other parts, we imagine them made up of muscles, cells, molecules, atoms, a whole menagerie of subatomic particles, and so on down into mysterious depths where energy and mass are somehow convertible and any resemblance to our sensations is beyond surmise. In the universe around us, all is equally mysterious. Surrounded by dogs, squirrels, moles, sparrows, catfish, turtles, bats, and countless other sentient creatures, we have no idea how much consciousness they possess or how they experience the world. As for nonsentient beings, apples fall, clouds float, and planets spin, all in accordance with the laws of gravity, yet we have no insight into the regularities we label “laws”; we see no reason why they hold. Billions of years back, before all such familiar patterns, we envisage a pinpoint from which this staggering universe erupted, but why and how there was such a point is as 209 210 Theology within the Bounds of Language mysterious to us as was human conception to our ancestors. And even though we should arrive some day at similar, scientific understanding of that cosmic seminal moment, Hume’s conclusion would still carry through: we do not and cannot perceive the necessity of anything occurring as our science says, or surmises, that it does. For us human inhabitants of the cosmos, mystery is all-pervasive. It has widely been felt, however, that theology, to its credit or discredit, somehow specializes in mystery. And this impression has repeatedly, variously been related to theology’s linguistic situation. William Power has suggested, for example, that “the sentence ‘God is a mystery,’ like the sentence ‘God is the inexpressible,’ is actually a second order statement about what we cannot do or have not done with our language about God.”1 In a similarly linguistic vein, Gordon Kaufman has written: [T]o say, “It is a mystery” does not yet tell us anything specific about the subject matter we are seeking to grasp or understand. “Mystery” is, rather, a grammatical or linguistic operator by means of which we remind ourselves of something about ourselves: that at this point we are using our language in an unusual, limited, and potentially misleading way. The word “mystery,” thus, is a warning to ourselves not to mistake what we are now doing for our ordinary ways of speaking and thinking.2 The preceding paragraph’s many examples raise doubts about this assessment , with its linguistic emphasis, as do the typical dictionary entries for “mystery” they exemplify: both highlight our limited knowledge or understanding rather than any oddity of verbal expression. Preceding chapters, too, cause misgivings with regard to Kaufman’s claim of linguistic idiosyncrasy. The Principle of Relative Similarity and its norm apply to all areas of discourse, including theology, and to all factual claims, no matter how mysterious their subject matter. Closer scrutiny may reveal a kernel of truth in assertions such as Power’s and Kaufman’s, but for the moment they can illustrate how murky and how badly in need of elucidation is the relationship between mystery and language in theology. The very word mystery may obscure the relationship. As Gareth Jones has noted, “ ‘Mystery’ is a term used in many different ways in many different theological discourses; often it is ill-defined, confusing to the reader, and impossible to interpret in any meaningful fashion.”3 To be “entirely clear” about his own employment of...

Share