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3 The World in Which We Pray The Eclipse of God and a Fragile Theology of Faith Of course, practicing the Trinity Prayer is not enough in itself. Spiritual practices must be suffused with spiritual knowing if our spirituality is to be for real. Once the tyranny of the cognitive mind has been overcome, what is to become of the deeper mind and the thirsting heart? This question returns us to a mundane observation that I made at the beginning of chapter 2: in these times, it is not easy to pray. That observation, in turn, presupposes a much more telling question—about God. This is the issue that we must now confront. Never mind our spiritual practices for a moment, important as they are. Let’s deal with the underlying challenge. How is it possible to know God in the midst of the profoundly confusing world in which we live today? How is it possible to be claimed by God, to be thrown to our knees in awe, in a world where spiritualities seem to be a dime a dozen? We must confront this kind of question because, without that overwhelming knowing, all of our practices would obviously be for naught. In this chapter, therefore, I will cautiously venture to explore the contemporary question of God in terms of my own experience. To this end, I will follow a way—focusing on Jesus—that was identified by a number of Christian thinkers of the past century, foremost among them the theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who forged his spirituality in the midst of the crisis of the German church and the German resistance to Hitler during World War II.1 Instructed by Bonhoeffer, I will identify this part of our journey under the following rubric: the eclipse of God and a fragile theology of faith. Along the way, I will review—and then reject—what I consider to be perhaps the most plausible approach to “the God question” in our time, which I will 37 call a rigorous theology of facts. I will engage this topic in conversation with an eminent American theologian of our own era, a former teacher of mine, Gordon Kaufman. I regard the fragile theology of faith that I will be recommending as an implausible plausibility, particularly when it is juxtaposed to a theology of facts such as Kaufman’s. It is predicated not on a self-contained human logic but on what might be called a self-disclosing divine logic, the revelation of the eclipsed God in the person of the one who is said to have proclaimed (John 8:12), “I am the light of the world”—Jesus. Having identified what is for me this implausible plausibility, I will then venture in chapter 4 to explicate some of its meanings, again in terms of my own experience, beginning with the story of Mary Magdalene. The Eclipse of God and the Twilight of Our Times: A Place of Knowing The great German novelist Thomas Mann, lamented in the early twentieth century how easily the word God crosses over human lips. I do not take that thought lightly. A domesticated God is no God at all. God is either wholly other, an inscrutable and unspeakable mystery, as an equally great Swiss theologian of Mann’s era, Karl Barth, said, or God is nothing but a construct of the human imagination, born perhaps of desperation. God is either, in the words of a hymn I have sung all my life, “Immortal, invisible . . ., In light inaccessible hid from our eyes,” or God is an abstract, unifying idea for our worldviews, hardly worthy of our worship. Or, perhaps the idea of God would be some kind of a spiritual opiate, good for nothing but dulling the pain of human existence, as the nineteenth-century philosopher of history Karl Marx claimed. I want to honor the wholly other God as I tell my story. Indeed, I want to acknowledge that the challenge of faith in this God has become all the more acute for many people in the Western world today, since the time of Mann and Barth. If we do not live today in total darkness, as far as faith in the wholly other God is concerned, we surely do live in twilight times, when, for many, nothing ultimate is certain or even of much concern anymore, even in a time when there are many spiritualities competing for our attention. As you sometimes cannot see the forest for...

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