Approaching the End. Stanley Hauerwas

Approaching the End - Stanley Hauerwas


Скачать книгу
href="#ulink_844ebc86-9f4a-5d59-a06c-e48f08b9ba30">18. Yoder, Preface to Theology, p. 248.

      With Charles Pinches

      Beginning Explorations

      Christians are people expected to bear witness to what makes them Christian. Indeed, to connect witness to Christianity is commonplace. But as with many theological commonplaces, we can miss the significance of the grammar of a faith that demands that Christians witness to what they believe. The complexity of these matters is evident by the way the grammar of the last sentence betrays our contention about witness. Christians do not witness to what they believe, but what they believe must be a witness. Why should the God Christians worship require witnesses?

      In fact, believer and non-­believer alike often assume that any god worth believing in should not depend on witnesses to be made known. So if the God of Israel who raised Jesus from the dead requires witnesses, then this suggests that what Christians believe about this God must be false. Yet we will argue that if the God we worship as Trinity, and worship is the right word, could be known without witnesses, that would indicate that such a God, the Christian one, actually does not exist. No doubt this is a strong claim to which we cannot do full justice in what follows; yet we hope to say enough to suggest why the claim matters and what might be some of its important theological implications.

      One robust metaphysical point that relates to the connection between witness and truth is simply that all that is, the vast expanse of creation in all its complexities and intricacies, did not have to be. And of course, we are part of this “all.” We are created, contingent beings that did not have to be. Only God exists by necessity, as Christians (along with certain others) claim. But Christians believe further that the God that exists by necessity is known only through contingent creatures. “Witness” names the truth that the only way we can know the character of the world, the only way we know ourselves, the only way we know God is by one person telling another.1

      We believe an exploration of the relation between God, truth, and witness2 is appropriate in an essay that seeks to honor Fergus Kerr. We hope it helps illumine his work, in particular his understanding of Thomas. As Kerr observes in After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism, Thomas thought arguments for God’s existence were necessary not so as to convince hypothetically open-­minded atheists, or even to persuade “fools,” but rather “to deepen and enhance the mystery of the hidden God. . . . Far from being an exercise in rationalistic apologetics, the purpose of arguing for God’s existence is to protect God’s transcendence.”3

      Kerr develops this extremely important point by noting that Thomas’s arguments for God’s existence are expressions of his understanding of God’s simplicity. Divine simplicity makes clear that we cannot know what God is; rather, we can only reason to God from the existence of the world that did not have to be. Indeed, from this perspective, arguments for God’s existence are actually a way to resist idolatry, presuming as they do that those things about which we do have knowledge — that is, that which exists but requires no explanation — are best known as “effects.” According to Kerr, the notion that all that is testifies as “effect” expresses that all that is is created. In short, all that is witnesses to God by acknowledging that all that is is created.

      Kerr thinks rightly that his understanding of the character of Thomas’s “proofs” expresses his


Скачать книгу