Shuffling Masks
God not preached is the absconder, one who hides behind the naked abstractions, and there is nothing theology as such can do about that because theology is a collection of abstractions. It is only in the concrete proclamation, the present-tense Word from God, spoken “to you” the listener, that the abstraction is broken through for the moment and God no longer absconds but is revealed. This is what theologians with too few exceptions through the ages have either failed or refused to see. When the distinctive correlation between systematic theology and proclamation is overlooked, the theological impulse will of necessity be to attempt the impossible to go to work on the abstractions, to attempt to remove or see through them, to tear the mask from the face of the “hiding” God. When the proclamation is not heard, there is no other recourse. One attempts, against Luther’s frequent caveat, to “peer into the hidden majesty of God.”
Systematic theology has lately subjected itself to futility because of its preoccupation with such attempts. The attempt is futile because it only shuffles masks. Just when one thinks that he or she has removed one terrifying mask, another mask emerges and turns out to be even more threatening, though the perfidy may not be immediately apparent. Such theologizing only substitutes another seductive abstraction for the proclamation. For example, nineteenth-century liberalism proposed Jesus’ proclamation of “the Fatherhood of God” as a surrogate for the gospel. Yet “Fatherhood,” severed from its trinitarian moorings, has turned out to be just another frightening mask to many in our day. We should learn from this that similar masks such as “the Motherhood of God” will turn on us as well. They turn on us because the abstraction replaces the proclamation. Instead of the “I love you,” of the almighty one, we hear a lecture on a God who is in general “love.” The “solution” only creates an even greater problem. Instead of a word from God we hear theological opinions about God. We go out of the frying pan and into the fire! Recall our lover who at the crucial moment claims, “Of course, I love everybody!” or even perhaps “I am love,” instead of saying, “I love you!” What is the beloved to say or do about that? If the message is merely that God is love in general, then everything is turned back on us. “If God is love, what is the matter with me? Why am I such an unloving clod?” The generality, the abstraction, whatever its place, only turns on us because it can never do the job of the concrete, self-revealing proclamation. Theology simply cannot unmask God.
… there has been a fundamental miscalculation about the very purpose and limitations of the systematic enterprise itself. Theology undertakes to reconcile us to God by seeking to penetrate the masks, to get behind the abstractions. The result, however, is only to disenfranchise God and water God down. But God is not mocked. We do not by such artifice escape the divine wrath. We are delivered willy-nilly into the hands of “the judge” or perhaps of Satan, the accuser, the “attorney for the prosecution.” For apart form the proclamation God and Satan are virtually indistinguishable.
Via Forde’s Theology is for Proclamation, pp. 17-20.
