The Preached God
Systematic theology is reflection between yesterday’s and today’s proclamation. Having heard and been claimed by the Word of God, we reflect on how to say it again. We begin such reflection with the God we have heard. That is proper since “God” is the word we use for the beginning, as well as the ending, of all things. “In the beginning, God…” (Genesis 1), and in the end God shall be all in all (I Cor. 15:28). Having heard the word of God we are, in turn, impelled to speak it, to proclaim it. But how shall we reflect on God so as to foster proclamation? That is the fundamental question for systematic theology.
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The hearing of the proclamation makes us aware of a fundamental distinction, as Luther once put it, between God preached and God not preached. In the proclamation we hear something we have not heard before and cannot hear elsewhere: “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, …God has prepared for those who love him” (I Cor. 2:9). The distinction between God not preached and God preached helps us to reflect and speak honestly about God.
To begin with, assuming we have heard God in the proclamation, we can be honest about the fact that outside the proclamation God is something of an onerous burden. We see that apart from God preached, we are estranged from God. Rather than being the one we are allegedly always seeking, God not preached appears more as the one we can never quite get off our backs. As such, “God” is the name for whomever or whatever is “out there,” “up there,” “in the depths,” “transcendent to us,” and messing with us. “God” is responsible for it all. God is an enigma for us. Is there anyone, anything, “out there,” up there”? We are not quite sure, and our attempts to either prove it or to disprove it fall short. Outside the proclamation both theistic and atheistic theologians are strangely one. Both are trying to get God off our backs. The theist most often does it by trying to make God “nice,” to bring God “to heel,” so to speak, and the atheist does it by trying to make God disappear. Both attempts have a similar outcome from the point of vie of the proclamation: they only subvert it.
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Thus God apart from proclamation is a rather intractable problem for us. We neither get along very well with God, nor without God. We are at best ambivalent about God. On the one hand, we like the idea of an eternal “anchor” to things, or an eternal goal that is also the source and guarantor of all the things we seek: eternal truth, goodness, beauty, and so on. On the other hand, God is a threat to us: the ruler, the judge, the almighty One who has the final say. We are caught between seeking and fleeing God’s presence. The psalmist sings, “As a heart longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for thee, O God” (Psalm 42:1). But then, “Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?” (Psalm 139:7). Our thinking does not exactly help us, at least not in a direct positive sense. The problem is that when we think “God” we come up against an awesome string of sheer abstractions, what Luther menat, perhaps, by the “naked God in his majesty” (deus nudus in sua maiestate), the “bare idea” of God. God is absolute, immortal, immutable, infinite, timeless, passionless (apathos), omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient; God is the eternal ruler, judge, and disposer of all things, by whose power and will all things come to be and not to be. God is, by definition, God.
It is the very godness of God that causes all the difficulty in our thinking. For if those fearsome abstractions convey truth, “God” is the end of us. That is, should God be all those things, we are left with nothing–no significance, no freedom, no place to stand. God as sheer abstraction, as the “naked God,” is an inescapable terror for us. God “not preached” is a God of wrath. This concept may be unpopular but it is true. Otherwise, people would not feel the need nervously and desperately to hide it, to cover up or paper over the naked God with pages torn from theology texts. Outside the proclamation God is unavoidably wrathful.
Via Forde’s Theology is for Proclamation pp. 13-15.
