John Staak, OMI
On October 11, 2012, the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council, the Year of Faith began while the Synod on the New Evangelization was taking place. The convergence of these events provides an opportunity for the Church to renew her missionary spirit in faith as she continues to incorporate the Holy Spirit’s guidance from that Council. Pope Benedict XVI described the Year of Faith as a “summons to an authentic and renewed conversion to the Lord, the One Savior of the world.”[1] The revelation experienced in any encounter with Christ calls for the response of faith, provides a new understanding of freedom, and opens one’s horizon to new interpretations of meaning. In Christ our horizon becomes permeable to God’s revelation, so that the transcendent dimension of mystery might become more and more in tune with our personal life journey in communion with the Church and the world.
I would like to offer a brief outline of the dynamics of the faith journey, which starts from an encounter with God’s love and moves through various stages of conversion. After introducing encounter as a meeting of horizons, I review the importance of culture for the dynamic of conversion. My emphasis is on conversion as a journey of discovery and growth in freedom, but I introduce some key elements important for all stages of the dynamic. I limit myself here to three stages of conversion, to which I assign a respective theological hermeneutics: recognition and an inquiring hermeneutics of deliberation; receptive acceptance and an investigative hermeneutics of assent; and engagement and a relational hermeneutics of communion.
ENCOUNTER AS MEETING OF HORIZONS
In any encounter there are at least two perspectives or horizons that come into contact with one another. For the sake of example, I would ask the reader to review again one of the longest gospel accounts of Jesus encountering someone: Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well (Jn. 4:4-42).[2] That passage demonstrates various intersubjective elements that make up the background landscape of encounter: time and place, gender, age, religion, ethnicity, culture, nationality, etc. These intersubjective elements have great importance for understanding how revelation and meaning are received by those engaged in encounter. Merely functional encounters, such as the purchase of some mundanely needed daily item, may not tap the rich resources available from these intersubjective elements; but when it comes to conversion or awakening one to God’s revelation, these elements have great significance. Culture, especially, reflects the many intersubjective zones which influence our horizon of interpretation and meaning. These zones we carry into encounter as part of our reference point for reality and understanding, for assessing and judging the values that influence us.
More specifically, the person of faith remains attentive to the manifestations of God’s love and activity in the world as part of his or her horizon. The person who has not yet come to faith does not carry that acute attentiveness, but measures reality through the lens of personal freedom. These two perspectives (one of faith and one of potentially coming to faith), then, reflect the primary concern of my reflections on horizon here.[3] One’s freedom remains ever open to growth or conversion no matter the level of freedom one thinks one has attained. It is the imagination, however, that directs the lens of freedom to explore the richness of reality, opening or closing down one’s awareness and appreciation of mystery and meaning.
And yet culture maintains a strong influence on the imagination’s ability to survey and creatively interpret reality. For this reason, the Church, philosophers and theologians alike have given more attention to the critical importance of culture. Culture holds the key to any inquiry into the dynamics of encounter. People and their cultures need help translating the experience of God’s informing or breaking into their worlds of meaning. This is where theology can act as midwife to meaning, helping in its translation by pointing out forms of communication that may precede, or supersede, the linguistic form. Before his election as Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Ratzinger noted that cultures “have the inherent capacity for progression and metamorphosis, though also, of course, the risk of decadence. They are concerned with encounter and mutual fertilization…. Revelation is not something alien to them; rather, it corresponds to an inner expectation in the cultures themselves.”[4] By taking advantage of this inherent capacity to search for meaning, by understanding a culture’s inner expectations, theology can discover new opportunities to sharpen a people’s ear to God’s call.
God’s revelation will operate from the inner expectation that marks the human dynamics of each particular culture. The journey to interpretation and meaning passes through the filter of culture. As a filter, culture measures new experiences against its own understanding of sensibility, meaning and personal significance. Culture, then, contains elements that directly affect one’s preconceptual dynamics of reason. This preconceptual reasoning has less to do with knowledge and more to do with values that influence our perception. As the notable philosopher George McLean puts it, “while will depends on knowledge, we have a perception of values which precedes clear concepts and deductions, takes us out of indifference and situates our reasoning processes within an ongoing process of taking interest, evaluating and, at its highest point, being in love.”[5] For a culture to recognize God’s revelation of truth and love, this perception of values must move from the zone of hidden assumptions, ones carried to any encounter, to a conscious awareness that opens one to God as the transcendent source of our being in love. That journey of growth in consciousness unfolds as a discovery of new levels of freedom to which God invites us.
CULTURE AND CONVERSION:
DISCOVERY AND GROWTH IN FREEDOM
Before moving to the theological hermeneutics for the various stages of conversion, I first need to clarify what I mean by conversion. Some overzealous, nondialogical sects of Christianity have given the term conversion a negative connotation. They tend to present it simply as the necessary step of leaving one’s previous belief system in order to adhere to Christianity. I prefer, instead, to consider the term in the early Christian sense of metanoia, as a transformative change of heart. The task involves the unceasing journey to continue one’s growth in freedom, which reaches its highest levels in the deepening of the theological virtues of faith, hope and love. For the Christian, conversion constitutes one’s life journey of ever deeper discovery of God’s will through revelation in Jesus Christ: “the total fact of his presence and self-manifestation – by words and works, signs and miracles, but above all by his death and glorious resurrection from the dead, and finally by sending the Spirit of truth.”[6] As a journey of discovery it entails the steps of recognition or awareness, acceptance or assent, especially in the act of believing, and engagement or response as a faith-filled witness of God’s love and compassion in the world. The three hermeneutics of conversion I present in this reflection will attempt to probe those stages of the journey more deeply. As a preparatory step, I first want to review some elements present in all stages of the dynamics under the following three headings: a) journey of freedom for full identity; b) sensibility, disposition and the notion of gift; and c) the cross and paschal mystery.
Journey of Freedom for Full Identity
The journey to faith demands growth in human freedom. Ultimately, human freedom cannot reach its fully intended apex except through the gift of the virtue of faith. So, there is a necessary “freedom for faith” followed by its fullest perfection as “freedom in faith.” Unfortunately, the modern or postmodern understanding of freedom, influenced as it has been by secular, democratic interpretations, has fallen to what arguably could be called its basest level – the circumstantial, autonomous freedom of choice. When using culture as a foundational reference for their world of meaning and personal development, people tap the second, higher level of freedom: that of law or essence as an acquired freedom in the mode of self-perfection. Faith demands the movement beyond this essentialist freedom to an existential one: a natural freedom in the mode of self-determination and self-constitution.[7] It is this higher freedom that taps the full potential and creativity of the person. Far from being selfish or self-absorbed, it is self-giving and generally flows from a faith-filled relationship with God. In that relationship one truly discovers his or her identity through the generosity and openness that are the fruits of transcending one’s own concerns by referencing them to the concerns of all of humanity. Theologically, it can be likened to the realization of being intimately linked to all others who ultimately make up the mysterious, mystical Body of Christ.
Sensibility, Disposition and the Notion of Gift
Any movement of conversion and openness to God evolves most naturally when experienced as a discovery of the gift of one’s full identity, not as a threat to it. Conversion happens most easily when the journey is seen as an expansion of one’s freedom, rather than freedom’s curtailment. By appealing to a culture’s wellsprings, we help people frame the journey of conversion as a discovery of identity and growth in freedom. This respect of freedom and cultural identity proves critical for the pastoral appreciation of helping others maintain a positive attitude or generous disposition. Without an open disposition, the sensibility and affective awareness zones of the person cannot be fully tapped in order to allow the dynamic of discovering one’s identity to proceed. Culture, then, as foundation for hermeneutics, establishes a certain mindset, a certain set of eyeglasses, a certain operative sensibility for openness to the transcendent dimension and the communication of meaning. Culture influences our affective response to experiences, because it reaches to the origins of our world of meaning where the preconditions of thought, feeling and acting shape the boundaries of our imagination. One’s antenna for meaning operates at certain frequencies and wavelengths, and the degree to which revelation or dialog tune into these resonant frequencies determines the quality of response for one’s imagination and affectivity, that zone of sensibility so important to one’s credibility check and the dynamic of conversion. Conversion as the discovery of the full gift of identity, then, frees the disposition to engage actively, so that the full resources of one’s sensibility or affective awareness are open to development.
The Cross and Paschal Mystery
Conversion to a permeable horizon in faith involves learning the dynamics of how people, within their culture, can receive, live passionately, and transmit to others a life-world that is faith-filled – one that is imbued with the mystery of a love story with God. At the heart of this love story stand the cross and paschal mystery, the clearest expressions of the Father’s love revealed by the Son. This mystery of love touches implicitly each culture’s world of meaning. Achieving an active hermeneutic sense of the mystery, however, proves a challenging task for theology, even in those cultures where Christianity formed the foundation for civilization and development. Helping people reach an acceptance of their life and culture as a faith-filled love story requires that they take into consideration the religious context of a culture and its impact on reason. Faith assures us that, even when not recognized or embraced, the cross and paschal mystery are inherently part of every culture’s affective patterns and values systems, of its preconceptual or precognitive symbolic networks. Theology trusts that the paschal mystery resides at the heart of a culture’s hermeneutic structure, even as it works to bring that culture to full consciousness of the mystery.
Different cultures require different approaches in presenting the Gospel, just as do people of differing temperaments. In order to reach people and cultures so that they move away from a focus on selfishness and individualism back towards love as the form of all their virtues, theology needs to understand the full framework of their world of meaning. Distressed cultures need particular care, especially those that have had a deterioration of values to the point of near antithesis to Gospel values. Culture, however, remains the entry point. The mystery of the cross carries enough irony and paradox to uncover a culture’s blockages to freedom and virtue, so that the way to love might be rediscovered. Only the clear dialog of love can effectively break down barriers to faith, but love itself has to risk not being recognized while it seeks to make known its truth, even as worlds of meaning may be disintegrating.[8]
In just such a state of affairs the scandal of the cross, long taken for granted in post-Christian cultures as a symbol of quaint memory yet lacking real usefulness, returns to offer love a vehicle of communication that can overcome all barriers. But this victory of love has to take place in that free zone of the human heart struggling for meaning in a world that no longer offers any real answers. Here theology needs all the grounding of metaphysics and all the light of phenomenology in order to comprehend the power of being as it seeks hope and love in a culture of despair and broken values. Then, even a radically distressed culture can still provide the foundation for an effective hermeneutics.[9] The logic of the cross has ever been an absurdity and a stumbling block because the cross appears as the worst injustice and the most meaningless of all acts. Beyond the overused rhetoric on love, the cross reaches into a zone without words to break down old theories and old logic in order to restore the sense of love to a culture’s common sense. Unfortunately, too often this love of God cannot be recognized or accepted until the devastations of life experience lead one to face meaninglessness. But the meaningful act of accepting the “meaninglessness” of the cross turns all things on their head and opens up a clear view of the deepest reality of all: God loving us in spite of everything and calling us into a communion of love.
The hermeneutics which theology must ever employ to promote a permeable horizon, the theory of interpretation that has to guide theology so that others can recognize and accept it, has to be the one of seeing the world and all reality through the eyes of the crucified Savior. Every culture has within it elements of this hermeneutics of love in varying degrees, so there will always be the opportunity to correlate the paths of interpretation and the worlds of meaning. But the power, scandal and grace of the cross – with all its paradoxes and ironies – have to be communicated ever anew within a cultural setting. Culture provides the foundation for the hermeneutics, while theology instills it with the hermeneutics of love flowing from the paschal mystery. As culture acts as the foundation for any person’s operative hermeneutics, so the mystery of the cross and resurrection, in the victory of the kenotic love that it announces, heals the person’s or culture’s world of meaning and brings it to closer union with God. The mystery of the cross and resurrection, then, provides faith with the necessary and common grammar of love for each culture to express in its own language. The first step of the conversion dynamic to a permeable horizon informed by the paschal mystery involves recognizing the gift offered, or awakening to a new awareness, by means of an inquiring hermeneutics of deliberation.
REACHING NEW AWARENESS:
INQUIRING HERMENEUTICS OF DELIBERATION
As an introduction to the first theological hermeneutics, I want to present some preliminary remarks on awareness and affectivity. Openness to the transcendent dimension where recognition of the reality of God can occur requires that a certain level of awareness be achieved. We could describe the simple fact of being awake for the day ahead as a state of “being conscious.” A further distinction to depth of awareness could be called the state of “conscious intending.” This level could be likened to knowing what we want and consciously pursuing it. A still deeper level of awareness, however, is what can be called “consciousness of our intending,” for it is at this level that we begin to reflect on the question of why I am intending this or that. In other words, it is the realm of awareness where we become aware of the value systems that are informing our intentionality. This is the realm where subjective reflection can open us to the possibility of conversion, transcendence and to God as personal Other.
In the objective sense, a guiding horizon helps us to interpret our experience in the present from the past wisdom that makes up the infrastructure of that horizon. Without letting go of all that we know from such a horizon, I want to revisit affectivity with another of McLean’s insights that will aid us in understanding the dynamics of deliberation. Affectivity can be described as a measure of one’s conscious intentionality. The subject is not simply an objective observer, nor simply involved in self-reflection or self-determination. Attention to affectivity, then, is a deep element vital to the experience of engaging one’s horizon.[10] The affective dimension of the person acts as a window into or a reflection of one’s subjectivity. The perceptions of the feelings mirror the experienced reality of the person as an engaged subject. Affectivity shapes that firm link of the subject to objective reality, to one’s receptivity of being as reflected in the emotional responses evoked in experience. The process of deliberation, then, must include both the external horizon, as it extends our understanding of reality, as well as this internal horizon of perception. This affective horizon of perception provides a check or balance for how authentically one is engaging reality – the level of personal openness and freedom.
One’s horizon, no matter how limited or extensive, is always a friend and a bridge, never a foe, when it comes to recognition and conversion. Though a horizon may be limited because of one’s experience, it is never a barrier. Instead, it serves as a trusted starting point for growth. One’s horizon is a bridge to the wisdom and experience of others, a rich soil of opportunity for understanding and growth in freedom. The ability to “see far” and interpret rightly depends on how well one’s horizon has been polished as a lens of freedom. But horizon always serves as an opening to or a clarifying tool for the journey to faith. As spiritual midwife towards deeper mutual communication, theology works with people starting from their horizon, without criticism or condescension, helping them to expand and develop their own horizon as they draw on the rich experience, tradition and culture of their people.[11] Their own horizon has to be their primary reference tool as they enter a deliberative reflection that will lead them to conversion to truth, freedom and faith.
The dynamics of deliberative reflection, then, involve all those factors of freedom that influence how one engages and expands one’s horizon, allowing it to become ever more permeable to discovering new meaning. This stage of conversion to new awareness is a work of interpretation. The subject moves through a deliberative process of receptivity to recognize the truth and love of God. It is marked primarily by an attitude of inquiry, through which the subject references culture in order to evaluate the possible manifestation of God’s truth and love. To simplify the understanding of this inquiring hermeneutics of deliberation, I divide my reflection into four parts: questioning knowledge, questioning values, appealing to tradition, and culture as life and text.
Questioning Knowledge
When some new insight or impression strikes at the limit of one’s horizon, deliberation of its validity or truth claim begins. Here the subject questions the limits of his or her worldview, including personal interests and the effectiveness of those interests for informing the fullness of life. One tests the cultural structures that have informed life viewpoints and, slowly, one grows in awareness of one’s conditioning.[12] As the questioning of knowledge’s framework continues, reason begins to widen its reach. As a form of knowledge, faith stands ready to offer reason a sensible vista to explore. The deliberation leads one to question operative values as well.
Questioning Values
The deliberation process takes place in the context of one’s immediate community as well as the broader reach of one’s culture. The shared set of common values that give culture its form and expression reflects the cumulative acts of freedom and learned wisdom from long experience. The framework for values that inform a people’s horizon honors that long experience. The horizon has to be sound, yet ever expanding to embrace the variety of events and challenges that come one’s way. Once deliberation reaches to the level of questioning values, a new caution presents itself. If one’s horizon ever feels under threat, then so too will personal and shared freedom. The internal dialectic has to be free to consider reality in its totality as experienced: the good, the bad, the emotions, etc. – all the hard facts as best known. All has to be considered so that the process is not too abstracted from real life and does not subsequently end in an overly simplistic observation. The questioning of values is essential to a critical evaluation in search of truth. But as relates to freedom, only good, not evil, is of value concern.[13] Through the questioning of values, then, the aim is to recognize the structural blocks to freedom so that the hidden manipulations they promote might no longer limit one’s development. As the subject grows in freedom, a creative contribution is made to the community’s value system. Similarly, in its discernment of the signs of the times, theology assists a culture in its value-based developments by remaining free of societal manipulations. By continuing to listen to the good and the true, while avoiding the manipulations and ideologies of what otherwise might be understood as new social norms, theology not only discerns the signs of the times but contributes creatively to forming them.
Appealing to Tradition
As subjects question frameworks of knowledge and operative values, they appeal to the tradition of their culture for possible answers or insights to their inquiries. For such an appeal to tradition to prove fruitful, the subject has to be able to examine tradition with a certain critical distance, so that previously hidden opportunities may emerge into the light of one’s consciousness. History and the tools of social analysis and critique offer the most effective means for obtaining this critical distance. In history, time opens up new sources of meaning. The aim consists, not so much in distinguishing claims of truth and falsehood, but in opening up doors of understanding, discovery and meaning. This requires claiming the subjectivity of the past, rather than looking for a strictly objective analysis. With this attempt to understand the subjectivity involved in the historical events, a previously unrecognized meaning and wisdom has opportunity to emerge.
Social analysis and critique are meant to uncover the contextualized struggle for the freedom of a people. The goal is to help liberate a culture from unjust interests that may have negatively distorted its value system. But such data have to be examined carefully to discover the internal biases that may have been used to gather the information. Theology has to examine the data closely to uncover the contextualized struggle of a people, thus reaching deeper understanding, discovery and meaning. The data cannot be used for mere judgment of what they did rightly or wrongly, well or badly, but as an indicator of their struggle for freedom and of their receptivity to the grace offered by the Holy Spirit and the possibility of hearing the Word of faith.
Culture as Life and Text
All of this points to the critical role that culture plays in anyone’s deliberation. Representing the cumulative acts of freedom made by a people over time, culture provides a living text for interpretation. This truth has to be respected and honored so that no hint of condescension be made toward the subject, or in theology’s attitude toward the culture.[14] Each culture provides a first reference for people on their journey of conversion. Any movement of conversion begins as deeply personal and intimate. It can then become communal and historical as demonstrated in culture.[15] New awareness happens from the subject’s point of view; it cannot be imposed without violating his or her freedom. Timing, then, becomes a vital element in the accompaniment of a person engaged in an inquiring hermeneutics of deliberation. The Church in general, and theology in particular, has to cultivate respect for the active intricacies of the dynamic as the new awareness of God unfolds.
FREEDOM FOR FAITH:
INVESTIGATIVE HERMENEUTICS OF ASSENT
As the awareness of God grows, the person moves from a stance of inquiry and deliberation to perform a credibility check on the new reality being discovered. In relation to God’s truth and love, this credibility check involves an investigation that opens the door to the assent of faith. Before going into the dynamics of what I call an investigative hermeneutics of assent, I first want to review the importance of freedom and the imagination on behalf of the subject.
Freedom acts as the lens through which the person focuses the imagination. The imagination, in its turn, has to direct the lens of freedom to explore the horizon of truth. As John Paul II noted, “Only in this horizon of truth will people understand their freedom in its fullness and their call to know and love God as the supreme realization of their true self.”[16] As the awareness of truth grows, so too does freedom, until one’s heart is ready for an encounter with God through revelation. A critical part of this recognition of the truth of reality is that the human being cannot satisfy his or her deepest longings.[17] One must eventually come to the realization that dependence on God does not stifle, but actually enhances, the exercise of freedom. The higher level of existential freedom taps into the dynamism of the heart, allowing the person to be freed from focusing on oneself so as to shift the focus outward instead. A new sensibility makes itself felt which allows the person the freedom for a new receptivity. The horizon of truth teaches us that we cannot satisfy our own longings or search for meaning and fulfillment. The deeper appreciation of the sense of life as gift and the freedom that follows from this reality of existence expand one’s heart and help to cultivate this sensibility of receptivity.[18] This dynamism of the heart, then, opens the possibility of comprehending that Christ died for all, a notion that ultimately has to be embraced personally by human freedom under the influence of grace. This movement or growth in freedom coincides with the dynamic of accepting the truth that one’s personal identity can only be fully discovered in God. This is what I mean by the expression “freedom for faith.”
Imagination has to embrace the full freedom available to it in order to awaken in the subject a deep sense of reality. Once having done so, the imagination can then apply this deeper awareness of reality creatively to develop the religious sensibility latent in the person’s being. Imagination’s role is to direct the focus of the lens of freedom for creative understanding and engagement, a vital element for the faith dynamic. When imagination operates fully, it serves to direct the focus of the person’s affective perception. This affectively influenced cognitive perception belongs to the faculty of reason, which has been too often confined to a zone of the strictly rational. The imagination, then, belongs to reason, but in a way that is not limited to empirical, quantifiable realities. Imagination penetrates to the deepest sensibilities, which involve questions of life and death, of meaning and sacrifice. Though not limited by any set patterns, it has the ability to derive new patterns and possibilities based on the sensibilities it perceives as it freely explores reality. It also reorders perception and integrates one’s values into reality in a creative manner. This recreative power of the imagination is the fuel that powers the engine of one’s freedom so that culture can develop, and especially so that it can be transformed by faith.[19] This characteristic is what allows our minds and hearts to respond to a revelation of love in a way that, when the assent of faith is given, the newfound faith can transform not only our powers of perception, but reality itself. In this way it focuses the mind’s attention on reality to discover the fuller drama of one’s existence and identity as immersed in love.
When the person’s freedom and imagination are working together, the subject is able to engage fully in a check of the credibility of God’s manifestation which is so necessary to prepare for the assent of faith. I divide this investigative hermeneutics of assent into three main elements: 1) respecting a new sensibility; 2) the discovery of meaning; and 3) hearing the invitation for personal assent.
Respecting a New Sensibility
The first consideration in the check of credibility has to do with respecting the sensibility of those who are on the journey of conversion. This implies being attentive to their shifting world of interpretation from inside their culture. It is there that they have to begin to perceive their experience, indeed all of reality, as an expression of love. Such new sensibility cannot be imposed or overly rationalized. To respect a growing sensibility to love and an opening to the transcendent dimension, the hermeneutic direction is best employed from the affective to the cognitive, rather than vice versa. This shift in direction draws on existential activities of life where affective concerns usually precede cognitive capabilities, thus realigning these to the actual pattern of human development.[20] The imagination, freely and creatively employed, can engage reality and the experiences of existential life without being confined to cognitively developed patterns or structures. Respecting this sensibility, then, implies honoring the person or culture as more than a rationally cognitive creature who analyzes reality and employs ingenuity to use materials available. The human being’s constitution as body, soul, and spirit, possessing intellect and will, is an integrated unity in the plurality of its dimensions (physical, psychological, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual, etc.). And human reason, in order to go “beyond itself,” has to extend beyond cognitive considerations to the origin of full human sensibility in existential being.[21]
Another element critical to people’s sensibility is their cultural context. Unfortunately, culture can distort reason because of misplaced values in a historically conditioned manner. The tools of critical distancing discussed above, historical analysis, and the application of social analysis critiques have to be employed to uncover how culture truly cultivated the freedom of a people. Culture reflects the temporality of history, taking time seriously. It does this by linking the present moment to past wisdom and by orienting a people’s focus to the future. The existential projection of life into the future by the culture, then, becomes essential for respecting a people’s sensibility in their credibility check.
Tradition is that element of culture that allows us to respect this sensibility, not so much in its more synchronic sense, but in its more dynamic, diachronic sense. Tradition requires that time be taken seriously, and that a sense of “timing” be taken into account when accompanying peoples or cultures in their conversion journey. Daily reality offers us authentic novelty. God continues to reveal himself so that we might be converted and believe by the act of faith.[22] The values and virtues that a culture develops are not static entities to be examined but are constantly in dynamic flux. God’s ongoing revelation and the presentation of the Gospel generate the response of faith through the help of the Holy Spirit, thus allowing a people creatively to renew their values and make adaptations to them.
Discovery of Meaning
The second critical element of any credibility check involves the discovery of meaning, which ultimately unfolds from its connection with the mystery of God. In the investigation for assent to faith the subject addresses the reality of God as both meaningful and personally significant. This normally requires a shift in the subject’s dimension of experience beyond the horizontal level of human relationship to the vertical domain of transcendence. The vertical vision allows reason to go beyond itself to enter the realm of mystery, while also keeping one grounded to existential being and values. This mystery moves one to mobilize and orient one’s life, and also opens one to a wider horizon where identity need not be restricted by the burden of particular circumstances.[23] By communicating its religious heritage, culture carries the historical experience of a people’s ongoing dialog with God. It does this especially by forming the imagination and affectivity of the person before any specific articulations of faith.
Hidden away in a culture’s symbolism, stories, etc. there resides a people’s dialog with the Holy Spirit. The Providence of God active in a people’s history is passed on, not so much through explicit words or statements, but in the hidden zones of their imagination and affectivity. For a subject’s thirst for meaning to be satisfied, that hidden zone has to be touched or stimulated through symbols or metaphors that awaken this hidden dialog with God. For this reason one’s search for meaning is very much connected to one’s experience of community. One’s community provides the context for the search, but also the living history of a group’s faith journey and struggles. Their search for religious and scientific truth reflects their values. The intermingling of truth, justice, mercy and love creates ambiguities and paradoxes that can initially frustrate even the most well-intentioned, but holding those tensions helps to clarify the community’s values and to tame its spirit with a healthy humility. Communities struggle to sift through the pull of values and their apparent oppositions to one another, but the fruit of the work is the discovery of meaning and freedom from self-absorption.[24] The fullest depth of meaning can open up in the experience of suffering love, and every culture carries some sense of how to endure it and even prosper from it. The understanding of a self-giving, suffering love gives the folly of the cross a foothold in the midst of every culture. Anger, bitterness and revenge may be tolerated for a while by a culture because of difficult circumstances, but every community knows deep down that these do not lead to life and meaning. Theology’s task, then, is to assist the culture in finding its way back to its life-giving values and in sublimating its experiences through a suffering love.
An element that marks the discovery of meaning is what I call a sense of harmonious reference. The Holy Spirit shapes a person’s or a culture’s identity through the gifts and challenges of life. For the discovery of meaning, the verification is complex; it involves the complex emotional journey of coming to see community and the experiences of life in terms of gift. One’s world of symbol and ritual, one’s horizons and worlds of meaning, need to be reassessed and put to the test together with others who have shared similar journeys of discovery. When this is verified, the characteristics of complementarity and generosity mark the relationship in their harmonious reference to God. The full web of meaning ultimately comes to be discovered in the mystery of the cross and resurrection of Christ, the only source that can reconcile the many disparate, paradoxical experiences in our lives.[25] Any verification of a symbol or metaphor or revelatory event, then, passes through this standard of harmony, this relationship with the Holy Spirit, alive in the cultural tradition. This allows a subject to build added layers or deeper insights onto any existing world of meaning in the culture through the revelation encountered. Although a revelatory event may initially shock or jolt a subject or culture, fundamental theology must artfully ensure that the dynamic fusion of new meaning onto existing cultural meaning unfolds seamlessly, just as grace builds on nature.
Hearing the Invitation for Personal Assent
In the final check of credibility for faith the person has to move from the more general zone of the discovery of meaning to claiming that meaning as directed to and significant for oneself. The meaning has to be understood as complementing and confirming one’s identity, not in changing or doing violence to it. The horizon of assenting to God in faith, then, has to be seen as a broadening, expansion or deepening of one’s personal horizon developed over a lifetime of experience – a sort of “coming home.” The subject moves from consciousness of reality to a formed conscience, allowing one’s life narrative to come into clearer, more meaningful focus. The new freedom experienced from this wider horizon goes far beyond mere autonomy and choice; freedom comes to be lived in relation to God for others, rather than for oneself. For this generous self-giving to unfold one’s own suffering has to be reconciled with the mystery of God’s love on the cross. The person accepts the paschal mystery as more than an idea or event from the past, but as a living mystery alive within oneself, informing one’s world of meaning. That mystery is not some insight or notion that just clarifies and sheds light, but is the living relationship of love to which God invites us. Such a freedom needs the conviction of community. The ecclesial embrace of the Church provides a critical element in a person’s hearing this invitation of God and in confirming the validity of the depth of the mystery alive in one’s heart. Once the person responds to God’s invitation and accepts revelation’s authenticity, he or she can then, with the believing community, apply it to the transformation of culture.
The key to this whole investigation, then, is to grasp the revelation offered, so that the boundaries of our old horizons and old prejudices open up new zones of meaning for us in our everyday life, as well as point to an entryway to faith. The check of credibility not only confirms the truth being offered in the revelation but also calls forth the fuller wisdom latent from our culture and community context. Then, when assent is made in faith, the full resources of the revelation and the culture become available so that the imagination can construct a future based on relationship with God. The gift of faith cannot itself be earned; the discussion above did not imply that. The hermeneutic investigation is necessary for a credibility check and for fully disposing the subject to receive the gift of faith. That check allows one to identify what indeed has become real to the imagination, not mere fancy or fantasy. The investigation helps a subject to identify the hunger for faith and to realize that one shares, as Dulles says, the “human drive to be known, valued, and loved; to be drawn into communion with others; to be delivered from death and from the threat of final absurdity.”[26] The assent of faith is a special gift of the grace of God; it follows upon the ability to allow things to converge to a central source of belief and meaning. The dynamic is not one of rational analysis or demonstration, but a growing into certitude that can connect all of the paradoxes, ambiguities, and doubts. Looking at John Coulson’s reflections on John Henry Cardinal Newman’s insights and the literary imagination, we see that the certitude of faith “does not come under the reasoning faculty, but under the imagination.”[27] The rational, reasoning side of the human being cannot always carry the various tensions and perplexing ambiguities and contradictions of life, much less their accompanying emotions. Very often God chooses, instead, to reach us through our literary imagination, by which we can apply the metaphors and symbols needed to unite poetically the prose of the disparate experiences of life. It is our narrative of life that has to find its place in a context of meaning. As that narrative comes into focus our truest identity is sharpened so that meaning, identity and life narrative all converge together in God.[28] As stated above, great risk is involved in the assent of faith; the understanding of our very identity is at risk. Only with the imagination operating freely can the risk be made in confidence, assuring us that we shall not lose, but truly find ourselves.
TOWARDS A PERMEABLE HORIZON:
RELATIONAL HERMENEUTICS OF COMMUNION
Once the revelation of God’s truth and love is accepted, the person’s new life of faith changes not only the boundaries of one’s horizon, but even how one considers or views that horizon. Faith leads us more deeply into a lived relationship of love. A new vision of life and one’s relationship to others and all of creation follows. God emerges as the underlying, common referent for all of reality. Just as the journey to reach a freedom for faith was dynamic, so is the life of faith. The dynamic is lived with others as an expression of charity alive in the history of the believing community. New categories of thinking about and expressing this lived dynamic become necessary. A new language with a grammar of love takes shape and develops within the community’s response to challenges, an underlying grammar taught by the assent of faith.
Faith as lived relationship of love, then, not only seeks a new language to express the grammar of love that has changed one’s life; it also influences the intellect and imagination. The reordering that the imagination conducts bases itself on accumulated experience, but also on something more primal: a unifying principle on the part of the intellect that works towards an integrating unity of all reality. As the imagination focuses one’s perception, the lens of one’s freedom, it operates free from any set patterns or preexisting structures to reorder creatively how one views reality and integrates its various components into a unified whole. For the move towards a permeable horizon which allows the Church to share her world of meaning while entering into and sharing the horizons of meaning from other cultures and religions, theology needs the tool of what I would call imaginative intellection. This requires a more inductive way of thinking, rather than strict deductive analysis, so that theology may reflect more effectively in terms of the global whole.[29] The assent of faith frees the imagination so that it can work towards an integrating unity that has God as its author.
In order to map out a structure that can provide an adequate relational network for incorporating each person’s individual uniqueness and the global whole, McLean turns to Nicholas of Cusa’s notion of contraction. Without going into all the details, the notion of contraction asserts that the significance of the whole exists in the unique reality of each individual. Each person keeps his or her uniqueness as a particular contraction of the totality of being or the global whole.[30] In this manner, too, one cannot be considered depersonalized amidst a broad conglomeration of many. Each person has a value that is indispensable to the whole, just as the identity of each cannot be fully realized or comprehended without relation to the whole. Since each person is a microcosm or unique contraction of the totality of being, all are related and form a living community on an ontological level, not merely a functional level. McLean’s emphasis is that the relationships between people are of the internal order and are made so by the global sense of the whole.[31] This philosophical interrelatedness blends well with the theological reality of all being called to be unique members making up the mystical body of Christ.
The global interrelatedness of peoples and cultures mirrors, by analogy, the internal relations of the Holy Trinity. Only by sharing one’s own horizon with others and entering into their worldview as well, does the fullest depth of the meaning and mystery of one’s experience and identity become clear. One’s participation in freedom for the good of others and the whole then takes on more significant meaning: it gives expression to one’s own identity and makes a vital contribution to the development and discovery of the identity of others and of the communal whole. From a theological perspective, the response called for after the assent of faith cannot be considered simply a functional service to build up the body of Christ. The dynamic that engages us as believers who made the assent of faith expresses even more – new awareness of who we are internally and most intimately. It expresses our identity in God with freedom for others. The name I give to this dynamic expression of engagement, so vital to the development and perfection of the global whole, is a relational hermeneutics of communion. I divide this relational hermeneutics of communion into four primary considerations: 1) attitude of open participation for truth; 2) horizons and the ambit of freedom; 3) relational dialog of cultures; and 4) permeable horizon of communion.
Attitude of Open Participation for Truth
Each new encounter, each new dialog, offers the opportunity to probe the intimate dialog of communion the Holy Spirit has with ourselves, as well as those we are encountering. Our openness to others whom we encounter has its basis in God and thus expresses our open participation in God’s truth and love. Short of this union with God, engagement in the world slowly deteriorates into competition and oppression. Participation has to extend beyond the sense of a cooperative spirit between isolated individuals or groups who are seeing to their own needs, while respecting others who are doing the same. The connection has to be deeper than respectful tolerance. Our concern cannot be limited to self-realization and a narrow form of freedom, but has to flow over into inviting others to a new communion. Just as a person who has made the assent in faith openly participates with a new hermeneutic attitude of communion, the same attentive openness for dialog must also characterize the Church’s and theology’s spirit. And the real test for theology’s adopting such an attitude comes, not from its desire to defend or prove or convince, but to serve, especially to serve the suffering and marginalized who might appear to have nothing to offer. Both in his living in solidarity with the poor as Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires and in many of his symbolic gestures of communion with the poor and marginalized, Pope Francis has demonstrated this spirit of service so essential for the Gospel’s effective communication. In such a service of listening and dialog, theology might discover new opportunities for expressing the truths of faith and new disclosures of God’s love. Truth is a hermeneutic work connected to Jesus’ life, mission, and spirit (cf, Jn. 18:37-38). Through the action of the Spirit, Jesus continues to bear witness to truth in religions, cultures and peoples of the world, especially those who have nothing to offer but their suffering and marginalization. Through ongoing dialog with them in a spirit of communion, theology can continue to draw upon the truth of Christ for its mission of service. Our own dialog and encounter with others provide a gateway to deeper truth and meaning.[32] Open participation with others in truth, then, demands that horizons be evaluated and extended in view of Jesus’ ongoing witness to truth in peoples and cultures of the world, especially the most vulnerable.
Horizons and the Ambit of Freedom
An attitude of open participation for truth ensures that we can remain open and attentive to the truth in the horizon of others, truth which is demonstrated in their culture and which they have learned from their own experience of exercising their freedom. The shift towards a more permeable horizon “implies the need to open one’s horizons beyond one’s self-concerns to the ambit of the freedom of others.”[33] One’s own concerns do not disappear, but are placed in the context of other peoples, other cultures and other nations. Dialog with others, then, helps us to recontextualize our own tradition by taking into account their freedom and struggle for the good. From the context of faith, the Church enters into the horizon and lived freedom of other cultures, while helping them to embrace the values of the gospel. The Church uses the grammar of love she has received through faith to assist in generating new and diverse cultural expressions of freedom that coincide with the truth of the Gospel. In the ensuing interchange, the new horizon of shared meaning serves to create a deeper communion. The Holy Spirit, then, effects the new communion by building on the freedom of the participants as they probe more deeply the horizons of meaning and truth. As gift of the Father given through the Son, the Holy Spirit is the author of that common meaning and the keeper of faith horizons.
Relational Dialog of Cultures
The two sections above were necessary to situate the place of one’s attitude and freedom for a relational hermeneutics of communion. The dialog of cultures can be described as a way of communion, an engagement in Christ’s drawing all things into one, or an expression of charity that reflects the journey of various cultures along the path of unity. As such, every dialog becomes an occasion for creative discernment of truth and values. For theology this entails engaging cultures with all the tools at our disposal in order to demonstrate, as Blessed Pope John Paul II would say, the universality of faith’s content. As he described in Fides et Ratio, such engagement “enables us to discern in different world-views and different cultures ‘not what people think but what the objective truth is.’ It is not an array of human opinions but truth alone which can be of help to theology.”[34] Theology, then, takes a creative stance at the table of cultural dialog in order to find assistance in its discernment of truth and its task for building up living communion between peoples. The goal is to seek new languages and mechanisms for building up the communion God intends. Another necessary component for effective dialog that builds communion is what I would call the recognition of the gift of differences.[35] These differences affirm the uniqueness of each culture and also reflect the rich diversity of various expressions of the search for the good and the true. Theology has always learned new insights through proclaiming the Gospel to any new culture it encounters. As the Gospel purifies, challenges, and enriches the culture, the culture, in turn, discloses new depths of meaning and grace in the Gospel. By cultivating the extraordinary richness of multiple cultures, theology can broaden its understanding of the Gospel and discover new ways to bring expression to faith and doctrines. The people and their relationship to God in the Holy Spirit give a culture its ontology in being, as well as its consciousness in history. Cultures, then, are what McLean describes as “matters of subjectivity.”[36] Creative dialog between cultures which embrace differences as principles of cooperation offers a mechanism to engage the other’s subjectivity. It also affords the opportunity to discover new meaning in one’s heritage as one’s own subjectivity is reflected back by others in the dialog. What slowly occurs is a permeable fusion of horizons, through which a new perspective comes into focus for evaluating and deepening one’s own identity and heritage.[37] Theology is suited for facilitating such a dialog because it recognizes that God forms the foundation of the subjectivity of each participant and, thus, the basis of relationship in unity. The differences are understood as gifts, which broaden the expressions of the subjectivity of each culture’s journey with God and refine those expressions in dialog.
Finally, through this sharing of horizons, the Church gives witness to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and applies what she has learned to an imaginative reconfiguration in charity. Dialog involves a bit of risk, the risk of learning deeper truths. As such, it places our horizon in what could be called a vulnerable position. But our faith tells us that any new truth of the Gospel revealed in dialog will only serve to widen and strengthen our horizon and world of meaning, not threaten it. The only things threatened by new truth are incomplete structures that may not be serving the full breadth of truth that the Gospel entails. Gospel love catalyzes our freedom and opens our authentic subjectivity to a more open and generous receptivity; this can be likened to a sort of theological empathy. Once received, new truths have to be incorporated into the Church’s theological vision guided by the virtue of charity. The reconfiguration cannot be aimless, but, through applying the imaginative intellection discussed earlier, follows instead a movement towards unity. The imagination, then, has guideposts that direct its energies. New insights have to be considered in light of revelation for clarification of faith and development of tradition as necessary. This would allow for the creative expression in freedom for the ongoing development of the tradition.[38] To do it well requires the full use of theology’s hermeneutic tools and also the use or understanding of another culture’s hermeneutic tools. The imaginative reconfiguration of one’s heritage is part of the journey of conversion: specifically creative work stimulated by new disclosures of revelation perpetuating itself. God’s love acts as the catalyst, because the disclosures are God’s attempt to renew that communication of love. God’s love establishes the differences as principles of cooperation and acts as the integrating point for the relation between cultures. Committing to dialog, then, demands a decision about expanding the context of one’s world of meaning, thus broadening the foundations of one’s framework and possibilities for new insights.[39] It is also a decision to allow one’s horizon to be opened to the horizons of others, so as to become permeable to the worlds of meaning held by other cultures.
Permeable Horizon of Communion
By virtue of baptism every believer is called to engage in a relational hermeneutics of communion. Through personal conversion each helps the wider believing community to strive to develop a more permeable horizon of communion with peoples of all faiths or of no faith. This demands trust in the Gospel and the freedom it tries to generate in the human heart. Through their horizons, which are vantage points of meaning for the mind, people come to know their own limits, and become more aware of transcending those limits through interacting with the horizons of others. This permeability of one’s horizon, the ability to move in and out of other horizons, allows for each culture to retest constantly its assumptions and its special place in communion with others. Theology has the role of guiding this slow journey towards communion, ensuring that the growing unity in God’s plan not be replaced by a sort of tolerant relativism without rudder or direction. Pope Francis has been giving witness to a Gospel element which can serve as a cultural horizon check: the gift of the marginalized.[40] How we view and treat people on the margins of society serves as a measure of Gospel charity and our own interpretation of life as gift.
Just as the marginalized offer a challenge for cultures to become more aware of their blind spots in their horizons and relations with others, they also provide theology with a check on a culture’s dynamic movement towards real communion. Because they live on the edges of cultures and are not integrated, the marginalized demand that cultures move beyond not only their existing horizons but also their whole way of thinking about horizons or boundaries in general. With the introduction of the Gospel, horizons begin to appear sometimes as artificial constructs maintained for reasons of security or dominance. Taking account of the marginalized breaks down those constructs and makes existing horizons more flexible and more permeable, not simply for a relativistic inclusion and tolerance, but for a more genuine and responsible communion with its foundation in God who created all. Theology’s goal remains one of proclaiming the faith in thanksgiving, even as it listens and learns new expressions of God’s manifestations from the various cultures of the world. Through aesthetically assimilating those diverse testimonies of cultures, while taking into account the witness of the marginalized, theology seeks to harmonize the horizons of all and lead them ever closer to the eschatological unity God intends.
Rev. John Staak, OMI, former Director of Mission Research at Oblate School of Theology, is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at Christ the King Seminary in East Aurora, New York.