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Does faith create its own objects?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
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The claim that faith is creative of its objects resides primarily in the conviction that the richness of the life of faith demands that it shall be subject only to its own laws. Its very diversity of expression is indication that it should not be fettered or confined by a restrictive model that outlaws the marvellously unexpected quality of its explorations. Yet that metaphor itself suggests caution; for exploration is necessarily of a territory that the explorer does not bring into being by his voyage or journey. His travels have their own richness; thus Shackleton's famous boat journey has its place in the records of human endurance. But travel assumes a ground to be traversed, and the journey of Ernest Shackleton and the men who sailed with him was not conjured out of nothing, but an achievement made necessary as response to a situation that was itself in no sense of the explorer's contriving. Yet of course we are impatient with the suggestion that it was a mere, largely passive reaction to natural emergency, and only marginally regarded as humanly creative.
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References
1 The Divinity of Jesus Christ (Hulsean Lectures for 1936), C.U.P. (1938)Google Scholar: re-published as a Fontana paperback in 1963 with an introduction by Professor D. M. MacKinnon.
2 In my introduction to the Fontana edition of Creed's Hulsean Lectures, a part of this presidential address is reproduced from the privately circulated proceedings of the O.S.H.T.
3 The vexed question of the authorship of these epistles need not be discussed in this connection.
4 Review by Professor Alan P. F. Sell of Themes in Theology in King's Theological Review.
5 To be found in the collection Sponsa Christi (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1960), pp. 45–79.
6 Psalm xxii.3 (B.C.P. version).
7 The importance for von Balthasar's theology of Adrienne von Speyr's spirited doctrine with its emphasis on the impenetrable silence of Holy Saturday must never be forgotten.
8 John xvii. 19.
9 The ‘seventeenth of John's evangel’ was uniquely precious to the Scottish reformer, John Knox. In his magisterial biography of Knox, (John Knox (Hodder & Stoughton, 1938)Google Scholar) Lord Eustace Percy stresses that for him, the words of that chapter, embodying colloquy of the Son of God with his Father, were never words for human beings to make their own. If he based his fierce hostility to the theology of the Mass in part on his judgement concerning the unshareable character of this prayer, he must be applauded for recognizing its uniquely crucial significance even by those who dispute his insistence on its totally unshareable remoteness.
10 The Fourth Gospel, by Hoskyns, E. C., ed. Davey, F. N. (Faber & Faber, 1940)Google Scholar.
11 Maurice de la Taille S.J., Mysterium Fidei. Although in many respects out-of-date, this work remains uniquely illuminating, especially if its insights are complemented by attention to the detail of the ministry of Jesus as presented malgré tout by the Synoptists.
12 Mark i. 12, 13. The Greek verb is ekballei.
13 John xiv.6.
14 John xviii.38.
15 Aristotle, Metaphysics 6.4 (1027b 17ff.).
16 John xix. 11.
17 John xvii. 19.
18 My debts here are many. Especially I mention Professor John Wisdom; Fr. Ignace de la Potterie S.J., whose monumental two volumes on La Vérité dans St. Jean (Pontificium Institutum Biblicum, Piazza della Pilotta 35, Rome, 1977)Google Scholar I read after I had had the advantage of hearing him on the subject and talking with him; and Dr Gordon Wakefield. But none is responsible for what I have written.
19 John xii.20ff. The texture of the dialogue demands close study.
20 It would be legitimate to regard each individual Gospel as in effect a single, organized statement with its truth or falsity, or indeed its intelligibility judged as a whole. Such an approach would be entirely consonant with treating individual pericopai as factual descriptions to be assessed by reference to a rigorous correspondence criterion.
21 Christology at the Cross-Roads, Jon Sobrino S.J. (SCM Press, 1978)Google Scholar.