Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.01.1998, Síða 49

Practice and Passion in Theology
know God in loving; truth is revealed in love and in loving. ‘Everyone who
loves,’ we read in I John, ‘is a child of God and knows God., but the unloving
know nothing of God, for God is love.’7 And further: ‘he who dwells in love is
dwelling in God, and God in him’ .8 Lovers, and only lovers, can know God; love
is at the heart of personal knowledge. This emphasis is deeply entrenched in the
biblical record. The same Hebrew verb (yada) may be translated as knowing or
loving (in the sense of sexual intercourse), so that we read that Adam knew Eve
his wife, and they had a son.9 To know God is to respond to God in the loving
practice of discipleship, or as the liberation theologian Miranda constantly emp-
hasises, knowing God in the Old Testament is the doing of justice, which is of
course closely integrated with love. Of the one who upholds the cause of the poor
and lowly we read; ‘Did not this show he knew me? says the Lord’.10 In the
biblical record we come to know the truth in loving action and in the doing of
justice, not in standing back in detachment and passivity, not in seeking objecti-
vity, certainly not in experimental probing of the data, torturing the facts to make
them reveal their secrets.
In a complicated sermon on John’s gospel, St Augustine I suspect saw a
glazed and sleepy look creeping over the faces of his congregation. So he cries
out:
Show me a lover and he will understand what I am saying. Show me some-
one who wants something, someone hungry, someone wandering in this wilder-
ness, thirsting and longing for the fountains of his eternal home, show me such a
one and he will know what I mean. But if I am talking to someone without any
feeling, he will not know what I am talking about."
Without passion we cannot know God.
Ordered and Disordered Passions
In seeking to reaffirm the place of passion, emotion, feeling in Christina life, in
practice and in understanding I am not to be understood as proposing a sort of
Dionysian celebration of emotion as such, an affirmation of passion to correct
the still dominant Apollonian stress in modern theology and in many under-
standing of the Christina life. Nor am I endorsing the position of my fellow-
countryman, David Hume, who famously said, ‘Reason is, and ought only to be
7 I John 4.7-8.
8 I John 4.16.
9 Genesis 4. 1, 17, 25; 38.26, etc.
10 Jeremiah 22,16
11 Augustine, Homilies on St John ’s Gospel. 26.5
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