When I go to Glasgow University
Library I usually ignore the lifts and take the stairs. Theology is on floor
10. I think of it as a sancta scala, a stairway to wholeness if not holiness,
at one and the same time aerobic exercise and a defiance of that creeping
laziness that thinks saved time and energy is a greater virtue than healthy
slowness. Those who know me know I need to learn healthy slowness!
I joined the University of Glasgow Library in 1974 when I graduated, paying £50 for a
lifetime membership. That is one of the greatest gifts and biggest bargains in
my life. Mum and Dad paid half of it, and I paid half with a prize what I
winned by having wrote the goodest essay (but not for good grammar!). Over the
years I've borrowed, browsed and buried myself among the stacks. Amongst the
various places I go to feel nearer to God, or at least to put myself within
range of God's presence and voice, is the familiar library, a place of learning, quiet and inner humbling.
The University of Glasgow, New
College Edinburgh, University of Aberdeen, St Deiniol's in Hawarden, are all
places where I've spent hours, days, in one or two cases weeks, in the company
of a great cloud of witnesses. But Glasgow's theology floor is the highest and hardest
to get to by stairs. There’s something symbolic about the hard climb and the
sense of exertion and effort before walking into Floor 10 with its hundreds of
feet of shelved theology and philosophy. Reading Eberhard Jungel’s The Mystery of God in the World is the
intellectual equivalent of climbing to Floor 10 to do your theology! Exertion and
effort are required but you hope it’ll be worth it. This is a book that has
dared me to read it – and having dared, my instinct for recognising a hard book
is again confirmed.
Now time was when I would finish
any book I started. A matter of pride and conscientious resistance to
cherry-picking, body swerving, free-wheeling – in other words I was refusing to
take the lift, preferring to persevere with the stairs. But more recently,
whether because of experience, wisdom or the sense that life isn’t forever and
there’s too much to read that’s good, I’ve become more impatient with those
books that don’t quite do it any more. A book like Jungel’s Mystery of God could easily be dismissed
as unnecessarily hard going, and defensible reasons given for laying it aside.
But I’m thinking of it in terms of Floor 10. The hard work of taking the stairs
eventually brings you to the place where theology and philosophy are given
their place, and where learning can begin. And the by product of the long
climb, if it’s done regularly, is an improved cardiovascular system, or in
reading terms, theological fitness and stamina.
Anyway, it’s only in the hard books
that you come across such observations as this. Speaking of human anxiety in
the face of life’s precariousness and human mortality:
Anxiety is not to be understood as a
deficit, but rather something positive as concern for that which exists. Man is
not less human when he perseveres in that anxiety than when he is definitely
removed from it. In a definitive way, however, man cannot remove himself from
this anxiety. Definitively he can only be
removed from it. And if man is definitively removed from his anxiety about
non-being, then God has been at work and is experienced as the one who always was at work, so that one can only
look after him and can only recognise the posteriora
dei (hinder parts of God, Ex 33.23). (Page 34)
In a passage like this, Jungel’s
own experience of anxiety and insecurity doing theology in the former Communist
East Germany, injects a charge of spiritual authenticity and faith tried in the
place where it carries its own cost. Anxiety being transmuted into concern and
caring for life, our own and others, is one of those counter-intuitive comments
that sheds an entirely different light on our own inner fears. Instead of feeling
guilty about being anxious, we cast all our anxieties on Him – but that needn’t
mean we will no longer feel anxious for others – for such anxiety may only be
the urgency and persistence of love. And a book about the theology of the Crucified One we
should expect to challenge every attempt to minimise the personal cost of loving others.
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