Does God Speak?

If this were day one in a course on the Theology of Christ, the first order of business would be to issue the following disclaimer, which is that not even the least glimpse into the mystery of Jesus is possible without first answering one very big question. Leave it out and the whole inquiry regarding who He was and the work He came into this world to do would simply implode on the launching pad.

And that is to ask, in all seriousness, whether in fact God has at any time or in any place actually spoken to the human race? Does God speak? Has he ever told us anything at all? About Himself, certainly, but also about us and the world He brought into being. Placing us, we like to think, at the very summit of the stair, the crowning jewel of His creative genius. “The glory of God,” says Irenaeus, “is man fully alive.”

Is that true? And if so, how much credit for that belongs to the One who came to save us from our sins?

Meanwhile, here is how the Hebrew psalmist put it, asking of God:

What is man that thou art mindful of him,
and the son of man that thou dost care for him?
Yet thou hast made him little less than God,
and dost crown him with glory and honor. (Psalm 8:4-5)

Again, is that true? Has God done any of this for us? How do we know unless He told us so? In the absence of a single affirming word from above, thinking well of ourselves makes no sense. Especially not creatures fashioned from the dust of the earth.

“O that thou shouldst give dust a tongue” exclaimed the poet Herbert four centuries ago, “To crie to thee.”

But, once again, how do we know this? And if we don’t, why should Herbert—or the psalmist, for that matter—be any more entitled to such outbursts of lyric pride than, say, the fabled frog in Aesop, who, driven mad with jealousy by the mighty ox, proceeds to puff himself up until he too bursts?

So, maybe God hasn’t spoken to the human race after all. Who knows, perhaps He does not speak at all but remains only this Absolute and Eternal Silence, a God who, beyond all telling, beyond all the words and movements of the world, has really nothing to say. Like Islam’s symbolically absent name for God, fixed high above the 99 beautiful names already given to Him, which is to say, the Unutterable One.

Is God unspeakable? Has He in fact spoken His name into the world? There is, after all, a world; it is clearly not a dream or figment of some antic imagination. It is most palpably real. And if you don’t think so, try pitching yourself over a cliff and see how real the gravitational pull is that leaves you quite dead at the bottom. But then why would God create a world in the first place if He had no intention of ever speaking to it? Not even a whisper or a sigh delivered to the countless creatures made in His image?

That surely is the question that needs to be asked. Which, until you do, precludes your asking any other question. In a fundamental theology framed in a Roman Catholic perspective, the question can be put even more sharply: Is it possible to establish or demonstrate the truth of the claim that God has not merely spoken to the world but, in fact, has shown Himself in the world, revealing Himself in the Person of His Divine and Eternal Son, Jesus the Christ? Is it possible to establish or demonstrate the truth of the claim that God has not merely spoken to the world but, in fact, has shown Himself in the world.Tweet This

And the answer? Yes, most emphatically. Christ is the very one, we are told in the oft-repeated passage from Paul’s Letter to the Colossians (2:9), in whom the very “fullness of divinity dwells in bodily form.” That is to say, the very pleroma of the Godhead itself, a word signifying the sheer superabundance of the divine life. And that the word is cited 17 times in the New Testament, each referencing the totality of the reality of the Deity, should certainly convince the Scripture scholars that, on the strength of the text alone, the evidence is overwhelming that God has shown Himself.

“Once he has given us his Son,” declares St. John of the Cross in the Ascent of Mount Carmel, “who is his Word, God has no other word to give us. He has said everything to us, all summed up in that unique word. What he said partially in the prophets, he has said entirely in his Son.”

In looking upon Christ, therefore, we see with the eyes of faith the true face of God, He who is the image, the very one on whom God Himself has imprinted an immediate, iconic expression of who and what He is. Christian faith is not about acknowledging some vague spiritual basis upon which the world and human beings hope to take their stand. As Joseph Ratzinger reminded us in his seminal work on the Church’s Creed, Introduction to Christianity:

Its central formula is not “I believe in something,” but “I believe in Thee.” It is the encounter with the human being Jesus, and in this encounter it experiences the meaning of the world as a person…Thus faith is the finding of a “You” that bears me up and amid all the unfulfilled—and in the last resort unfulfillable—hope of human encounters gives me the promise of an indestructible love which not only longs for eternity but guarantees it.

And if not, what then? Alas, only one of two possibilities appear to follow. Either God has spoken to us but in a language so garbled and confused that no one can lay sufficient claim to determine just what it was He said; that between the two of us, the lines of communication have so broken down that none of us is ever quite sure of anything divine or supernatural. Or, alternatively, that God never said anything at all, having kept entirely to Himself. He remains this Absolute and Eternal Silence, which thus keeps the world and ourselves from ever making contact with God at all.

There are, one supposes, two further possibilities that need looking into, in order to be scrupulously fair to the evidence. That there is either no God at all, we are simply talking to ourselves whenever the conversation turns to God. Or that having betrayed Him and His message, He’s no longer interested in keeping the relationship going. Like the owner of a bar where the patrons are always breaking up the place, who has finally decided to shut the place down.

But let us suppose that there is a God, only His name is Silence, which means that in the beginning there was no Word, only the absence of the Word. And so all the ways to God would need to be kept open, no one way offering itself as better than any other. All must be tried and pursued. Each of us would then become his own pilgrim in search of the absolute, indeed, his own priest and professor, who, in a Promethean sort of way, must figure everything out on the fly, as it were, God having left the auditorium altogether, cutting Himself off from any sort of contact with the world. That had been the position taken by the great mystery religions of antiquity, Zoroastrianism in particular, which was a species of Gnosticism fairly widespread among the Persians before Islam came along in the seventh century to put an end to it.

But, of course, nothing could be further from the truth, from the sheer seismic shock caused by Christ’s coming among us, an event which we did not hallucinate but drew directly from the data of human history, becoming a fact as plain as a potato. Thanks to the testimony of the whole Johannine tradition of the Fourth Gospel, we may with complete confidence repeat the stirring words written in the Prologue:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (1:1).

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father. (1:14)