Inside the Mind Of Faith: Exploring Theology with Paul Molnar
The Road to Theology
After baptism as an infant, and intending to go into a seminary, I worked in an investment bank! I knew I really didn’t want to stay in the business world. I mean, I was not unhappy making money, don’t get me wrong. But I wanted to do something different with my life.
So, while I was working there, I studied part time in psychology. When I was at Queens College they were pushing me toward experimental psychology where you observe rats in cages and things like that. I expressed great unhappiness with that, and a friend said: “well you always loved theology, why don’t you go back and study theology – and even if you don’t want to do anything with it, well, you could just see.”
And I did like it! When I was at St. John’s I had a professor who, when he walked into the classroom, you thought Athanasius, Sabellius and Arius were all standing in the room arguing with each other. That really got me interested. Because then I knew that these were not just dusty old debates but debates among people who thought that there was something terribly important to be understood.
And then I got interested in modern theology. [Thomas. F.] Torrance, and Karl Barth, and Karl Rahner… At that point I was hooked, even though fairly sure I would never get a job teaching theology, because they were pretty scarce even in those days.
On theology and it’s particulars
Everyone has a life with God, but theology’s job is to think about what that means. That’s not just something you can make up. You need to read the Bible, and you need to study the great tradition, the doctrines of the Church, to try to understand what theologians were attempting to get at. It’s a rigorous discipline. As most theologians would say it’s ‘faith seeking understanding.’ Nonetheless I don’t mean by that faith in my own experiences and feelings. I mean faith in Jesus Christ.
On enjoying theology
What makes theology beautiful is when you actually do know God as God is - as the Creator of the world. Then you see the beauty of God and you know something of the love of God and what that means.
But also there’s intricate argument, trying to understand, to push something to its limit and there’s beauty in that too. Critical theology is extraordinarily important because its task is to discern the difference between intricate arguments that lead to God and those that lead one away from Him. You can only do this by engaging in dialogue, and reading - learning what has been said. That makes it exciting and maybe a little explosive.
On innovation
Ah ha, that’s a loaded issue. If you’re just looking for something new instead of looking at God who is new to us every morning, but not necessarily new to himself every morning, that could lead you directly into conflict with the truth.
I would say yes to innovation, but it has to be tempered by reality. I’m thinking of certain theologians who say the concepts of God, Christ, and salvation are in the Bible. And it’s our job to take them out of the Bible and to construct a world in accordance with a transformed image of who God is, who Christ is, and what salvation is, in light of our deepest human needs today. I would totally reject that idea that theology serves human purposes and needs and should be judged by the extent to which is serves the agenda we have set for theology. If we set the agenda for theology there is no theology – we have made ourselves God.
The starting-point issue
Crucial! I love dealing with that issue. My basic argument as a theologian is that we can’t arbitrarily pick our starting-point. We have to be faithful to the choice God has made to choose us as his own in Christ. A particular tradition of natural theology, both Catholic and Protestant, argues that we can know God through human reason reflecting on itself. [This is] actually at variance with the truth perceived through the Holy Spirit.
Allow yourself to be led by the subject matter instead of imposing some set of ideas on the subject.
The Word of the Christian God and where it is heard
I could look at the world around me and say, as [T. F.] Torrance would say, nature’s dumb, it doesn’t tell you anything. On the other hand I’m not saying, as Kant does, that we bring to reality categories that we impose on it. That’s what eliminates reality. That’s not what I mean by faith.
Now, to digress, you can’t do theology without experience. If we reject experience we couldn’t say anything! But when you know God as God is, you know God remains the criterion of your experiences – not the other way round. I do think all our emotions are there, and they’re theological when in the service of God’s word. Our whole selves are involved. But outside of the Christian context I would say you wouldn’t know it as the word of God. When you look around you and say the “world magnifies God’s glory, look how beautiful and immense it is” you are already interpreting who God is, from the perspective of faith. You didn’t learn that from the world.
On the preached word as a model
Yes – it’s not great in the (Catholic) church. If they just stuck to the word of God for instance, I think homilies would be better. Luther once said that if God could speak out of Balaam’s ass to the prophet, then God could speak through a preacher who is not very good.
It is difficult today because too often we think we hear God speak when in fact he has not spoken. I think if I’m just trying to be Catholic or Lutheran I may miss what it means to be Christian, what binds us all together. That’s why I focused on the doctrine of the Trinity. I think we’re all actually already one in that belief, in that knowledge, because God has made us one in Christ and through his Spirit. If that would be recognized as the thing that binds us all together ecumenically then that would be very substantial.
The theologian cannot be isolated
That would be insane. Theology takes place within the community of believers, and ecumenically as well. You need the community to check your thoughts. We have to constantly check them because of the risk of running wildly in one direction or the other. And, also, you never know where a good idea is going to come from!
Resurrection – an event in God’s life
If you don’t make a clear distinction between God in Himself and God for us then you end up with statements that make the Cross and Golgotha the essence of God. They’re not! God’s essence is at work in those events because Jesus Christ is the Son of God incarnate, and God did raise Him from the dead to destroy sin and death for us.
God is in those events for us, and those events are somehow involved in God’s immanent (eternal) life, but not in the determinative sense that history and historical events are constituting that life.
The event of the Cross is a saving event because God is at work in that human history. It’s the divine life that determines the meaning of that event.
I agree that God remains incomprehensible, but on the other hand, you can’t use that as an excuse – substituting Jesus’ human history, for example, for his divinity. The ‘savingness’ of the Cross would be lost otherwise.
If you start with the premise that history constitutes God’s being, God’s eternity, which has become the major premise of contemporary theology from [Jurgen] Moltmann to [Wofhart] Pannenberg and others, you’ve made God’s being dependent on the outcome of history. No theologian working within the Nicene faith, I think, ever wanted to say something like that. They were opening out from the fact that Jesus was begotten of the Father, not made.
How the light gets in
Barth once said in a debate with Paul Tillich that God could speak to us through Russian communism, a dead dog, or a shrub – and if he does, we’d do well to listen. Barth talks about secular parables of the truth, and of the light, too. But there is only one light of lights. We share in that only by faith and hope. We really cannot know it perfectly here. We will not know it perfectly until the second coming when the redemption is complete. Then we will be like him when he raises us from the dead.