|
|
Email
your suggestions,
disagreements or any
other comments and
they will be responded
to without delay
|
No broadband? |
|
|
| Notes
on the Dedicated Life Swimming Against the Tide Margaret Dewey SSM W hen the theological colleges of the Society of the Sacred Mission closed (Kelham in 1973, St Michael's House in 1983), it seemed to many that the Society had lost its raison d'๊tre. But it was in 1935, in the heyday of the community, that its founder Herbert Kelly wrote:
In his theological vision Kelly was swimming against the tide of a scepticism rooted in what is still popularly called the "modern" scientific world view. At Oxford (where he had read history) Kelly had learnt to see "the whole creation as God's province" and "the whole of history as the drama of the purpose of God". This is theology as understood throughout European history until the Enlightenment, as the "Queen of Sciences" which unites and gives meaning to all the others. But in the worldview of Newtonian physics, truth was to be found by reducing things to their component parts and studying the parts and the mechanisms by which they interacted. With human knowledge thus fragmented, theology had become just one specialised academic subject among many others. It was only when Kelly began presenting men for ordination in England (not just for the overseas "mission field") that he came up against the theological establishment, saw what had happened to their discipline - and rejected it:
The Society is unique among religious communities in having the doing of theology as one of its principal aims. When the Society's colleges closed, what it lost was not its raison d'๊tre, but only the then most obvious way of fulfilling it. How, now, are we to make Kelly's idea of theology and the Society tradition known? What is its relevance in the post-modern world of today - the world of quantum physics? In subatomic physics, there are no "objective facts", only indeterminacy and paradox. According to the type of experiment, all the basic constituents of matter - electrons, protons, neutrons - behave sometimes as particles, sometimes as waves. Light, hitherto understood as "light waves", in a certain type of experiment behaves unmistakably as a stream of particles or "quanta". In other words. there is no real answer to the question "What is light?" or "What are electrons?" The Danish physicist Niels Bohr concluded that any statement that seems to say something about the intrinsic nature of an object in fact only describes how it is observed to interact under certain circumstances. We cannot know what light "is" when it is not being observed interacting with its surroundings. Werner Heisenberg (who worked with Bohr) discovered that you cannot measure accurately both the position and the motion of an electron at the same time, for the more accurately you determine the one, the more uncertain the other becomes (Heisenberg's "uncertainty principle"). Bohr saw that the "wave" and "particle" views are complementary, and that both must be accorded equal status (Bohr's "complementarity principle"). Seen thus, the paradox disappears. The contradictions arise only when we try to fuse the two types of observation into a single mental picture of "what the object is". Bohr said that the nature of human knowledge is such that we must stop short of such abstractions. This is the frontier of the knowable. Meanwhile in the humanities there has been a conscious attack on the whole "Enlightenment project". The first shots were fired in the late 19th century by Friedrich Nietzsche. But the real assault came in the 1970s in the realm of linguistics, with the rise of a literary theory known as "deconstruction". Deconstructionists say that meaning is not inherent in a text, but depends on the perspective of the interpreter. They attack the assumption that there is a substantial convergence between "reality" and our description of reality. They insist that we can never get to a "reality" which exists prior to our perception of it - which is exactly what Bohr said about physics. According to another physicist, Fritjof Capra,
But the old worldview dies hard. The Enlightenment faith that through science and technology human reason will enable us to control nature and bring peace and growing prosperity to all is still preached by politicians, proclaimed by the mass media, and practised by economists - all blind to the environmental and social costs of unlimited growth. Similarly, biblical literalists still look in the Bible for "objective facts" in the manner of Newtonian science. The quest for certainty is powerfully attractive, but the conversion of Paul of Tarsus stands for all time as a warning that certainty can be mistaken. When asked how we know what the will of God is, Kelly would reply, "We never do - and that's the giddy joke!" In 1992 Hilary Greenwood SSM summarised the Society's theological tradition in terms of three characteristics of its founder:
Quantum physics was only just emerging in the 1920s and 1930s, but Kelly's reverent agnosticism accords well with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, and his teaching in paradoxes, with Bohr's insistence on complementarity as the way of knowledge. And it was Kelly's growing awareness of the inadequacy of words to convey the reality of God which led him to adopt his increasingly elliptical and paradoxical style ("What does Father Kelly mean?"). In his recognition of the inability of language to convey "reality", Kelly was fifty years ahead of the deconstructionists. Melvyn Matthews has recently called for the retrieval of the "mystical way" - the deep contemplative Christian tradition at the heart of the scriptural and liturgical life of the whole Church, as understood from the time of the Desert Fathers until the Enlightenment:
Retrieval of the mystical tradition, and taking postmodern insights seriously,
Matthews sees in postmodernity
It seems that Father Kelly's idea of theology is an idea whose time has come. And his willingness to live with uncertainty and paradox, in loving
trust in the God of paradoxes, is a way of discipleship for the
postmodern age. |