Theology Lessons with Herbert McCabe

Herbert McCabe was a truly remarkable theologian. I could not think of anyone better to recommend to someone looking to learn some theology. McCabe can be recommended because his writing is so different to the jargon filled, tortorous prose that many modern theologians produce, yet without losing anything in terms of profundity. An example of this can be seen in an article he wrote for New Blackfriars (which may also appear in one of the volumes that comprise various of his articles, I’m not sure). He has the superb ability to really capture an important theological idea with a simple turn of phrase, a perfectly understandable analogy and retains great wit and informality throughout. Below is a discussion of his essay.

God:

He opens with the ever-important reminder that our conceptions of God are only ever approximations to the divine. That the terms in which we speak of God can only ever be used analogously. Or as he puts it:
“He is always dressed verbally in second-hand clothes that don’t fit him very well”. When we speak of God we only ever speak in terms which are familiar to ourselves and which do not reveal who or what God is but nevertheless are essential if we are to talk of God at all. McCabe thus tells us that clearly metaphorical terms such as ‘the Father’ are preferable to more abstract terms such as ‘God’ since they are clearly metaphorical and not likely to be confused for the real thing. That this is of paramount importance becomes clear when one considers the dangers inherent in talk of God as ‘Being’: the perils of making God a mere ‘god’ (or as it has been fashionable to say since Heidegger, the dangers of ‘onto-theology’) are always close at hand and must be carefully guarded against.

The Divinity of Christ:

McCabe then links our understanding of the divine to the radical change that Jesus Christ has brought about to it. Our understanding must begin “from what we have come to call the Trinity“. McCabe puts paid to the Barthian-inspired fears that Thomist theology tacks on Christian doctrine to a pre-existing, ‘pagan’ understanding of God. The importance of Jesus is the radical change he made in our understanding of what ‘love’ means. Thus the Christian emphasis on charity or agape: that understanding of love which is differentiated from eros in its universality, its insistence on equality. The claim by Jesus that the Father loved him is the most radical of all.

McCabe then proceeds to explain Christ’s divinity from this claim. “Love begins and ends in equality“, says McCabe, and from this goes on to explain how God could not ‘love’ his creatures. There is abolutely no equality between us and the Creator. At most then, God could be kind to us, He could take pity on us, He could be caring towards us, but He cannot love us. Even a master/slave relationship can involve affection and kindness, but there can be no mistaking this for a relationship of love in which two equals must be presupposed. Hierarchical structures, although they have always existed and in human society are a necessity can never be love (although that is not to say that they are necessarily unloving).

And yet the problem remains: does God not then love us? Must God remain in an infantile relationship of authority with his creatures? Both Marx and Nietzche saw this and felt the need to reject the existence of God, for the sake of mankind. Man could never be free, if this God were accepted: he would always remain a kind of ’slave’. Thus Jesus’ claim, that the Father loved him, is a claim on behalf of his divinity: “To say that Jesus is divine and to say that God is capable of love is to proclaim one and the same doctrine.” An Arian view of Christ, marking him as only a supreme creature, destroys the possibility of love. If Jesus is truly loved, then he must be more than a creature. To say that “God is love” requires the doctrine of the Trinity.

Grace:

It remains the case, however, that we ourselves are but creatures and thus God cannot love us equals. Here the doctrine of grace comes in, so clearly explained by McCabe: “‘In Christ’ we are taken up into the exchange of love between the Father and the incarnate and human son, we are filled with the Holy Spirit, we become part of the divine life. We call this ‘grace’. By grace we ourselves share in the divine and that is how God can love us.”

Deification:

The issue of sin has not yet even been alluded to. It is first and foremost our creaturehood that prevents us from being genuinely loved by God. And so “we need not only to be forgiven from sin but to be divinised from simple creaturehood.” Sin, therefore, is nothing but our settling for our creaturely status, refusing the risk of being drawn up into the life of the Triune God. The gift of the Holy Spirit allows us to share in God’s own love.

Freedom from Sin and the Law:

Although laws are a necessary institution in human society, to live under the law is ultimately to be a sort of ’slave’. The essence of man is freedom and “it is a mysterious fact about human beings that even to conform to the law of our own being is to be restricted. We naturally tend beyond ourselves“. (Here McCabe echoes the key insight of the ressourcement movement in Catholic theology last century). Man is a ‘graced creature’, there never has been any ‘pure nature’ and thus, as a matter of fact, the only way to be without grace is to reject it: not only are we slaves, we are guilty ones. To be forgiven is thus to be brought back around to the fact that God loves us unconditionally, we need no longer labour under the mistaken conception of a “punitive” judge, who changes his mind about us only once we have repented. This insight from McCabe brings our attention to the ‘immutability of God’s love – His love for us is unwavering: we need only, like the prodigal son, return to the arms of our loving Father, who is already waiting to greet us. McCabe argues that it is this realisation that frees us from the bondage of sin.

God as Lover, God as Creator:

For McCabe then, the radical Christian insight into the nature of God is that He is primarily a lover, wishing to draw us into His love – the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is necessary if we are to make sense of scripture’s statement that “God is Love”. But it is equally important not to lose sight of the notion of God as creator, for although we are to be ‘divinised’, we are to do so as human beings. For McCabe, grace does not elide nature and he points out how this is a specifically Catholic (and Jewish) concern. This is clear, for example, when one considers the Canon Five of the Council of Trent’s decree on Justification:
“If any one saith, that, since Adam’s sin, the free will of man is lost and extinguished; or, that it is a thing with only a name, yea a name without a reality, a figment, in fine, introduced into the Church by Satan; let him be anathema.” Humanity’s natural faculties, though impaired, have not been completely destroyed and the grace sent to us perfects our nature, raising it to the supernatural level which it naturally (!) tends to.

Love thy Neighbour:

To love someone is to give them the gift of freedom; the freedom and ’space’ to be themselves. Of course, as McCabe points out, indifference seems to be very much the same thing. One can see this in modern day attitudes that wish to equate Christian love with the liberal principle of “live and let live”. But this attitude is a counterfeit, what it manifests is a complete lack of care about other human beings. God loves us unconditionally but this does not mean he is indifferent to sin.

The difference of creation:

In one sense, the doctrine of creation makes no difference whatsoever to things. Science, for example, can study natural phenomena without any need to consider whether the world was created out of nothing. But in another sense, creation makes, quite literally, all the difference in the world. It makes all the difference between there being something or nothing at all. And for McCabe, although he does not particularly address it in this essay, the question “why is there something rather than nothing?” is the first step to recognising that the entire world’s existence is a mystery to which God is ultimately the answer. I hope to write about this some other time.