Bertrand Russell once famously asserted that the history of Western philosophy has been a series of footnotes on Plato. Whatever the insightfulness of that comment, numerous western thinkers have been learning, relearning, and unlearning, to various degrees, the wisdom of Plato’s teacher’s observation on the philosophical task: the wise are those who are aware of their ignorance. Socrates’ learned ignorance has not, at least if James Byrne’s book has merit, always been appreciated in theology. Theo-logia, one might assume, has been more the occasion of mapping the theo-‘logic’ in some kind of comprehensive fashion, or at least in a way that enables us to possess the wisdom of being un-Socratically ‘knowledgeably secure’.

What Byrne’s delightfully readable and accessible study (although for ease of reading sacrificed has been in depth analysis, substantive argument and justification, and detailed referencing) does not do (and the negative tone of these opening observations is appropriate, given the nature of the book) is (1) provide a systematic theology of what God may be like; (2) map the wide-range of theological conceptions; (3) or attempt to defend any positively voiced theo-logical particularity. In fact, this lack of theo-logical specificity, while a child of Enlightenment moves against arbitrary theological parochialism, is not necessarily a strength, as will be maintained later. This book operates within a distinctly philosophical milieu of asking about what kind of theo-talk is appropriate. Of course, one herein glimpses Byrne’s ‘God’ (the irony of naming this ‘God’ is obvious), since the question is always uppermost what kind of talk is appropriate to the kind of God that God is not.

Many of the themes of the book turn on Byrne’s rejection of what could be called the god of ‘classical modern theism’, the god of natural theology, whose ways and works are evident to the inquiring mind. Byrne’s is a learning of one’s theo-ignorantia through learning the folly of the fate of God-talk in modern times, and an unlearning of the grammar usually entailed by modern Western talk of the cosmically explanatory thing referred to as ‘God’.

He argues, "proofs and disproofs do not work, and the truth will always elude our feeble attempts at certainty. … We cannot step outside our world and view it sub specie aeternitatis; that, after all, is the prerogative of God, and we have no such luxury" [5].

"I have no idea whether there exists a Being that we can call God" [ix]. The problem with ‘Being’ language, as much of the Christian tradition has known all too well, is that can lend itself to making God an aspect (even if it be the pre-eminent aspect, or the highest) of the ‘things’, ‘items’, or ‘furniture’ of this ambiguous world (the world does not wear any ‘meaning’ directly on its sleeve) that can be named and made an object of our knowing. There must be critical restraints upon fantasy and self-deception. And it is in this that Byrne displays sensitivity to the destructive propensities toward idolatry.

So Byrne continues, "we can never know for certain if there is a God. To put this philosophically, when it comes to God, all of us must be philosophical agnostics" [x]. But here Byrne has overstepped the mark by confusing questions of cognition, and the limits of human conceiving, with the existential status before ‘God’. Even Kant, whose limiting of the human imagination to the phenomenal, accorded highly significant ethically regulative status to the noumenal [Byrne does come close to this as a statement about how ‘God’ can function for others: "‘God’ is the utterly ineffable symbol through which we attempt to express a reality greater than the fragments of the mundane, a totality greater than the self, and a horizon beyond the tangible", xiii]. After all, certain reasoned fideists (not to be confused with uncritical realists/fideists), or theologically critical realists, would not agree that cognitive uncertainty necessitates agnosticism as such. Concepts such as ‘faith’ and ‘hope’ work in the space inhabited by a certain cognitive ‘blindness’.

Something else is going on in Byrne’s account to entail that questions about his perspectivism venture into questions about whether he has provided an adequate theo-logical mapping. In his introduction a clue is provided by his "wandering approach" conversationally locatable within a "pluralism of discourses" [xi]. Byrne seems to celebrate this with little sense of Nietzsche’s unease, of it being at once liberating and a burden and creating a task (however that task may be conceived). Instead of a docta ignoranta that remains a part of our journeying, Byrne’s silence too easily gives the impression that the job has been finished, and we can become stationary in our ignorance, a lazy silence in other words taking place in empty spaces – "we best understand God when we remain silent" [xii]. His treatment of the Christian apophatic thinkers is made less useful here by his failure to map types of silences, and therefore to distinguish an apophasis which is learned through being enveloped by the mystery identified as ‘God’, and the silences of one’s emptiness.

Byrne is concerned "not to defend any particular theology, least of all official Christian dogma" [xi]. Leaving aside the question of what may be identified as ‘official Christian dogma’ (itself by no means a simple question) Byrne could be seen as returning theological discourse to generalising banalities, that take place nowhere and by no-one, and displays no savant for the irreducibility of the particular and concrete.

Admitting this is not to dispute the accuracy of his comments to the effect that all religions are perspectival. But is not Byrne himself verging on accessing a powerful meta-story, albeit one infused with postmodern agnostic sensibilities? It is reasonable to argue that "no idea or concept of God is completely innocent" [68]. However, it is also possible to ask whether the tone of the book suggests, unwttingly, that Byrne has attempted to find an innocence in a non-realistic negation of theism and atheism [a non-realism is suggested by "Our religious experience then becomes a relation not to some other Being but to the depths of our own being … an orientation towards the whole of human existence which regards that existence as constituted by relationality", 20]? While one may agree that "our anthropomorphic ideas of God are always limited and inadequate" [68], it needs to be asked whether our silences are any less limited and inadequate. Should it not be asked, with much of the apophatic tendencies within traditions of Christianity, whether the silence is one learned in the particular schools of theo-linguistic pedagogy, in other words a studied imprecision disciplining our naming of that which we worship, and that discourse of divine transcendence and absence are themselves parasitic upon acquaintance with the divine reality?

Some of the book’s concerns and its weaknesses in approach are demonstrated in ch. 5 and part of ch. 6 when Byrne considers the notion of, in anthropomorphic terms, ‘God’ acting. The target that Byrne, thinking through Spong, has in mind is a conception of God as super-natural and therefore interventionist, summoned or directed to act through a style of praying determined by what Byrne describes as a magical concept of the world, resulting in a certain arbitrariness and capriciousness of resultant divine ‘action’. "God thus understood becomes an ethical affront to our sense of justice and fairness" [81]. Without much detailed justification Byrne asserts from Spong that this manner of praying to be demeaning to human beings and damaging to the idea of God. What he seems to mean by those is that this type of divine action leaves little room for contingency, human responsibility, and their manifestations in the politics of ecclesial agency (Byrne here cites the example of the politics of the Arian controversy), that which is often surmised as being subjection to an overly paternalistic deity. Byrne’s understanding of prayer, then, is markedly different:

The problem that Byrne does not suggest awareness of, in this simple self-assuredness, is the complexity of conceptions of divine agency and the nature of prayer. What he is targeting is certainly a popular impression but by no means the universal one among, for example, Christian theologians. Envisaging models of divine agency beyond the simple dualism of the interventionist image is a common feature of theological reflections on human and divine agencies as non-competitive. Something else is going on through Byrne’s critique, somewhat problematically suggesting a threat to his postmodern god:

Socrates, at his trial in 399 B.C., maintained that the reason he philosophised was because "the unexamined life was not worth living". In a temper not prophetically irrelevant to our modern western consumer society, he had through his life complained of the engagement of his contemporaries in pursuing goals such as fame, riches, pleasure, and so on, without ever asking whether these are important (or even useful, useful for what?). Unless they raised such a question, and seriously sought the answer, they could never know whether or not their entire lives might be wasted in pursuing useless or even dangerous goals.

Byrne’s study could provide a useful tool for introducing students to the difficulties of their theo-logical journeying, particularly in taking them beyond the simplisms of various popular atheisms and theisms, indicating for them reasons for the changing fortunes of the western beliefs in ‘God’ in the modern period, and rejecting the modern autonomous ego. This ‘God’ must be unthought through and beyond the ‘death of God’. However, the book’s limitations lie precisely in its tendency to be less than sensitive to the complexities of some of the debates. This is perhaps why, when there are profitable discussions of the likes of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Marion, the book is less well equipped to enable readers to navigate the particularisms of religions, and no mention is made of the Christian theological giants of the twentieth century – von Balthasar and Rahner, for example, and both Barth and Bonhoeffer are mentioned only in passing.

©John C. McDowell, 2001