Chapter 1. DOCTRINE AS THE TEACHING OF THE CHURCH

Theology starts in the worship of God and in the Church’s experience of communion with God. Our experience of this communion involves a whole range of relationships, so theology is not simply about a religious, moral or psychological experience, but about our whole experience of life in this communion. Theology touches on life, death and our very being, and shows how our personal identity is constituted through relationships, and so through love and freedom. What makes man different from any other creature? Can humans be truly tree? Do they want to be free? Can humans be free to love?

Theology is concerned with life and survival, and therefore with salvation. The Church articulates its theology, not simply to add to our knowledge of God or the world, but so that we may gain the life which can never be brought to an end. Christian doctrine tells us that there is redemption for us and for the world, and each particular doctrine articulates some aspect of this redemption. We have to enquire how each doctrine contributes to knowledge of our salvation. Rather than isolating each doctrine, we have to set each doctrine out in the context of all other doctrines. Theology seeks a living comprehension of the Christian faith, of our place in the world and relationship with one another. It does not just want to preserve the statements of the Church as they were originally made, but also to provide the best contemporary expression of the teaching of the Church.

Christian theology sets out the teaching of the Church. The worship of God, the Eucharist and baptism were the immediate origins of Christian teaching, which took a variety of forms even in the Scriptures. The New Testament shows us how the faith was confessed by the first Christian communities. The Christology which gave shape to the teaching of the Apostle Paul can be seen the Christ hymn of the letter to the Philippians (2.5–11). Many consider the Gospel of John to be a eucharistic and liturgical text, because its prologue at least is comprised of liturgical material used in worship. The letters of Peter probably also have a liturgical context: the first letter resembles a baptismal liturgy. The same is true of the eucharistic references of the first centuries, which represent forms of liturgical theology of the bishops who led the Eucharist, and who were initially free to improvise as they led the worship of their congregations, as can be seen from the Didache and Justin Martyr.

Baptism, and the catechising that prepares candidates for it, was another context for theology, All the earliest creeds originated in baptism, and the first Council of Nicaea used the baptismal creeds of the local churches as the basis of its creed. Another context was given by the need to respond to the rival alternative accounts of the faith that were offered by other teachers outside the Church. This form promoted the development from baptismal confessions to a broader range of creeds, in order to confront Gnosticism, Arianism and other deviations from the faith of the Church. This was the background of theological writers such as Irenaeus, Athanasius, Cyril of Alexandria and Maximus the Confessor who wrote because they were asked to respond to opposing views of the gospel, rather than because they set out to compose comprehensive statements of the faith.

Origen in the third century was the first to offer a comprehensive presentation of the Christian faith, setting out a systematic arrangement of the doctrine of the Church in his ‘On Principles’. Saint John of Damascus did the same, five centuries later, in ‘The Exposition of the Orthodox Faith’, while the ‘Summa Theologica’ of Thomas Aquinas represents the high point of the subject’s development in the mediaeval period. Nonetheless, there is no particular reason why Christian theology should be presented as a system.

Theology also originated in the councils of the Church. Councils were called in order to respond to deviations from the faith of the Church, and as one council followed another, faith was expressed by increasingly detailed statements given in creeds and canons. Theology also had its origin in the reflection of Christians on their own lives, and particularly reflection on the lives of the monks. These are expressed in the sayings of the Desert Fathers recorded, for example, in the works of Saint John Climacus (sixth century), Maximus the Confessor (seventh century), Simeon the New Theologian (tenth century) Gregory Palamas (fourteenth century) and those spiritual Fathers we know as the Hesychasts.

These various elements of liturgy, baptism, the need to respond to distortions of the faith, councils and finally the ascetic experience of the Christian life, mean that Christian theology is the expression of the experience of the living Church, rather than of intellectual perception or the logical arrangement of propositions. Theology affirms truths which come, not from the intellect alone, but from the whole relationship of man with God.

The task of re-stating Scripture and Christian doctrine is termed ‘hermeneutics’. All theology is a matter of hermeneutics, that is, of deciding how to receive and re-state the teaching of Scripture for the Church and the world. Scripture is silent until it is read and interpreted to the world, so we could say that all Christian teaching is simply interpretation of Scripture. Christian doctrine would be no more than an archaeological artefact until the Church goes on to interpret and re-state it for the world.

There are two aspects to the interpretation of Scripture and doctrine. One is the attempt faithfully to understand the context in which Scripture and the teaching of the Church was first expressed. Good historical scholarship will present the historical reality without anachronism. It asks a certain range of questions: what challenges did the Church face in each period? How did it do so? What written and oral traditions, Scripture or doctrinal, were available to it? Each council used the traditions it had inherited. What vocabulary and conceptuality were available within the intellectual and cultural environment of each period? To take one example, by tracing the decisions that led the fourth century Church to adopt the term ‘homoousion’ – unknown to the New Testament – we learn something about the logic of the revelation that the Church intended its teaching to manifest.

All biblical interpretation requires good historical scholarship. Any account of a doctrine is open to challenge until we offer some description of the original historical setting within which it emerged. What was the relationship to Christian worship and discipleship of each doctrine? How did martyrdom relate to Christian life and worship within the New Testament, for instance? What role did icons and apophaticism play in worship for the Seventh Ecumenical Council. In the same way, we need to identify the issues that brought about the drafting of a doctrine. We have to decide which textual and philosophical sources the Fathers used, and what experience of worship and the Christian life any particular doctrine represented.

We have to examine the terminology and conceptuality of that period of history. The Fathers of the Church did not remain fixed to the letter of the New Testament. Although it does not change in essentials, the worship and life of the Church varies in form and emphasis so, for example, in some periods the Church experiences public martyrdoms, while in others worship and spirituality take a more interior form. We can see the influence of monasticism on the worship of the Church through observance of the canonical hours, and then gradual disengagement from this in the twentieth century. These shifts in the experience of worship and the ascetic life have consequences for the Church’s interpretation of doctrine.

But interpretation of Scripture and doctrine also requires that we interpret our own situation. This means that we must analyse contemporary intellectual movements, and the challenges thrown up by economic, technological, ecological and other changes. But theological interpretation of doctrine demands that its relationship to other currents of thought, and thus to philosophy, must be established too. A theologian must be familiar with the intellectual climate of his or her own time. But he or she must also be a philosopher in the sense of being a truly enquiring mind, and in the wider sense of being sensitive to the deepest needs of human beings. The theologian must also be familiar with the liturgical experience and the life of the Church, including the institutional forms established by the canons of the Church. Perhaps no individual can be expert at all of these, but whoever aspires to be a theologian must be aware of each of these disciplines. Theology requires expertise at a range of disciplines, accompanied by a moral sensitivity and intellectual curiosity.

We have said that theology is first worship of God and that the fundamental logic of theology is given in the event of baptism and eucharistic worship. The Creed sets out the confessional structure which corresponds to the relationship with Christ that God has provided for our salvation. Problems start to occur when the arrangement of the individual doctrines of God, Christology, salvation and so on, does not relate to the logic of public confession represented by the Creed. The structure of any work of theology has to be flexible enough to allow all the relationships between each doctrine to emerge. For example, the chapter on the triune doctrine of God must establish connections to the Church, the sacraments and the eschaton. We cannot examine each doctrine in isolation from the whole to which it belongs, or we would be reproducing the individualising approach to dogmatics of the Scholastics and rationalists.

Then we must set out the significance of a doctrine for the period in which it emerged. What problems were met by those who first gave expression to the new doctrine and what conceptual means were available to them to meet these new challenges? Christian theology must always set out a plausible account of the development of each doctrine, so we need a set of principles by which we can interpret doctrine as a whole. We have to ask how Christ was worshipped and encountered within the Church. Then we have to relate the teaching of the Church to the problems faced by each historical period, and by making explicit the relationships between each Christian doctrine and the human search for love, freedom, and the hope of overcoming death, we have to relate our doctrine to the deepest problems of our own contemporaries. Though this is the job of theological ethics, theologians must at least offer the principles by which ethicists can tackle this task. Finally we must establish the relationship of doctrine to the wider contemporary issue of knowledge, particularly as it is posed by philosophy and the natural sciences.

Christian doctrine is the teaching of the Church. ‘Doctrine’ simply means ‘what is taught’, from the Latin doceo, to teach. Dogma, the word used by the Greek Fathers, comes from dokein, ‘seeming’ or ‘believing’, derived originally from that which was good or right. So dogma is related to belief, consensus, faith, principles and a wide range of similar meanings. So Plato refers to ‘making use of the many dogmas and words’ (Sophist 256C). From this original sense of ‘personal opinion’ the term was used of various views of the philosophical schools, so when Plutarch talked of ‘the dogmas about the soul’ (Ethica 14B) he meant the wide range of teachings offered by ancient philosophy on this subject.

This term was also employed to signify the decisions or decrees that bore the authority of the state, and so it meant something authoritative. In Plato’s Laws for example we read of ‘the city dogma’ (Laws 644D), and in the Gospel of Luke ‘a decree (dogma) was issued by Caesar Augustus to conduct a census of the population’ (Luke 2.1). In the Old Testament and Judaism, it had a legal or mandatory sense. The Apostle Paul says that Christ has ‘cancelled the written dogmas that were against you’ (Colossians 2.14) and that Christ has abolished the enmity in his Body, by ‘abolishing the dogma of the law of the commandments’ (Ephesians 2.15). For Luke, dogma has a positive sense: ‘As they passed through the cities, they delivered to them the decrees (dogmas) approved by the apostles and the elders’ (Acts 16.4). So ‘dogma’ came to refer to authoritative decisions about the faith, received by the Church and linked to the presence and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. For example, in a conciliar letter quoted in Acts, the Apostles wrote, ‘It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us’ (Acts 15.28).

The dogma or teaching of the Church relates to worship rather than to preaching. We see this in Saint Basil’s statement that ‘Dogma and proclamation (kerygma) are two distinct things: doctrine we confess without argument, but our preaching we make known to all the world’ (On the Holy Spirit 27.65). Basil means that doctrines are what the worshipping community of the Church has to learn, and ‘honour in silence’, whereas ‘kerygma’ exists in order that it can proclaim the truth to those outside the Church, which does of course involve arguing with them about what is true. The community of the Church and its worship is the context that gives doctrine its authority.

The Fathers take it for granted that dogma is only for those within the Church. Gregory of Nyssa said, ‘Let us reason within our ownborders’ (Against Eunomius 10.4), by which he means ‘within the Holy Land, rather than in Egypt’, that is, within the Church rather than on the foreign territory of philosophy. The authority of a doctrine does not come from a simple obedience to reason, though it certainly does not come from any refusal of reason, The reason it points towards is that renewed reason that corresponds to the relationships embodied within the community of the Church.

Dogma is the doctrine that, through its councils, the Church confesses as the truth that brings salvation for every human being. This truth brings us into particular relationships with one another, and it brings the Church into a particular relationship with God and with the world. The Church expects that through their own experience its members will recognise the truth of this teaching, and therefore its authority too. The preaching of the Church is addressed to the wider world. When people become Christians and members of the Church, they will have experienced the truth for themselves and so they will confess that what the Church has taught is true.

The preaching, and teaching, of Christians becomes doctrine when it is confirmed by the Church. Since the Church is a living body, it may set out new statements of its teaching for each generation. The Holy Spirit acted not only in its earliest period, but he acts through every period of the Church, now as much as in what we refer to as the Patristic period. For this reason there is no upper limit to the number of dogmas the Church can affirm in its history. It can make whatever statements are required to preserve the faithfulness of the Church in each age. The Holy Spirit enables Church councils to make, and the whole Church to acknowledge, these re-statements of the Church’s teaching. The teaching of a particular spiritual teacher or academic theologian can only become binding when it has been confirmed by the whole Church, led by, its councils.

It is the task of the Church to judge how to understand the teaching it has received in Scripture and doctrine and set it out in each new situation. From the Reformation on, Western theologians asked whether divine revelation has one source or two. Protestants rejected the authority of the tradition of the Church and introduced the principle of ‘sola scriptura’, Scripture on its own, without the experience of all previous generations of the Church in expounding that Scripture. In Orthodox theology, the problem arrived with the so-called ‘Orthodox Confessions’ of the seventeenth century, which were shaped by the encounter with Roman Catholicism in the case of the confession of Peter Mogilas (1597–1647) and with Calvinism in the case of the confession of Cyril Lucaris (1572– 1637). The West tends to regard Scripture and doctrine as two distinct sources and tries to arbitrate between what it understands as their rival claims. If we understand that the continuity of the apostolic tradition is the work of the Holy Spirit, there is no problematic relationship between tradition and Scripture, for each serves the other.

There are two reasons why Western churches saw the relationship of Scripture and doctrine as a problem. The West tended to regard revelation as primarily rational or intellectual, and the Scriptures and the Church simply as a repository of truths, available as individual units of inert information. In the Orthodox tradition, however, Scripture and the Church are regarded as the testimonies of those prophets and apostles who have experienced the truth of Christ. But truth is not a matter of objective, logical proposals, but of personal relationships between God, man and the world. We do not come to know truth simply through intellectual assent to the proposition that God is triune. It is only when we are drawn into the life of God, which is triune, and through it receive our entire existence and identity, that we have real knowledge. Then we may realise that the Church’s trinitarian doctrine of God faithfully articulates the truth of our experience in this communion that is the Church. Through such living experience, every member of the Church experiences the communion of God and is able to affirm that the doctrine of the Trinity is the truth of that reality. The revelation of God is an event in which man comes to experience, and share in, the life of God and of his fellow-man and the world, and this revelation brings new light and sense to all life. The Scripture that brings this revelation is complete, and this revelation makes sense of every part of the canon of Scripture.

The revelation of the one true God is the person of Christ given to us. Revelation is of course always personal, for God revealed himself to Abraham, Moses, the Apostles, the Fathers and so on. Consequently, we have no new revelation and no addition to the revelation of Jesus Christ given in Scripture. Though it is personal, this revelation takes a variety of forms. The epiphanies of the Old Testament, such as the event of Mount Sinai in the Book Of Exodus, reveal Christ. In the New Testament, revelation of God has taken an unrepeatable form. With Jesus Christ, we are allowed not only to see and hear God, but to actually touch and feel him and relate to him physically. It is not merely communion of the mind or the heart, but a communion of vision, hearing and touch, with him ‘whom our hands have touched’ (1 John 1.1). Nothing is superior to the revelation of Christ, for ‘whoever has seen me, has seen the Father’ (John 14.9). The Fathers insisted that this communion was final and complete. The New Testament is the record of the experience of those who had this physical communion with God. It sets their experience above Old Testament appearances of God, and above whatever revelations have been given to the Church since the time of the Apostles.

The incarnation has given us a fuller revelation than that represented by the Old Testament. The Church attributed this superiority to the physical and tangible relationship Christ shared with the disciples, and understands the Eucharist and sacraments as the continuation of this fully physical form of communion. Ignatius, Cyril of Jerusalem and Cyril of Alexandria insisted that those who worthily participate in the divine Eucharist see God better than Moses did. Saint Maximus summed up Saint Irenaeus’ teaching about their relationships with the phrase ‘the Old Testament is the shadow, the New Testament is the image, the things to come are the truth’ (Scholia on Dionysius’ Ecclesiastical Hierarchy 3.3.2).

The entire life of the Church lives from the revelation of God in the historical event of Christ recorded for us by the Scriptures. The New Testament is the fundamental doctrine, or dogma, of which all other forms of revelation, the Old Testament and all subsequent teaching of the Church, are renditions. A further revelation could only be an entirely different revelation, and different religion, altogether. So to sum up what we have said so far, the New Testament and all subsequent Christian doctrine simply point to the person and event of Jesus Christ. The teaching of the Church, taken together with the whole canon of Scripture, enables us to experience this new relationship between God, mankind and the world.

The divine Eucharist is the complete revelation of him ‘whom our hands have touched’ and direct communion with God in personal and tangible form. Every revelation of God, in whatever form it comes, manifests Christ. All revelations are appearances of Christ, and thus of the untreated light which shines from the historical body of Jesus Christ. As John of Damascus and Theodore the Studite insisted, it is the incarnation Christ that makes the icons revelations of Christ.

To return to the relationship of Scripture and doctrine, we can see that all doctrine essentially recalls the event of Christ. It reveals that we have been brought into a living relationship with God and so with all truth. Jesus Christ is the whole knowledge of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit and this is the reason why, in the course of setting out the truth of Christ, the Council of Nicaea set out an entire theology of the Trinity. All subsequent ecumenical councils were concerned to elucidate Christ as the truth of God, and thus the truth of our salvation, even when it may seem that they were concerned with issues not directly connected to Christology. The experience of the Apostles, recorded in the New Testament, is the doctrine which all subsequent teaching has to set out. Doctrine only ever restates the experience of the Apostles and restores the clarity of their witness to Christ. The continuity of doctrine is sustained by the dogmas set out by the ecumenical councils of the Church; these dogmas are themselves icons of Christ, painted by each new generation, each with all the means that it has at its disposal. This continuity is both external, because it represents a fidelity to all preceding tradition all the way back, to the period in which Scripture was written, and it is internal, because it preserves our living relationship of God with humankind and the world, fulfilled and revealed in Christ.

Jesus Christ is the revelation of God, so Christology is theology. The doctrine that articulates this revelation of Christ presents us with two fundamental issues. The first is the need to account for the period of time between Christ in history, and the Apostolic era and subsequent historical periods in which christological doctrine was formulated. What accounts for the continuity of the revelation of Christ through time?

The second problem is that within the historical revelation of Christ there is a tension between the present and the future, the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’. In the historical Christ and the experience of the first Apostles, God’s revelation is a poor reflection ‘as in a mirror’ rather than the whole reality that the eschaton will reveal ‘face to face’ (1Corinthians 13.12). Christ now presents an image and foretaste of that complete and direct personal knowledge of God for us, though, according to 1 John 3.2, until that kingdom arrives, no prophet or saint has full or final knowledge of God. How can we attain a foretaste of heaven, the complete knowledge of God, and be confident that Christian teaching is the faithful and accurate expression of this foretaste? Truly to portray Christ as the revelation of God, Christian teaching has to be faithful in two respects: It has to portray truthfully the historical Christ of the past, and the future, eschatological Christ and his kingdom.

Christian doctrine must hold together the past, historical revelation of Christ and the future advent of Christ in glory, and this union and transformation of past and future is the particular task of the Holy Spirit.

‘It seemed proper to the Holy Spirit and to us’, concluded the council of the Apostles in Acts 15. It is the conviction of the Church that, just as Scripture is ‘God-breathed’ (2 Timothy 3:16), the teaching of the Church is equally the work of the Holy Spirit. There are a number of ways in which we could understand this. The presence and action of the Holy Spirit could be understood as some kind of mechanical or magical intervention of God. For the ancient Greeks, ‘divine inspiration’ was involuntary, manifesting itself through divination and oracles, often without the consent of the individual who was caught up in prophetic rapture. But such an understanding as this would make the authors of the bible and the Fathers of the councils the involuntary tools of the Spirit. Another possibility would be to understand the presence and the effect of the Spirit in terms of the development of the human spirit through time, and the consequence of humanity’s efforts towards its own amelioration. A third possibility is that the work of the Holy Spirit is an event of communion that centres on a community, and which has a horizontal as well as a vertical dimension.

The first of these possibilities can be excluded straightaway. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of freedom, so he does not force himself upon us. Christ’s revelation fully respects the freedom of the person. The second possibility at least fits the spiritual experience of the disciple and ascetic, for without being purified froth sin, it is not possible for anyone to see God, for ‘whoever hates his brother cannot see God’ (1 John 2.11). The Eunomians claimed that sin does not present any obstacle to immediate knowledge of God. Saint Gregory Nazianzus argued that they had thereby created a theology of the disembodied intellect, which allowed anyone to ‘do theology’, as though theology were just another topic of conversation that would pass the time between the races and the theatre. Gregory insisted that theology is not open to anyone, but only to those ‘who have been tested, having spent their life in contemplation (theoria) of God, cleansed in soul and body, or at least undergoing such a purification’ (First Theological Oration., Against Eunomius, III). But equally to isolate spirituality from all other considerations and make it the sole requirement of the theologian would be individualism and moralism. We would be mistaken to think that God reveals himself to those individuals who isolate themselves in order to advance to a higher degree of spirituality.

The third option we could call the ecclesial action of the Holy Spirit. Wherever he works, the Holy Spirit brings the communion of Christ. We need to rid ourselves of the belief that the Holy Spirit acts upon us as isolated persons and leaves us as isolated afterwards as before. This perception that the Spirit takes persons away from community is so widespread that we must reject it emphatically. Those who defend this view overlook the fundamental distinction between the action of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament and in the New Testament. In the Old Testament, the Spirit is given to particular persons, prophets and kings, but not to the whole nation of Israel. But in the New Testament the Messiah gives the Holy Spirit to the entire people of God. In his account of Pentecost Luke quotes the prophet Joel, ‘In the last days I shall pour my Spirit forth on all flesh, says the Lord Almighty’ (Acts 2.17–18).

The New Testament teaches that all baptised Christians have the Holy Spirit, and with him, his charisms and gifts. The Apostle Paul explains in 1Corinthians 12 that being a member of the Church means the possession of some particular gift and office of the Spirit for that Church. Paul clearly rejects the view of the Corinthians that some people may be more spiritual or more charismatic than others; he insists that everyone has some spiritual gift, even if it takes the form of an unostentatious service like administration. Paul rejects every manifestation of a spiritual elitism, saying that even if someone has faith enough to ‘move mountains’, he will be nothing if he has no love.

What does the Apostle mean by ‘love’? If we take a look at chapters eleven to fourteen of the first letter to the Corinthians, we see that love is the communion created by the community of the Church. Love here does not refer to an emotion or to good will but refers to the mutual relationship between the members of the Church, for it is this mutual relationship that makes this communion one. No one says that they ‘do not need any other parts of the body’ (1Corinthians 12.21), for love means that all offices and ministries are exercised interdependently and in union.

The Apostle relates this fellowship to the Holy Spirit. The phrase that ends his second Letter to the Corinthians, ‘the fellowship of the Holy Spirit’ (2Corinthians 13.13) appears to have been part of the liturgy of the first Churches, prior to Paul, and it has remained part of the divine Eucharist ever since. Wherever the Spirit blows, he brings an end to individualism and elitism, and creates a community. We could point to a multitude of quotes from the Fathers of the first centuries. Gregory of Nazianzus refers to the Holy Spirit’s focus on personal contemplation (theoria). He says that though we may desire solitude and purification of mind in order to achieve contemplation of God, this is not the direction the Spirit leads us in. The Spirit brings into being a congregation and makes each member of that congregation fruitful, so that each, ‘being helped by helping others makes public the Spirit’s enlightenment’ (Twelfth Oration, 4). This is why the experience of the gathered Church is, Saint Gregory believes, greater than the experience of contemplation ‘just as the skies are greater than a single star, or as a garden is greater than a single flower, or an entire body is greater than any particular part of it’ (Twelfth Oration, 4). The Fathers tell us that it is the Spirit’s chief work to lead us towards the gathered Church, and not towards an isolating individual experience.

It is not simply the rarer or more cerebral charisma, but all the charismas of the Church that belong to the revelation of God. Each gift should be understood within the symphony made up of all gifts. Not everyone is intellectual, or has the ability to treat the sick and heal them, not everyone can speak more than one language, or excel as a leader and we cannot all be prophets. But no one can approach God by his own effort, without the many charismatic gifts that the service of our fellow Christians makes available to us. The Spirit calls together this community, and all the Spirit’s acts and gifts serve the unity of the community of the Church. Our conclusion is that revelation of the truth always brings about communion, the particular communion of Christ. Christian doctrine points to this communion and teaches us that this communion is the truth itself.

Now we have come to the part that the Church plays in the formation of doctrine. Christ is the reality of a new relationship between God, mankind and the world, and the Church is the community within which this new relationship is manifested for the world. In the Church, the entire world, with Christ the new Adam at its head, acknowledges God as Father. The new relationship expressed by this acknowledgement, is the world’s salvation from dissolution and death. Knowledge of the revelation of God is an empirical reality within the body of the Church, which enjoys the relation of the Son to the Father, in which the entire world is embodied, making it the body of Christ. The relationships that constitute this community and make it this body are the actualisation by the Spirit of the revelation of God in the world.

All members of the Church constitute this communion that is the living knowledge of God. It is only together that all baptised members of the Church constitute the body that reveals Christ. The people (laos) created by baptism, laity and clergy together, are the revelation of the Son who is the truth of the new relationship of the world with God. Christ, together with his Apostles, stands at the head of this people. Christ makes himself present to the Church in the person of his ministers. They must ensure that the community preserves the original form of the body of Christ, as experienced by the whole people of God from the earliest moments to which Scripture bears witness. This is the particular ministry of the head of the eucharistic community, the bishop who, accompanied by his presbyters, represents the image of Christ surrounded by his Apostles. In the Eucharist, the community of the Church lives and displays the Christ-centred relationship of God and the world. The knowledge of God is given by the new, salvific relationship of God to the world, manifested in Christ and experienced as Eucharist. In the person of the bishop, the community gathered at the Eucharist expresses its faith ‘with one accord’, as the liturgy puts it.

Doctrine acquires its authority from its faithfulness to the truth of the relationship between God and the world. This is revealed as the communion of God, the world and mankind in Christ, which is the communion experienced by the Apostles and their communities, as the New Testament records. When all the Churches confess the same faith, the catholicity of the Church is made evident ‘throughout the world’. ‘The bishops in every corner of the world are of one and the same mind as Jesus Christ’, in the words of Saint Ignatius of Antioch (Letter to the Ephesians III). The councils of bishops are the form in which the Churches express the unanimity that makes them the one Church and body of Christ. They are ecumenical because they include all primatial bishops, representing the whole world (ecumene). The doctrine of the Church set out in the decisions of these councils expresses the faith of the whole Church and fully reveal the knowledge of God within his relationsbip to the world through Christ in the Spirit.

Because Christian doctrine witnesses to the living truth it must be continuously received and transmitted by all the members of Christ’s body. There are no specific procedures for this reception of doctrine by members of the Church, but this reception occurs in the ‘Amen’ given by the whole people of God in worship. Without this public and eucharistic affirmation there cannot be any liturgy, or preaching or teaching. Such affirmation can be withheld when there is disagreement between bishops and the laity, as it was at the Council of Florence in the fifteenth century. But above all, this giving and receiving in the entire community, by which doctrine is disseminated around the whole body, is effected through the experience of the truth of this doctrine, and maintained by the exercise of all the charisms of the Holy Spirit in the service that constitutes the Church as a unity.

Bishops have the particular office of convening councils, through which the faith can be learned and confessed as the common and unanimous acknowledgement of God by all the churches. For this reason they have to formulate the doctrine of the Church which expresses the reality of the communion created by this acknowledgement. Thus the whole people led by their bishops participate as one Church in the shaping of the dogmas as living truths that reveal God as the Father of Jesus Christ, and through him, of the entire world, with the God-man, Jesus Christ, at its head.

In order that Christian doctrine receives its proper authority, it is vital that the eucharistic community functions properly. This community must include people in all stations of life, exercising all the charisms. When the eucharistic community is properly and catholically constituted, doctrine is not unilaterally imposed from above by an institution acting with a merely judicial authority, a magisterium, but rather demonstrated and affirmed by the ‘Amen’ of the whole people. When doctrine is received in this way and becomes secure in the mind of the Church, it is irrevocable and cannot he changed, and can then only be experienced and interpreted by Christian teaching, worship, discipleship and the life of the saints. Whatever is decided by a fully ecumenical council, and is recognised and acknowledged as doctrine by the whole Church, has full authority and is then a dogma, which no subsequent council or theological development has the power to rescind. The task of bishops and theological teachers is only to interpret this doctrine, by formulating teaching, which may itself eventually become the doctrine of the Church, expressed in the decisions of subsequent councils of the Church.

Here we must say something about the infallibility of the doctrine of the Church. Infallibility is not the possession of any institution, either councils or bishops. It is not the possession of any individual, no matter how great his or her office or spirituality or intellectual achievement. As individuals, the saints and Fathers are not infallible. Infallibility is the consequence of the ‘fellowship of the Holy Spirit’, who brings about the wholeness of the Church. Without any reference to the other charismas and functions of the Church, no individual is infallible. But any individual can express the truth of the Church as it has been infallibly formulated by the councils of the bishops, as long he is faithful to his truth. A hymn writer, any martyr or outstanding disciple, and every ordinary Christian who lives faithfully and humbly as a member of the eucharistic body of the Church is a witness to the infallible truth.

Christian doctrine can claim infallibility only if it is faithful to the dogmas decreed by the councils. Many theologians have confused the teaching of the Fathers with the dogmas of the Church. You hear it said that because some particular Father taught a doctrine, that it cannot be mistaken, but this is not so. For the teaching of a Father to acquire real authority, it must be confirmed by the experience of the saints, in the furnace of the ‘fellowship of the Holy Spirit’ and made explicit in the ruling of an ecumenical council. Athanasius correctly articulated the faith of the Church before the Council of Nicaea, but it was only when the teaching of that council was affirmed by the Church, that Athanasius’ theological teaching became dogma, compelling the affirmation of the whole Church.

What happens in those periods when there are no ecumenical councils, and no truly ecumenical dogma can be given? At such times the Church continues to live and confess the truth of God’s revelation, through the whole range of lived experience and Christian confession, through the teachers given to it. The Church has its Fathers in every generation, of course; the Fathers did not come to an end in the ninth century, as is often assumed. They interpret the teaching of the Church. They do not produce dogmas, and they do not demand that the Church accept without question their account of its teaching. What we attempt, as students and teachers, is simply faithful interpretation of the teaching that has been passed down to us. We do not make any stronger claims: it would be a foolish teacher who expects his own interpretation to be dogma, that fully and validly expresses the teaching of the catholic Church. Each one of us is, as an individual, capable of erring, so we must learn humility and listen to one another’s views, for without humility we risk setting ourselves up as judges of the Church. The truth is revealed and secured, and in this sense becomes infallible, only as we submit to the communion of the Holy Spirit and are incorporated into the body of the Church. God is not known outside the communion of the Spirit and the love created by him, as we will see as we turn to examine the issues of knowledge and faith.

How can we know God? Is knowledge of God innate, as theories of natural revelation maintain? Are we born with some knowledge of God which we can then build upon? Or does our knowledge of God come through direct revelation? Is it possible to gain any knowledge of God from nature, or from human nature? Contrasting views of the possibility of knowledge of God developed on the Western side of the Church, in the rival accounts of Roman Catholic and Protestant theology. But theology does not need to understand the origin of our knowledge of God in either of these two ways. Before we examine patristic views of the knowledge of God, we must consider the question of knowledge more generally.

What is knowledge? Since we are not just theologians, or scientists and academics, we can start by, taking a more everyday and common sense approach to knowledge, by looking at how we know anything. When we say that we know something, such as the table in the room in which we find ourselves, it means that we orient ourselves to it in a particular way: we relate it to ourselves. Aristotle introduced this idea, which became familiar to the tradition as Aristotle’s ‘this thing’ (tode ti). When we identify something by pointing to it, saying this, rather than that, we are saying that we know and recognise it. Knowledge is identification: when its identity is lost to us, we have no knowledge of that object, How do we identify objects? Again this is hot an issue of theology but just of epistemology generally. How do we know that this is a table? What makes its identify it in this way? First, we recognise it by a process of negation or exclusion, by ruling out all the things that it is not. We say that it is A, and not B. To define A, we exclude all other entities, so when we say ‘this one’, we mean none of the other objects or possibilities.

A second factor in the act of knowing is that we are obliged to ‘define’ this object in order to exclude other objects. The etymology of the word ‘define’ relates to boundaries which we place around this object to separate it from all others. The third action, consequent on the second, is that we ‘describe’ it by referring to its properties. In the case of our table, we might describe it by its shape, given by space and time. If it loses his shape it would no longer be a table, but something else, like a pile of wood. If there were no space, we would be unable to isolate and describe this table on the basis of its form. This table here would be one with that table over there, absorbed into it, and we would be unable to tell one table apart from another, in which case the identity of this table would be lost in a confusion of all other objects. Without space and time we would have no knowledge of this table.

As Aristotle pointed out, description gives objects those attributes we judge they have. When we say that this table is square we have begun to acquire knowledge of it. But where did the concept of ‘square’ come from? Plato believed that our concepts are drawn from an unchanging world of ideas and that we apply their names to our objects. Aristotle said that squareness is an attribute possessed by the object itself, so it resides within the table in some sense. But this table is not the only square thing: if it were, we could not call it square, for an attribute must be held in common by a number of other objects. The concept of ‘square’ is not applicable only to this table, but to a vast variety of other things too.

We describe the object by referring to its various attributes: it has a particular colour. The more attributes we add, the more we know of the object, and the more we are able to relate to it and make use of it. Its usefulness to us allows us to define it: it is a table because we can write on it, lean on it, leave things on it, walk round it. There is always a latent utilitarian or pragmatic aspect to our knowledge, because its attributes make it available to us, either to exploit in some specific way, or simply because it has some aesthetic attraction for us.

So far we have said that to have knowledge of something we must exclude it from other objects and describe it on the basis of attributes given in the context of time and space. We relate not only to what we see, of course, but also to what we cannot see. I know my father, even though I cannot see him because he is no longer alive. Time, that individuated me from him in the first place, has now separated me from him altogether. Without time there would have been no distinction between my father and myself, and without such distinction of things, I would never have been able to know my father as someone other than myself. I was able to identify him only because of the distance that time and space created between us. Time and space allows us to distinguish one thing from another and so enables us to identify things. We know them by descriptions that identify their attributes and the way we employ and value them. We make comparisons: this table is bigger and better than that one and these aspects are also part of scientific knowledge. It is our entire social and cultural context that makes this rather than that attribute of an object useful, and thus makes the object significant for us so we notice it in the first place.

Whilst for the ancient Greeks, the attributes of form and beauty were fundamental to knowledge, in our utilitarian Western culture we tend to place the emphasis on the utility of knowledge, so aesthetics and theoretical sciences are considered to be of less significance. If when you discover something new you are not able to demonstrate its usefulness, your research is regarded as of less value, even as less scientific. Why should we talk about the beauty or fittingness, of art, or of God? What can they contribute to a national economy? Humanities departments are under threat because funds go to departments that demonstrate measurable economic benefit. But how is such benefit to be measured? We can measure it only through the practices of knowledge by which we are able to define and describe it. Knowledge is given by the practices of judgment and evaluation promoted by the humanities, so without these practices we will have little idea of what is useful or worth discovering. Without considerations of value there is ultimately no knowledge at all. Finally, since relativity, and more recently, quantum theory, we have had a change in the perception that the researcher, the knower, must distance himself from the object of his knowledge. Contemporary natural sciences understand that the researcher is involved in the processes by which he comes to know his object, so the experimenter may affect his own results. Knowledge is largely or perhaps even entirely an interaction with a complex environment. So we have very briefly sketched the issues that relate to science and indeed to knowledge of any kind.

We have described what is involved in knowledge of an object. But if we apply this to the knowledge of God we will entirely fail to gain any knowledge. Why is this? First, when we apply the method of exclusion (A is not B), in order to know A we must presuppose that there is something else around, which we have to exclude. So we are obliged to accept that something exists along with God, even if that something is just ‘nothing’. But when we say that God creates something out of nothing, what is that ‘nothing’, besides himself? For some, like Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth, ‘nothingness’ seems to have some shadow existence that God rejected and removed by bringing the world into being in its place. On this basis, something is excluded in order to make a first step towards knowledge of God. We would have to suppose that there is something that is not God, which exists in parallel with God, in order to say anything about God. But is it possible to relate God to something other than God without forfeiting the very concept of God? For God to be God, we may not assume his co-existence with anything else, so we cannot take a first step towards knowledge of him by distinguishing God from whatever he is not.

Description, the second element we mentioned, relates to our location in space and time. Any description of God would place him in time and space. But time and space presuppose a beginning and it is only creatures who have a beginning. They are given their boundaries and separated by the distance given by space. Time and space cannot be applied to God and so we are unable to produce a description of him. The Fathers called God indescribable, which means that it is not possible to ascribe boundaries or limits for him. So it appears that it is simply not possible to say anything about God.

This brings us to a perennial discussion about the attributes of God. Medieval theology taught that we may know God by his attributes, because we can say that God is good, almighty, omniscient and so on. But we know an object by its attributes because we take those attributes from our experience of other objects. We do not find the attributes simply and solely within the object we investigate. If we were to invent some word not found in any language, and then describe this table by that word, and say that the attribute named by this invented word exists only in this table, we would not be offering any description of it that would allow others to identify it. Imagine we show some new invention to someone who had never seen anything like it before, and when he has watched it working, ask him to relate it to something. Its action will remind him of something else that he is familiar with, to which he can make some comparison, however far removed. If he has truly never seen anything to which it can be compared he will be unable to offer any description of it, and so will have no knowledge of it. We comprehend what is new by analogy with things that are familiar to us, for all knowing is a matter of making connections with our existing experience. We identify what we don’t know on the basis of what we do: knowledge is analogical.

The attributes that we allocate to an object are never unique to that single object: we can never know what is truly unique. We are able to know objects because they have characteristics in common, so there are degrees of resemblance or kinship between them. If someone’s body was truly unique, we would be unable to relate his anatomy to our experience of any other anatomy, and so we would be unable to perceive him at all.

This being so, what can we say about God? From where can we draw his attributes? How can we say he is good, for example? Where would this attribute come from, if not from our own experience? I know various people who are good or powerful, and I know about God’s goodness or power because I draw this knowledge from my experience of other persons generally. But if I attempt to reach God by extrapolating from my experience I am making God a creature; indeed, I am making him my own creature. Since attributes of goodness or power are not exclusive to God, the human race is endlessly able to substitute various phenomena or abstractions for God. If God is like these other phenomena or like other persons we know, why not replace him with them? Why should I revere God and not revere a thunderstorm, if both of them are ‘powerful’?

We can see this in the case of our notion of God as Father, which is where the problem of anthropomorphism most frequently appears. We teach children to refer to God as ‘Our Father’. In what sense do they, or we, understand this? It mast be on the basis of those children’s experience of fathers. They identify their father with certain attributes: he can do things that they cannot, perhaps, such as protecting or providing for them, and through these attributes the child receives an idea of God. When adolescence, and with it the desire for freedom, arrives children have to free themselves from subordination to their parents. The young person can only turn into an adult by shaking off some of these received ideas and undergoing a revolution against authority and dependence, and in this revolution, the childhood idea of God has to disappear.

This event of disbelief in God is the same whether viewed on a personal level, or on the level of a society or civilisation. In those moments of cultural transition where authority is contrasted with freedom, the idea of God is discarded, It has to be put aside because we came to ‘know’ God on the basis of experiences and attributes that we acquired from our own family and wider relationships.

We cannot give God the attributes found in other objects. Danger follows inevitably from knowledge attained by extrapolation from familiar objects and from notions abstracted from them. The knowledge of God is bound up with the results that this knowledge offers, and such knowledge will ultimately be rejected. How many people lose their faith in God because he does not answer their prayers! Just as I choose to reject and ignore this table if it is of no use to me, I will eventually reject God and ignore him as of no use to me. And the word ‘ignore’ does not simply mean that I know that he does not exist, but that, since he makes no difference to me one way, or the other, he does not exist for me. I do not know him because I decide I do not need to know him. I do not condescend to know him, that is to concede him any acknowledgement, so my ignorance of him is deliberate. You can see what kind of danger the knowledge of God – epistemology – contains, when it is based on the attributes of God. It leads to atheism, because by definition, God cannot be fined into any of the moulds that we have available to us or in any way be made useful to us. If this were not the case, then at any given moment, just as I push a button to start up a machine, I could likewise push the prayer button and wait for the answer to come. This would demote God to the status of an object and, and worse still, demote me to the status of someone bound to such an object.

We cannot speak of God’s attributes and then attain knowledge based simply on these attributes. We cannot resort to any categorisation that includes place and time, because time and space came into being at creation and do not apply to God. So how can we come to know God? Is there anything that we can find in our own experience that can point us on the way? Is it possible to know something, without going through this process of objectification and then exclusion of attributes? Either we cannot know God, or we give up trying to describe God on the basis of our experience and say simply that, though we know God, we cannot describe him.

These two options have been discovered many times over the centuries, and they are very much on offer today. The response we call negative theology insists that we cannot say anything about God. Our silence about him must be absolute, for whatever knowledge we have, we are unable to put into words. The other response is a form of mysticism that allows a certain expression of God, that involves experience and emotion which, in its most extreme form, obliterates the distinction between the one who knows and the one who is known. Through the centuries, Christians have experimented with both negative theology and mysticism. In ‘The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church’ Vladimir Lossky (1903–58) tries to offer a combination of the two. If negative theology, which insists that we do not know God by nature, is the way forward, what can we say about God? It is easy to say what God is not, or to say that we cannot say anything about God. What can we say affirmatively about God?

Negative theology appears as the problem of opposition between God and the world. In order to know God, you must go beyond the world and leave it behind you. Neoplatonism represents this principle of ‘beyond the essence’. In the hands of the sixth-century theologian Dionysius the Areopagite, its method was to attach the prefix ‘hyper’ (over or beyond) to every concept. ‘Whatever we say about the world, we must use ‘hyper’ when we refer to God. So, for example, to say that God is ‘good’, which is of course based in our experience of the goodness of other people, we would have to say that God is more-ghan-good, or beyond-goodness. By this we do not mean that God is good to the maximum degree but that he surpasses goodness entirely. In the same way we say that God is not ‘being’ but ‘beyond being’ (hyper-ousios). Dionysius wants us to understand that all our categories represent the projection of our worldly experience onto God and so we must be taken beyond them. But despite all this rhetorical effort, we cannot definitively pass beyond ourselves to God.

Now we must see what knowledge of God is offered in the teaching of the Church. To find out how the Fathers approached the knowledge of God we must examine a little patristic history.

In the middle of the second century, Justin began to use the concept of the Logos to set out the view that the human mind is the instrument of understanding. Origen (c.185– 254) and then Evagrius Ponticus (345–399) expanded this into an epistemology in which the mind purified itself all that was available to our powers of perception, which fitted well with Evagrius’ view that the calling of the monk is to rid himself of all worldliness. According to this view, there is a direct relationship between God and the human mind, so the mind is the link between God and man, and the means of our knowledge of God.

One danger of this doctrine is that it excludes from our knowledge of God everything perceived by the human senses. Though this may seem obvious, it does not easily agree with the confession that Christ has become perceptible to human senses, and that the senses too are therefore the means of knowledge of God. The human mind appears to be able to perceive God directly, without any interaction with the material world, and so becomes the point of contact between man and God. Some of Origen’s followers developed this doctrine into an entire theology. It was corrected however by another monk, Makarius the Egyptian (c.300–390) and eventually condemned by the Council of Constantinople (553). Makarius introduced another faculty, the heart, into the discussion. Rather than the mind, the heart was the source of our knowledge of God. Because the classical view of man understood the heart as the source of the emotions, Makarius was not always understood, but in fact he was not making a distinction between mind and emotion.

In the theology of Israel the heart was the faculty of cognition because it was the instrument of obedience. The heart represents man’s obedience and so it knows God as God, since the pure in heart ‘shall see God’ (Matthew 5.9). The heart is the place of freedom, where we say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to one another and to God. The obedient heart does God’s will. So knowledge of God is not an issue simply of intellect or of emotion but of obedience. For those formed by the Greek worldview and coming to terms with the teaching of Scripture this was not obvious. For Greeks, knowledge had to point towards the identity and existence of something. An object must be much more than a moral summons, to which I respond with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Through obedience we acknowledge that someone truly exists, so for Makarius there was an ontological aspect to this knowledge.

The breakthrough came with Saint Maximus the Confessor (580–662). Maximus was one of the great, perhaps the greatest, theologians of that time, because of the boldness with which he reconceived all the major theological issues. He used Makarian ideas to correct Evagrius, so that the theological tradition of Origen was purged of its more detrimental aspects. This did not require any aggressive confrontation: doctrinal breakthroughs seem to come without any great fury, in the Patristic period. Although Origen had huge authority, Athanasius, the Cappadocians and above all Maximus amended him radically, but none of them found any need to mount great campaigns against his theology.

The first change that Maximus made was to redefine the term ‘Logos’. To Maximus, Christ is the Logos of God. It is through the Logos that we come to know God, and all beings have their logoi and reason within the one Logos and Word of God. The breakthrough came when Maximus perceived this Logos of God as this person, the Son with whom God the Father has a relationship of love.

Only Christ, the Logos of God, can know God. Only the Logos is in an eternal loving relationship with God which actually reveals, discloses and makes known the identity of God as this person, the Father. As the Gospel of Matthew puts it, ‘no-one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him’ (11.27). Maximus insists that the Son knows the Father because of the relationship of love that exists eternally between them. In this relationship the Father is recognised and revealed by the Son, who says, ‘You exist as my Father.’ Within this relationship of Son and Father, God reveals himself, and is acknowledged, as truth. Athanasius made the same observation in argument with the Arians: he said that the Son was forever with the Father, and that it was impossible for the Father to exist without his Son because the Son is the image and truth of the Father, and image and truth are united in him (Against the Arians I, 20–21).

This was a significant epistemological move. The Father knows himself as he recognises the Son as his own image. You cannot recognise yourself in isolation from another person. You need a relationship to reflect back to you who you are. The Son is the mirror of the Father, which is what Athanasius meant by calling the Son the image and truth of God. This is the conception that powered the theology of Maximus the Confessor. A relationship of persons, and therefore of love, reveals the truth, and makes known what could not be known in any other way. God is known through the Logos because the Logos is his Son. The Fathers had given up all the earlier teaching of Origen and Evagrius that the mind is the sole conduit or vehicle of knowledge. The Logos is a person, who loves and is loved, and through this loving relationship, he recognises and relates directly to the person who is his other. There is eternal knowledge of God because God is eternally recognised and known by the Son. It is not the creation of the world that makes God known. He is known in his Son in the love that exists between the Son and the Father.

Let us go back to the theological implications of this epistemological revolution. This topic was discussed again in the fourteenth century by Saint Gregory Palamas (1296–1359), though with an epistemology quite different from Origen’s. Since Origenism had long receded, the Fathers were free to involve the mind in epistemology again. The mind cannot acquire knowledge on its own, without the whole person, so the heart and mind were understood as a unity. The heart knows, and the mind loves, and because it loves it is also able to know. This meeting of heart and mind was referred to as the ‘descent of the mind into the heart’.

Having established that the Logos by which God is eternally recognised, is the Son, Maximus took another step. We too may gain knowledge of God through the Son, and only through him. Maximus agreed with Makarius that the heart was the source of human knowledge. No true knowledge of God comes through the mind or the heart, by either intellectual or spiritual exercises. The Son, who is his true other, and who is loved by the Father, knows and loves the Father and accepts his identity and his being from him. The only true revelation and knowledge of God is located in the loving relationship of the Father and the Son, and God reveals himself through this relationship of love. We may come to know God in Christ.

So how does love relate to knowledge? We have looked at the way in which we know objects and we have said that none of those approaches could be applied to knowledge of God because all the conditions by which God could be known as an object would directly abrogate the meaning of ‘God’. We found that there is another way that is linked directly to our experience, and of course it has to be linked to our experience if it is to become knowledge for us. This way relates to the communion of the Son who, loved and known by the Father, knows and loves God.

We have said that we cannot simply repeat the theology of the Fathers word for word. We may use their terminology, but we must also do the conceptual work that is required in order to in interpret them and he faithful to their meaning. If we are to learn from them, so that their theology is allowed to challenge the way we understand ourselves, we have to take the vocabulary and conceptuality of our own age and use them to interpret the Fathers’ theology faithfully. Then the theology of the Fathers will change our conceptuality and influence the way we think about ourselves. This requires that we relate our own experience to Patristic theology, bringing one into the light of the other. All knowledge that is truly ours must relate in some way to our experience. What experience can we apply to God without encountering all the problems that we observed with knowledge of objects? It is the experience we know as personal relationship.

In order to make clear the connection between knowledge and relationship we have to examine the Fathers’ discovery of the concept of person. A person is identifiable only within a relationship with another person. There is no person outside relationship with other persons, so one person is no person at all. No person can be substituted by another or be absorbed into another. We may know things through their attributes, but this is not how we know persons. We cannot submerge persons into attributes and classes.

We could even say that we know persons in spite of their attributes. The person you know may be in all sorts of moral trouble, but because you love him and regard him as unique you do not allow his deficiencies to define your relationship. If it is only because of their goodness that you relate to a person, you are not relating to them as a person. If we likewise identify God by his goodness, we are identifying him not as a person but as the sort of object which, when it proves to be not quite as we expected, we lose faith in, with the result, that the relationship comes to an end.

Each person affects our own life and very existence irreplaceably. We exist in relationship to him and this relationship affects our very existence. If this person were to disappear, in some measure we cease to be ourselves. Since one person acquires his identity through his or her relationship with another person, the disappearance or death of that person affects him or her ontologically.

In terms of theology, this means that if the Son ceased to exist, the Father would not exist either. If the Father did not exist, neither would the Son. Their relationship is mutually constitutive, each of the parties in this relationship depending on the other. Now we must look at the particular significance this has for theological knowledge. This personal relationship of Christ and the Father is given in Christ to us, so we are enabled to recognise God because we are made sons, who can address God as Father. In teaching them to pray ‘Our Father’ Christ gave this privilege to his disciples, and we are brought within this relationship so we can also address God as Father. There is no one but the Son who can eternally address God as Father, therefore only the Son can bring us into relationship with himself, so we become sons of the Father and thereby able to know God as he is, as God the Father. The Christian approach to God as Father originates exclusively from this relationship of the Son to the Father, and the right that the Son bestows on us to address God as Father with him.

The concept of the paternity of God was common in the ancient world. To the Greeks, Zeus was ‘the father of gods and men’. But in the bible only the Son has the right to address God as Father. Christ alone is able to reveal that the Father is the identity of God. Knowledge of God means the acknowledgement that God is the Father. This relationship that God has eternally with his Son is the relationship that is passed on to us. We do not therefore come to know God by compiling a dossier of his characteristics, in the way that some dogmatics systems do. That God is Father is the whole truth of God, so a true understanding of God is only possible within the identity of the Son of God. If we are familiar with Christian doctrine, we may even give this our intellectual assent. But really to know this is to recognise and acknowledge God as Father, which is the prerogative of the Son. A son knows his own father in quite a different way than he knows anyone else’s father. Personal knowledge exists only within relationships that are unique and irreplaceable.

What is it that distinguishes knowledge of a person from knowledge of a thing? Freedom is one of the basic elements that distinguishes persons from things. A thing cannot be known freely. When a thing is known to me it has no freedom; indeed, neither the object nor the subject who knows it can be free. We are not free to ignore what is directly in front of us, because the object imposes itself on us, making our knowledge the function of necessity. Christian apologetics attempts to prove the existence of God, so we have no choice but to accept it. If we intend to convince someone that God exists by a logic that they cannot evade, they can only be compelled to concede their acknowledgement, and this knowledge would eradicate their freedom.

On this basis, God would become an involuntary object, to himself and to us. When God is regarded as ‘supreme being’ or ‘higher power’, this is the acknowledgement that animals, demons or idolaters are able to make of him. They understand him in this way because they are obliged to do so by consciousness of their own weakness before the all-powerful being that they cannot control. But what does it mean to know something, or rather someone, freely?

Saint Maximus (Ambiguum 9) asked in what way does God know things? What form of acknowledgement does he give the world? Does he know it as a scientist knows the laws of nature? Maximus replies that God does not know the world according to its nature, for this would mean that what he knows he has to know, and cannot avoid knowing it. Such a conception of knowledge does not fit God, for it is not by nature that God knows things. He knows things because they are the creatures of his own will. By willing them, he created them. The nature of things is not the condition of God’s knowledge of them, for everything that is is the product of his will. As a result, we may also know a person not because we have to acknowledge his presence and existence but because we freely identify him as the one we freely love. The ‘object’ of love can only be a person. It is not due to their nature that you know this person, and perhaps not due even to their presence with you, but because, like you, they are free either to refuse you and withhold themselves from you, or to return your love and enter relationship with you.

Here we have to make an effort of the imagination to see how different a person is from a thing. Imagine you are in love with someone, and you have not seen them for what seems like a very long time. Say you have arranged to meet them at a café, but when you arrive at the café cannot see them. You scan the crowd and it is full of friends, but the one person you want to see is not there. You are oblivious of all the others who call you to join them because at that moment the absence of the person you love fills the entire café. By their physical absence, they determine the way you experience all the others who are present in the café. Strangely enough, the absent person you love fills the café with his or her presence, while those present become absent for you. One’s person is not dependent on one’s physical presence. You can be present within a personal relationship without being so physically. Absence can help us to come to know one another because this means that our knowledge of one another is not overpowered by our physical presence. There is an element of involuntariness about physical proximity. Physical presence does not entirely determine our knowledge of persons. We have to grasp this in order to realise that knowledge of God does not rely on physical presence.

We can recognise a person as a person only in freedom, so all the knowledge we have of persons depends on whether and how they reveal themselves. We cannot know anyone as a person by force, so if someone does not wish to divulge their identity, we cannot know them as persons. We may regard one another as objects of knowledge, with all the properties that we observe from one another’s physical presence, but no one can finally and definitively know someone until that person is willing to make themselves known. God intends to give himself, so we may acknowledge him and gain knowledge of him without threatening his freedom. Personal knowledge is therefore always free, which means that it comes to us as a gift or a revelation. Because he desires to, God identifies himself to us through our knowledge and so reveals himself freely.

We can go a step further and say that God does not want to be known or be acknowledged by us, unless this takes place in freedom for us too. Knowledge that is imposed on us, in defiance of our liberty, is not person-to-person knowledge, and so is not the knowledge that God wishes for us. If God’s existence were to be proved so that we became compelled by logic to believe in him, it would not be God who was thus believed in and known. God does not intend to be known, and therefore cannot be known, by compulsion. Man has the choice not to know God. We can tell him that we do not wish to know him. We are free to say that God may exist, but as far as we are concerned, he does not. We reject this possibility for ourselves. God wants us to know that he exists for us, for me; he looks only for that acknowledgment that can take place person to person.

When God reveals himself, he does so as our Father. Such knowledge encountered in freedom gives us the possibility of saying freely, ‘Yes, you are there’, or ‘No, I don’t want to know you’. Freedom both for God and for man is therefore intrinsic to knowledge of God. A relationship between persons is not determined by nature. God is known to nature only in the form of necessity: animals know of God, as do the principalities and powers, ‘demons believe and are terrified’ (James 2.19), but who wants that sort of knowledge?

By saying ‘no’ to God, and withholding acknowledgement of him, man demonstrates his freedom. If you tell me that you have no time to meet me, either now or at any time in the future, you are withholding relationship from me. ‘I do not know you’ (Matthew 25.12) is what Christ warned he will say to those who finally withhold themselves from him. If Christ says, ‘I don’t know who you are’, the possibility of any personal relationship is gone. So in theology we are not dealing simply with knowledge, but with the knowledge that originates in the freedom of persons, and which is therefore personal knowledge, for only this knowledge exists in freedom.

Another fundamental constitutive element of knowledge is love. By love we do not mean an emotion or a relationship given by nature, for there is an element of compulsion to all such relationships. For the ancient Greeks for whom eros was a fundamental reality, love held all things in a harmony which made the cosmos as a whole beautiful. In the Symposium Plato speaks of love: in his view each good thing has a power of attraction, so love necessarily draws us towards it. Goodness and beauty are forms of necessity. This was so in the moral realm too, because the Greeks believed that we have to love someone who is good. Wherever there is nature and biology, the power of attraction – which is what love is – is at work. How can we demonstrate that we are free, and not utterly determined by the force of necessity that nature represents? We can show this only, by breaking and reversing the force of necessity. This is the great revolution introduced by the gospel.

In his discussion of the Symposium, Ioannis Sykoutris, a modern Greek authority on Plato, says that if Satan asked God why he loves his human creatures in spite of their sinfulness, God would be hard put to come up with an answer. What sort of reason could there be for such a love? Where would you find a reason to justify God’s love towards the man who will not give up his sin, and where everything indicates that he should be given up rather than loved? It is exactly this that demonstrates that we love of our own free will. We do not love because we have to; we love because we will to do so and so we love freely. Knowledge that is determined by love is not compelled but motivated by freedom.

We have to consider the love that is not driven by any necessity whatsoever, not even the most moral or spiritual. God loves in perfect freedom, so Christ reveals to us a love that, because it is free, is quite unconstrained by man’s love of sin. if you remove the love towards a sinner from the gospel, the entire freedom in which God loves disappears. It is not difficult to love someone who is good or attractive; in fact, it is natural to do so. But to love a sinner even to the point of dying as a result of love for that sinner as Christ did, may be utterly opposed to nature or sense, but it is surely an expression of freedom.

I have said that personal knowledge is the form that complete knowledge takes, and that personal knowledge is a function of love. The third element that is contained in this love is that that we come to know God through a particular relationship. If there is no love, and no relationships of love, there would be no knowledge of God to be had at all. Several New Testament verses make the fundamental point that, we cannot know unless we love. In the First Letter to the Corinthians, where he deals with the issue of knowledge, Paul points out that many people boast how much they know, but he says, ‘knowledge puffs up, while love builds up’. He continues, ‘if one believes he knows something, he has never known anything whatsoever, in the way that it should be known; if one loves God, he shall be known by him’ (1Corinthians 8.1–3).

Here the apostle lays out an entire epistemology in which love is the presupposition of knowledge: ‘Though he believes he knows something, he does not know anything whatsoever’. One truly knows only within a relationship of love. In the case of the knowledge of God, it is God’s love that precedes our knowledge of him. ‘He who loves God shall be known by Him’, or even simply, ‘he who loves shall be known by God.’ This is repeated more clearly in the Letter to the Galatians, where Paul says, ‘having known God’ and then corrects this to ‘or rather, being known by God’ (Galatians 4.9). You cannot encounter God unless God has acknowledged you, because we cannot love him unless he first loves us, as the First Letter of St John (4.10) states.

God first knows us, and reveals himself to us. But this occurs only within a relationship of love. If man cannot love, he cannot come to know God, for as John again tells us, ‘He that does not love, does not know God, for God is love’ (1 John 4.8). In John the words ‘he does not love’ refer to the love that is given in the specific communion of the Church. Love for us means inhabiting this specific set of relationships which we call the Church. As we shall see, ecclesiology is essential to epistemology.     John goes on to explain what he means by ‘God is love’. ‘God’s love was made apparent’ because ‘he sent his only-begotten Son.’ God’s love is not an emotion, and it does not flow from God, as though it were wine poured from a jug. The Fathers were very careful to avoid all those expressions of this sort that were commonplace in the ancient world. God’s love consists of his being the Father of the Son. The Father’s love is his Son, this person and this relationship, whom the Father gave to us so we can know him. Our knowledge is entirely a function of this relationship, which God is in himself, and into which he has brought us. This relationship exists before we do, so we are not compelled to initiate it for ourselves.

Knowledge of God involves our admission into the relationship of love of the Father and the Son, a relationship that we desire in freedom for ourselves. This relationship is free because God is not obliged to love us, but does so of his own volition. Equally we are not obliged to love him, but we may either enter this relationship willingly, or we may decline it. Entry to this relationship means identifying God in the person of Jesus Christ. If we do not accede to the relationship of love that exists between the Father and the Son, we remain outside all knowledge of God. The many forms of philosophical, mystical and pagan knowledge that remain open to us are unable to identify God as he is, which is the Father of the Son.

Now we can say that love is that particular relationship that we may refer to as being ‘in Christ’, within which we may acknowledge God as Father. We belong to the community and the body constituted by this relationship. There is no approach to God outside the body brought into being by the Son’s acknowledgement of God and consequent knowledge of him. God is known as who he is within the Church and there only. Anywhere else he could not be acknowledged as Father, but only as something else. The Father is who God is and how God intends to receive us and does in fact receive us. God may be many other things, but we cannot know what they are because we can only know him as, in his freedom, he receives us and reveals himself, as the Father of Jesus Christ.

The knowledge of God as Father involves the re-constitution of every relationship by which we are constituted. We exist through all the relationships we know, and the many more we are unaware of. My identity is linked to all the relationships that I have with persons and things. All these relationships and our direction and desires undergo a re-ordering and purification as they are brought into this relationship with God. This represents a radical purification, which is what the life of the Christian is. The re-ordering of our relationships brings us filially into being, setting us definitively with the relationship to the persons of God that will secure our life without limit.

We heard Saint Gregory Nazianzus say that talk about God is not a general possibility, but only for those who have ‘undergone testing, lived in contemplation, and have cleansed body and soul.’ In another oration Saint Gregory tell us that such purification is essentially a matter of love. ‘God is the ultimate light … which is contemplated as we purify ourselves, is loved as we contemplate it, and which is known as we love it’ (Oration 40.5).

We may come to know God only as we love him, and we are known by him only as we are loved by him. Ascetic purification will not reveal God to us, automatically as it were, simply by re-ordering our desires. It is through love realised in communion within the body of Christ, as we come to participate in the relationships that make up this body, that God becomes known to us.

What difference is there between Christian spirituality and other forms of spirituality? Is the difference merely one of form, so that, apart from the fact that we use the name of Christ, Christian spirituality is otherwise not very different from that of other religions? If we do not refer to the community of Christ’s body, these specific relationships within which we are placed, we will be quite unable to say how Christian spirituality differs from every other spirituality. A Buddhist also claims to know God by cleansing himself of his passions. But for a Christian, knowledge of God does not come until we enter this specific community of persons who, bound together by love, make up the body of Christ and in Christ know God.

We have said that Christian teaching is given and interpreted within the Church, and it is most particularly given in the event of the Eucharist, which is the fullest possible acknowledgement of God on earth. All other forms of discipleship or teaching are provisional, and although we should not minimise them, they all direct us to the relationships of love into which God freely brings us in Christ. I must have the love that God has for my brother, or I do not know God. ‘If anyone says I love God yet hates his brother, he is a liar; for if he does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen’ (1 John 4.20). Knowledge of God is not simply a vertical line between me and God, but it connects me to all other persons, and through these persons it connects and binds together the whole world. This is why ‘he who loves not, does not know God, for God is love’ (1 John 4.8).

So we have said that knowledge is identification. Then we have said that there are two kinds of knowledge, of things and of persons. Things appear before us as givens, which we identify because their nature and ours compels us to. We distinguish them from other objects, and on the basis our experience gives us, we describe them by those characteristics that they have in common with other objects. We identify them by their location within networks so that they have value, function and represent opportunities that are there for us to take.

Then there is knowledge of persons, which involves identifying another being in a relationship of freedom and love. Freedom means that we are not compelled to acknowledge the identity of this being. We will recognise particular characteristics and attributes of course, but it is the person himself who willingly reveals his presence to us and allows us to acknowledge him in freedom.

We identify each person within a set of relationships of constitutive interdependence, We come to know him as part of a relationship of love that is integral and necessary to our own existence. We know him, not as a ‘thing’, and thus not because this someone imposes themselves on us through their attributes and power, but because they open themselves up to us and we to them in a free relationship of love.

We have said that knowledge of God is offered to us within a loving relationship of the Father and the Son in which God is identified and known eternally, quite apart from us. We identify God in Christ as we become part of this existing relationship. This knowledge is the function of this relationship of love, so God is known within the community constituted by these relationships. The Holy Spirit sustains the relationships of love that make up the community of Christ.

We must now turn to the subject of faith. We must start with the main elements of dogmatics as they are found in the Creed. Were we to adopt some other approach we would be attempting to force Christian teaching into the categories given by logic. The Creed is based on the living relationship created by baptism, and sustained by the holy Eucharist, by which man and creation are held in union with God.

The Creed begins, ‘I believe..’. The relationship of faith and knowledge represents a problem to many people because they regard faith and knowledge as opposites, so we may either believe something or we may know it. If we believe, we have given up on real knowledge. An equally common perception is that we know something and then we believe it, or the other way around. Just as we asked whether love comes before knowledge, or knowledge before love, so we must ask which, of faith and knowledge, comes first.

The baptismal rite of the ancient Church was recorded for us by Justin in the second century and in more detail by Cyril of Jerusalem in the fourth century. In this rite, when someone is baptised, an act of exorcism frees them from whatever powers have had dominance over them. Then they are called to turn to face the east, so at the moment they first say ‘I believe’ their whole direction changes. When man is born, he has a particular orientation and perspective to life, to all other created beings and to God, that is governed by nature and destined to die. Baptism reverses this orientation and re-orients that person towards true life. We cannon say ‘I believe’ if our direction remains as it has been given us by birth.

The words ‘I believe’ are a response to a question, which means that they are not the action of an individual on their own. The baptismal candidate replies to the question put to them by the Church. No one can say ‘I believe’ unless as a reply to this community, so no one can come to faith whilst locked up alone in his room. Faith is possible only within the community that puts this question to us.

There is a second element to this turn to the east. The east is the direction from which the Church awaits Christ’s coming, towards which the prayers of the early Christians were offered, and to which all the Church’s liturgical rites are essentially oriented. We turn to the east because that is the direction from which the completion of history and true life will come with the coming of the kingdom of God. Faith is therefore an about-turn by which we turn to face the direction from which our true life comes.

A fundamental definition of faith is given in the Letter to the Hebrews. ‘Now faith is the substance (hypostasis) of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen’ (Hebrews 11.1). Faith is the hypostasis, which is an ontological term, of things not yet seen. When we say that faith is this hypostatis, we mean that we believe in truth, and that through faith we are enabled to perceive reality in truth.

But the second element is that this identification is eschatological. It is the ‘substance of things hoped for’, which we do not possess at this moment. It is in expectation that we turn towards the culmination of all time in the future, and acknowledge the reality of things that are not yet physically present to us. The second part of the expression, ‘the evidence of things not seen’, clarifies the first. The things that we can see convince its of their existence. Things ‘not seen’ are not available to the scrutiny of all our senses, so although only vision is mentioned, all the senses can be understood here.

We cannot claim faith in those things that we already grasp by our senses, or by the processes of logic by which we perceive a coherent world through those senses. There is no faith involved when a being is an object perceptible to our senses, so that we have no choice but to be convinced about it. Where we are obliged to recognise its existence there is no mediating role for faith, so the concept of faith is about freedom once again.

    My presence before you is perceived by your senses, which we conceptualise primarily in terms of sight. You cannot say that you do not recognise me, or cannot identify me, when I am standing directly before you. By being here before you I am imposing on you, so you have no choice about acknowledging my presence. Faith however is what is not imposed on us by the presence of things, or by nature, or by experience or history. Faith relates to whatever is on its way to us from the future, which is to say, from what is net yet visible or perceptible to us.

Faith allows us to move beyond such imposed and involuntary knowledge. Knowledge that forces itself on us may offer us social and psychological security, of course, just as when faith is understood as trust between two persons. A child trusts its mother, but this trust is not the same as faith because it springs from a very tangible cause. The child is certain of its mother’s love because, from conception her womb has mediated that love, and after birth the child continues to experience its mother as love. A child knows who loves it: it knows ‘things unseen’ though nonetheless very well intuited, so we can conclude that trust, is not same as faith.

Faith is more far-reaching than trust. Faith is a somersault: we land facing a new direction. Our being no longer consists in what nature makes secure and verifiable to us. This faith is not supported by experience of things already known to us, but comes from that about-turn and a new start in a direction for which we have no experience. Faith receives no support from anything that can be grasped by senses, logic or either historical or psychological experience, all of which represent some kind of compulsion.

This understanding of faith can be seen in Christian baptism, in which the believer places their security in what they can have no confirmation of. At baptism the first Christians were asked to give up their identity and receive a new one, not based on any set of known relationships. Faith implied a ‘crisis’ because it involved this about-turn which placed all existing relationships under judgment. The first of these are the relationships of biology and so of family which provide us with our most basic security and identity. The child is born into relationships with parents and family, and if these relationships are removed it would mean disaster for that child. A second set of relationships that determine our identity are our social and political relationships. Our security derives from the community we belong to, which vouches for us and acts as the guarantor of our identity. Without the recognition that this community gives us we would have no public identity or public existence at all. For the early Christians, as for us today, identity has a public and civil clement. Let us imagine that in some violent event you are stripped of your identity: imagine your passport, driving licence, credit card and all other identity papers were taken from you, and imagine that when you try to rectify this situation you find that your bank account has been closed and national insurance number withdrawn. You have no means of entering employment or any other relationship with the rest of society, or of being acknowledged by any public institution. Your civil identity has vanished: you have no public existence.

Here we arrive at the distinctive thing about Christian faith. The first Christians were asked to do two things at their baptism. Firstly, they said goodbye to all the identity and security they received from their families. To be baptised was to obey the words of Christ, ‘if you do not forsake your kindred, you cannot follow me’ (Matthew 10.37) or in the even stronger words of Luke, ‘if you do not hate your own family, you cannot follow me’ (Luke 14.26). In other words, in baptism we are torn away from every biological root.

The second thing which was true for the first Christians, though not for us, is that when they were baptised as Christians they ceased to have any civic identity. Christians were non-persons in the eyes of the law, until Constantine granted legal recognition to them for the first time. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews says (13.14) that ‘here we have no permanent city, though we seek one to come.’ By ‘city’ we mean a state and the legal framework that enables the rule of law. ‘We have no city’ means that we Christians are persons without civic identity, for our citizenship is ‘in heaven’.

Baptism means the loss of one identity and the gain of another that is not acknowledged by the state. We ‘look for the city that is to come,’ orientated, to the eschaton, the kingdom and society that is yet to come, so we are the naturalised citizens of a state that has not vet established its presence in history. We do not enjoy the security of a state on earth, yet. This is indeed a giant leap into an identity that is known and secured by someone whom we are unable to see. Our identity is based on his promises about our future.

This faith takes us into a situation in which nothing is in our control. Everything is as yet unconfirmed biologically, historically, socially or by our own experience, or by logic. Indeed such security does not even come when, through faith, God reveals himself to us and we become conscious of this new relationship, and even able to say what kind or relationship it is. Faith cannot be based in such empirical experience. For often, despite the absence of any such evidence, when God is silent and we have no experience of his presence even in prayer, we are called to have faith in him.

We could then say that faith is that giant leap towards someone whom we believe loves us, no matter what. Regardless of all evidence to the contrary, we believe that he loves us and will never abandon us, and we live simply on the basis of this promise. Nothing forces us to acknowledge him, but when of our own will we confess that this loving relationship is the source of our existence, we live from the promise of God and no other security. For the first Christians who made this leap, this faith meant participation in the community of the future, the eschatological communion of God.

The Lord’s Prayer tells us that our Father is ‘in heaven’. In sayings such as ‘call no-one on earth your Father; you have one Father and he is in heaven’ (Matthew 23.9) and ‘if you do not abandon your father and your mother’ (Luke 14.26), the contrast with ‘earth’, tells us that ‘heaven’ means that God is beyond the grasp of our senses. Out of our reach, he cannot be compelled or manipulated. In baptism the Christians abandon their earthly parents and masters and the security they represent, and put their hope on things that they cannot control or verify. Such faith means that we are growing into a relationship that connects us to God our Father. Because our relationship is with the Father who is in heaven our life can also no longer he grasped or imposed by biology, family, society and so on.

What about the historical nature of Christian revelation? Do we have no historical evidence, ‘proofs’, that compel us to acknowledge God? The pagans point to the phenomena of nature, but these only point back to their own pagan conceptions of God. If nature gives no proof of God, what about the evidence of history? God has ‘not left himself without witnesses’ (Acts 14. l7). The witness statements we have are historical records. The Old Testament points to God’s dealings with his people through history, showing that God miraculously saves his people from disaster, and repeatedly asks Israel whether they are going to remain faithful to the God who so often intervened to vindicate them. Surely this is the evidence that supports our faith? Isn’t the supreme proof of God that Christians have the person of Christ himself, whose life and death are historical events, giving our faith an objective basis?

All this is true, and yet no such evidence alone can be the basis or our faith. That which has already been given to us by God as evidence of his existence, cannot be ignored by faith, which is why the Creed sets out the acts of God in history. But the evidence of his existence that God gives through history, even including the resurrection of Christ, contains an element of indeterminacy or paradox. Although the events themselves are real and certain, God does not allow them to become convincing in an absolute sense. If the ascension had not taken place, but things had continued just as they were after Christ’s resurrection, how could anyone not believe in God? If we saw the Lord among us as Thomas saw and examined him, how could we not believe? Then the presence of Christ would compel us to believe.

But Thomas, who is not prepared to believe until he has the evidence of his own hands and eyes, receives the rebuke ‘Blessed are they who have not seen, and yet have believed’ (John 20,29). Christ looks for those who believe without any such assurance or reinforcement. They are blessed because they believe and know in freedom. The moment such tangible evidence convinces him, Thomas’ faith has lost its freedom.

Our freedom is made possible by the ascension of the Lord, which is followed by the gift of the Holy Spirit who is himself freedom. The ascension opens a new era in which we may know Christ but by faith, without compulsion. Knowledge of Christ cannot be compelled.

God now addresses our free will, and this free will is a characteristic of the Spirit and of life in the Spirit, lived by faith. God gives us signs of his presence, but of a sort that we are quite capable of not receiving if we have no wish to. The Apostle Paul could have refused to receive the light that halted him on the way to Damascus: the possibility of shrugging off what happened on that road and referring to it simply as imagination, was open to him. Our faith is supported by the witnessed presence of God, but in a way which makes it possible for us to refuse it, not in a way that closes down our freedom. God never reveals himself in a way that does not allow us to say ‘no’.

Often a number of things are confused here, particularly when it comes to the sacraments of the Church. The sacraments are indeed knowledge of God and the signs in which our faith is rooted, but they do not replace the freedom represented by faith. When Christ offers himself in the form of bread and wine, he does so in such a way that we are not obliged to recognise him through them, for the sacraments are ‘the substance of things hoped for, and the conviction of things unseen.’

The same is true for the greatest disciples and saints of the Church. Sometimes we are given the impression that there is a constant, almost objective holiness in the presence of a holy man or woman. But even the miracles of saints leave a margin for those who wish to doubt them. We cannot rely on miracles which would make our faith in God’s presence unfree. So God offers signs of his presence amongst created things and events, without destroying our freedom, and he does this through his saints, who often know moments when God is not present for the verification of tangible experience. The lives of saints include whole periods of God’s absence, through which the saint remains faithful.

Faith will pass away, for faith itself is not the goal of the Christian experience. There will come a time when the ‘substance of things unseen’ will be unseen no longer, but there for all to see. We will not need the ‘assurance of things hoped for’, for by then those things will have become reality. Love alone will remain constant through our history and into the kingdom (1Corinthians 13.8–13).