#nicholas lash

Mother earth, mother nature, mother church. Maternal imagery is central to the archetypes of nurturing, personifications of the context in which we are, or seek to be, at home. If the church (to use the opening words of an encyclical letter of Pope John XXIII) is ‘Mater et Magistra’, mother and teacher, this is both because the church is the appearance, form or sacrament of God's maternal pedagogy, and also because it is, for the most part, women in the church who exercise its teachership or ‘magisterium’ (though many of the men still have not noticed this).

It follows [...] that to confess God as one is to acknowledge the impossibility of bringing him under some appropriate description or into some single story we could tell. Hence the emphasis, characteristic of Christianity but by no means confined to it, on what is known as ‘negative theology’: the disciplined insistence on unknowing, acknowledgement that even the things we find ourselves enabled or allowed or required to say of God are said ‘in fear and trembling’, in recognition that what we say is quite beyond us. God's oneness is beyond our comprehension. By now, some irritated reader may be muttering: but surely there is at least one quite straightforward implication of our confession of faith in one God; namely the rejection of all other gods as idols, as false gods, as unreal? This is true, in the sense that Christianity, like Judaism and Islam, has always resisted the division of our hearts, insisting that there is but one proper object of our hopes, desires and dreams, our loyalty, promises and trust. “I believe in one God” does, therefore, as used by Christians, does entail the belief that there is only one God. But even this apparently innocent expression can be dangerous [...]  some people seem to think that “I believe in one God” means something like: “I believe that the species deus has one and only one instantiation”. But God is not a member of a species, an individual with a nature. [...] Some people, accordingly, suggest that we insist that God is not a god. This may be true, but that does not seem particularly helpful. Others have suggested that the word ‘God’ is now so burdened with misunderstanding and misuse that we would do better to discard it. Perhaps, but on the whole it seems more likely that the surrender of the term would contribute to our forgetfulness of God, would reinforce our propensity for egotism, short-sightedness and despair, then that it would help keep us watchful and attentive to the presence of the healing mystery that makes us and all things one. [...] I said earlier that God is not an individual with a nature. Natures are kinds and categories, and the One who we worship is beyond all categories, creates and comprehends all kinds. [...] If God were an individual with the nature we could, in principle, presumably, give some direct account of what that nature was. But, since God is not a creature, an object of some kind, what we continue (nevertheless!) to call God's nature can only be spoken of indirectly, under the discipline of negation, and an abstraction from the modes or aspects of our relationship to him.

The construction {of the phrase ‘I believe in God’} is so familiar in English that, at first sight, it is hard to see why all the commentators, from Augustine onwards, should have been so preoccupied with the strange notion that, as Christians, we believe ‘in’ God. Augustine’s distinction between three Latin constructions - ‘credere Deo’, ‘credere Deum’, and ‘credere in Deum’ - exercised a massive influence on later Christian thought. I shall accordingly take his account, and Aquinas’s interpretation of it, as my guide. ‘Credere Deo’, according to Augustine, is a matter of believing what God says or, as we would say, ‘believing God’. ‘Credere Deum’ is a matter of believing God to be God. Unfortunately, the most natural English rendering of this would be ‘believing in God’ -  taking this phrase to cover either one or both of: acknowledging that God exists and supposing that the God we speak of is, we might say, the only real God. In any of these senses of ‘belief’, Augustine adds laconically, demons and evildoers may believe in God. It follows that ‘Credo in Deum’, as it stands at the head of the Apostles’ Creed, does not mean any of the things that we might most naturally take ‘I believe in God’ to mean. Faith, for Aquinas as for Augustine, is the way in which, in this life, we know God. (We may have some difficulty with this idea because, in modern English usage, we tend -on the basis of distinctions sharply drawn between ‘merely believing’ things and knowing them- to keep faith and knowledge quite some way apart.) Aquinas takes up Augustine’s distinction, and suggests that God may be understood to be, in three ways, the ‘object’ of our faith. First, in the sense of what faith knows or has in mind; this is what it is ‘credere Deum’, to believe in God. Second, in the sense of the point of view from which faith knows whatever it knows (including God); this is what it is ‘credere Deo’, to believe God. Under the second head, in other words, face is considered as our response to what God says, to God’s uttered Word And the third sense? This is Augustine’s ‘credere in Deum’, under which heading God is the object of our faith as heart’s desire, as goal towards which all our life and thought it set, as (we might almost say) faith’s ‘objective’. One translator tries ‘believing unto God’, but this is an awkward and unfamiliar expression. Augustine says it better: “What is it, therefore, to believe in him [credere in eum]? It is in believing to love, in believing to delight, in believing to walk towards him, and be incorporated amongst the limbs or members of his body.” {...} Thus {t}o confess belief in God is to set all our life, our mind, our heart, in God’s direction.