H. Stephen Shoemaker
Myers Park Baptist Church
Charlotte, North Carolina
June 17, 2001
THE SILENCE OF GOD AS THE SALVATION OF THEOLOGY:
ON KATAPHATIC AND APOPHATIC SPIRITUALITY
Text: I Kings 19:8-13
Today we move between two mountains and two kinds of spirituality. We see
Elijah move from the dramatic victory of God at Mt. Carmel to the silence of God at Mt.
Horeb. And we see Elijah move from theological know-it-all to theological know-nothing,
from smart-aleck to mystic.
I
What I am describing is the essential polar movement in theology and prayer back and
forth between the kataphatic and the apophatic. Kataphatic and apophatic are
transliterated Greek words. Think of the English word "emphatic," the strong use
of words or speech.
Kata-phatic means according to or along with word, speech or image. It is the use of
words, images, symbols, metaphors as windows or avenues to God. It is the spiritual path
which, to use the words of John Denver, "fills up our senses."
Apo-phatic means apart from or beyond word, speech or image. It refers to the
spirituality which comes with the emptying of the senses, the relinquishment of language,
the letting go of words, images, symbols, metaphors as a way to God.
The kataphatic says, God is like . . . God is like . . . God is like. The
mathematical symbol is the curved equal marks.
The apophatic says, God is not like, not-like, not like. The mathematical symbol
is the curved equal marks with a line through it.
The kataphatic is sometimes termed the via positiva, the positive path. It is
open-eyed prayer, wide-eyed with wonder. Edna St. Vincent Millay’s line of poetry
captures its essence:
O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
The apophatic way is sometimes called the via negativa, the way of negation,
closed-eyed prayer. It is the path that closes out the senses because they have become not
a window but a shut door to God, as overloaded circuits shut down. It is captured in this
line from Wordsworth:
The world is too much with us . . . .
The negative path acknowledges the limits of language, the elusiveness of spiritual
experience, the exhaustion of the cognitive. It is close to what the poet Keats called
Negative Capability, which he described as
. . . capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable
reaching after fact and reason . . . .1
Spirituality and theology move back and forth between the kataphatic and the apophatic,
between the utterable and the unutterable, between talking until you talk too much and the
end of talk.
Jaroslav Pelikan says that the apophatic in Christian history has served as a
check on the pretensions of theologians.2 It is what I mean by "The
Silence of God as the Salvation of Theology."
II
Let us now move to Elijah on Mt. Carmel. The religious landscape had changed in Israel
as King Ahab took Jezebel to be his queen. He married her to secure a political alliance
with Phoenicia. When she moved in she took over, promoting the worship of Baal across the
land.
Israel didn’t need much coaxing. Baal was the god of fertility, the god of crops,
flocks and babies. Baal worship is the worship of success, self and sensuality; of
fortune, fame and feelin’ good: If it works do it; if it serves my interests, do it; if
it feels good, do it. It is the Market as God (Dowism, as in the Dow Jones), the ego as
God, instant gratification as God. It is the worship of the God we can see rather than the
one we cannot see. The God who produces.
Elijah the prophet challenged the prophet of Baal to a spiritual duel on Mt. Carmel and
invited the citizens to watch.
Meet me on Mt. Carmel, he said. When the day of the showdown came, there were 450
prophets of Baal plus 400 prophetesses of the goddess Asherah. And there was the lone
prophet of Yahweh, Elijah.
Elijah sounded the challenge: A choice must be made. It’s either/or, not both/and.
You cannot worship Yahweh and Baal. If Yahweh is God, follow Yahweh. If Baal is God
follow Baal.
Here is how he put it to Israel: (I Kings 18:21).
How long will you go limping with two different opinions? (NRSV)
How long do you mean to hobble first on one leg, then the other? (JB)
How long will you sit on the fence? (NEB)
Literally the Hebrew means "hobbling on two branches," as a bird flitting
from one branch to the other, or a man on crutches shuffling from one crutch to the other.
Sounds like American Christianity to me. We practice a practical polytheism, making gods
of our immediate wishes and desires.
But the prophet says: You cannot serve two gods. "Choose this day whom you will
serve. If Yahweh is God, follow Yahweh; if Baal is God, follow Baal!" Elijah set the
terms of the contest. Let us each set up an altar to our God. Then let us prepare a bull
for the altar. The God who answers by sending fire to consume the sacrifice is the true
God.
The contest was on. The priests of Baal built their altar and prayed from morning until
noon, but there was no response. Then they began a half-limp, half-dance designed to get
Baal’s attention. Still no action.
At this point Elijah gets carried away, as we do today, 30 points ahead at half-time.
He begins to taunt the prophets of Baal; the prophet as theological talker of trash:
"Cry louder to your god. Maybe he’s meditating, or maybe he’s gone on
vacation, or maybe he’s asleep. Or maybe," and now Elijah gets even more obnoxious,
"maybe your god has gone to the john!" (I kings 18:27)
How embarrassed God must be sometimes with the ways we defend God. Most translators
have camouflaged Elijah’s taunt with more polite euphemisms.
So the RSV translates: "he has gone aside!"
The NRSV: "he has wandered away!"
The NEB: "he is engaged."
The Jerusalem Bible: "he is busy."
The King James Version: "he is pursuing."
The Today’s English Version is all too clear: "he is relieving himself."
(On second thought, I think I like the old translations.)
Hearing these taunts, the prophets of Baal threw themselves into a greater frenzy,
crying louder and louder, cutting themselves with swords and spears. But there was no
answer from Baal.
Elijah then asked the people to come closer. He built Yahweh’s altar with twelve
stones representing the twelve tribes of Israel. He dug a trench around the altar and
flooded it with water so to magnify the miracle to come. Prophet as Las Vegas magician.
Then he prayed, "Answer me, Yahweh, so that your people may know you are
God."
Immediately fire came from the heavens, struck the altar, and the altar was consumed in
flames. The people fell on their faces and cried, "Yahweh is God, Yahweh is
God," which is what Elijah’s name literally means: Yahweh is God.
III
With the rush of such a victory running through his veins, and armed with the law of
Moses which says false prophets are to be put to death (Deut. 13:5), Elijah said,
"Seize the prophets, let none of them escape." And they seized them, and Elijah
took them down to the brook Kishon and slaughtered them there.
I must interject a comment here on biblical interpretation: Sometimes the biblical
God is not the God depicted in the Bible. There is a tension in the Bible
between a picture of God who seems to authorize sacred violence and a God who calls us
beyond violence in the name of God. There is a shalom tradition in the Hebrew
scripture that attempts to purify old images of God. Elijah at this point has not caught
the distinction. In the gospels the disciples ask Jesus to call down fire from heaven like
Elijah did and destroy Samaritans who have refused them hospitality. Jesus shows a higher
way.
We in every age need to choose between Yahweh and Baal, but we are not called to
slaughter those who choose Baal.
Elijah at this stage talked too much and knew too much, and the result was sacred
violence.
IV
Now we move to the chastening of Elijah by God and to the apophatic mode of
theology.
When Ahab and Jezebel learned of the slaughter of their prophets, Jezebel swore to have
Elijah’s head on a stick within twenty-four hours. There’s nothing like seeing your
picture on the post office wall to change your disposition.
Elijah "frightened for his life ran away." He was not only frightened, he was
in dark despair. If he was manic on Mt. Carmel, he crashes now in deep depression.
"It is enough," he cried. "I’ve had it. Take my life. I alone am left
to worship you and now they want me dead. Just end it now."
God’s intervention into Elijah’s despair was first with the gifts of food and
sleep. Sometimes food and sleep are our first steps back to life. It is at this point in
Mendelssohn’s Elijah where he puts the solo "O Rest in the Lord, Wait
Patiently for Him."
Revived by sleep and food, Elijah travels south to Mt. Horeb, which is the same as Mt.
Sinai, where God gave to Moses the Ten Commandments.
Elijah traveled back to the holy mountain the way we go back to holy places, hoping
that the God who spoke and acted in the past will make it happen again.
Elijah climbed the formidable red craggy mountain and lodged in a cave. God came near
and asked what Elijah was doing there. Elijah said:
I’ve been zealous for the Lord, yet the Israelites have forsaken they
commandments and ruined thy altars and killed your prophets. I alone am left,
and now they seek my life.
God said, "Go stand on the mountain before Yahweh." What happened next is one
of the watershed moments of sacred history. In the stark and spare syntax of Hebrew
poetry, here is what happened -- and didn’t happen:
And there was a mighty wind
Not in the wind was Yahweh
And after the wind, an earthquake
Not in the earthquake was Yahweh
And after the earthquake, fire
Yahweh was not in the fire.
And after the fire
Kol (voice), demamah (silence) dekah (crush)
The sound of crushed silence.
The traditional translation is "still small voice," which is way too tame.
This translation has become a spiritual cliché, but what happened was the opposite of a
cliché. It was the annihilation of all spiritual expectation. In a translation from the
Hebrew both literal and poetic, what happened was "the sound of crushed
silence," a silence that was at the same time both empty and full, an utmost silence
which was at the same time the opposite of what was expected and more than what was
expected, a deafening quiet. Here was an apophatic moment, beyond, apart from
image, word, symbol, sensory or cognitive experience.
There Elijah was, hoping for God to reveal God’s self as before: In the wind like the
wind that parted the Red Sea and delivered the Hebrew people from Pharaoh’s army, but
the wind came and God was not in the wind. In the earthquake like the one that shook this
very same mountain when God gave the Commandments to Moses, but the earthquake came and
God was not in the earthquake. In the fire like the fire on Mt. Carmel which won the day
for Yahweh, but here was the fire and Yahweh was not in the fire.
Then "the sound of crushed silence."
And there in the annihilation of all spiritual expectation, Elijah covered his face
with his mantle, for there in absence of God was the presence of God.
When we have talked too much, presumed too much, spilled too much blood, done too much
self-righteous harm, theology moves from the kataphatic to the apophatic,
from words, symbols, creeds, images and metaphors to silence and emptiness.
When we’ve grown too sure of God and too sure of ourselves, God makes God’s self
scarce so we can see the vanity of our theologizing. God stops speaking so that we can
learn again to tell the difference between God’s voice and our own.
Spirituality moves back and forth between Mt. Carmel and Mt. Horeb, between the
capacity to speak of God and the incapacity to speak of God. We wait on the Lord. Who
waits for what one has? It is a saving waiting, for it delivers us from our schemes of
self-salvation so we can receive the kind of salvation God brings. In the apophatic
we give up the grasping self, the self grasping even for spiritual experience, and wait on
the Lord.
Thomas Merton speaks to the importance of the kataphatic and the apophatic
when he says we must affirm and deny all at the same time. If we go on affirming without
denying, we end up delimiting the being of God in our concepts. If we go on denying
without affirming, we end up denying that our concepts can tell us about God in any sense
whatsoever.3 We need both the kataphatic and the apophatic, creed
and contemplation, theology and silence; we need prose which speaks of God and poetry
which spans the gulf between the utterable and the unutterable.
I read this week of seventh-century theologian named Maximus the Confessor. His stand
for the orthodox creed cost him the loss of his right hand and his tongue. But he also
wrote:
God is unknowable and inaccessible to all and altogether beyond understanding.4
The people of God are Maximus, giving, if necessary, our hands and tongues to say the
right things about God but knowing that God is beyond all our words, creeds and songs.
This is what Elijah learned on Mt. Carmel and Mt. Horeb.
