In On Christian Theology, Rowan Williams writes, “Language about God is kept honest in the degree to which it turns on itself in the name of God, and so surrenders itself to God: it is in this way that it becomes possible to see how it is still God that is being spoken of, that which makes the human world a moral unity. Speaking of God is speaking to God and opening our speech to God’s; and it is speaking of those who have spoken to God and who have thus begun to form the human community, the unrestricted fellowship of holiness, that is the only kind of universal meaning possible without the tyranny of a ‘total perspective’.”[1]
We must have a certain humility of speech that always turns our words back to God’s Word. We must be open to hearing the word of others in the community of faith who also speak their word back to God. This humility of speech might be understood as repentance. We keep turning back to Christ. We recognize the limitations of our speech and simultaneously offer this speech back to God in worship and prayer.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar sees our experience of God in a similar light. We offer our experiences of the divine back to God in the community of faith. Balthasar puts it this way, “all subjective evidence must remain exhaustively open to this freedom of the objective evidence of revelation.”[2] This also sounds like a form of repentance. This not repenting from sin but turning from our understanding, our experience, our speech, and looking to God.
This looks similar to the back and forth of ancient Israel and God in the Psalms. Again Balthasar writes of the Psalms, “This is a dialogue of mutual blessing: man sends God’s blessing back to him.”[3]
This turning and returning to God can be understood as repentance. Rowan Williams writes, “The repentance of theological discourse can be shown in the readiness of any particular version of it to put in question not only this or that specific conclusion within its own workings, but the adequacy or appropriateness of its whole idiom. This is again, perhaps, to look to the plurality of style and genre in Scripture as a model of the collaborative enterprise that speaking of God can be.”[4]
[1] Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Ltd., 2001) p. 8.
[2] Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics I: Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (San Francisco; New York: Ignatius Press; Crossroads Publications, 2009), 409. He continues, “To be a recipient of revelation means more and more the act of renunciation which gives God the space in which to become incarnate and to offer himself as he will. Only in this way is the sphere of the ‘spiritual senses’ given its proper place, and only thus does the integration of the archetypal Biblical experience and the ‘ordinary’ experience of faith become possible”
[3] Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, a Theological Aesthetics VI: Theology: The Old Covenant, trans. Brian McNeil and Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (San Francisco; New York: Ignatius Press; Crossroads Publications, 1991), 207.
[4] Williams, p. 9.
