theistic religion, and it cannot be dropped completely from our Western vocabulary for naming the mysterious dimension of our existence. Furthermore, the word “God,” if it is understood according to the symbolic and narrative way in which it originally came into religious consciousness, specifies and adds an element of meaning to the notion of mystery that the latter term itself may not immediately suggest. We may call this added dimension of significance simply the “graciousness” of mystery. It is in order to accentuate the gracious, self-giving nature of mystery that we use the term “God” in referring to it.61
We might say that there are only two major “truths” that a genuine religious sense requires from us.62 All other “doctrines” of religion are derivatives of these two truths; if we keep this in mind, religion will not have to be as cumbersome or complicated an affair as it sometimes seems to be. The first of these truths, as I have been trying to show, is simply that our lives are embraced by mystery. The second major truth is that this mystery is gracious. All religions try to give their devotees some sense of mystery, and this fact alone should be sufficient to establish a sense of community and solidarity among all the various religious traditions today, especially in the face of the contemporary suppression of mystery by cultures built on the ideal of domination. The graciousness of mystery is also enunciated by all the religious traditions, in markedly diverse ways of course, but with a sense of unanimity that mystery is trustworthy and that our fulfillment lies only in a surrender to it. One of the most explicit formulations of the graciousness of mystery is the one which maintains that the mystery gives itself away completely, in self-emptying love, to the world which it embraces.63 It is especially because of this graciousness that we may call the mystery by the name “God.”
From these two propositions—that we are circumscribed by mystery and that this mystery, referred to as God, gives itself completely to us—can be derived all the other important ideas of religion. Religion has been made entirely too complicated and forbidding at times and, in the morass of doctrines and practices that it inevitably generates, its two foundational insights may easily be lost sight of. Obviously, the sense of mystery and its graciousness have to be mediated in particular forms of speech, narrative, and activity corresponding to different cultural and historical habits of thought. So we must be tolerant of the diversity of religions and not seek the monotony of a homogeneous, all-encompassing religious format. But amidst the diversity of religious ideas and practices, it is helpful to keep before us their common grounding in an appreciation of mystery and its gracious intimacy with the universe. Seeing through the jungle of concrete religious life to these two central tenets of religion should prevent us from making hasty condemnations of others’ religious ideas and practices. For beneath their apparent peculiarity and needless extravagance, there may lie a deep and simple sense of mystery and its goodness.
At the same time, however, our keeping the two “truths” constantly before us provides us with criteria to evaluate and criticize the actual religious lives of others and ourselves. For there is no doubt that religious traditions which have their origin in a decisive encounter with mystery and its graciousness can themselves deviate from their founding insights and end up participating in the eclipse of mystery. Religions can become entangled in the pursuit of domination or the legitimation of oppression and thus themselves become an obstacle to the sense of liberating mystery. Hence they should constantly be evaluated in accordance with the criteria of mystery and its graciousness.
It should not be either embarrassing or surprising to us that the human experience of the nearness and graciousness of mystery would often come to expression in a religious language heavily loaded with personalistic imagery. Although the mystery is not exhausted by its representation as a “person,” the disclosure of its intimacy to human subjects endowed with intelligence, will, and feelings could scarcely be possible unless it were itself presented to them as having analogously personal attributes. It is doubtful that something less than personal could inspire us deeply to trust and surrender. To persons the mystery must at least be personal itself. It is difficult to find precise language with which to interpret the relationship of divine personality to divine mystery. Is the mystery really personal, or is personality merely one of the projective ways in which we creatively go out to meet the mystery that summons us toward itself? We have already admitted that our religions are inevitably imaginative, projective, and that there is always some level of illusion in our actual religious consciousness, owing to the infantilism of desire that we can never completely eradicate. Is the propensity to think of God as personal still perhaps more a manifestation of our immaturity than a realistic appreciation of the inexhaustible mystery of reality?
Without denying that our images of a personal God always have a projective aspect to them or that these images do not exhaustively represent the mystery of our lives, we may still view “divine personality” as an indispensable symbol of the proximity to us of mystery. All of our language about this mystery necessarily has a symbolic character. Because of mystery’s unavailability, we cannot discuss it directly or literally. We tend to speak of it, if we speak of it at all, in terms of those places and events where it breaks through to us most decisively and intensely. For most of us, the most intense disclosure of mystery probably occurs in our encounter with other persons. The child’s earliest encounter with mother and father, for example, is an experience of such overwhelming “numinosity” that it remains a permanent layer of all of our involvements. And the meeting with a truly accepting and caring person is often the occasion for our experiencing the depth and graciousness of life’s mystery in a decisive way. The human face itself has often been experienced as deeply mysterious, as causing us to turn away in fear or as attracting us with its enchanting power. Human personality is often the occasion for our experiencing the mysterium tremendum et fascinans.
Inasmuch as human personality is especially transparent to the horizon of mystery and its graciousness, it is not surprising, then, that personalist imagery would cling to our discourse about God. Since we often perceive the mystery most clearly as it shines through the lives of other persons, we can never completely separate our experience of God from the experience of personality. To do so would again be an unnecessary reduction of the mystery. The freedom and unmanipulability of other persons gives us a sense of the unavailability of the mystery that is their depth. To remove the personal face of mystery is to lose access to it. Through the medium of personality, the depth of reality is “revealed” in such a complete way that we must speak of God as personal. God is the depth and ground of all personality.64
54. The following text is an excerpt. Previously published in Haught, What is God?, 115–131. Reprinted with permission.
55. See Otto, Idea of the Holy.
56. See Bacik, Apologetics, 3–64.
57. See Smith, Beyond the Post-Modern Mind, 83, 88, 114, and 134–35.
58. Skinner, Beyond Freedom, 54.
59. On the distinction between problem and mystery, see Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having, 117.
60. Haught’s discussion of limit questions was especially influenced by Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order, 91–118. The original notion of “limiting questions” comes from the philosopher Stephen Toulmin, Examination, 202–21.
61.
