Beyond Understanding

If there is one lesson that Karen Kilby wants her readers to retain from perusing her recently published collection of essays, God, Evil and the Limits of Theology, it is that God is “beyond understanding” (1); and thus – she avers – it is no part of classical doctrinal teaching itself (let alone of contemporary theologians’ further exposition of it) to “give insight into God” (15), and especially not in relation to the doctrine of God-asTrinity. But what is meant by this version of “apophaticism” (her chosen word) in Kilby’s understanding? A close reading of these attractive, alluring, accessible – but ultimately somewhat bemusing – essays does not really supply a clear to answer this key question at all; or rather, Kilby gives a plethora of different answers to her own conundrum, some of them much more theologically convincing than others, and some decidedly unconvincing if what Kilby aims to achieve – as she purportedly intends – is the recapture of a more pristine patristic or scholastic understanding of this matter of “apophaticism” than that which has been besmirched by modern misunderstandings. (Ultimately, in fact, I shall be suggesting that it is she who has unintentionally re-imported the modern misunderstandings – but that is to anticipate). In what follows in this response to Kilby, therefore, I shall first attempt to unpick a set of different accounts of “apophaticism” that co-exist confusingly within the key essays in this book; for its argument unfolds in several chapters devoted to this same theme. From here I shall be in a position to adjudicate on the persuasiveness of Kilby’s overall thesis, and finally to assess briefly – as is appropriate for this journal – what it all might mean for the specific project of “political theology.” Consider, first, the opening salvos in chapter 1 of this volume (originally published as long ago as 2000), which is devoted to a critique, now quite familiar, of so-called “social trinitarianism.” The target here are those well-known, and highly popular, revivers of trinitarian thinking from the 1980s onwards (Moltmann and some of his pupils, Zizioulas, Gunton, Boff, and feminists such as Wilson-Kastner) who saw in the Trinity a ready, imitable prototype for renewed social, ecclesiastical and political