In the last decade, I’ve been reading the works of Eric Mascall (1905-93), the distinguished 20th-century Anglo-Catholic philosophical and doctrinal theologian. Mascall embraced the classical doctrine of God exemplified by Aquinas, though to label him a Thomist (in any straightforward sense) does him a disservice and belies his indebtedness to Augustine. Mascall’s works have been a joy and blessing, a source of spiritual and intellectual nourishment and edification.
I began with his extraordinary 1943 essay He Who Is: A Study in Traditional Theism, which is one of his best-known books. Recently, I engaged his 1980 monograph Theology and the Gospel of Christ: An Essay in Reorientation. Therein Mascall writes that “the primary need of the theologian is to be in love with God” (xx). In so saying, Mascall draws inspiration from the Canadian Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan. Mascall channels via Lonergan a wonderful intuition, one to which this essay is devoted. That intuition involves the unity of “dogma and spirituality” (xix). What attracts me to Mascall’s writings is not only their academic rigor but their overt piety. With Mascall, one senses that he practices what he preaches, which is the need to be in love with God.
We are made for God, created to be in love with God, world without end. Mascall knew that theology, when undertaken “in our secularized universities,” would struggle—to put it mildly—with the notion that “its primary concern is to confront students with the living God” (xxii). While I would prefer the language of “hold forth” rather than “confront,” I appreciate the intuition. Theology is about God, not simply “thought about God,” but God himself, “the God implied by the foundational beliefs of the Christian community” (xviii).
Confronting students with the living God, indeed holding forth the living God, matters. But why? It matters if, as Mascall observes, academic theology is to “be of use to the Church in its tremendous pastoral and evangelistic task” (10). If academic theology is to be profitable, it must be preoccupied with God and, might I add, the Holy Scriptures of the living God. One thing that renders Mascall’s theology helpful is its profound lack of “academic attitude” (24).
An academic attitude operates primarily on the descriptive level. The academic attitude, Mascall avers, “finds it interesting to investigate why men thought as they did about God but is unconcerned with whether [what] they thought about him is true or false” (24). The academic attitude is archeological in nature, excavating what a given doctor of the church says and why, but never really going beyond that. A different disposition, one less dispassionate and more invested, raises a more difficult and important question, namely, the question of truth. Does what a doctor adjudges true conform to Scripture and encourage a greater love of God and neighbor in relation to God? These are the sorts of questions we must ask.
Writing when and where Mascall did, in a (theological) world dominated by the naturalizing tendencies of scholars such as the patristics scholar Maurice Wiles, Mascall resists treating God in particular and Christian truth more broadly as if God were to be known like any other object. Instead, Mascall encourages love as the way to knowledge. Such love discourages thinking about the things of God in a way removed from their sharp existential purchase. If Christian theology forfeits nurturing love of God, if it brackets the liberating constraints of the body of Christ, if indeed it isolates itself from membership in Christ’s body, then it is of no use to the church. Not only “academic but spiritual ascesis” matters, being “integrated at every level” (60).
Theology, then, is motivated by love of God. Theology frowns upon a descriptive temperament, evoking rather one “motivated by love and involving conversion on the intellectual, moral, and religious planes” (190). If so, then, is there a place for academic theology in “our secularized universities”? I think so. I teach in a publicly funded state university, one with deep roots in 19th-century Presbyterian polity and life. The University of Otago was founded by a Presbyterian minister. Doing theology in such a setting has its challenges, of course. Even so, having taught in an evangelical Protestant seminary setting in western Canada for some years prior, each institution doesn’t exactly roll out—albeit for different reasons—the red carpet for a vision that comports with Mascall’s.
Why? Well, to use an expression of Ephraim Radner’s, “there is no safe place” in which to do theology that is “of use to the Church in its tremendous pastoral and evangelistic task.” Again, why? Because, as with the Scriptures in all their undomesticated grandeur, God is in the uncomfortable business of regenerating and reforming—“sometimes very dramatically” (45)—those who seek to be of use to him and his church. Perhaps, in this upside-down world, such regeneration and reform are relegated to the “too difficult” basket. That would be a shame. Theology is an ecclesial and ascetic undertaking. Those who are called to it in a vocational sense simply do what all the baptized are called to do, which is to pray for ears that hear “the revelation given by God to man through Christ in his Church,” to the benefit of his church and the glory of his triune name (35).
I am grateful for Mascall’s writings. As an Anglican who drank deeply from Thomas Aquinas, his work shines with excitement at the fecundity of the basic confession of Christian faith. Theology, if it is to be of any use, must delight in that fecundity, avoiding the temptation to talk and write on a descriptive level, and embrace the mind of the Fourth Evangelist, who explains at the close of his text that his writing was not a complete transcript but rather for a purpose: “But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name” (20:31).
The Rev. Dr. Christopher Holmes is professor of Systematic Theology in the Theology Programme at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.
