Experiencing the Numinous God

July 26, 2007

Matt’s response to Tony’s post about the existence of God prompted a few questions and speculations on my part. So here goes:

Well, I very much like this question about God disclosure and human mediation. You seem to be suggesting that Jesus’ life and ministry were invested with a kind of significance ex post facto and that consequently his purported divinity is really more a function of the community’s response to his life. Of course, the question then becomes, why did his life invite such a response and so radically transform his cultural situation in such a short period of time? Jesus’ divinity could only become real as a collectively recognized fact from within a community. What sense would it make to speak of a God who appeared to no one? As a rule, Gods appear before others but this does not mean that their divinity is exclusively some invention by these others. Divinity becomes real through a posture of recognition. Without an existent community which recognizes and identifies the disclosure of divinity, I don’t believe divinity really meaningfully exists.

I’m also curious to understand what you mean when you write that there is no “empirical record of Jesus the divine man as written according to the writers.” Do you mean to say that the Jesus of the gospels (and there is admittedly more than one, in certain respects) is not verified by some other source which would render it empirically sound? In other words, what kind of sourcing in your mind would suffice to meet this “empirical record” to which you refer?

On to your point about ineffability. You seem to be suggesting that “God” is really a misinterpretation or concretization of the ineffable, sublimity, the trace written in experience, etc. In “The Idea of the Holy,” Rudolph Otto writes that “[the numinous] is a content of feeling that is qualitatively sui generis, yet at the same time one that has numerous analogies with others, and therefore it and they may reciprocally excite or stimulate one another and cause one another to appear in mind.” He is more interested in the kinds of stimuli which seem to awaken the feeling of the numinous but is very adamant about distinguishing the numinous from aesthetic concepts like ineffability or sublimity. Because, what you seem to do in your own post is say that this X is really something that you are more conceptually comfortable with—e.g. the sublime. But the numinous is not the sublime. They are similar in many respects but they are conceptually distinct. Your issue seems to be not with the experience of numinousness but rather with the character of the numen which we stand before and which consequently awakens this feeling within us.

I’m not sure that you and I are very far apart on this question of the numinous in human experience. I see the numinous as an essential and defining mode of being in the world and I would distinguish it from other similar categories like sublimity, ineffability, etc. You may feel more comfortable with these aesthetic modes because they do not project the existence of an x being before which we stand in fascination and terror. It seems to me that your chief objection is in moving from the experience of the numinous to the existence of a God—e.g. delineating the specific character of the numen before which we stand. Or, more abstractly, suggesting that there must be some being at all which “causes” us via our relation to experience the numinous. The question really hinges on the character of that x before which we stand. You are not objecting to an x, or to the experience of the numinous in human life, but rather to the violence of specifying the identity of the x. Humans have personified the x for thousands of years but I, at least, am not translating the x into a person or even necessarily a being or intelligence. However, I do regard it as a presence and I find an inherent value in the human attempts to come to terms with the character of this presence, via metaphor, analogy, myth, magic, etc.

I think that the human attempt to render comprehensible, to make one’s own, to ingest, stabilize, etc. the numinous object really characterizes the religious experience. However, as Christians, we must be insisting that there is something unique about the God disclosure that occurs in the person of Jesus Christ. As I see it, an undeniable normative claim is being leveled about Jesus as a unique and more fully complete example of God disclosure. This manifestation must more completely expose the character of the numen or x, in a way that other attempts had not. This wouldn’t preclude us from very much identifying with other attempts to come to terms with the truth of the numen’s character but it would, I think, involve making some judgments about those other “incomplete” attempts. Of course, there is something incomplete about the God disclosure that occurs in the person of Jesus Christ as well—or in the fact that we come to him via a mediated narrative which must be incomplete.

As I see it, the numinous experience does not allow us to experience the divinity of Jesus Christ specifically. Rather, we apprehend the wholly other, mysterious God which is both terrifying and fascinating, yet ultimately unknowable. Religious experience of the numen leads us to this experience of the presence of x but it does not necessarily lead us to Jesus Christ. I order to specifically identity with Christ as the most complete example of God disclosure, we would need different bases for our argument. This is where I would be interested in Tony’s Barthian commentary on the primacy of scripture within a Christian faith system.

So, the character of the numen, the x, the trace written into our human experience, is where I presently stand with many questions. Tony, as believers, it seems that we are insisting this presence has an “identity” which I imagine Matt might not be able to go along with. Thoughts fellas?

Posted by MATT Posted in Continental Philosophy, Posts by Matt, Queer / Theology