I’ve called this series of blog posts “Retrieving Theology.” It comes from two convictions. One is that old theologies have in them insights that remain crucial for understanding the truth about ourselves, our world, and God. We throw away these theologies at our peril. The second is that these same theologies are too often presented in ways that obscure the very insights that they contain. Our task—always the task of good theology—is to restate these theologies in ways that allow us to retrieve what good things they have to teach us. In this series, I’ve been trying to do just that. Not that I have been given insights into these theologies not given to others. Your attempts at retrieval may be better than mine. What I’m trying to encourage is a way of looking at theology that asks in every case: what’s going on in this theology? And asking that question, refusing to stop until the theology yields its truth anew.

Good theologians have always done this. The early Calvin was one such. In his seminal 1536 Institutes of Christian Religion, Calvin—young (26 years-old), a scholar full of renaissance learning, and a newly passionate Christian—is eager to probe the Christian faith and the scriptures for what had been lost in the carelessness of official religion. There is a palpable excitement in his writing. He is eager to consider old teachings from new perspectives.

The early Barth would be another example, writing his commentary on Romans at age 33 in 1919, as Europe emerged from the First World War. There are many others. But for this piece, I have in mind a different voice, a woman living in the 14^th century in the wake of black plague, Julian of Norwich. I turn to Julian for two reasons. One is a specific issue at the heart of her theology, an issue still in play in our time, the issue of the relationship between God’s love and God’s wrath. The Bible speaks of both of these. Your theology depends to a very extent on which end of this theological conundrum you grasp. Does wrath come before love? Or love before wrath? In the conservative theological circles in which I grew up, theology often comes down to the view that with God wrath goes before love. With this, Julian profoundly disagrees.

My second reason for turning to Julian is perhaps more important than her conclusions about that issue or about any other. It’s the way Julian models how theology should be done. She does so even though she tells us early on in her Revelations of Divine Love that she is “unlettered.” She means that she was not trained in theological Latin. Or theology, as it was then practiced. Her way of doing theology was not that of the theological schools. For one, she wrote in English (the Middle English of the time), the first theologian to do so. What’s more, she wrote plainly, though she is never easy. Never being easy is not because her writing is obscure; it’s the result of her method. And her method is to insist on both/and rather than either/or.

Let’s start there, with Julian’s method. Denys Turner, in his Julian of Norwich: Theologian (), calls her theology “aporetic” (137). He means that she puts at the heart of her theology truths that seem opposed to one another. To return to Turner’s language, at the heart of her theology is an “aporia.” An aporia is apparent contradiction, two ideas, insights, teachings that seem impossible to fit together. Say, predestination and free will. Or, in more accessible language, whether God chooses us or we choose God. There seems to be no way through, which is what “aporia” literally means in Greek: “no way through.” For Julian, it’s what the church teaches about God and what God has revealed to her in her revelations. Key to Julian’s method is that she refuses to let go of either of these. She refuses to make it easy on herself or on us.

Contrast this with the way theology in churches usually goes. In the sort of theology I was taught, you were told that you must choose one side or the other of any given issue. When I grew up in the Christian Reformed Church, preachers would do sermons in which they presented a theological issue, say the number and meaning of the sacraments, tell us what other theological traditions said about the issue, and then tell us what the right answer was. In these sermons, they would say the Catholics say such and so, the Lutherans say such and so, the liberals say yet another thing, but we all know the truth to be what we Reformed say. Amen. Sing the doxology. We could leave church glad that we had it right. Theology was a matter of either/or.

It’s this sort of thing that Julian refuses to do. Before diving into what she does say, let me give you a little background on this too little-known saint. Well, technically not a saint. Julian has never been canonized. Which perhaps is just as well. It allows us to see her for what she is: a visionary theologian.

We don’t know all that much about her. We don’t know about her training. We don’t know about her background. We don’t even know for certain what her name was. Was she called “Julian” for the church in which she lived? Or was the church named for her? What we do know is that she was an anchorite. Anchorites took up residence in an anchorage. An anchorage, a small room usually attached to a church, typically had three windows: one into the church so the anchorite could worship, one into the kitchen for food and to dispose of waste, and one to the street through which the anchorite could interact with those who sought counsel and prayer. Julian was enclosed in the anchorage attached to St. Julian’s church in about 1390. She lived there until she died in 1416.

When Julian was about 30, she had a series of visions as she lay dying or seeming so. She wrote down her visions immediately in what has become known as the “short text.” She then spent years reflecting on those visions theologically, eventually producing the much longer text we know as Revelations of Divine Love.

In Revelations, she several times comments on her method: “All this was shewed by three [ways]: that is to say, by bodily sight, and by word formed in mine understanding, and by spiritual sight” (Chapter IX, translated into somewhat more modern English by Grace Warrack, 2^nd edition, 1907, Digiread edition, 2013). As I understand this, Julian proceeds much in the way of the ancient biblical prophets. “Bodily sight” is the visions themselves. They are the starting point for her reflections. “Word formed in [her] understanding” is her long biblical and theological reflection on her visions,” and “spiritual sight” is the knowledge of God and of herself that proceeds from her reflections. This last is always partial: “But the spiritual sight I cannot nor may not shew it as openly nor as fully as I would.” “But, she adds, “I trust in our Lord God Almighty that He shall of His goodness, and for your love, make you to take it more spiritually and more sweetly than I can or may tell it.” Her goal in Revelations is just this: that we may see as she sees not for the sake of seeing only but for the sake loving God: “Because of the Shewing I am not good but if I love God the better: and in as much as ye love God the better, it is more to you than to me.”

And what does she see? What she sees is love. She concludes the book with this:

And from that time that it was shewed I desired oftentimes to learn what was our Lord’s meaning. And fifteen years after, and more, I was answered in ghostly [spiritual] understanding, saying thus: Wouldst thou learn thy Lord’s meaning in this thing? Learn it well: Love was His meaning. Who shewed it thee? Love. What shewed He thee? Love. Wherefore shewed it He? For Love. Hold thee therein and thou shalt learn and know more in the same. But thou shalt never know nor learn therein other thing without end. Thus was I learned that Love was our Lord’s meaning (Chapter LXXXVI).

What was the meaning of the visions. Love. Simply the love of God.

Well, not simply. This love of God is not, was not, simple at all. What she faced were not only her visions but the teaching of the church. And what the church taught seemed more of wrath and hell than of God’s love. Here, in an early chapter, Julian starts with God’s love:

. . . God is all that is good, as to my sight, and God hath made all that is made, and God loveth all that He hath made: and he that loveth generally all his even-Christians [fellow Christians] for God, he loveth all that is. For in mankind that shall be saved is comprehended all: that is to say, all that is made and the Maker of all. For in man is God, and God is in all. (Revelations, IX)

God loves what God has made. This idea is at the core of Julian’s theology.

But the idea that all are included in God’s love was not the teaching of the medieval English church. Julian goes on: 

I speak of them that shall be saved, for in this time God shewed me none other. But in all things I believe as Holy Church believeth, preacheth, and teacheth. For the Faith of Holy Church, the which I had aforehand understood and, as I hope, by the grace of God earnestly kept in use and custom, stood continually in my sight: [I] willing and meaning never to receive anything that might be contrary thereunto. (Revelations, IX)

And the faith of the church includes wrath and judgment. And hell.

She refuses to let go of either of these. She speaks of two “dooms,” using “doom” in the sense of judgment, as in “doomsday.” The first doom is God’s love for God’s own creatures as she saw in her visions. “Yet,” she says, “in the beholding only of this, I could not be fully eased: and that was because of the doom of Holy Church, which I had afore understood and which was continually in my sight. And therefore by this doom methought I understood that sinners are worthy sometime of blame and wrath. . ..” 

Given this theological impasse, this aporia, she asks how it can be faithfully resolved. How can she be both a child of the God she met in the visions and equally a child of the church, when these two seem at odds with each other. It’s this impasse she sets in front of herself and in front of us:

Then was this my desire: that I might see in God in what manner that which the doom of Holy Church teacheth is true in His sight, and how it belongeth to me verily to know it; whereby the two dooms might both be saved, so as it were worshipful to God and right way to me. (Revelations, XLV)

How does she work this out? As I said above, it’s complicated. I will not do Julian justice in the following paragraphs, but I hope to get the core of her thinking right. The crucial passages for this are chapters 51 and following in Revelations of Divine Love. In these chapters, Julian introduces two ways to think about who we are. The first is who we are in God’s eyes. Or, better, who we are in relationship to God. The Bible in Genesis 1 defines this relationship as “image of God.” Julian pushes this some. She says that what God is we also are:

High understanding it is, inwardly to see and know that God, which is our Maker, dwelleth in our soul; and an higher understanding it is, inwardly to see and to know that our soul, that is made, dwelleth in God’s Substance: of which Substance, God, we are that we are. And I saw no difference between God and our Substance: but as it were all God; and yet mine understanding took that our Substance is in God: that is to say, that God is God, and our Substance is a creature in God. (Revelations, LIV)

Here I think the language available to Julian in medieval England betrays her. She uses the word “substance” in a way we are not used to using it. She not thinking of “substance” as stuff of some kind, spiritual stuff, say, rather than physical stuff. It might work better for us if we use the adjective “substantial.” What she is talking about in the paragraph I just quoted is what we are substantially. We are substantially creatures who think, who have minds, who experience the world in a way analogous to God. In Genesis 2 terms, we share with God “the knowledge of good and evil.”

Julian works this out in terms of the Trinity. We are, she says, “made Trinity” in relationship to God who is “unmade Trinity.” Julian does not directly quote scripture but in this part of her Revelations she is clearly channeling chapters 14-17 of the gospel of John. When she speaks of us dwelling in God and God dwelling in us, she uses a word for “dwell” that comes from the same root as the word used in John (Greek menō in John; Middle English wǒnen in Julian). 

This relationship defines us as humans. It’s what we are, in her terms, substantially. For Julian, this is the Father relationship. God has created us, fathered us. But this relationship is not where we live. We don’t live on this spiritual plane. Where we live is as creatures of the earth. We have bodies. We love, we laugh, we hurt, and we die. For this, Julian uses the phrase “sensual soul.” We are sensual souls that live through our physical senses.

God also meets us in this sensual life, this life on earth. Here God meets us in Jesus or better in the Son of God, who enters our suffering, experiences our joys and pains, lives for us and dies for us. In this way, God enters in. In a remarkable observation, Julian says that when Adam fell (she means by Adam all humanity), the Son of God fell, not into sin but into Mary’s womb. Through the incarnate Son of God we meet God in the flesh.

Julian regards this second relationship with God as the mother relationship. Through the incarnation, we are given birth. What we are substantially—children of God—we now become actually, in our sensual experience, our faith life. Through this faith we are birthed anew.

For Julian this second relationship is the world of the church and its theology. This theology lives, as it were, on the ground. It confronts a world full of pain and evil. It requires rules and laws. It can sound harsh. The church talks about wrath and punishment. It wants justice. But, Julian says, even if all this makes sense on the ground, in human terms, it should not blind us to the word that God slips in through our theological systems: love. Wrath is our word, she says. It may have its uses. But it’s not God’s word. God’s word is only and always love.

This is all too brief an introduction to Julian’s theology. What I love about Julian is the way she refuses to surrender either what God has shown to her in her visions (and through her long reflection on the visions) and what the church teaches. She works and works until she can begin to make sense of the two together. 

In our time, we need space to do the same. We need theological spaces where we can wrestle with both our own understanding of God and with the long legacy of the church. We were taught theology as a sort of winner-take-all game, in which my side is right and yours is wrong. But this is not the way to theological truth. The way to theological truth lies in the space between your truth and my truth, between your tradition and my tradition, between your way of thinking about God and my way of thinking about God. In these spaces, we may discover, as did Julian, that what we thought could not go together goes together indeed.

Clay