The author of The Cloud of Unknowing used this endearing phrase in his free rendering of Pseudo-Dionysius’ Mystical Theology. In his more famous work, the author advised that ‘no one can fully comprehend the uncreated God with his knowledge; but each one, in a different way, can grasp him fully through love’ (ch. 4, Bill Johnston’s translation). He invited us to be at home in the darkness of the cloud that seems to exist between our mind and God, feeling nothing but a ‘naked intent towards God’. It is, of course, the central paradox of mystical theology that so many words are used in the attempt to describe our reaching out towards the unknowable God who first reaches out towards us. Even the great ‘doctor de la nada’, St John of the Cross, indulged in a great many complex and technical words in his account of the ascent of a mountain whose way and end is nothing, nothing, nothing. Surely, the wise course would simply be to say nothing about the One of whom nothing can be said.

Appealing as this may seem to weary theologians and exhausted preachers, I think it simply won’t do. This is not because we can ever fully grasp with our minds that which may only be grasped through love (here meaning self-transcending ‘naked intent’) but because it is a very real temptation to say wrong or unhelpful things about God, even if we must retain a certain hesitation about saying anything at all. More than that, it seems to me to be a very noble thing to seek to understand that which is most important in life, humbly admitting at the outset that there are limitations to such an enterprise. Of course, the work of theology will always be something of a vertiginous looking into the abyss of the unknown, but should we fear to do so, once we have admitted our proper sense of hesitation?

Unsurprisingly, it is often the theology that is expressed without such hesitation that is the most dangerous – theology that confidently claims God for our own causes or that sets out a simple formula whose reliable output is salvation. The response to this, surely, is not to abandon the project altogether but to do it better, more carefully, more generously, more mystically. Mysticism is not an excuse not to think but an invitation to think the unthinkable as far as one can before falling back into the silence from which the exploration sprang. It is quite appropriate to recognise the absurdity of trying to say anything about God, but let’s not give up trying.

I raised a question in my sermon yesterday which I didn’t then address (you can only do so much in one sermon!). I used an example of religious exclusivism to ask a question about the nature of truth, suggesting that, for Jesus, truth was not so much a system of thought as his own embodied way of living. Truth is found in living as he lived – by dying to self. The question I left hanging was whether Christians consider that those of other faiths could ‘come to the Father’ while remaining within their own faith tradition. To put it in traditional terms, is there salvation outside the church?

This is a far more complex question than it seems, hence my decision to leave it alone in a sermon that was really about other questions! For a start, we would need to ask whether a Christian notion of salvation would even make any sense to people who belong to that other faith. Many religions see that there is a problem at the heart of being human, but may diagnose that problem differently and, therefore, propose a different remedy. If, as a Buddhist, you see the problem in terms of suffering caused by our cravings and a false view of the world, then release from suffering comes from an awakening to our true nature, not through forgiveness of sins. Even this example is complex when you begin to explore how these two approaches, Christian and Buddhist, may in fact offer different angles on a similar problem, and how, even within Buddhism, there are many accounts of how this operates (through disciplined effort? through invocation of the Buddha Amida? through sudden awakening?).

Of course, some people do not see any kind of problem here at all: live and let live, each religion is truthful on its own terms (an approach often called ‘pluralist’). The problem is that Christianity does make claims that are universal in their scope – ‘In Christ, God was reconciling the world [kosmos] to himself’ (2 Cor 5:19) etc. To take a pluralist line would require a significant modification of this kind of claim, so the exclusivist approach does at least have the merit of consistency. What it lacks, however, is the sense that God and God’s truth may be somewhat bigger than our capacity to grasp them, or the sense that God may be free to use other means to draw people to himself.

One kind of approach that seeks to honour both the universal claims of Christianity and its humility in the face of religious diversity is often called ‘inclusivist’, though these terms, like all attempts at taxonomy in complex realms, have their limitations. One way of describing an inclusivist approach would be to say that God’s action in Christ is far greater than our ability to describe it and that, in God’s own economy, God is able to ‘save’ Muslims as Muslims, Hindus as Hindus through the cosmically significant work of incarnation and redemption in Christ. The risk here, of course, is the suggestion that good Muslims are just good Christians without knowing it. A more nuanced approach might be to say that, for Christians, we see the pattern of God’s salvific activity in Christ (the pattern of self-transcending love) and that this pattern may well be present in other faiths and expressed in very different ways. Additionally, if we think that those of other faiths may be ‘saved’ through the exercise of that faith, then, as Christians, we must believe that it is God who is doing the saving and, as Christians, we can only describe God in trinitarian terms and, therefore, Christ and the Spirit must be active in that saving activity. This approach could only ever be a Christian account of the theology of how God might work through other faiths and any respectful dialogue would be open to hear that faith’s own account of how human beings reach their ultimate fulfillment. In other words, an inclusivist theology of religions is an internal discourse for Christians but, in a subtle form, might be capable of opening Christians up to the possibility of divine action through the exercise of another religion.

What about pluralism? Surely this is a more satisfactory approach which respects the equality and distinctiveness of religions without trying to see one through the lens of another? I think it has much to commend it but is also not without its challenges. Is truth only ever relative? Are there no categories for discerning the truthfulness or otherwise of any religious claim, whether within or outwith our own faith? Might it also limit our understanding of God, making him only ever a ‘tribal’ rather than universal deity? I do think it is possible to describe a more subtle pluralist approach that, again, expresses humility in the face of what we cannot know and assumes that divine activity transcends our categories (but would we then say that God is active even in those who are not theists? Is that not back to an inclusivist approach?). And there are certainly pluralists who are willing to work at some means of discerning both good and harmfulness in religions, thus refusing a lazily relative account of truthfulness.

All of this is a work-in-progress for me, but as a Christian, I think I find myself drawn to an account of other faiths that fully respects them on their own terms, yet admits the possibility that our Christian account of God’s saving action in Christ is partial, and that there is, indeed, a cosmic truth revealed in the shape of divine self-giving love as seen in Christ which transcends religion. To approach dialogue in this way makes it possible that, among other things, we might learn more about Christ from those who are not Christians. It would not be for me to speculate what the non-Christian partners in that dialogue might take from it. If that makes me an ‘inclusivist’, rather than a ‘pluralist’, then so be it, but I’m not too concerned about labels!

When I worked as a hospital chaplain, there was a period of a couple of weeks when the prayer room used by Muslim patients and staff was out of action while it was being renovated. During that time, we agreed that space would be made at the back of the chapel, which was just next door, for Muslims to use for prayer, with an appropriate indication of the direction of prayer. This arrangement went pretty smoothly and I must say that I felt that there was something very precious in celebrating mass at the altar in the chapel while Muslim colleagues prayed in the same space. Each group was directing its prayer towards God in its accustomed way, side-by-side, respectfully making space for each other.

The one objection I saw to this arrangement came in a fairly low-key, yet pointed form. Someone had left an open bible next to the area set aside for Muslim prayers and it was open at today’s Gospel passage, indicating the words; ‘I am the way, the truth and life; no one comes to the Father, but by me.’ The objector had, presumably, read this text in a way it has often been read – as a claim to Christian exclusivity, a monopoly on truth possessed by those who sign up to its propositions. In its more generous form, this kind of exclusive claim might be made with a degree of humility, but it often comes with a kind of self-satisfaction in having backed the winning side. This kind of thinking depends on an understanding of truth as a static body of thought, a coherent and immutable system requiring our assent. Those who withhold assent are outside the system and therefore do not gain its prize – access to the Father.

I recognise that I have put this position rather starkly and don’t mean to belittle those who hold to it. As I said, many who hold an exclusivist position on Christianity’s place in relation to other religious paths do so with humility and with a genuine desire for the wellbeing and eternal salvation of those who differ from them. But I fear that this position does not represent well what Jesus was saying. I fear that it diminishes something rather central to Jesus’ teaching.

Last week, we heard Jesus describing himself as the door to the sheepfold and I suggested that we might see this image in terms of thresholds where a life-giving encounter takes place. And in this chapter of John’s gospel, we have a similar kind of image. The first of Jesus’ words to describe himself is as a ‘way’, a path, and I think the next two rather depend on how we understand this. In speaking of himself in this way, Jesus says that the life-giving truth he embodies is personal, and that it is dynamic. His way to true life does not reside in a system of thought, but is embodied in himself, in the way he lived his life, in the way he approached his death, in the way his death was no defeat but a pathway to fuller life. The way he lived his life was to empty himself of all but love – a dying to self that is the only route to full life. And it is dynamic because it is a way that is only revealed by walking it. Truth unfolds as we go along. The Christian life, I think, is not so much something that we adopt as a metaphysical lens through which we then interpret the world, but nothing other than the very living of our lives in the pattern of Jesus’ life – in his way. Don’t get me wrong – I’m quite partial to a bit of metaphysics, but the Christian life is so much more than that.

There’s a wonderful Spanish pilgrim’s palindrome that goes ‘la ruta nos aporto otro paso natural’ – the path provides the natural next step. So if Christ offers himself as a way and calls us to walk in it, then the first, last and constant thing we must do is go. The resurrection accounts are full of this: go to the tomb, go to Galilee, go on the road to Emmaus and go back again, go out into the lake. Encounters with the renewed life of the risen Christ only happen when we get up and go, and that going will always entail a going to a place we don’t yet know. Jesus is met on the way. You see how far this is from seeing Christ as a static body of truth over which we might gain some mastery? The Christian life always entails a fairly substantial helping of not knowing. The other word for that is faith.

We are living through a time when everyone wants to know what’s next for us – when will the lockdown end; when will we have a vaccine; when will we get back to church? And there’s no shortage of people happy to speculate answers. People are also asking important and difficult questions about the future of our economic and political life, the future shape of our church life, the future of our relationship with the planet. However, anxious speculation can have a paralysing effect on us. Jesus said; ‘let not your hearts be troubled.’ We cannot know the future but we can choose to live the future we would want to see right now. It seems to me that Jesus invites us to live life without certainty, but to live it anyway, and to do so in the way that he did; generously, selflessly, gratefully, trustingly.

Well, just when I asked a question about why there are so few images of the resurrection in churches I received a stunning answer in the book I’m currently reading by Tomas Halik, Patience with God. I think Halik is one of the most creative theological voices I’ve heard in a long time in the way he responds to the situation of Christian faith in contemporary Europe, writing, as he does, from one of the least religiously observant countries in our continent. But he writes as a sympathetic fellow-traveller, not a strident critic of his contemporaries.

His take on the absence of images of the resurrection is subtle. First, he insists that there can be no meaningful talk of resurrection without a serious understanding of the cross and all it entails in terms of Jesus’ abandonment and suffering. Such a resurrection would simply be a find of triumphalism. Then he suggests that the resurrection is not depicted because it is an event that must take place in us. It is a profound mystery which, if it does not decisively shape the way we live our lives is nothing more than ‘just another event’ to whose veracity we assent passively:

What distinguishes it from the other historical facts is that it is ‘visible’ only with the eyes of faith – and because in the here and now even faith sees all the things of God only partially and as in a mirror, it must be supported in the darkness of our lives by patience and the perseverance of hope.

and

Belief in the Resurrection means accepting that ‘strength that showed itself in ‘weakness’, the strength of Christ’s sacrifice – His sacrificial love as a living reality. Not to believe in Christ’s Resurrection is to live as if the cross were the final end.

Seen with the eyes of faith, the resurrection becomes a total commitment to the way of self-giving love, trusting that this way is ultimately life-giving. In the midst of history, the resurrection ‘should be present through the testimony of those who make known that Christ is not a finished chapter.’

I’ve been thinking quite a lot about doors recently. Each morning, I open up the door to the Calvary Stair from Jeffrey Street and then lock it behind me as I prepare to pray Morning Prayer and the Mass, not alone, but in the company of many who join online and very many more who pray where and whenever they can, conscious that they are part of something bigger. The ‘something bigger’ is not just the scattered community of Old St Paul’s, though I think we’ve all realised even more deeply how much we value that these last few weeks, but the scattered community of all those who long for something more, who have a sense that life is not purposeless, not disposable, but truly valuable, truly meant.

So on one level, it feels wrong that I have to come down those stairs again some time later and once more lock the door. We are used to our precious temple being a little island of peace in our city that welcomes any who seek solace, peace, meaning, rest, quiet – a place where all questions are welcome, all longings treasured as signs of the beyond, indications of the incomplete nature of life that nonetheless suggest a deep intuition that all is not meaningless.

But I wonder if this time of locks and closed doors might be inviting us to think afresh about what the thresholds are between a patterned, committed religious life and the lives of those who may not feel comfortable joining us, and yet are asking the kind of serious if unresolved questions that we all recognise. Let me put it more starkly: does this time of locked doors not open to us the possibility that the threshold between ‘in’ and ‘out’ is something much more dynamic than we had supposed? Where is our doorstep? Where is the half-opened door where the most vital conversations happen? Who is inside and who is outside, and do these categories really make sense anymore?

We are used to thinking of doors and thresholds as devices necessary for containment. I think there is a real risk in the current crisis to harden that kind of thinking. We’ve heard it already from some political leaders who see this pandemic as an opportunity to draw more sharply the line between in and out, us and them. Those of us inside have been assaulted from without by some alien invader. This thinking is profoundly wrong and extremely dangerous for it fails to see that we are all in this together, irrespective of borders, and the only wise response is one that works from a very wide sense of what ‘us’ means. We need each other now more than ever.

And for the church too, this is a time to consider again what we mean by ‘us’. Who are those on ‘this’ side of the door and who are those beyond? Today’s Gospel might easily be read as a manifesto for those who want to make a clear division between the insiders and the outsiders. The good shepherd knows his own and protects them from the nasty invaders who threaten them. Keep together, shut the door, close ranks against the big bad world outside. But I hear the story in today’s Gospel very differently. Jesus does not seem to be interested in the identity of the sheep that are of his own particular flock. He is concerned with the gift of abundant life to anyone who hears a voice that speaks their name, anyone who ‘goes in and out and finds pasture’. The thing is, the door is Jesus, and the door is open. The door is not a separating barrier but a threshold where encounters happen and it is everywhere.

We might then say, ‘why speak of doors at all? There is no difference, no separation, no sacred and profane, no us and them.’ I think I want to keep hold of the image of the doorway because all of us recognise that, in life, there are thresholds. There are times when we realise something new, times when we break through to a new insight, times when we move from a place of hesitant inaction to a place of dynamic, if still hesitant openness.

I wonder if this time of closed doors might be a time to rediscover the thresholds where encounters happen, thresholds where people are expressing their deepest longings for meaning, love, nourishment, hope. I wonder if this is a time when we discover once again that the church is a doorway that always lies open to the world, open to this city of ours, open to the questioning, the seeking, the hesitant. How might we find new ways to linger in that doorway, wherever it is?

And I wonder if this is a time when we discover afresh the encounter that happens for ourselves, on our own thresholds between us and one whose voice we recognise. This voice says ‘come on in’. It says ‘come and go and come again with your news about where you have found good pasture’. It says ‘look out for the sheep that are not of this fold’. It says ‘you are a flock without number, without limit.’ The voice says ‘you are alive when you see that the door lies open because the door is me, and I am not here. I am out and about, seeking to save that which is lost. Come with me.’