Jaarboek Thomas Instituut 1995 - Thomas Instituut te Utrecht

THEOLOGY OF PROVOCATIVE RECEPTIVITY 15
this entrance, of the attractiveness of new issues and the challenge of
new problems De Grijs thinks it important to underline that theology's
topic is not history on its own. The point he wants to make is
concerned with the qualification 'on its own'. The emergence of new
knowledge and insight, the fascination of the new agenda suggests that
historicity is so all-embracing that therefore history is necessarily the
topic. But De Grijs questions this. He points to a general feature of
empirical sciences : " ... no empirical system can provide insight in
the characteristics of what that system tries to systematise, to know
about or to make available". History as science is not able to provide
insight in "what is essential to history and the historical". To
understand the historical features or historicity one has to move
beyond history. Such a move is possible, for the human mind can
transcend time, be it that such a transcending always takes place in
time, in history (36, p. 71). So, there is need for a meta-historical or
trans-historical intentionality (36, p. 71, note 5), This general insight
De Grijs then uses to specify how history is to be treated in theology:
not history on its own, but history related to God. That presupposes
faith, for only faith can disclose that relation. For only in faith one
becomes related to the living God. Without faith there is only "the
multitudes of contemporary new human experiences" and "the great
Jewish-Christian experiential tradition", but no connection between
these two (36, p. 72).
The importance of faith, the crucial role of the relation with
God, is stressed and further specified by De Grijs when he calls the
disappearance of the direct relation with God from theology (and from
faith) one of the fundamental problems of theology in the present time.
The reason, he surmises, is an insight from hermeneutical theology
that, apart from its context, functions as an all-determining slogan: we
can know God only through mediations. His point is neither that there
are no mediations nor that mediations are not important, but that these
mediations are incorrectly seen as replacements for immediacy or as
blocking immediacy. "Are my eyes mediating? Are my glasses
mediating? Do I look at my glasses? Do I look at my retina?" (47, p.
364). Of course mediation requires attention, eyes and glasses need to
be observed and examined, but not exclusively or permanently. In the
end, the attention has to be directed towards God. So, decisive for the
theologian becomes the orientation or direction of attention." To talk