When we speak of God,
we do not say all that we might (for that is known to him only) but only what
human nature is able to receive and our weakness can bear. We do not explain
what God is but candidly confess that our knowledge of him is not exact. Where God is concerned, confessing our
ignorance is the sign of greatest knowledge.- Cyril of Jerusalem
Theological formation is the gradual and often
painful discovery of God's incomprehensibility. You can be competent in many things,
but you cannot be competent in God.
– Henri Nouwen
He is beyond our conception, but the very fact that we cannot grasp him gives us some idea of what
he really is.-Tertullian
It feels as if having even the ghost of a hint of
a taste of a suggestion of it in your mind requires a spatially impossible contortion in which the immense is contained in
the tiny. If you try to imagine what the world is like from its point of
view you stumble into awe, defeated- Francis Spufford
I get the sense too
many believers aren't honest enough about their doubts and uncertainties
because they are afraid of doubt (or it has been demonized around them), being
wrong, or not fully understanding the very thing they have presumably committed
their life to. To me this is a shame. Our uncertainty and doubt actually points
to something bigger and more incomprehensible. Our doubts and lack of understanding are a necessity
to the bigness of the very thing we Christians feebly try to defend.
Often it feels as
though we mistake what we believe about God with who God actually is. It’s a crucial, categorical mistake. If God
becomes reduced to our understanding of him, he becomes defined by human ideas
rather than something that transcends rationality. He becomes an abstract
concept rather than something that is defined by relationality. He becomes an argument
instead of an answer. But no, God’s goodness isn't dependent of our understanding
of it. It just is, and is beyond what is. This is not to say God is completely
unintelligible. That would be a mistake. But it is to say, as Boyer and Hall in
The Mystery of God put it, that God
is “Supra-intelligible”. That is, there is intelligibility beyond human intelligibility. God is not extensively unintelligible but dimensionally
unintelligible. The Christian can claim to know things true of God, just not exhaustively.
Migliore notes “Confession that God has been revealed, however, is altogether
different from the claim to know everything about God or to have God under our
control.” Right on, instead we join the Early church fathers and say Deus Semper Maior (God is always greater!) Migliore
further notes that God’s revelation is paradoxically a “hiding of God” writing “If
it is truly God who is revealed, God remains hidden, beyond our grasp, never
our prisoner.”
But even still this
explanation misses something. Critical thinking, concepts and ideas might be
helpful for making some sense of the
divine mystery, but we forget that Christianity makes the interesting claim of
truth being found in a person. If you
want to know a person, standing from a distance making analytical comments can
only get you so far (especially in that person is God incarnate). But
Christianity has a part to it which can only be experienced, lived in, felt- an
aesthetic aspect. James Smith notes that “we inhabit the world not primarily as
thinkers, or even believers, but as more affective, embodied creatures who make
our way in the world more by feeling our way around it.” And when our
affective creaturely senses are engaged with the divine, part of the mystery of
is peeled back. Not in the sense that you are left knowing more because of it,
but in a more vulnerable, messy, human and lived in kind-of-way. For the
critics the lack of objective content to this claim might be frustrating, and I
get that. But unfortunately human experience is a crucial aspect of the Christian
theological tradition. But if that’s where you stop, you end up with a pseudo-mysticism
that tries to bridge the chasm of mystery via unification with God. Paul
Tillich on the other hand said that “revelation is always a subjective and an
objective event in strict interdependence.”
These are just a few thoughts. I could definitely give more
attention to the mystery of God and his plans revealed in the person of Christ-
Perhaps i’ll do a follow up blog.
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