“Our starting-point must be the fact that God cannot be named… no mind has yet contained or language embraced God’s substance in its fullness.” – Gregory of Nanzianzus
I know that [theological statements] dazzle our eyes and flow in and out of one another like eddies on a river, and nothing that is said clearly can be said truly about [God]. Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood. – C.S. Lewis “Till We Have Faces”
The attempt in modern Protestant circles, especially – but not exclusively – to domesticate God, to find in Him only the kindly, only the friendly, the avuncular, is nearly proverbial. The young Karl Barth found this an irritating and symptomatic trait of Kultur Protestantismus. And despite his mighty labors to excise such smug domesticity, the one-sided, toothless God lives on. While the Goodness of God ought never be impugned, we might all agree that a Christianity that is only hospitable, only useful and edifying, has not taken the full measure of the Living God. He is Good, Goodness Itself, and He is Holy. Bending down in awe before Almighty God is the first act of proper piety. It is not simply that God is Incomprehensible, although it be true; nor that His Mystery cannot be dissolved, though that is also true; nor that His Transcendence makes every similarity collapse before the Incalculable Dissimilarity, though that is certainly true. It is even more that the Presence of the True God is shocking, an Undoing; there is no quiescence before the Revolution who is God. – Katherine Sonderegger, Systematic Theology Vol 2
It’s a godsend, though, that we were given the ability to discover His rules, from the music of the spheres in the heavens above, to the intricacies of life on our little water planet. Dave G