God-Talk Is Dangerous

We have no choice but to risk confusing people.

It is impossible to talk about God without creating huge problems.

This is an odd thing to say for someone who is embarking on a series about the attributes of God.  But it needs to be said at the outset.  The problem is this: When we start talking about God, we inevitably use images/metaphors/ideas that we can readily grasp--but another moment’s thought makes it clear that we’re already in trouble.  We instinctively know that an infinite God cannot be grasped by finite minds. 

And yet we stumble on, using language that implies that God is merely another being like us, only a super being, one bigger and better than us. This leads to all sorts of problems, the very problems atheists use as ammunition to demolish theism.  David Bentley Hart pointed this out in an article in First Things a few years ago.  

As a rule, the New Atheists’ concept of God is simply that of some very immense and powerful being among other beings, who serves as the first cause of all other things only in the sense that he is prior to and larger than all other causes. That is, the New Atheists are concerned with the sort of God believed in by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Deists. Dawkins, for instance, even cites with approval the old village atheist’s cavil that omniscience and omnipotence are incompatible because a God who infallibly foresaw the future would be impotent to change it—as though Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and so forth understood God simply as some temporal being of interminable duration who knows things as we do, as external objects of cognition, mediated to him under the conditions of space and time.

For better or worse, we theists fall into this habit as well, which is why we too become contorted with questions that are fundamentally categorical errors.  As Bishop Robert Barron notes, we Christians don’t believe in a god who is merely “some very immense and powerful being among other beings, who serves as the first cause of all other things only in the sense that he is prior to and larger than all other causes.”  We’re atheists too, then, if that’s the god we’re talking about.  The Christian conception of God is fundamentally different.  Hart goes on: 

The most venerable metaphysical claims about God do not simply shift priority from one kind of thing (say, a teacup or the universe) to another thing that just happens to be much bigger and come much earlier (some discrete, very large gentleman who preexists teacups and universes alike). These claims start, rather, from the fairly elementary observation that nothing contingent, composite, finite, temporal, complex, and mutable can account for its own existence, and that even an infinite series of such things can never be the source or ground of its own being, but must depend on some source of actuality beyond itself. Thus, abstracting from the universal conditions of contingency, one very well may (and perhaps must) conclude that all things are sustained in being by an absolute plenitude of actuality, whose very essence is being as such: not a “supreme being,” not another thing within or alongside the universe, but the infinite act of being itself, the one eternal and transcendent source of all existence and knowledge, in which all finite being participates.

This common approach of Christian philosophers is grounded in the revelatory moment when God, replying to Moses’ query about to whom he is speaking, says, “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14).  God is the great I Am—not merely one being among others, but being itself. 

But here’s the problem: Jesus did not say, “Go and make disciples of all nations … teaching them that God is “the infinite act of being itself, the one eternal and transcendent source of all existence and knowledge, in which all finite beings participate.”  This is true, but it is not the good news of the gospel.

In fact, our repeated and lamentable categorical errors are the result of Jesus’ teaching about God, whom he compares to common things—for example, like a shepherd, a housewife, and a father in Luke 15.  In fact, he is very fond of the father metaphor—which cannot help lead us to think about God as a very immense and powerful father among other fathers, a kind and compassionate, if sometimes lovingly stern entity—the best father ever!

Jesus picks up this habit from the Scriptures he was immersed in, where God also is compared often to a shepherd (Psalm 23,  Ezekiel 34), but also to many more common objects.  One example will suffice: 

The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold. (Psalm 18:2—italics added). 

In short, according to the revelation of God himself, he is like so many other things we know in this life—but much bigger and better.  

In short,  it seems that God doesn’t care if talking about him in this way is utterly inadequate, and worse, will inevitably create the categorical errors that fill us with doubts and questions—doubts and questions that, in fact, lead some simply to ignore him and argue against his very existence. 

We want to talk about God partly because we are fascinated with what some call the Elusive Presence, and partly because, as elusive as God is, he is the one who not only gives us permission to talk about him, he also commands that we do so, using terms that will lead to powerful insight but also a great deal of confusion. 

We might call evangelism and discipleship the dangerous game of God-talk.  We cannot not talk about God, and so we cannot but get ourselves and the church into trouble. Christian philosophers can rescue us by pointing to God as Being itself, but then we have to get back to reminding ourselves and teaching others, “God is our loving Father….” 

Grace and peace,

Mark

Image: The return of prodigal son by Josef Kastner the older, early 20th century, in Erloserkirche church in Vienna. Photo by Sedmak.