Learning
to Live with Mystery
January
12, 2022
I once heard the
great Russian/British historian/philosopher Isaiah Berlin say that western
culture rests upon three basic assumptions. They are:
1. Every
question has an answer.
2. Every
question has only one correct answer.
3. It
is possible to know that answer.
I don’t know if those three
assumptions underlie all of western culture, but they certainly do seem
to characterize secular western culture. People in our secular culture do seem
to think that there are no unanswerable questions. We do not live comfortably
with questions to which we do not know the answer. When people hear of
something that they can’t explain they often speculate about possible
explanations though they cannot know which of their speculations, if any, is
correct. We just don’t like living with unanswered questions.
Yet even in the
secular world there is a multitude of answered questions. I’ll turn to the
science of astronomy to illustrate the point. Scientists believe that up to 85%
of the mass of the universe consists of something they call “dark matter.” They
postulate the existence of dark matter because they think that the total mass
of the visible universe, unimaginably enormous as it is, is not enough to
explain the observed behavior of the universe and everything in it. Yet they do
not know what dark matter is. For now at least they cannot see it, so they
really cannot investigate it except through observation of what’s going on in
the visible universe that they cannot explain without positing the existence of
dark matter. Astrophysicists are working very hard to solve the mystery of dark
matter. Science cannot live with unanswered questions without trying to answer
them. Scientists see unknown answers in their field of study as challenges. Trying
to discern answers to unanswered questions gives them a great deal of work to
do and a great many research grants to obtain. We creatures of western culture
will keep looking for answers until we find them even if we can never find
them.
Science has had
an immense effect on how we think about everything, not just science. One thing
that happened during the scientific revolution that was a big part of the
European Enlightenment of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries is that
people came to believe that truth consists only of facts and that science can
discover those facts. This notion of truth as fact bled out of science and into
religion. People came to want religious truth to be of the same order as
scientific truth. As a consequence most Christians came to see the Bible and
other stapes of the faith as reporting only facts. Allegorical truth, which
today we call metaphorical or more technically mythic truth, which pre-Enlightenment
culture knew and lived with, for the most part disappeared from the religious
field. People came to understand concepts like God, Jesus Christ, the
Incarnation, the Trinity, and others as entities of the same nature as the laws
of gravity or thermodynamics. A great many Christians came to see in the faith
only in simplistic, factual terms.
When faith was
reduced to fact it lost all sense of mystery. Protestants in particular locked
God up in the Bible as a compendium of facts. The Bible became the only source
and arbiter of religious truth. Jesus Christ was often reduced to being people’s
friend rather than being a bringer or revealer of salvation as mystery. Today,
as a result of the Enlightenment’s reduction of truth fact, people want a simple,
easily comprehensible God. They want a God who is not only understandable but who
they can manipulate through prayer. Most people today see God only as humanity
writ large with nothing remaining as mystery. People today are unwilling to
live with unanswered questions. Here's the thing though. Any God who is fully
understood is not God. Any God as to whom all questions are answered is not
God. Any God about whom there is no mystery is not God. When people won’t live
with mystery they do not live with God.
Here's why that
is so. Our human minds are limited. There is only so much we can understand.
Our understanding of anything necessarily comes from the world we perceive
through our various senses. Our senses are the only way we have of relating to
anything material, anything factual. Our minds mostly operate within and relate
to a presumed world of objects, a world consisting entirely of facts. Our minds
connect us with a reality that is limited in time and location. Our minds are
finite and can fully understand only that which is also finite.
Yet true God is
not and cannot be finite. Our minds are finite, but they can and sometimes do
experience the presence of something that transcends their experience of the
finite. Sometimes we get a glimpse of a reality that far transcends our
limited, finite reality. We catch a glimpse of it. In a way quite unlike our
experience of our finite world we encounter a reality that infinitely
transcends that world. We get a glimpse, but we can never fully understand what
it is that we are glimpsing. We can’t fully understand it because that of which
we are getting a glimpse is utterly transcendent. We do not experience it the
way we experience the finite because it is not finite. God, you see, is not
just another element of created reality. For God to be God, God must transcend
that reality. One of the great paradoxes of faith is that God also inheres in
the reality which God utterly transcends. That’s why we can sometimes
experience God. Yet God still transcends that reality absolutely, and as
absolutely transcendent God is ultimate mystery. The Catholic feminist
theologian Elizabeth Johnson calls God “the mystery that surrounds human lives
and the universe itself.”[1]
That is indeed who God is.
If we can fully
comprehend something if it is finite. Yet if it is finite, it is not God. If a
reality does not remain ultimately mystery it is not God. Anselm of Canterbury
is famous for having said that God is that greater than which nothing can be
imagined. While that statement may not finally work as a definition of God, it
does point to a truth about God. We can comprehend finite reality and we can
imagine a reality beyond finite reality. We can imagine it, but we cannot fully
comprehend it with our finite minds. Of necessity it remains always mystery.
The Bible puts it this way:
For my thoughts
are not your thoughts,
nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
For as the
heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts. Isaiah
55:8-9. NRSV.
God is indeed higher than we are. God
must and does always remain mystery, and a great many people are profoundly
uncomfortable with that truth.
Yet understanding
God as ultimate mystery has a spiritual power that understanding God as merely
another fact never can. We can stand in awe of ultimate mystery. We can accept
God as God not just as another creature. Most of all, perhaps, understanding
God as mystery introduces mystery into our lives. Because we can never fully
understand mystery we cannot believe that we can manipulate it the way so many
people think that through prayer they can get God to do things God would not
otherwise do. Because we can’t fully comprehend ultimate mystery faith becomes
more than a function of the mind. We can open our heats and spirits to that
which is ultimate mystery and to the new things God is always doing in the
world. We can trust our lives and our souls to that which is ultimate reality,
ultimate truth. We can trust rather than know; and faith is not knowing, it is
trust.
Sure. We think we’d
like to reduce God to facts that we can know. After all, learning to live with
ultimate mystery takes practice, and most of us don’t have the patience
practice takes. It takes practice for us to say to God this is the best I can
do, and I trust that for you it is enough. Accepting God as ultimate mystery
lets us live in wonder, and wonder enriches life like no mere fact ever can. So
I urge you: Accept God as ultimate mystery. Accept that you can know that God
is real and trust that how you live with the mysterious reality of God will be
enough. For us finite creatures, that is indeed enough.
[1]
Johnson, Elizabeth A., She Who Is, The Mystery of God in Feminist
Theological Discourse (Crossroad, New York, 1997), 3-4.
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