The Known Unknown

 

The Known Unknown

January 17, 2022

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

In my time as a seminarian and as an ordained minister I have noticed something about many of the people of the church. Many Christians are quite sure that they know all there is to know about God, but here’s the truth. They don’t. They can’t. None of us can. One of the things that follows from people’s conviction that they know all there is to know about God is that they try to limit God to human ways of thinking and doing things. That, after all, is the only way they can believe that they know everything there is t know about God. They are uncomfortable with the idea there is more to God than we can we can ever know. They find it hard to accept that God is not merely humanity writ large and that God’s ways and thoughts are not our ways and thoughts. I once heard someone say that the main thing she had learned in seminary was that she had made her God too small. She has lots of company in that regard. Most Christians make God too small, and they do it by making God too human and too human, too knowable.

At least in a few places the Bible knows that God in finally unknowable, we just know that God doesn’t think and act in merely human ways. At Ephesians 3:19 the author prays that the recipients of his letter may “know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.” At Isaiah 55:8-9 we Read:

 

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 higher than your ways

     and my thoughts than your thought.

 

So Christ’s love, which of course is God’s love, is beyond our knowing, and God’s thoughts and ways are not our ways. Why? Why do we have to live with a God we cannot fully know? Why can’t God think and act our way so that we can fully comprehend what God is up to? Here’s my answer to those questions.

Who is God? Christianity answers that question at the deepest level, as it answers all question of faith at the deepest level, with a paradox. God is a reality that is two things at the same time that cannot both be true but are true. God is both utterly transcendent and immediately present with us on earth at the same time. God is Spirit that is infinite in every aspect of God’s being, which means that in God’s transcendence God is other than us in very way. Theologians say that God is totaliter aliter, Latin for totally other. Isaiah gets it exactly right here. God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, and God’s ways are not our ways.

There is however also the other side of the paradox of God. God is utterly transcendent, but God is also immediately immanent with us here on earth. Is it possible for God to be both utterly transcendent and yet immanent? No, as I have said many times, things like that about God aren’t possible, they’re just true. One paradox of God (there are others, like the Trinity) says that God is both known in God’s aspect as presence and unknown in God’s aspect as totally other. That’s not possible, it’s just true.

I can hear some people saying, “OK, but you just said that God was totally other than us. How can we know anything that is totally other than us the way you say God is? Well, it certainly isn’t possible for us humans to be here and there at the same time. (Many of us have wished that our seminary had had a class on how to be two places at once, but of course it didn’t.) It’s not possible for us humans to subsist in two totally different natures at the same time. But what is impossible for us is not impossible for God. What we’ve done when we say that something  isn’t possible for God is make God too small. We have made God too human.

One of the primary ways many Christians make God too small, too human, is by making God’s love, that is, God’s grace, conditional. I have taught, preached, and written for years that God’s grace is entirely universal and entirely unconditional. It always has been universal and unconditional, and it always will be. Our problem is not that we aren’t saved, out problem is that we don’t know that we are saved. St. Paul can be maddeningly inconsistent, but at times he recognizes the universal and unconditional nature of God’s love. At Romans 8:38-39, for example, Paul says:

 

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor rulers, not things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, not anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

 

To say as Paul does here that nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God is to say that God’s love is truly universal and unconditional. It is always there for everyone no matter what.

Yet Christians almost always insist that there is something we must do before God will extend God’s grace to us. They don’t all say that it’s the same thing we have to do. Some say we must lead a sinless life (as though that were possible, which it isn’t). Some say we must do good works in the world. Most Protestants say that we must have faith in Jesus Christ. Some say he have to have had a once for all conversion experience in which we take Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Savior. We make God’s love conditional and specific to us in so many ways.

And every time we do, we make God too small and too human. See, our human ways of doing things is to say, at least most of the time, that to receive some benefit we have to earn it. Sometimes we may donate time or money to a charity that helps people who haven’t earned anything (or at least that  think haven’t earned anything). For most of us though our primary point of reference for the relationship between benefit and reward is that we work, or at least someone in our immediate family works, to earn a paycheck. In our human world, for the most part, we work in one way or another, and then someone gives us money in return for our work. Our receiving money from our employer, or customers, or clients is conditioned on our doing work of a certain kind and amount. This dynamic so conditions to see reward as conditional that we apply that standard to God all the time.

But look again at what the scripture passages I’ve quoted here say. The love of Jesus Christ is so vast that it is beyond our knowing. There is no way for us to know all of it or fully to understand it. God’s thoughts and ways are so much not our thoughts and ways that we cannot fully know them either. We can never truly get our heads around how vast God’s love is because God’s love exceeds our love infinitely. God’s ways are so unlike our ways that when we actually discern them we think we’ve got to be wrong. Here’s an example.

At Matthew 20:1-16 Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven (which is the same thing as the kingdom of God) is like this. Early in the morning a landowner who has a vineyard hires workers to work on his land that day. He promises to pay them the usual day’s wage. A bit later in the morning he hires more workers to work his land that day. He tells these workers that he will pay them whatever is right. He does the same thing at noon, at mid-afternoon, and late in the afternoon. Some of his workers have therefore worked many more hours than others of his workers have. At the end of the day the landowner has his manager pay the workers their wages for the day. Those who worked the entire day receive what they were promised, the usual daily wage. Then all of the workers who worked fewer hours, including those hired only at the end of the workday and who therefore did relatively little work, also receive a usual day’s wage, the same amount as those who worked all day received. Those who had worked all day are upset because those who had worked fewer hours had received the same amount as they did. It seems they thought they should have received more because they had worked all day and the others hadn’t. The landowner says to them you received the wage I promised you when I hired you. Take it and go. He says, “I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous? So the last will be first, and the first will be last.” I have never had a parishioner who read or heard this parable think that what the landowner does is right. No, they say. Those who worked more hours should receive more compensation than those who worked fewer hours.

Why do these good folk think that? They think it because we’re all so conditioned by the worldly way of earning and reward. We live with that way every day of our lives. That’s how it is with us, so we think that’s how it should or even must be with God. But remember what Isaiah’s God says through him: My ways are not your ways and my thoughts are not your thoughts. Because God’s ways so transcend our ways, much of the time we just can’t understand them. With God in God’s nature as transcendent there is much about God that we simply cannot know.

Then we run smack into the paradox of God. Christians and people of other faiths have long confessed that God is a real, known presence here on earth with us in our earthly lives. We Christians even say that in Jesus of Nazareth God came to us as one of us precisely to make God’s nature and ways known to us. People in the Judeo-Christian tradition have long believed that God sometimes reveals Godself to us humans. The prophets of Hebrew scripture all believed that they had received a commission from God to reveal to the people what God had said to them. Paul believed the same thing about himself.

We Christians confess that God’s most complete revelation of Godself is found in the life, teachings, suffering, crucifixion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In him we see who God is when God becomes human. Belief in Jesus Christ as a true revelation of God is a wonderful thing; but, as there is in all good theology, there is a trap here. Far too many Christians believe that Jesus Christ reveals to us the fullness of God, that in and through him we know God in God’s very essence. Believing that is a trap because it dispenses with the transcendence side of the paradox of God. In Jesus we know God, yet God remains ultimately unknown. Even in the Incarnation God remains the Known Unknown.

In Jesus Christ God has revealed Godself in a way and to the fullest extent that we humans can comprehend. Yet our comprehension is finite, and God is infinite. The man Jesus of Nazareth, the Incarnation of God that he was at the same time notwithstanding, was finite. Matthew and Luke (though no one else in the Bible) say that Jesus’ conception was virginal and through the Holy Spirit rather than through the usual biological processes. But even for those two evangelists Jesus was a human being who was born, lived, worked, suffered, and died just as we all do. That’s the paradox of Jesus as the Christ. He was fully God, but he was not fully all there is to God, for he was also fully human. As with God being both transcendent and immanent at the same time, so Jesus being God and human at the same time isn’t possible, it’s just true. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Alice says to the White Queen that you can’t believe impossible things. The White Queen answers, “That’s just what we Christians do every day of our lives—believe six impossible things before breakfast.” I don’t know if Lewis Carroll meant that as a sendup of Christianity or not, but to me the statement rings true. Well, maybe we don’t believe six impossible things before breakfast, but we believe at least three impossible things all the time—the paradox of God I have described here, the Incarnation in Jesus Christ, and God as Trinity, as three and as one at the same time. None of those is possible, they’re just all true.

So I urge you. Do not believe that you will ever know all there is to know about God. You won’t. None of us will. That’s because there is an existential chasm between God and us. God is infinite, we are finite. Many of us yearn to cross that chasm and have direct experience of the fullness of God. We never will. But God both subsists on one side of the chasm and reaches across it to reveal Godself to us—reveal Godself that is in ways our finite human minds can comprehend. There is of course a danger in all faith. What we believe about God may be wrong. We can’t avoid that danger. We can however live in trust that what we believe God has revealed of Godself will not fail us. God is the Known Unknown. God is immediately present and revealing Godself to us, and God remains ultimately unknowable mystery at the same time. That is all we know or ever can know of God, and it is enough.