The deeper we get into reality, the more numerous will be the questions we cannot answer.
—Baron von Hügel, The Reality of God
A few weeks after we moved to California’s San Joaquin Valley, a family in our new congregation invited us to dinner at their home several miles outside our town. We had been warned about the thick fog that was often a feature of the winter months. As veterans of harsh Chicago and Minneapolis winters, we wondered, “How difficult could a little fog be?” That evening we found out. While we were on our way to the family’s home in the countryside, fog closed in around us. No longer could we see landmarks or even street signs. After we spent many minutes following the directions they gave us, a familiar brightly lit intersection loomed out of the fog. We had circled our city and were now approaching from the opposite direction! Chastened, we doggedly started over and found their home on our second try. My recollection of our first night driving in the fog is still vivid: creeping along gravel country roads with my head out the window, straining to see the side of the road and avoid driving my family into the ditch.
Since then I have spent many hours driving in all kinds of fog. Fog can still be unnerving when I drive on unfamiliar roads. When I am in a hurry, I can rue the fog like most people do. Yet fog’s mystery has had a growing appeal for me over the years. Now I appreciate fog’s eerie ability to hide familiar sights while at the same time revealing them in new ways.
Lampposts, Forests, and Starry Heavens
Mystery is not paradox, but the two are related. If mystery is the goal, paradox is one way to journey into it as I drive into the fog. Theologian E. L. Mascall identifies three features of mystery.1 First, as with fog, the area in which we have clear vision fades into a vast obscure background. Second, as we attempt to penetrate this background, we slowly understand it is far greater than we realized. Driving in fog, our headlights show us some things clearly but also make us aware of how much exists in the haze. Making a crucial point, Mascall observes, “In the contemplation of a mystery there go together in a remarkable way an increase both of knowledge and also of what we might call conscious ignorance.”2 Third, mystery, while itself remaining obscure, has an uncanny ability to illuminate other things. The same is true of paradox: while it remains obscure and mysterious to us, it illuminates or opens a door into the mystery of God. We will circle back to these three basic components of mystery often in the pages ahead.
In C. S. Lewis’s classic The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Lucy passes through the wardrobe into a world that is similar to, yet very different from, her own. She sees snow on the ground, pine trees, and a lamppost you might find in any London park, yet she soon encounters animals that talk and centaurs and a land where it is always winter but never Christmas. It is the points of familiarity that show how different Narnia truly is. Hence mystery is not simply the unknown. If there were no points in common, Narnia for Lucy would not be mysterious and thus exciting to explore; it would instead be bewildering.
A key element in all mystery is that the little we know draws us deeper into, invites a closer inspection of, and engages our imagination about what remains unknown. Roger Hazelton compares it to a forest: “Faith is like a forest which urges us on and deepens, even as it corrects and satisfies, our thought. By its means we never know God and ourselves wholly, yet we know nevertheless truly. We may see in a glass darkly, but we really do see.”3 Standing outside the forest, you observe only a dark wall of trees. However, the farther into the forest you penetrate, discovering clearings and streams and birds, the more acutely you experience its mystery, never knowing wholly, but knowing truly.
Baron von Hügel, perceptive about many matters, including mystery, uses similar imagery: “A sheer conundrum is not mysterious, nor is a blank wall; but forests are mysterious, in which at first you observe but little, yet in which, with time, you see more and more, although never the whole; and the starry heavens are thus mysterious, and the spirit of man, and above all God, our origin and home.”4 A conundrum is not mysterious; it is simply a puzzling dead end. Likewise, a blank wall is not mysterious; nothing is there! But for Von Hügel, the heavens offer an experience similar to that of the forest. Identifying constellations in that immense starry mass engenders greater wonder than a quick glance at the sky. Learning that the light from some stars in those constellations was radiated millions of years ago heightens even more our appreciation of the mystery of the heavens.
In both forests and the heavens, what we discover serves to raise our awareness and appreciation of what we do not know. We are more likely to hike farther and explore the deeper reaches of the forest once we know some paths into it. We are more likely to gaze into the heavens with a telescope once we recognize some constellations. In the same way, the attraction to mystery grows as we penetrate the mystery more deeply. As theologian John Macquarrie suggests, “A mystery is . . . a question in which we only glimpsed the shape or direction of an answer, and found that the more we penetrated into the answer, the more its horizons expanded so that we could never fully grasp it.”5
Knowing the God We Do Not Know
I love backpacking in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. As I’m climbing a steep ridge, the horizon beckons me onward, until it looks to be only yards in front of me. Just a few more steps will reach it! Yet after those few steps, do I finally meet the horizon? No, those steps to the top of the ridge open up a far greater vista. More ridges and valleys come into view, with the horizon again far in the distance.
We can seem on the verge of having God figured out. Yet when we reach what looked like the summit, a grand new perspective greets us. The climb has increased our knowledge of the terrain (we know God better than we did before), but we now see all the unknown territory reaching outward to the distant new horizon. Theologian John Leith reflects about never reaching that horizon: “Human knowledge may fill the gaps in our knowledge and in our power. Yet the more knowledge and more power we have, the more the horizon recedes. There does not seem to be any escape from the mystery that encompasses us.”6
When I speak of God’s mystery, I have this horizon in mind. Where God is concerned, what we do not know far outweighs what we know. As we have seen, E. L. Mascall provocatively calls this conscious ignorance. Swiss theologian Karl Barth describes it in a no less memorable way: “God remains a mystery even as he reveals himself, for it is as a mystery that he is revealed. Our Christian situation is not that of ignorance or not knowing alone; it is the predicament of knowing what we do not know, and of calling mystery by its right name, God.”7 If “knowing what we do not know” sounds paradoxical, that’s because it surely is.
As we penetrate deeper into knowing this mysterious God, we discover that often when we think we have things nailed down and say, “God is this,” we must quickly go on to say, “But God is also that.” God is transcendent but also immanent. God is sovereign but also creates humans in his image with genuine freedom. God is perfect love but also is perfectly just. God is three but also one.
As we drive into the fog, our headlights extend our range of vision and illuminate things previously unseen, but at the same time we recognize that there is a vast, obscure background we cannot yet penetrate. God is mystery. Knowing God means growing in both knowledge and, at the same time, conscious ignorance. Most people are quick to seek knowledge. Few clamor for conscious ignorance. Yet in knowing God, we cannot have one without the other.
As we begin to explore this “known/unknown” paradoxical landscape, Eugene Peterson reminds us that God’s mystery is not frightening: “There are necessarily many mysteries that we will never comprehend. (A god you can understand is not God.) But they are good, light-filled mysteries, not ominous evil-tinged mysteries.”8
Neither is God’s mystery irrational. Barth cautions us that we must not wallow in God’s mystery but do the best we can to comprehend it: “Theology means taking rational trouble over the mystery. . . . If we are unwilling to take the trouble, neither shall we know what we mean when we say that we are dealing with the mystery of God.”9 Thus, while we can never map the vast wild regions of the mystery of God, if we are willing to take the trouble, we can find rational pathways that lead us into them.
Observers both ancient and modern suggest that one of these pathways is paradox. For all its frustrating aspects that cause us to eye it nervously or throw up our arms and stalk away, paradox has an allure that cannot be denied. Like unusual stones discovered in the bottom of a prospector’s pan, some paradoxes keep us coming back to them, as we roll them in our palms, pondering their secrets. Even as postmodern society continues to turn away from organized religion, its fascination with mystery has never been greater. From a hundred different directions, people today avidly seek a spirituality that addresses life’s inherent mystery. Christians are well positioned to come alongside them, if only we will recognize that we are sitting on the mother lode of the Mystery that so many are earnestly prospecting for.
An Invitation to Settled Explorers
A party of pioneers entered a new land. Game was plentiful in the verdant forests. Rivers sparkled with enormous trout easily plucked from their glacial waters. The air was pure and sweet. An enormous sky stretched from a green horizon to white-capped peaks. Everywhere the pioneers looked, beauty and majesty beckoned. Everyone agreed it was just the place they had imagined to make a new life for themselves.
After tramping in the dark forests, they sat around their evening campfires and told stories of their explorations. Soon trees were felled and cabins built. Youngest to oldest sweated together, carrying stones out of the meadows so crops could be planted and harvested to sustain them through the long winters.
After the dangers of the trail, creating a settlement was a welcome change. The men still hunted and fished, of course, and the women and children often entered the forest to pick berries or look for mushrooms. But fewer trips into the really wild lands were required; everything needful was now close at hand. Rather than exploring, the settlers went on holiday excursions to familiar places for swimming or picnics. Their early adventurous days in the dark forests and mist-shrouded peaks held wonderful memories, but they had built homesteads and were busy with the tasks of daily life.
In the evenings as they sat in front of their cabins, watching the sun turn the peaks a fiery pink, sometimes they speculated about the wilderness valleys they had never explored. “We should mount a new expedition!” someone would propose, prompting nods all around. Seldom did anything come of it. One summer, the stream running through their valley dried up, throwing the community into disarray and prompting an emergency excursion to its headwaters. Once every year or so, greasy mountain men ambled into the settlement with tantalizing tales of the territory beyond the mountains: forests overpopulated with game, and rivers so thick with fish you could walk across them. While the wilderness still occasionally beckoned to them, most of the people in the community remained content with what they already knew.
If entering into mystery can be imagined as exploring a forest, perhaps this imaginary tale describes how some of us have come to know God. While it is initially exhilarating, few can live under frontier conditions indefinitely. Even Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett built homesteads. But as we settle into a relationship with God after the early excitement of coming to faith, we risk shrinking God down to the size needed to sustain our lives on the homestead. Perhaps we stop exploring the wilder territory of God because we think there is little left to discover. Or maybe we already have enough of God to satisfy our needs. What will get us to mount a new expedition into the mystery of God?
Paradox gets us exploring because it regularly intrudes into our settled lives; paradox is part of being human and, even more, part of being Christian. Beyond well-worn trails to the creek or woodpile, paradox opens up new paths into the untamed landscape of God that surrounds our settled clearings. “Faith is like a forest which urges us on and deepens, even as it corrects and satisfies, our thought.”10 Every one of us first entered this faith landscape as explorers; settled believers can become explorers again.
Reflection Questions
1. Describe an experience, like driving in the fog, where the mysterious became intriguing rather than frustrating.
2. Has your relationship with God ever involved standing back to observe, question, or wonder? How has this changed you?
3. Have you ever considered that conscious ignorance might be a good thing? How might this be true in relation to God?
4. “Pray for us, too, that God may open a door for our message, so that we may proclaim the mystery of Christ” (Col. 4:3). The New Testament writers often speak of the mystery of God. How has the meaning of this mystery changed for you after reading this chapter?