The loss of mystery has led to a loss of majesty. The more we know, the less we believe. No wonder there is no wonder.
—Max Lucado, In the Grip of Grace
Job offers a vivid example of how harmonious paradox opens a door into the mystery of God. Job has lost everything. Sitting in a comfortable chair reading Job’s story hardly prepares us to relate to the cascading, cataclysmic loss of Job’s loved ones, his material well-being, his health—everything. To figuratively sit with Job as he scrapes his sores with a potsherd (Job 2:8), we might need to sit with the Ethiopian women my wife sat with every week, women who sorted through mountains of stinking garbage in Addis Ababa every day to stay alive. They ask along with Job, Is God aloof from my pain? Has God forgotten me? Or does God still have his eye on me, even here, even now? Many of us have asked this question: how is this all-powerful, high-and-lifted-up God still personally involved in the yawning depths of my trials? As we track Job’s conversations with his friends and with God, however, Job allows both tines of the tuning fork (God high and God low) to keep vibrating.
At the end of his story, Job rejects all simple solutions. God’s ways are mysterious and unsearchable; who is Job to discern or judge them? “And these are but the outer fringe of his works; how faint the whisper we hear of him! Who then can understand the thunder of his power?” (Job 26:14). Acknowledging he stands before mystery, Job declares, “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know” (Job 42:3). Yet living in this paradox—a God so high above him and yet still with him—has clarified for Job a crucial truth: his faith must be in God, not in what he knows about God.
A woman in our congregation lost her husband to cancer and was left with two young children to raise by herself. As we walked together over several months through various stages of grief, she repeatedly wished for a sign that God still cared for her. Periodically she would say, “If God does this for me, maybe I can trust him again.” The signs never came. God always failed her tests. To her credit, she described God’s failures not in angry, derisive tones but with a piquant longing for an assurance of God’s presence, which she thought she had lost forever. “Why can’t God just do this one simple thing for me to show me he’s still there?” she often lamented. In theological language, she believed that God was transcendent (far beyond her), but she had lost confidence that God was also immanent (involved in her personal life).
During one of our conversations, she offhandedly described how several mundane issues had gone unexpectedly well for her. In one of those moments when the words came out without a lot of forethought, I replied, “Maybe God has given you the signs you wanted all along.” I asked her which showed her own love toward her children: giving in when they jumped up and down clamoring for a treat, or caring for their needs through a multitude of unrecognized but essential chores day in and day out? Suddenly something changed. Through new eyes, together we began identifying signs of God’s love during her tragic loss and its aftermath. New insights started to flow. Perhaps God had indeed been involved in her life all along.
Stars and Sparrows
God is transcendent. God is not part of creation, not even the highest or best part, for as its Creator, God surpasses our universe and is not bound by space and time as we are. One of our most basic Christian beliefs (although we rarely think about it) is that God is ontologically different from creation—different in essence or being. (Ontological comes from the Greek word ontos for “being.”) Diogenes Allen reminds us that when we distinguish between a real duck and a duck decoy as both float on a pond, we are making an ontological distinction. Living flesh and carved wood are different in essence or being. In a far more radical way, the reality of creation and the reality of God are utterly distinct—so distinct that we creatures do not even have mental categories to express the difference between our Creator and ourselves.1
This ontological difference is the reason why God always remains a mystery to us—in fact, we could know nothing whatever of God (any more than the wooden duck can know anything of the living duck) had God not graciously chosen to reveal himself to us through creation, through Scripture, and most fully in Jesus Christ. Thus the mystery of God is not just one theological idea to be set alongside many others; mystery is part of every doctrine about God. The first Soviet cosmonaut returned to earth thinking he had struck a fatal blow to Christianity when he announced he had surveyed the heavens but had not seen God. Of course he hadn’t. God is transcendent.
God is also immanent. God is a personal being actively engaged in the creation, so that we, who are also personal beings and are created in God’s image, can have a relationship with our Creator. Moreover, the Bible gives several hints that God is so personally involved in the creation that the divine power keeps it intact, perhaps even at the subatomic level: “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17).
Scripture paints beautiful pictures of both sides of this paradox. Our sun is one of a billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which is one of a billion galaxies (see Gen. 1:14–19). Our vast universe gives clues to the grandeur of its Creator, yet God transcends even the universe itself; God is not part of the universe and existed before it came to be. Carl Sagan, while no friend of Christianity, identified how we diminish God’s transcendence in his 1985 Gifford Lectures: “A general problem with much of Western theology in my view is that the God portrayed is too small. It is a god of a tiny world and not a god of a galaxy, much less a universe.”2
On the other hand, God is so personally involved in our lives that he provides for our daily needs as he does for the sparrows (Matt. 10:29, 31). God knows us through and through (Ps. 139). Even the hairs on our heads are numbered (Matt. 10:30). Perhaps we see the personal nature of God in no better place than garden-variety prayer: that such a transcendent Being would enter into dialogue with us poor creatures is truly astounding! Commenting on the intersection of the transcendent and immanent, William Alston writes, “Our understanding of prayer is one of the prime loci of the pervasive tension in Christian thought between God as ‘wholly other’ and God as a partner in interpersonal relationships.”3
Two Dangers
In A History of God, Karen Armstrong observes that the God we meet in the Old Testament is a “tribal deity Yahweh [who] was murderously partial to his own people.”4 She suggests that “the idea of a personal God seems increasingly unacceptable at the present time for all kinds of reasons: moral, intellectual, scientific and spiritual,”5 and we should instead “seek to find a ‘God’ above this personal God,” a God who is “beyond personality.”6 She goes on, “Ever since biblical times, theists had been aware of the paradoxical nature of the God to which they prayed, aware that the personalized God was balanced by the essentially transpersonal divinity.”7 Armstrong believes that this paradox no longer holds. Crippled by aimlessness and alienation, many find that a personal God “no longer works for them.”8 All that remains, then, is the transcendent or transpersonal side of the paradox: “This God is to be approached through the imagination and can be seen as a kind of art form, akin to the other great artistic symbols that have expressed the ineffable mystery, beauty, and value of life.”9
Many themes of the liberal theological tradition are present in this statement: affinity for subjective experience, sensitivity to mystery, imaginative openness that assumes God’s reality can never be locked into human concepts, and especially, a desire to be in tune with contemporary culture. That modern people hunger for mystery in just these ways shows how in tune Armstrong is with her audience. Twentieth-century examples include Paul Tillich’s notion of God as Ground of Being who “was not a distinct state with a name of its own but pervaded each one of our normal human experiences,”10 or Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s vision of God as a divine force driving the evolutionary process. But when we jettison a personal God to satisfy our cultural expectations, are we not in danger of actually losing the God we meet in the pages of Scripture?
Others, of course, are repelled by the very notion of God as “a kind of art form.” Generally suspicious of mystery, this group prefers to tell it like it is—no intellectual qualifications, no wishy-washiness, no indecision. The message here seems to be that Christian faith is one place where everything can still be spelled out. How reassuring to modern people anxious to make sense of their fast-changing world. The truth is captured—pinned down like a butterfly—ready for closer inspection. In significant ways, this mindset is also in tune with American culture—the segments that yearn for security, simplicity, and solid answers in the face of change.
But to this group I want to ask, Can every truth of Scripture be captured and mounted so easily? Do not some biblical truths elude us, beautifully intriguing and sun-dappled with color, yet fluttering just beyond our rational grasp? Can all biblical truth be reduced to bullet points? Can the truths of the Bible be spoon-fed to us, or do they occasionally require a good deal of gnawing? Is it not also telling it like it is to declare that this mysterious Holy Other is far beyond our comprehension? Here is the opposite danger: God becomes trivialized, shrunken to meet human needs—as a supernatural vending machine, as everyone’s buddy, or as a symbol of American civil religion.11 To sum up, taking only one side of this paradoxical God ends up either in relativism (everything about God is a matter of my interpretation and preferences) or in dogmatism (everything about God is known and possessed by me); neither is congenial to some of us.
Tension Again
How do we relate to a God who is simultaneously transcendent and immanent, ontologically different from all creation yet personally involved in that creation? My friend grieving her husband had lost this tension. Still aware of God’s transcendence, she questioned whether God was personally involved in her life. One of the qualities of mystery is that it reveals even as it hides. Seeking a sign that God was still with her in her loss, this woman discovered God unexpectedly present in the ordinary routines of life. God revealed even as God hid.
At the end of his wrestling with God, Job admits that God is unfathomable, but Job also (paradoxically) indicates that he now knows God better than he did before. “My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you” (Job 42:5). Intriguingly, Job’s last word on the subject is not “I understand” or “I believe” but rather “I repent” (see Job 42:6). Perhaps he repents of his inadequate vision of God, which this encounter has exploded. Might some of us also say “I repent” as we discover that God is far more transcendent, or far more personal, than we have always assumed?
Why is seeking to live in this tension important? Why not simply gravitate toward whichever pole of the paradox is more personally attractive to us (God high or God low)? What happens, for example, if we focus only on a low, immanent God? Surely a God who knows us so well that even the hairs on our head are numbered is a great personal comfort, especially during hard times. Yet when we embrace only God’s immanence, we end up with a heavenly buddy who likes hanging out with us but, as our Best Friend, asks very little of us. Here we might also mention some approaches to worship (or worship music) that are criticized for dumbing down God’s transcendence.
On the other hand, what happens when we focus only on a high, transcendent God? We might end up as the eighteenth-century deists, whose God was so high that God was AWOL from human life entirely, the famous watchmaker God who set the universe ticking but then disappeared to parts unknown. Deism and its modern equivalents quickly degenerate into humanism; adherents try to follow the natural law or ethical principles God has left behind, but only through their human ability. For some people who have trouble with the supernatural (seen throughout the biblical record and undergirding Christian faith in general), such a high but very distant God is just the ticket—we are left with some principles to follow, but we’re on our own.
When we do not keep the high and low in constant tension, we risk accepting a caricature of God; we miss the pure note of truth heard only when the transcendent and immanent vibrate together in unison.
Reflection Questions
1. Can you think of any personal experience, like the woman’s in the opening story in this chapter, where you lost contact with either God’s transcendence beyond you or God’s personal involvement with you?
2. Which danger do you find more prominent for you: so neglecting God’s immanence that God becomes “a kind of art form” or so forgetting God’s transcendence that God becomes your buddy?
3. Which of the dangers in question 2 do you think is more common in your church community or among Christians you might know? Why do you think this might be so?
4. After reading this chapter, is your response similar to Job’s “I repent,” or something else?