OUR INCOMPREHENSIBLE GOD

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The tragedies we’ve been watching on the news in the past few weeks can make you wonder: What kind of God would allow all this unspeakable suffering? This is an interesting question that needs to be very carefully considered.

THE TRUE GOD, OR THE REASONABLE  ONE?

As a religious believer and a monk, I spend hours a day praying privately and publicly to the God who is revealed in the bible, specifically the God who is revealed to us by Jesus Christ.  This is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the creator and redeemer, who rescued the Chosen People out of the slavery of Egypt and brought them to a land flowing with milk and honey. This is the same infinitely merciful Father revealed to us in the person of Jesus. But this God, besides being infinitely loving and infinitely merciful, is also, by definition, infinitely incomprehensible.

This last word is a tremendous stumbling block for us moderns. We can’t help it -- it’s the way we’ve been brought up, the way we’ve been educated. The ultimate argument against any statement is “It doesn’t make sense!” or “There’s no evidence for that!”

One scripture scholar puts it this way: "It is all too easy to make the mistake of speaking and thinking as though God might be a being, an entity within our world, accessible to our interested study… open to our investigation by the same sort of techniques we use for objects and entities within our world." (N.T. Wright, Simply Christian, Why Christianity Makes Sense, p. 56)

So, here’s the problem: If your “God” can be neatly defined and understood in terms of logic and evidence, as an entity within your world and accessible to your analysis, then you’re dealing with something finite -- oops! By definition that can’t be God.  

The “God” that atheists do not believe in has zero to do with the God I pray to every day. Their God is “a being, an entity within our world, accessible to our interested study… open to our investigation by the same sort of techniques we use for objects and entities within our world," and who, of course, fails the rationality test miserably.

SWITCHING GODS

I mentioned that we can’t help reverting to this second approach to God: our entire culture, everything around us, follows the laws of logic and the rules of evidence. That’s our default position on everything.

It’s from this position that we can ask “If God is all loving, how can he let hurricanes and earthquakes happen? The logic doesn’t work; God is acting irrationally and irresponsibly.” And, of course, from the rational position, there are no answers to the questions. The flaw lies not in the questions themselves, which are very logical, but rather in the God who is the object of the discussion. A “God” who is subject to the boundaries of logic and restricted by the rules of cause and effect is a contradiction in terms, like a four-sided triangle.

So, when we’re faced with monstrous evils, whether moral ones such as the massacre in Las Vegas, or physical ones such as the recent hurricane in Puerto Rico, we have to avoid the trap of looking for “explanations,” as if everything must have a rational explanation, and as if God were “a being, an entity within our world, accessible to our interested study.”

ON HOLY GROUND

As a Christian, you humbly remove your sandals in the presence of such awesome mysteries

as these evils, and you pray to the God of Abraham, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and ask for strength and courage for yourself and for people who are suffering from these tragedies. You can scold God the way the psalmist does a lot: “Lord, where are you?” “Lord, how could you let this happen?” But the questions are rhetorical ones, posed from the standpoint of a personal relationship with a loving God; they’re not questions of scientific inquiry looking for a rational answer.

The idea of an incomprehensible God may make us moderns uncomfortable, but it sure beats the idea of a comprehensible god, who by definition isn’t God at all!

Let’s pray for our brothers and sisters who are overwhelmed with grief right now, and who are angry at God because of the tragedies God permits. We can all sympathize with their feelings, which means that we can pray that much harder for them.

Just make sure that the loving God you’re praying to is the One who is infinite and incomprehensible.

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