The Mystery of God

At the beginning of my sabbatical blog, I stated that the Christian apophatic tradition, the via negativa, “rejects all analogies of God as ultimately inadequate,” [Lane, p. 4], whether from language or nature, and then went on to say that, paradoxically, it uses the three spare and lean images of desert, mountain, and cloud to bring us to the most profound and ultimately indescribable human experiences of both joy and pain, and of who God is in reference to these experiences. It is time to clarify this paradox.

Luther believed God is a hidden God. This is a somewhat strange and yet profound way of protecting God from the constant human tendency to “domesticate” God and make God our own.

Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx argued that there is no God, and what we call God is nothing other than human projection onto a non-existing being of what humans really want for themselves. In other words, we create a god to justify our desires for life.

It is also possible for us to do basically the same thing within a theistic system. We define or interpret God only along the lines of what we want, and ignore any competing claims.

For Luther this was the “theology of glory,” which is nothing other than a theology that uplifts and magnifies the human desire for glory, power, control. Luther, in contrast, posited a “theology of the cross.” Our God is a “hidden God,” who comes “under the sign of opposites.” We would expect God to come in power, pomp, and circumstance, and shape this world up. Instead God comes in a manger, born into poverty, having to flee to Egypt to stay alive. This God lives in poverty (“the son of Man has no where to lay his head”), allows himself to be arrested, unfairly prosecuted, condemned to death, and then to die in the most gruesome and cruel fashion imaginable. For Luther, as for Paul, this God is God only to the eyes of faith, because this God goes against everything the world expects of a god.

This theological understanding of God coincides with apophatic spirituality.
While there is obviously value in metaphorical images of God (and the Bible uses many of them), yet there is a danger as well. We may use those images to try to control God, and assume we know God better than we do. The strength of the apophatic way is that it keeps us constantly aware of the limits of language, including metaphor, to adequately describe everything about God. For all we may know, there is still so much we do not know.

Pseudo-Dionysius (a Syrian monk in the 6th century) attempts to explain this distinction by referring to Moses assent up Mount Sinai. On the mountain, “beyond the summit of every holy ascent,” Moses was plunged into “a truly mysterious darkness.” He was not allowed to see the total splendor of God’s being and majesty, but only to see the place where God dwells. (See Exodus 33:21) By doing this Psuedo-Dionysius is making a crucial distinction between the essence of God (unknowable to humans) and what God does reveal to us about Godself. (See Lane, pp. 64-65)

Here is where we finally see the paradox of apophatic spirituality, which distrusts all language and images of God, and yet uses the most fierce landscapes to get us to the edge where we finally sense in the most profound ways the mystery of God. Lane writes:

. . . . apophatic tradition, despite its distrust of all images about God,
makes an exception in using the imagery of threatening places as a
way of challenging the ego and leaving one at a loss for words.
If we cannot know God’s essence, we can stand in God’s place—
on the high mountain, in the lonely desert, at the point where terror
gives way to wonder. Only there do we enter the abandonment,
the agnosia, that is finally necessary for meeting God. [Ibid.]

It is only when we give up our need to control God, including how God is defined and imaged, that we become open to revelations of who God really is, and what God wants for us and for the world.