Talking about God is kind of a strange thing. I sense that it is something we all want to do -- even something we all really rather must do. It is something that, until we do it, we don't know ourselves. To talk about God is to describe not only our upper limit (that which we most definitely are not) but also that without which we will never be at peace. We were created with such a desire to be at peace and in union with God, that to not talk about him at all is a kind of terrible travesty against our very beings.
Each of us therefore has something that must be said about God. This word we have is one with the fact that we are alive. This word that we have is also already a word that is given in response to the Word of God that has already gone out into the world. Christ, the Word of the Father, speaks the Word of God in our hearts. Our response is beautiful, unique, and full of a life that is more than we are.
We have all of creation that we can see and touch and hear. Yet we realize that God is not creation. We have our people in our lives that we love, yet we realize that God is more than the people in our lives that we love. All of us are, I think, searching for words to describe this Word of the Father that calls us to Himself. When we find our word, our response, our talking of the Father, we will have also found ourselves. We will feel complete and whole because we have described and loved as much as is possible for us the God who calls us out of ourselves into Himself where we are at peace.
We have been given Scripture as a cannon of texts that all describe God in very different ways. We can know that words about the Word of the Father are closest to being really descriptive of God when they conform to the words in Scripture. In fact, we must use these words and live inside of them.
But how do we do that? For just as it is obvious that God does is not creation, and that God is not the people we love, God is also not Scripture. Scripture describes God using human emotions, and as being good, powerful, creator, and as one and three. Yet, this only increases our wonder. For just as God is more than creation, more than other people, more than ourselves, so God must be more than human emotions. God must be more than good, more than powerful, more than creator, more than one and more than three. Indeed, he is above all, but must be more than what we mean when we apply the words "above all" to anything we know.
Yet, God must be close, personal, able to be found because He has indeed found us and placed within us the desire to speak our word in response to His Word. But, this closeness is closer than anything else that we typically use the word closeness for. How do we live inside the words of Scripture and allow them to draw us up into God?
This aspect that we recognize of God, in which God is more than every word that can be used to describe God is helpful. For it does not lead (as some wrongly suppose) into a nothingness. We do not say, "well, since God is obviously good and more than good, and powerful and more than powerful, and loving and more than loving, my words of good, powerful, and loving are actually without meaning when applied to God."
When we attach this "more than" aspect of God to God's infinity, it certainly leads us to conclude that we can't really actually describe God at all. The temptation is to say that we are finite, he is infinite, therefore, he is "more than" everything we can use to describe Him. But this is unhelpful. We would run the risk of just making God an infinite version of us, not some actually different from us.
Another way of viewing the "more than" language about God is to attach to it the meaning of "source." God is more than good because God is the source of good. God is more than love because God is the source of love. God is more than creation because God is the source of creation. God is more than people because God is the source of people.
Just as a fire is different from the heat it produces, just as a tree is different then the shade it produces, just as a flashlight is different from the sight it enables, so God is different then creation. God is more than creation because God is the source of all that is.
So what? Why does it matter to me that God is the source of all that is? Well, it means that when I try to respond to His Word, and talk about God within the words in Scripture I now have a way of so responding.
Rather than being led into speechlessness by the utter beyond-ness of God, I can be led into praise by the utter source-ness of God. Since all that is is from God, I can and should praise Him as the source of all, even myself.
Your advice to use "source" is very helpful! Couldn't help but think of an excerpt I read the other day from Barth that at least in my brain connected with what you shared:
ReplyDelete"God is not only unprovable and unsearchable, but also inconceivable...In the Bible God's name is named, not as philosophers do it, as the name of a timeless Being, surpassing the world, alien and supreme, but as the name of the living, acting, working Subject who makes Himself known...The whole work of God lives and moves in this one Person [Jesus]. He who says God in the sense of Holy Scripture will necessarily have to say Jesus Christ over and over again."
What you've written about finding our words to respond to the Word of God reminds me of some of the stuff I've read in Simon Chan's Liturgical Theology. I'd like to string together some thoughts on this:
ReplyDelete"To be the church is to be the worshiping community making a normative response to the revelation of the triune God" (p42).
"In true [normative] worship there is an inherent fittingness of the response to the One who reveals himself as who he is, because it comes ultimately from the Spirit of God who indwells the body of Christ" (p47).
"The worship of the Church is, properly speaking, the action of the triune God in the Church. But it is divine action joined with human action" (p48).
Furthermore, to call worship the "fitting response" to God’s revelation reveals the essential connection between worship and theology: the concept of "primary theology" is our participation in God, who is Truth. This is not secondary reflection (scholarly theology), but "The Faith" finding its concrete expression in worship. This means that the Church’s liturgy is the full and adequate expression of the faith of the Church - there’s an organic and essential interdependence between the two.
This is summed up by the concept lex credenda est lex orandi. Lex orandi doesn’t refer to a specific "order of service," but the deeper shape or structure of the liturgy which has taken various (but remarkably similar) forms through time. Thus, Primary theology is like that wordless awe you were describing, and liturgy (at its best) gives it words.
Sorry if that's kind of long and rambling, but it seemed to be a cool intersection between your thoughts and mine.