Today is the Sunday of Saint Gregory Palamas among the Orthodox. Imagine my surprise when I found an article in a sci-fi magazine that was written by a Christian. You can find it here. In it I found the following quote:
“And while it makes perfect sense that the love of a god (let alone the love of God) might be incomprehensibly more than we can ever imagine, and might at times be strikingly – even shockingly – alien in its highest expressions, surely it can never be less. That strikes at the root of all human experience and all logic. Surely, that which is more includes that which is less. It does not exclude it. A baby can understand love only in that it is snuggled and is dry and is fed. It knows nothing of a love poem or heroic deeds in the name of love. It would find them alien and possibly even frightening if it were give them. But as an adult, I can still enjoy being snuggled and being fed, and I can certainly understand how to give these things to my children.”
“One of my favorite authors, who understands this beautifully, is Lois McMaster Bujold, who is the best since Dan Simmons (and perhaps C.S. Lewis) at conveying a God who is both big enough to create worlds, and small enough to love those who inhabit them. Her land of Chalion and its Five Gods is astonishingly well realized. Through her protagonists, Cazaril and Ista, Bujold draws for us broken and real humans, who abandon their gods, curse their gods, and suffer greatly. And like those of us who choose to follow our God, these men and women are faced with a terrible choice: to keep faith and do what is right when the cost seems disastrous, or to run away and save themselves.”
The author is making an important point in the article, and one that is well worth catching. We must both say that God is so “large” that we will never ever fully understand him, and yet God is so able to reach out to a tiny thing called a human being that Jesus can say that, “if you have seen me you have seen the Father.” God is both unknowable and utterly knowable. He is unknowable in the way in which the author of the quote above points out. More than once in Scripture, human beings are left completely flummoxed by God’s choices and God’s actions. One of my favorite books that shows that is the Book of Habakkuk, in which the Prophet is horrified by what God considers to be a completely adequate and appropriate solution.
“Lord, are you not from everlasting?
My God, my Holy One, you will never die.
You, Lord, have appointed them to execute judgment;
you, my Rock, have ordained them to punish.
Your eyes are too pure to look on evil;
you cannot tolerate wrongdoing.
Why then do you tolerate the treacherous?
Why are you silent while the wicked
swallow up those more righteous than themselves?”
This passage comes right after Habakkuk has been told by God that He is going to solve the problem of the wickedness of Israel by having the Assyrians come and invade Israel and destroy a rather large part of it. This is where Prophet Habakkuk ran up against his limits. He was not able to reconcile some of his different conceptions of God with what God was actually doing. Frankly, we have the same issues today. There are Scriptures that say that God will not gaze upon evil and that He will never consort with evil. But, in Habakkuk’s questions, and to his horror, God appears to be consorting with evil by sending the most Evil Empire known that day in order to punish Israel. Later, He confounds Jeremiah by speaking about Cyrus, who is a Babylonian conqueror, as his anointed one who will lead Israel to freedom. The term for anointed is the identical one that is used in other Scriptures to speak about the coming Messiah. But, how can God consider Cyrus to be anything like the Holy Anointed One?
Those are only some of the instances in Scripture that give us glimpses of just how unknowable God is. Those are the instances to which the author of the article quoted at the beginning of this post refers when he says, “… the love of God … might at times be strikingly—even shockingly—alien in its highest expressions, surely it can never be less.”
But, there is another side to this. Christians make a strong, and even shocking statement. We say that in Jesus, “… we have seen the Father.” In fact, it is even stronger than that. If we have not seen the Father, then we are not saved. Our only hope of salvation is not simply the assurance that what we have heard is true. Our hope of salvation is the assurance that we have direct contact with God. Only God can guarantee our salvation. Anything short of direct contact with God does not give us any assurance of salvation. This is why Jesus is so important. He is our direct contact with God. He is both God and Man. When he speaks, God has spoken. In a mystery, the totally alien God has become one with us, and knowable while still remaining totally unknowable.
About this time you are saying that this does not make sense. You are correct, I cannot explain it. I can only state that we must continue to say that God is totally other and unknowable and alien to us, and that in Jesus, we have truly known God the Father. The one problem I have with Saint Gregory Palamas is that some of his “followers” appear to be saying that God is not knowable in any way at all. But, as the corollary of what Habakkuk found out, if we say that we do not know God in any way, we endanger our salvation. It is not simply God’s energies that we experience. Somehow, as we experience Jesus, we experience God Himself. That is our hope of salvation. Jesus is both God and Man. If we have seen him, we have seen the Father. There is no other option. In that sense, I cannot say that we know God only through His energies. That is too simplistic a statement. It is as simplistic as Habakkuk’s assumption that he knew better than God. He did not and he found that God was more alien than he assumed.
Finally, too much of Evangelical Christianity treats God as somehow fully knowable. Too much of Orthodoxy treats God as fully unknowable. The truth is one of those mysteries that short cut our brains. God is unknowable and alien. We have seen the Father in Our Lord Jesus Christ.
Thsi is the kind of discussion that makes me thank the balanced Lutheran-slanted teachings I have received about balancing law, the knowable, and grace, the unknowable but oh so necessary and welcomed.