Mys­tery that Over­whelms, Yet Attracts 

In my last post, I shared a com­ment from C.S. Lewis: ​“We believe that the sun is in the sky at mid­day in sum­mer not because we can clear­ly see the sun (in fact, we can­not) but because we can see every­thing else.” The first time I read these words, I strug­gled to under­stand them. Final­ly, the ​“aha moment” came. Of course. If I look at the sun direct­ly, almost imme­di­ate­ly I don’t see any­thing. Every­thing goes dark. Yet I know the sun is shin­ing if I look at any­thing else. If not for sun­light, I couldn’t see squir­rels, spi­ders, trees, golf balls fly­ing, hum­ming birds, or my dog Pon­cho. I know the sun is there because it enables me to see every­thing else. It took me a while to get Lewis’s point, but when the light final­ly came on in my brain, it made all the sense in the world. 

So, the ques­tion becomes how this illus­tra­tion might relate to our under­stand­ing of God and what Chris­tians have said about God for over two thou­sand years. Chris­tians have insist­ed, for exam­ple, that God is ​“one,” ​“true,” and ​“liv­ing.” God is not one ​“thing” among many oth­ers, but is the cre­ator, source, and end of all ​“things.”

Not only so, but we are for­bid­den to make any ​“image” of God, since any image would dras­ti­cal­ly, infi­nite­ly fall short of the inde­scrib­able real­i­ty that God is, has always been, and will always be. I recall bib­li­cal writ­ers insist­ing that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, God’s ways are not our ways. ​“All the gods of the nations are idols,” declares the psalmist, ​“but the Lord made the heav­ens” (Ps. 96:5). The Cre­ator of all things ​“lives in unap­proach­able light” (1 Tim. 6:16). Before God both heav­en and earth flee away, and no place is found for them (Rev. 20:11). God warns us: ​“No one may see me and live” (Exod. 33:20). In light of texts such as these, Chris­tians have rec­og­nized that God is ​“incom­pre­hen­si­ble,” ​“inscrutable,” ​“hid­den,” ​“past find­ing out.” 

Yet the moment we speak these words, we also know that God is also the cen­ter of all things, the fount of life, the God of truth, the Father of lights, the Light that ​“enlight­ens every per­son com­ing into the world” (John 1:9). How can we hold all these won­der­ful affir­ma­tions togeth­er? They seem to con­tra­dict one anoth­er. How can Life be the occa­sion of death, or Light dwell in daz­zling dark­ness, or Truth be beyond under­stand­ing? Yet para­dox­i­cal expres­sions such as these are used to describe God through­out the Bible. 

Con­sid­er the Latin phrase mys­teri­um tremen­dum et fasci­nans: ​“mys­tery that over­whelms yet attracts,” a phrase the Ger­man philoso­pher of reli­gion Rudolf Otto used to describe God. Doesn’t this sound right when we think of God? This Latin phrase insists that God is, in some quite remark­able sense, a mys­tery. To speak of God this way is to speak of God as blind­ing, crush­ing, dev­as­tat­ing, over­pow­er­ing. To approach God is to approach an unfath­omable depth of real­i­ty and truth that, like the sun in the sky, is too intense, too bright to look at, but that nev­er­the­less brings mean­ing and coher­ence and beau­ty to every­thing else. God is a mystery. 

What we will need to explore is this: If God is a mys­tery, exact­ly what kind of a mys­tery are we talk­ing about? 

You can catch up with all of Chris’s blog posts at Con­ver­sa­tions with Chris.