God The Awesome

Human thought cannot fully contain God but the follow isn’t a bad glimpse at it. It attempts to consider God from an angle not usually used, that of a Monster.

 An excerpt from this intriguing article….

And (may it not be blasphemy to say it!) is not God himself monstrous to mortals? Though creating all, he extends outside all that is known or knowable, limited by nothing but his own being, full of the plenitude of all things. To look on him unmediated would be death, even seen in the person of Christ, the utter strangeness of his thought and action stumps and stuns us. His oneness does not diminish the multiplicity of his persons, his threeness doesn’t dilute his unity. He is all places, times, and so immanent in his creation that Psalm 139 says that he dwells in the place of the dead, as well as in heaven. In asking for his name, Moses received a simple declaration of infinite being. In speaking of ancient generations, Jesus simply said that his being was “now” with the past.

The God of Scripture is monstrous, utterly other, and I worship as I say that.

Orthodox Christians have a potent theology of this. For them, the place to begin speaking of the Godhead is not in light, but in darkness, not first in revelation, but first in mystery. Before God removes our veil, he is masked from us, by his greatness and his strangeness. His divinity and unknowability are nearly the same thing.

And yet, he reveals himself. The marvel of it is that such a worthy Monster should make himself known to us, become one of us, join us in our small, dark world full of fears and things that walk in the shadows. In Christ, that great, good monster wrapped himself in our skin, feared with us, hurt and felt loss with us, learned what it meant to be a small soft thing in a cruel, hungry world. He knew, in order to give us knowledge. He feared, to give us his courage. He died, to give us his endless life.

I am sad, but not surprised, that popular Christianity tries to tame God, to muzzle Christ and the dangerous, burning Spirit. We try to place him like King Kong, in cunning cages. Scholars do it with theology, Christian bookstores with kitsch. Worship leaders do it with catchy melodies designed to make us feel like God’s just an accessory to our feel-good salvation moment. Pastors, charged with shepherding Christians as this dangerous Christ would, often call believers to a thin faith focused on penny-dreadful meager ministries designed to put butts in seats and keep them satisfied.

We feel uncomfortable with even the least rumor of God’s monstrous-ness, his transcendence. We try and brush aside that which makes us uncomfortable, even though that is precisely where our true worship ought to begin.

How’s that for writing?

Read more here.

Image: Helix Nebula A.K.A The Eye of God from the European Southern Observatory