“The argument is made that naming God is never really naming God but only naming our understanding of God. To take our ideas of the divine and hold them as if they correspond to the reality of God is thus to construct a conceptual idol built from the materials of our mind.”
― Peter Rollins
Can God be known?...like actually known and understood?
Is God just a construction of our minds? Are we forever limited to worship gods of our own construction because our finite minds cannot comprehend something so transcendent, something so beyond us?
Is agnosticism the only intellectually honest position on matters of the Divine?
I'm haunted by questions like these. I have been most of my adult life.
In the tension between faith and doubt, I've come to realize that I can't fully say "I know" much about answers to these questions.
I've learned that asking questions, rather than having answers, is where true faith is born. My faith is deeper and richer and stronger because I also doubt.
The nagging notion that God is a conceptual idol has been particularly formative in my spiritual journey. Please understand, that I'm not suggesting God is only something we make up. Freud's idea that God is merely wish fulfillment is a false dichotomy. Institutional religion's claim to have a flawless and accurate depiction of God is I believe, equally flawed. God is a form of wish fulfillment for all of us in some respects. But God is real beyond our constructions. He or She or It is more than just a product of human psyches attempting to cope with a difficult universe.
I took my kids to a local Jazz festival not long ago, and their anticipation was quite high in spite of my attempts to describe it ahead of time. Upon arrival, they discovered that it wasn't the kind of festival they'd envisioned - kids activities, rides, junk food - but rather a sparse gathering of adults listening to music of a genre my kids are mostly unfamiliar with. Certainly the event was not how they had construed it to be in their minds. I had warned them of this ahead of time, but the word festival, and their own wishes for how it would be misled them. That doesn't mean the festival didn't exist. Just because it was different than their minds had created, doesn't change that it was an event they could access. And, they even found some aspects of it a source of joy, but in ways they had not anticipated.
In the opening quote of this piece, Pete Rollins reminds us of the problems with naming (which is an attempt to describe) and even trying to comprehend God. Our humanity inevitably leads us to create false conceptions. And when life turns out differently than we expect, or when God turns out differently than we expect, it's easy for us to despair.
Many of you on similar journeys to my own have shifted away from trying to box God into propositional truth, and opted for a richer experience of the divine. This is a good path. For too long in the Protestant tradition God has been an intellectual exercise, almost a theological hobby. And experience might allow us to encounter God as God is, rather than in tidy conceptualizations that inevitably mislead us.
But experience is imperfect too.
Experience occurs through a set of lenses that also warp and skew our experience of the Divine. For thousand of years philosophers have stated what contemporary neuroscience confirms. There is no pure perception, conceptualization, or experience of anything, let alone the Divine. We are limited in this respect by our human brains.
On a public transit ride home from school years ago I had a eureka moment (out loud) where it became clear to me that one of God's answers to this problem is Jesus. That in the mystery of the incarnation, we are given the opportunity to encounter God in a way that helps transcend our limitations: He becomes one of us. Truth is no longer limited to ideas, truth becomes a person we can encounter.
In years passing, I've become more convinced of this truth, but also aware that even our experience of Jesus is imperfect. Even if the red-letter words of scripture are His exact dictation, we still encounter his words through our filters: our experience, our biases, our expectations, our wishes, our traditions, and even our church's dogma. And it doesn't take very much time hanging out with people who claim Jesus as their own, to discover that even our experiences of Him are shaped by a whole host of factors.
So what occurs to me now is this:
God meets us in the imperfect.
God shows up in the midst of our idolatrous versions of Him/Her/It, and allows us encounter with the Divine. We can spend our lives worrying about pure theology or seeking pure experiences, but God doesn't need that, because God shows up anyway. In those places of brokenness and distortion, of misnamed deities and culturally defined worship practices, God shows up.
In your messy circus of a congregation, with so many barriers to authentic encounter, God embraces imperfection and meets you there anyway.
In your solitude - away from the obnoxious imperfections of institutional religion - but equally steeped in the distortions and imperfections of your own mind - God finds you and is present nonetheless.
We may be limited by human brains, but God is not. We may be limited by constructed ideas and experiences of God, but God is not. The transcendent transcends our imperfection. It breaks through to hearts and minds and stirs them. It gives them glimpses of a Divinity that it cannot fully grasp and leaves them changed, but still imperfect.
Today, may you be honest about the distortedness and imperfection of who you think God is, and how you experience God.
But may you also stop looking for the perfect place to find God, and recognize God meeting you in the midst of imperfection.
