Who God is

GOD. What word is more used and abused and understood in meanings that span the spectrum from devotion to anger; from exclamation to the trivial and the thoughtless?

The word "God" has become a catch-all term, a non-name, even a sigh or a swear word.

In Christianity too, it has become almost meaningless, merely a sliver of linguistic "silly putty." Make it mean what you will.

One day as I was photocopying at UBC, a young man bounded up to me, face flushed.

"Do you believe in God?" he erupted. Taken by surprise, I tried to give an honest answer. But I did not know if his concept of "God" was in any way similar to mine. Some prudence came to my rescue. To ease his agitation, I replied mildly, with an eye on the exit. "Yes."

"Isn't it great!" he cried.

"Yes," I ventured. The onslaught abated. As if by pinprick, he came back to earth and walked peacefully away.

Christian fundamentalists tend to use the "God" word in a reductionist fashion. Rev Billy Graham once bragged, "Does God exist? Of course He does, I just spoke to him this morning."

I had an image of couple of pals chinwagging over a back fence.

But our traditional Christian understanding of God is extraordinarily rich and challenging. It rises supremely above glib pacifiers that debase both the divine and the human reality.

In the early church, Christians recognized a tension between two gospel phrases of Jesus as recorded by John, "The Father and I are one", (John 10:30), and "The Father is greater than I", (John 14:28).

Wrestling with this paradox gave birth to a creative theological distinction that has become accepted in Christianity and is rich in potential.

In support of the second interpretation, Justin the Martyr, in the second century, taught that God in his intimate nature remains hidden, anonymous, unknown. We know something of God as creator, even as lord, but we do not know God's intimate nature.

Justin had a predecessor in Philo, a Jewish philosopher in Alexandria, who was a contemporary of Jesus. Philo died in the middle of the first century C.E. For him, God is unknowable in himself. God's essence cannot be encompassed by human conception. God can only be known as relating to us. Here, Philo distinguishes between God's essence and God's activities or energies.

Scholar Andrew Louth comments on Philo's thought. "God is unknown in godself but known in activities."

This distinction is echoed by a great chorus of Christian saints, doctors of the church and theologians who have made it a prime foundation of orthodox Christian mysticism and doctrine.

Leading the list is the attractive figure of Clement of Alexandria (150-215), who wrote: "We fling ourselves upon the majesty of Christ. If we then advance through holiness towards the abyss, we shall have a kind of knowledge of God who contains everything, not knowing what God is, but what God is not." Clement was followed by Cyril of Jerusalem, who taught the impossibility of gazing directly on the face of God whose essential being remains hidden from us. St Basil, bishop of Caesarea (300-379), called "Great," agrees that we know God from God's energies but we do not claim we draw near God's essence. God's energies come down to us but the essence remains unapproachable. "Divine energy is the grace of God."

Again, the distinction is acknowledged by Dionysius the Areopagite in the fifth century who was quoted by Thomas Aquinas 1760 times in his Summa Theologica.

The apogee of this teaching came in the 13th century writing of Thomas. He concluded that "having arrived at the outer boundary of our knowledge," we know God remains unknown. The word for "unknown" in Greek is agnosis.

Francis Tyrell, professor of theology in New York, says: "The essential incomprehensibility of the divine mystery results in the necessary agnosticism of Thomas. We know that God surpasses all we can understand of God."

It is an enticing God we have.

Fr. Jim Roberts writes from Burnaby, B.C.

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