The theological virtue of intellectual humility is a very different spiritual disposition from that intellectual form of immodesty which goes by names such as certainty, assurance, and even, often misused word, conviction. There is in faith a durability and endurability, a knowing that is more, and less, than full understanding: "the light shines in the darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not" - I love the King James Version of John 1.
In addition to the two earlier posts - Simone Weil on Christ and truth, and Douglas Hall on the God who is not have-able, I was reading Marilynne Robinson's When I was a Child I Read Books, and was immediately and immodestly pleased with myself when I began to read words that articulate why it is that God who is Love reveals our blindness and blinds us with the revelation of a Love incomprehensible because eternal:
"God is of a kind to love the world extravagantly, wondrously, and the world is of a kind to be worth, which is not to say worthy of, this pained and rapturous love. This is the essence of the story that forever elludes telling. It lives in the world not as myth or history but as a saturating light, a light so brilliant that it hides its source,..."
In an earlier essay she says with the gentle poignancy laced with realism that our culture (and the church) have a tendency to "marginalise the sense of the sacred, the beautiful, everything in any way lofty...religion in many ways abetted these tendencies, and does still, not least by retreating from the cultivation and celebration of learning and of beauty, by dumbing down, as if people were less than God made them and in need of nothing so much as condescension. Who among us wishes the songs we sing, the sermons we hear, were just a little dumber?" (pages 128, and 5)
Oh yes! It takes a novelist to remind theologians, and pastors, and worship leaders, that what happens up the front in a worship service is not the true, deep, soul-changing and soul-charging worship of the people of God. That is something deeper, far less in our control, the wild untamed beauty of a Love utterly beyond our words, radiant with life and light, made accessible only by the condescension of the Triune God who in love became incarnate, enfolding and embracing humanity and createdness. Makes no sense all of that - which is reassuring, and as it should be. Theology is done best not as logic, but as doxology - the God who is not have-able, is nevertheless the God who gives, without limit or calculation, a Love self-giving and eternal from One whose Being is inexhaustible and inexplicable, but in whom is life, and the life is the light of all humanity..."the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us, and we beheld his glory.." To behold the glory of God is the true task of the theologian - and that beholding includes understanding, articulating, and then worshipping because we stand under Niagara with a thimble, yet drink our fill.
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