Abstract
A thrust at truth and a lie
What is God like? For some people this is a relatively straightforward question. They reel off a list of attributes and actions. God is good; God is just; God is love. Or, God chose a people; God sent his Son to save me; God told me to become a minister. Yet such statements can betray a confidence which may seem close to presumption. This can be off-putting. As Nancy Mitford remarks in a novel, Sophia wished that Florence would not talk about the Almighty as if his real name was Godfrey, and God was just Florence’s nickname for him. There are traps for the unwary in speaking of God. There is, for the wise, always a certain hesitancy.
The Bible, which we might think would freely speak of God, often shows that hesitancy. Even the name of God reveals circumspection. The Hebrew consonants for the name of the God of Israel may be YHWH, but the vowel-marks spell a quite different word, Adonai, which means Lord. The name of God is too holy to say. And the name YHWH, I will be who I will be, is hardly transparent in meaning. Moreover, Isaiah has God say “my ways are higher than your ways” making the ways of God always beyond our powers of expression. For Paul, “we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part.” We “see through a glass, darkly.” Such hesitancy is a proper humility before God.
For there is a gulf between what, or who, we wish to describe, to approach, to worship – and our own selves. We can only use human language, language belonging to creation, language which is partial, provisional, changeable. Just yesterday a student said to me how hard it was to get the hang of Christianity because she is not studying it in her native language. But none of us approaches God in God’s native language, as it were. For God is not captured in created language: God is the Creator. God is not grasped fully in words: God is Word. As soon as we say that God is something, let’s say, that God is love, we can immediately think of all the human distortions, diminutions and disappointments of love that seem thereby to spoil what we mean of God. God almost becomes the denial of what we feel we can say truly:
Immortal, invisible, God only wise, in light inaccessible, hid from our eyes… Unresting, unhasting, and silent as light., Nor wanting, nor wasting, thou rulest in might.
That’s at least seven negatives in four lines – and you could argue that silent makes eight.
Yet the Bible does not say nothing of God, or only what God is not like. The Bible uses language in an immensely rich range of ways to express divine action in the world. It has little use for propositional argument, but uses myth, poetry and parables. It personifies God’s wisdom as a woman. It tells tall tales which still stab at the truth nonetheless. And this remains humble, because it does not pretend to exhaust divine reality. The Bible is not a Catechism which in two dozen dense chapters offers a complete systematic theology. It delights, instead, in likenesses. Thomas Pynchon writes, The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending on where you were. Speaking of God, too, is a thrust at truth and, in a way, a lie.
Hosea is a powerful example of this way of speaking of God, by metaphor, by drama. Chapter 1 has God turn the prophet Hosea’s life into an allegory of his own. As Hosea marries, so God offers himself as the husband of Israel. As Gomer is unfaithful, so Israel goes after false gods rather than the true God. As the children are bitterly named, so they represent God’s response to his unfaithful partner. It is as if conventional words, prophetic oracles, calls to repentance have failed. So God will now mime his love, his loss, his grief. Nowhere else in the Bible is the metaphor of God as Israel’s husband so powerful, and so disturbing. It is not an easy read. Even if we say that it is not because Gomer is a woman that she is unfaithful, but because she is human, the drama does not strike all the right chords in us today: it seems to place the shameful role too readily on the actress. But that is the unavoidable consequence, perhaps, of the Bible’s approach to God. It is a thrust at truth, and in some ways, of necessity, it lies.
Come the New Testament, metaphor still abounds. What else are parables, but stories thrown to the side to illuminate, obliquely, the point? Today’s reading from Luke includes a parable and other teaching by Jesus which uses comparison to talk of God. If a friend, woken up in the dead of night, sleepy, disgruntled, bad-tempered, does the decent thing eventually, how much kinder will God be. And later, “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask them.” Jesus uses imperfect, grudging examples of goodness to hint at how God is both like, yet beyond them.
We can’t escape our humanity in expressing our faith in God any more than we can leave it behind in our work, our knowledge, our love, our action. As Joe Bayly writes, How would the Eskimo describe a pineapple to others in his village, even if he were transported to Hawaii and then returned? ‘Sweet and juicy blubber.’ The truth is we cannot get to God except by the mediation of words, of language, of expression. And that’s all right. It’s all right to say, for example, “God is like a perfect three-minute pop song,” or “I believe God to be comic” or “I trust that God is not screening our calls.” The Bible also expresses faith in sometimes off-kilter language of its moment. It is not presumptuous to speak of or to God. We are invited to do so: “When you pray, say: Father…”
And there something even deeper, and more generous. Yes, God is beyond us: the Creator the ground of creation: the Word not words: always slipping beyond reach. And yet, isn’t the New Testament the witness to a different story? The Word become flesh; the language of heaven in human form; “the wise eternal Word/as a weak infant cries” in Pestel’s carol. There is a way to God which is barely metaphorical at all, but brutely physical – a human being whose compassion and anger, wisdom and wit, self-discipline and fatigue were seen, heard and comprehended. In Jesus we see what God is like: “he who has seen me has seen the Father.”
There must be hesitancy; there must be humility. Speaking of God is a thrust at truth and a lie. We cannot comprehend the divine – neither enveloping nor understanding completely. But we have a touchstone for our language; we have a rule for our metaphor – the gift of God’s Word, the parable-teller, the teacher of prayer. He will not give a snake instead of a fish: he is faithful, and he will hear us in our faith and our love, however inarticulate, and we will know what God is like.