Reading · Gospel Simplicity

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I have the strange job of talking about God for a living. To be clear, I love what I do. I find theology to be a deeply life-giving, wonder-inducing task that fills my soul. But in a world drowning in content about God, it’s easy to forget that talking about God is a rather odd thing. Not odd in the sense of some middle school fashion choices we wish we could take back. Odd in the sense of birds trying to swim or dolphins trying to fly. Sure, a seagull can break the surface of the waves to grab a fish, and yes, dolphins delight us when they crest the waves and glint in the sun, but we wouldn’t call birds great swimmers or dolphins great aviators. Yet, in many ways, we creatures of the dust who dare to pontificate about the Divine are more like these animals than we’d like.

Wade into the Christian tradition and you’ll soon find a chorus of voices singing the same song telling us that our words about God are always incomplete. God is, in the final estimate, beyond our words. Spilling so much ink on such a God, then, is odd.

If you’re looking for a word to describe what we do in the face of the beyond-wordness of God—no, the irony isn’t lost—apophaticism would be the one for you. It’s an approach to theology that recognizes our predications about God ultimately fall short, and thus, the safer road is to say what God is not. Even this, though, is incomplete. As Pseudo-Dionysius taught, our negations fail much like our affirmations. We can say “God is wise,” for instance, and that’s true to a point, but our word “wisdom” doesn’t fully describe God. It’s too small a thing. So we try saying, “God is not foolish.” That too is true, but only to a point. “Not foolish” can’t quite grab hold of God. So, affirmations and negations fall short of the target.

We typically associate such ideas of apophaticism with the more “mystical” theology of the Eastern Church. This is not without reason. The East is home to great treasures in this domain. It would be wrong, however, to think this is an exclusively Eastern phenomenon. Our neat categories of “mystical” East and “scholastic” West obscure the fact that the latter is no stranger to apophaticism and the former has much acquaintance with precision as well.

The West is, after all, home to the likes of St. Bonaventure, St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, the writer of The Cloud of Unknowing, and many other apophatically-inclined thinkers. The scholastic theologian par excellence, St. Thoams Aquinas, made Pseudo-Dionysius one of his primary conversation partners in the Summa, and while not a full-blown apophatic theologian, Thomas insisted we remember that our language about God is analogical, which is to say, human words might express what God is like but not what God is. St. Augustine insisted that even calling God inexpressible is, in a sense, a step too far because it expresses something about that which is inexpressible!1

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When you first begin acquainting yourself with the idea of apophaticism, it can be a bit discouraging. “If God is beyond words, what’s the point in saying anything at all?” At times, apophaticism leads to a sort of quietism, a reluctance to speak about God and a resignation to the utter unknowability of God. Though such an attitude is by no means absent from the Christian tradition, it fits awkwardly alongside a few core convictions of Christian theology. To abandon words is interesting when we worship one whom we call The Word of God.2 Furthermore, Christianity is a religion of revelation. We believe that God has made Himself known in the person of Christ first and foremost, as well as believing that the Scriptures are, in some sense or another, God’s revelation to us.

So, we have two pieces of the puzzle to put together. On the one hand, we have the idea that God, by His very nature, is beyond words in the sense that all our words fall short of fully describing Him. He is and ever remains, a mystery to us. On the other hand, we believe that He is a God who reveals Himself, chiefly in Christ, though also in other ways, most notably in Scripture which is, well, full of words. While some would dissolve this tension by saying the first part is just an imposition of Greek philosophy into Christianity, a malicious hellenization of the simple gospel, I would caution against that reading for at least two reasons. First, good metaphysics is just good metaphysics, regardless of origin. A recognition of the inherent mismatch between the finitude of language and the infinity of God seems to me nothing more than sound reflection. Second, Scripture itself points us in this direction. St. Paul says we see through a glass darkly, Isaiah speaks of God’s thoughts being above our thoughts, and Job offers us a startling picture of just how incomprehensible God can be to the human mind.

With these ideas in place, I’d argue that this is a tension we should learn to live with, rather than trying to avoid. But how do we do that?

Here, I’d like to propose that the limitations of our language to describe God should lead us to say more, not less.

An Apophaticism of Excess

We can think of our approach to the transcendence of God in negative and positive ways. By that, I don’t mean “sad” and “happy” ways. Rather, transcendence can lead to us stripping away all description until we find the God that simply is. I’ll call this negative transcendence. Get rid of everything until you find God in the nothingness that is everything. This isn’t altogether bad, but, once again, Christianity has a penchant for description. The other option, positive transcendence, is more like saying God is greater than our words. When coupled with the idea that we know in part and not in full, this can lead to a sense in which we can direct our words and worship toward a God who will never be fully understood by us or exhausted by our descriptions. Think less of a stripping away and more of a roaring waterfall whose bottom we cannot see and that never fills despite the ceaseless flow of water.

That’s a bit more like how I think of the task of theology. Not only does this allow us to make sense of an incomprehensible God who nevertheless reveals Himself, but it also makes sense of human experience.

For instance, we often say that an experience is “difficult to put into words.” But what do we do in such situations? We turn to the best words we can find. We form them into poetry that only ever approximates the feeling that defies description. We aim our arrows at the moon knowing they’ll never reach that pockmarked surface but yet we know that they’re headed in the right direction. We are, after all, children babbling on about a God beyond our wildest imaginations who yet delights in us as His children much as our hearts beam when our babies make even the first sounds resembling speech. Such is our theology, and it is a joyous task.

Two Inspirations for this Piece

This past week, I was spurred on to think about such things through ’s recent article in The New Ressourcement titled, “A Metaphysic of Love.” In it, I was introduced to two ideas that are particularly instructive for this “problem” of theology.3 The first was this phrase, “an apophaticism of excess.” Here’s what he had to say:

Christian mysticism is grounded in an apophaticism of excess. That is to say, although the beyond-being God—the divine essence—is not captured in any way by human language, not even that of goodness or love, we dare not let go of the positive language of revelation (the Trinitarian and Christological discourse and everything it entails), not even with regard to the God beyond being.4

If at first sight this is confusing, let me pair it with a second, related idea from Boersma: hyperphaticism. Here are his own words, once again: “when we speak of God as Love, we do speak of God himself—hyperphatically naming the unnameable from his theophanic appearance.”5 Basically, our words grasp at the ineffable one who reveals Himself as love in creation. Or, as Boersma goes on to say, “God is always more than words can express; but he is always self-diffusing Love,” and it is that self-diffusing love that Trinity and incarnation express.6

As it just so happened, I was reading George MacDonald on the same day as Boersma, and there was a wonderful convergence of ideas. In his unpsoken sermon on, of all things, the unforgivable sin, MacDonald touches on the limitations of language. He wriets:

“Whatever belonging to the region of thought and feeling is uttered in words, is of necessity uttered imperfectly. For thought and feeling are infinite, and human speech, although far-reaching in scope, and marvellous in delicacy, can embody them after all but approximately and suggestively.”7

While Boersma’s piece was an academic article diving deeply into debates surrounding Christian (Neo-)Platonism vs Aristotelianism and more, MacDonald’s piece is purposefully pastoral, written in a much different register. Nevertheless, they both recognize that our words are deeply limited and that God is a mystery to us. MacDonald takes this into an interesting place. For him, there is a priority of experience and feeling. That we can’t put feelings or thoughts into words seems to suggest that, while God can communicate with us through words, he communicates best at an even more intimate level, the level that, even in ourselves, is beyond expression, that of inner life. For instance, MacDonald writes, “No amount of discovery in his words can tell us more than we have discovered, more than we have seen and known to be true.”8 This is the language of “taste and see that the Lord is good.” It speaks to us of the God who is “known in the breaking of the bread.” A knowledge that can be approximated, but never fully contained, in propositions. And here, I think there is some overlap between MacDonald and Boersma. Boersma insists that our metaphysics be grounded in the self-diffusing love of God, and MacDonald is saying that our knowledge of God is first and foremost that of his love. Both, however, insist that this is not license to abandon the letter in favor of the spirit, if you will. Which brings us full circle to the title of this piece. The God who is beyond words is also present to us within words. Sublime as the words of Scripture are, they do not exhaust all that God is. Feeble as our words about God may be, God is not absent from them.

Odds and Ends

Exciting news! I’ll be leading a pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago July 8-18, 2027. We’ll be doing a shortened, easier version of the walk with luggage carried and transportation shuttling us between some of the most scenic stretches. But don’t worry, there will still be plenty of walking involved. Learn more: here.
In case you weren’t aware, my novel, The Long Road to Holy Island, is now available for pre-order. It’s a story about a grieving young man who embarks on the pilgrimage his mother always dreamed of—St. Cuthbert’s Way—despite not sharing her faith. Along the way, he meets a monk who becomes his traveling companion, and through their conversations and other people he meets, the protagonist is forced to wrestle with questions of faith in a world that so rarely makes sense. Pre-ordering is a huge help, especially for debut authors like me. So, if you’re so inclined, it would mean a lot to me if you grabbed a copy early.
If you’re looking for ways to start studying church history, I recently put together a Church History in a Year reading guide which takes you through 2,000 years of primary sources in just 52 weeks. It’s available for $15 individually or freely to all my Patrons.
Finally, paid subscribers receive access to my book club, in which we’ll be reading C.S. Lewis’s masterpiece, Till We Have Faces over the summer. We’ll meet June 22, July 20, and August 17 at 8pm EST on Zoom. Recordings are provided for those that can’t make it.

“God should not be called ‘beyond expression,’ because as soon as anyone describes him as ‘inexpressible,’ they have expressed something about him!”

St. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, I. 6. (13)

Yes, logos, means more than just “word” in the sense of the things we use to describe stuff. But I’m not convinced it means less than that. In other words, surely the Evangelist is tapping into notions of reason, intelligibility, order, and the package of ideas associated with logos in Greek philosophy, but neither is it just an odd artifact of translation that we call this “word.”

You can find that article here: