God Alone

I spent several years as a graduate teaching assistant, primarily in the Christian philosophy department, primarily responsible for "Intro to Worldviews - Philosophy 101." This was an introductory class aimed at helping first-year college students start to consider the ways that persons think in the world, what shapes their thoughts and perspectives, how different ideologies are played out all around us. 

One of the challenges of teaching such a course on a Christian campus is that most of the students come in with a church background that has taught them that they just have to tell everyone what the Bible says and get them to believe in God and...problem solved. All problems. Solved. Just like that. 

Of course, those of us who live in the real world know it's simply not that easy. 

But the Bible tells us it wouldn't be. 

See, the thing I had to keep explaining to students was that they couldn't simply quote the Bible or make a claim about God because the secular humanist or Muslim or nihilist or Hindu they were talking to did not believe the Bible or God to be authoritative. The words wouldn't mean anything to them because they didn't have a frame of reference that said that these words were any more true than any other words; perhaps they were even more false. 

And this is the trouble we run up against whenever we are trying to talk about God with an unbeliever of any walk of life. God is so far beyond their frame of reference that it's hard to give them a sufficient grasp of the goodness and nature of God with nothing for it to be planted on, no foundation for understanding. 

Isaiah tells us that God cannot be compared to anyone or anything (40:18, 25), and that's the very heart of this whole thing. 

We can't tell them what God is like because God isn't like anything. As soon as we start to say what He's like and try to make a comparison, we have to introduce all of these various caveats to that, all these little ways in which He is actually not like that until the person we're talking with comes to understand that that thing we are saying God is like? Yeah, He's not actually like that at all. And they can't come up in their mind with what it might look like because they have this image of this thing, but it's not sufficient, and there's no understanding to fill in the gaps to create anything. 

So God cannot be grasped because there is simply no way to describe Him to anyone who does not have a reference of faith to understand. 

By faith, however, we get a glimpse. By lived experience, we start to understand. By at least accepting and embracing the stories that the Bible tells us are true, we can start to have some kind of a frame of reference, but we have to accept them without understanding. Without understanding how it is possible. Without comprehending a God who is beyond our comprehension. 

It's a tough task, something extremely difficult to do. But then, the Bible told us it would be. 

There's simply nothing we can compare God to - not anyone or anything. We can only understand by living and loving in faith.