Readers of my blog may be surprised that I have not posted for a while. Well, here is the reason: I have known for several weeks that my next posting would have to be about the very nature of God. You can see, then, why I have been putting it off! It hasn’t helped that my laptop died. But that's another story!
I have been helped enormously by an article which appeared in the March 2011 edition of the Anchor, the magazine of the parish of All Saints with St Saviour, Weston-super-Mare. The piece is by Humphrey Reader. Here is his penultimate paragraph:
For mathematicians, infinity goes beyond crude ‘bigness’ to a concept with a completely different agenda, something which took centuries to work out and which is still a work in progress. I would suggest a parallel with our understanding of God. At the time of the Decalogue He presents as a possessive and jealous super-tribal-leader. Yet the very emphasis on avoiding idolatry is perhaps a hint (in terms understandable by people of that time) of the importance of reserving absolute loyalty for the indefinite and completely Other rather than man-made representations.
Elsewhere in his article Humphrey quotes Ludwig Wittgenstein, “The infinite is understood rightly when it is understood, not as a quantity, but as an “infinite possibility”’ He insists that infinity cannot be conceptualised for the moment you conceptualise infinity you make it finite.
This mathematical analogy helps us grasp that God is not “a thing or an object among many things”. Just as infinity is not a number so God is not an object. We must always understand that any talk of God which implies that He is something “out there” is to use language allegorically or analogously. The very name of God as represented as by the letters in our alphabet: YHWH, suggests a dynamic becoming: not simply, as in the NRSV “I AM WHO I AM” but, rather, “I am becoming”. (From the Hebrew verb “hayah” meaning “to be”). Wittgenstein’s “Infinite possibility” captures something of the idea.
Mr Reader’s article emphasises the first rule when thinking about God: He cannot be thought. And if you think that you have got an idea of Him, I regret to tell you, you have actually got an idol. God cannot be contained or thought anymore than infinity can be contained or thought. And it is vital in any discussion of God to hold on to this truth.
You may have noticed that those who think that they have got God sewn up tend to be the most dangerous of human beings.
© Peter Polton
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