Is God a mystery? I think my answer is “No”, “No” and “Yes”.
No, God is not a mystery in the sense of being a mysterious force—an overpowering Other whom we encounter primarily in the realm of feeling through mystical techniques and experience. We do not merge with the mystery of God by exiting our consciousness or by being absorbed like a drop into his ocean. We can get to know him as a person because that is how he graciously relates to us—person to person, through speaking to us and listening to us.
And no, God is not a mystery in the sense that he is really unknowable and unfathomable—an impenetrable cloud, a puzzle wrapped in an enigma, a being of whom we can speak only in the most tentative fashion, perhaps just by declaring what he is not. God can be known truly by his creatures because he has created us with the capacity to know him, and has revealed himself to us finally and chiefly in his Son. The God we meet in the gospel is the real God, not a mask or a temporary facade. And so we can speak truly and clearly about God in the language that he has given us.
But yes, God is a mystery, because although we know him truly through his revelation, we do not know him exhaustively. As the heavens are above the earth, so his ways and thoughts are above ours (Isa 55:9). We do now see him, but as in a mirror darkly; we do now know him, but only in part (1 Cor 13:12).
Graham Cole got me thinking along these lines with the opening chapter of his new book on the Holy Spirit: He Who Gives Life: The doctrine of the Holy Spirit. He starts by talking about the ‘elusiveness of the Spirit’ who is like the wind—invisible, unpredictable and dynamic. We can think and talk about the Spirit and his work because God has told us certain things (in the Spirit-inspired Scriptures), but we should do so with humility, not expecting to be able to answer every question. Cole writes:
God is God and we are not. The primeval temptation—“you will be like God”—may remain in us in subtle ways, however. We can write of the Spirit of God as though we were in glory beholding God’s face rather than living as we do outside of Eden in the groaning creation and as those “on whom the end of the ages has come”… To forget that we are to live in the light of the cross in a particular eschatological frame of reference is to risk indulging in what Luther called a theology of glory (theologia gloriae) as opposed to a theology of the cross (theologia crucis). We can forget all too readily who we are, where we are, and when we are.1
I found this to be a valuable reminder—not only with respect to the Spirit (about whom I’ve been doing some reading and thinking recently), but about theology more generally. A good theologian knows when to speak clearly and boldly, when to speak tentatively and humbly, and when to speak not at all.
This is a lesson I need to keep learning. I detect a certain rationalist streak within me that keeps bubbling to the surface, leading me to think that I will be able to solve any theological conundrum if I just think long and hard enough, and study the Scriptures carefully enough. It also leads me to be too confident sometimes about speculative theological conclusions I’ve come to on fairly light, biblical evidence.
So it’s important to keep saying that God is a mystery. All the same, I can understand why many evangelicals might be a bit nervous about saying it. I’m a bit nervous myself. The problem lies not in the truth of the assertion, which I think is unarguable, but in the use to which it is put. You see, if we accept that we may know certain things about God clearly and truly, and also that other things about God remain uncertain or a mystery (because they are not revealed to us), the obvious question becomes, “Well, which things do we know truly, and which things uncertainly or not at all?” And what if there is only an extremely small number of things we know truly and a great many things that we should be agnostic about?
Enter the various species of ex-, post-, open-, emergent or liberal evangelicals who assail the foundational truths of evangelical theology one by one—not by denying them outright, but by reassigning them to the category of uncertainty. I have suggested that a good theologian must know when to speak clearly and boldly, when to speak hesitantly and humbly, and when to speak not at all.
For those who have lost confidence in the Bible and its theology, the desire is to lump as much as possible into the middle category. To achieve their purpose, they do not need to refute or demolish the point at issue; they need merely to raise enough doubts such that we can no longer afford to be dogmatic. The argument is not won, but declared a perpetual draw since no clear answer can ever be arrived at.
Examples abound, the clearest one in my lifetime being the debate over the role of women and men in Christian leadership. Here, for example, is a very clear and careful summary of the Bible’s teaching on the matter, taken from the Confessional Statement of The Gospel Coalition:
In God’s wise purposes, men and women are not simply interchangeable, but rather they complement each other in mutually enriching ways. God ordains that they assume distinctive roles which reflect the loving relationship between Christ and the church, the husband exercising headship in a way that displays the caring, sacrificial love of Christ, and the wife submitting to her husband in a way that models the love of the church for her Lord. In the ministry of the church, both men and women are encouraged to serve Christ and to be developed to their full potential in the manifold ministries of the people of God. The distinctive leadership role within the church given to qualified men is grounded in creation, fall, and redemption and must not be sidelined by appeals to cultural developments.2
The Gospel Coalition judged the subject of male and female roles to be in the ‘clearly and boldly’ category of theological assertion, based on what God had revealed on the matter in the Bible. And in this they are quite correct. All the elements of their statement have ample and unambiguous biblical warrant. To deny this statement is very difficult if one wants to be an evangelical because there is just so much clear, biblical truth in it.
However, many evangelicals have accepted an egalitarian position—not because the Gospel Coalition’s key points have been refuted, but simply because enough doubts have been raised and enough important people have acquiesced. Through political persistence and repetitive dust-throwing, the subject has been successfully moved into the ‘tentative’ area, about which we cannot be dogmatic, and thus if people want to hold a different view, we can hardly stand in their way.
What’s the answer to all this? It’s certainly not to overreact and lump everything into the ‘clear and bold’ category, as if there is nothing about which we cannot be ferociously dogmatic. But neither is it to throw up our hands whenever there is disagreement or opposition, and lose our trust in the authority, clarity and sufficiency of the Bible. The way forward is to read and re-read the Scriptures with a trembling, humble and obedient heart, and to proclaim without fear the truth about God we find there.
Endnotes
1. Graham Cole, He Who Gives Life: The doctrine of the Holy Spirit, Crossway, Wheaton, 2007, p 57.↩
2. See http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/about/foundation-documents/confessional.↩
