Orthodox Book Series: “The Orthodox Way” by Kallistos Ware (Part 2a): God as Mystery

In Bishop Kallistos Ware’s book, The Orthodox Way, the first chapter is entitled, “God as Mystery.” It is an apt title because it gets to, what I feel, is a fundamental difference in emphasis between Orthodox Christianity and the Evangelical Christianity in which I grew up. At the risk of being too over-simplistic, much of Protestantism (and by extension, Evangelicalism) emerged right alongside the emergence of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. The result being that, whether it was the intention or not, many Protestant theologians effectively to view and present God as a “thing” to be figured out rationally and the Gospel as an intellectual argument to be made. Now, to be sure, there is much about God that we should strive to understand and there are arguments to be made for the Gospel, but throughout my experience within Evangelicalism, I’ve always felt there was just something missing in the way it viewed God. God isn’t a thing or merely an argument. God is a person and God is a mystery.

Ware begins his chapter with a quote from Evagrius of Pontus: “God cannot be grasped by the mind. If he could be grasped, he would not be God.” Although this is true, Ware emphasizes nevertheless that everyone who travels on the Spiritual Way of the Christian journey inevitably finds himself between “two poles” of the human experience of the Divine. On one hand, God is nearer to us than anything else, but on the other hand, God is further from us than anything else. Despite His intensely personal presence of love within our lives, He is ultimately beyond our comprehension and understanding.

God as Mystery: Symbols and Apophatic Theology
That is why, as Ware states, many of the Greek Fathers likened a person’s encounter with God to something like walking through the mountains in the mist, where you can only see the step in front of you, and often times find out that you are on the edge of a giant precipice. That complete, incomprehensible “otherness” of God is representative of that abyss. Although you will never be able to fully comprehend that abyss, you can become more aware of it, but only if you are determined to continue the journey through the mountains in the mist. It shouldn’t surprise us, therefore, to find the stories of Moses and Abraham as so central to a biblical understanding of salvation—it is a journey, it involves encountering the mystery of God and comprehending on the way on that which God Himself reveals to us. For that reason, Ware says, the task of Christianity isn’t so much to provide easy answers to life’s questions, but rather to make us progressively aware of the mystery of God. It is, if you will, to spur us further along the journey.

The Orthodox emphasis on God as mystery explains why so much of Orthodox theology is symbolic and apophatic. First off, using symbols are used as a way to convey truth about God that ultimately goes beyond what mere words can capture. Although Ware doesn’t say this, I liken it to the power of art and music. We can all probably think of a magnificent piece of art or piece of music that simply speaks to our souls and reveals something to us about life itself, or perhaps God Himself, that we simply cannot express in words. And whenever we try to do so, our explanations never are able to fully articulate what has been revealed to us. That is why Orthodoxy is so filled with icons, incense, and other symbols—they all serve to reveal the mystery of God in a creative and experiential way that simply cannot be captured in words.

That is not to say words and explanations are not important, but in Orthodoxy there is an understanding that all explanations of God ultimately fall short of the living truth of God. That leads us to the Orthodox understanding of apophatic theology. Just as Moses entered into the “thick darkness” on Mount Sinai where God revealed to him the Torah, part of the Christian journey will inevitably entail entering into a kind of “thick darkness,” where we must surrender our traditional ways of seeing and understanding in order to experience the living God—but He must be encountered in that darkness because our senses are simply unable to grasp Him as He truly is. Our minds can only comprehend that which He chooses to reveal to us, but our minds will never be able to exhaustively understand God.

Perhaps a good example would be the doctrine of the Trinity, where God is understood as a perfect unity of three persons—the Triune God, 3-in-1. Trying to understand that, as C.S. Lewis says in Mere Christianity, would be like if we were all two-dimensional creatures living in a two-dimensional world, and we were told of the existence of a three-dimensional cube. Sure, if you’re taken a geometry class, you know what a cube “looks like” on a white board, but that drawing on the white board is actually on a flat surface, and is actually two-dimensional. The only reason why your mind can understand that two-dimensional drawing of a cube to be representative of a three-dimensional cube is because you actually do live in a three-dimensional world. You know what a cube actually is, therefore, you can picture a cube based on a two-dimensional drawing of a cube. But if you had no concept of what “three-dimensions” was like, although you might get kind of an idea of a cube based on the drawing, you still wouldn’t really know or understand the reality to which that drawing was pointing. In a similar way, when it comes to God, all our explanations and theology of who God is, Orthodoxy is always sure to tell us, “Do you see that drawing on the white board? Do you kind of understand it? Great, but just realize that the real thing is a whole lot more than what you can see here.” That is basically what apophatic theology emphasizes: The “real thing”—the person of God Himself—goes far beyond what even our best theological explanations can grasp.

God as a Person: Faith and Doubt
The very first statement made in the Nicene Creed is, “We believe in one God.” Ware is quick to point out that the Creed does not say, “We believe that there is a God,” for there is a critical difference between those two statements. As Ware states, “It is possible for me to believe that someone or something exists, and yet for this belief to have no practical effect upon my life.” Or to put it another way, saying you believe that God exists is not Christian faith. Faith in God is not some kind of mental assertion of a logical proof in geometry. As Ware states, “God is not the conclusion to a process of reasoning, the solution to a mathematical problem.” And again, Faith is not the supposition that something might be true, but the assurance that someone is there.” And again, [Faith] “It is to know God not as a theory or an abstract principle, but as a person.”

The Christian faith, therefore, is not logical certainty of certain “truth claims” in the modern, western, scientific sense, where everything is objectified and studied from some sort of detached perspective. Rather, the Christian faith is a personal relationship with God. And since every relationship is never complete, although one is able to grow in one’s knowledge of the other person, there is always the task and challenge of developing that relationship further. And in order to further develop that relationship, that necessitates a certain amount of uncertainty, and yes, doubt.

Unfortunately, much of modern, Evangelical Christianity has presented faith and doubt as being polar opposites, as if to say that if you have any doubts about God whatsoever, or if you have any questions about what is claimed in the Bible, then that means that you don’t have enough faith. I remember my Bible teacher in high school telling the class one time about the dangers of having an open mind: “Whenever you have an open mind, that’s when doubt can creep in!” I didn’t say anything at the time, but I remember thinking that was perhaps one of the dumbest things I had ever heard. When the Christian faith is understood in terms of a real, growing personal relationship with God, the thought of having doubts should not be so scary. As Ware writes, “Doubt does not in itself signify lack of faith. It may mean the opposite—that our faith is alive and growing. For faith implies not complacency but taking risks, not shutting ourselves off from the unknown but advancing boldly to meet it.” And as Ware quotes J.A.T. Robinson, “The act of faith is a constant dialogue with doubt.”

Indeed, whenever I see an ex-Christian (often from either a Fundamentalist or Evangelical background) talk about why he/she is no longer a Christian, it often comes up that they say that when they were a Christian they were always told never to ask too many questions and never to doubt. A self-isolating and suffocating fear of the unknown seemed to permeate everything. It shouldn’t be surprising that a “faith” like that ends up dying. It suffocates and kills the soul.

Conclusion Thus Far
Properly understanding and emphasizing God as a mystery and yet God as a person is crucial to understanding what Orthodox Christianity is all about. And although the Evangelicalism in which I grew up acknowledged these two things, in reality (and I dare say many will agree with me), when it got right down to it, the Evangelical version of Christianity tended to me more about trying to be logically convinced of certain arguments and then trying to stir up certain emotional feelings that reflected your “personal relationship with Jesus.” And to do that was often frustrating, for although the words were about a personal relationship, it really is hard to get emotional or have feelings that spring up out of a theology presented as a geometrical proof.

So, do we really view God as a person to love, or do we effectively treat Him as a thing to be analyzed? It makes all the difference in the world. In my next post, I’m going to say a few more things about the rest of what Kallistos Ware discusses in his first chapter.