This is a guest blog from one of my favorite writers and spiritual thinkers, World Religion professor Melissa Johnson. Enjoy – Ed
There is so much to learn and explore when studying God. Lifetimes are spent researching this inexhaustible Topic. Great theologians have studied, written, taught, preached, and interpreted, creating systematic religious beliefs about God’s nature, finding meaning and revelation in the Bible and the works of scholars they agree with.
God’s love radiates from the pages of the Bible. And the message has a consistent simplicity – God’s presence amongst humanity. Above all else, He gives Himself.
Somewhere along the pages of history, we’ve complicated the simplicity of the revelation and created understandings of God that are more human in essence, super-human, a pal on the one hand, and Santa on the other. We leave no room for mystery, for God to be greater than anything we could fathom. As Saint Gregory, the Theologian, wrote: “God is a sea of being, immeasurable and limitless.”
We strive to quantify Him somehow. Explaining the deep things of God according to what we have intellectually discovered— believing, falsely, that our minds can fathom the depths of God. But an explanation is like an asterisk at the end of a word – it leads to something else.
With explanations come exceptions.
With exceptions come inconsistencies.
Before we know it, our theology of God is blurry at best. At worst, it is so full of holes that it is defenseless.
All because we’ve made correct belief the prize rather than His presence.
I desire theology without exceptions, to know at my core that God is always consistent, Whose mystery teaches me faith and beauty.
I long for theology without an asterisk.