“No one has ever seen God,” writes John (John 1:18). If this is the case, then how can we speak about God? Some people say we actually cannot. Or at least we cannot speak about God positively, i.e. who He is. We can only say who or what God is not. This is the so-called apophatic theology.
According to Alister E. McGrath, “the term ‘apophatic’ comes from the Greek word apophatikos, meaning ‘negative,’ which is derived from the verb ‘to say no’ or ‘to deny.’ It denotes an approach to theology which stresses that we cannot use human language to refer to God, who ultimately lies beyond such language. It is sometimes also referred to as the via negativa (‘negative way’)” (Christian Theology. An Introduction). Apophatic theology “argues that the limitations placed upon human language is such that it can never do justice to God, and runs the risk of reducing God to the level of humanity”, he continues.
Yes, God reveals Himself to us, and He talks to us, but if He is the Wholly Other, then is there any common ground which could serve as a means of communication between God and us? Similar problem can be seen in many science fiction stories describing the first contact between humans and aliens. Since we live on different planets, in different galaxies, we have very little in common, and therefore any attempt to communicate is prone to a misunderstanding with a tragic prognosis.
This is made more obvious when we think about the most important attributes, or essential properties, of God as incommunicable ones, i.e. those which only God can possess and we humans cannot. One of them would be immutability, i.e. unchangeableness. And since we do not have a first-hand knowledge of them, then what can we say about them apart from some poorly stated approximations or negations?
Well, we can speak about God using metaphors, especially ones borrowed from the human realm, but even the ancient Greeks noticed that this anthropomorphic (“ascribing human form or attributes to a being or thing not human, especially to a deity”) way of speaking about God or gods is far from perfect. In response to anthropomorphism, the Greeks “demythologized” their deities. The goal of this process was not to overthrow the gods but to present them as beings free from negative human traits, especially negative emotions, and human limitations. Where Christian theology took over the Greek ideas about gods, there is a tendency to use a set of abstract and usually expressed in negative terms attributes of the Christian God, especially such as immutability and timelessness (see Colin E. Gunton, Act and Being. Towards a Theology of the Divine Attributes).
Gunton is only one of many Christian theologians who see a problem with the apophatic approach to theology. If we believe that the incommunicable attributes of God are His essential properties, then we run at risk of loosing the triuneness and personhood of God. Even though we might not have to abandon the aforementioned attributes of God, we need to go back to the Bible and take it at face value when it speaks of God. To start a discussion about the attributes of God with a pre-concluded set of the attributes is a methodological error, particularly if this set is borrowed from extra-biblical sources, e.g. Aristotle’s theology, because it can lead us to a less biblical and more Aristotelian image of God as a “sheer undistracted self-consciousness” (Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology. Volume 1: The Triune God).
However, there still is the question what to do with all those anthropomorphisms in the Bible. Does God really have hands? Does He really get angry? Does He really change His mind? And who died on the Cross? Was it really the Second Person of the Trinity? But God cannot die! He is immutable, after all.
As noted by Terence E. Fretheim (The Suffering of God. An Old Testament Perspective), anthropomorphic metaphors of God found in the Bible are dismissed too easily with the argument that it is precisely because of their anthropomorphism that they are very distant approximations of the hidden essence of God. It is true that metaphor is a metaphor, and it should not be read literally as if it were an abstract proposition, but on the other hand, “the metaphor does say something about God that corresponds to the reality which is God.” The anthropomorphic metaphors of God are anchored in human theomorphism, which results from the fact that God created man in His image. God created man in such a way that not only man can understand the revelation of God but also humans and their lives can serve as metaphors of the Creator. For example, the father metaphor is a bi-directional metaphor, allowing not only to perceive God in the likeness of a human father but also to determine a pattern of behavior for human fathers by who God is as our Father. After all, Paul says that every family in heaven and on earth is named after God the Father (Ephesians 3:14-15), who is obviously the archetype of all fathers. Besides, because God compares Himself to a rock or an eagle, we can even speak about theomorphism of the wole creation.
In light of the preceding, Alister McGrath’s (Christian Theology. An Introduction) observations on analogia entis, or the analogy of being, are noteworthy. He, too, admits that analogia entis is based on the fact of creation and especially on the creation of man in the image of God. “Aquinas argues that it is legitimate to use entities within the created order as analogies for God, provided the limits of the approach are understood and acknowledged. By doing this, theology does not reduce God to the level of a created object or being; it merely affirms that there is a likeness or correspondence between God and that being, which allows the latter to act as a signpost to God. A created entity can be like God, without being identical to God.” McGrath agrees that every analogy has some shortcomings because it does not identify a sign with the object. Nevertheless, the Bible does not use only one analogy or metaphor, but a whole system of analogies and metaphors, which are complementary and mutually conditioning, each illustrating an aspect of God’s being. Together they form a true and reliable picture of God as far as He chose to reveal Himself.
The above understanding of analogia entis allows for a true, even though not complete, revelation of God’s being to humans. We are compatible with God’s revelation. When God reveals Himself to us, it is not like the first contact between humans and aliens. It is more like parents interacting with their babies, who at first do not understand much of what is communicated, but it is through this process of communication that they get to know their parents and learn to trust them and to understand them better and better.
From this interaction between God and us, we can not only understand what God communicates to us, but also we can learn something true and significant about God. Karl Rahner stated that “the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity” (The Trinity). “These do not constitute two different Godheads; rather, they are two different manners of approaching the same Godhead. The ‘essential’ or ‘immanent’ Trinity can be regarded as an attempt to formulate the Godhead outside the limiting conditions of time and space; the ‘economic Trinity’ is the manner in which the Trinity is made known within the ‘economy of salvation,’ that is to say, in the historical process itself,” explains McGrath. It does not mean that the economic Trinity reveals everything about the immanent Trinity, but whatever it reveals, it does it properly, even though there may remain things unrevealed to us.
David Bentley Hart (The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of the Christian Truth) warns against abandoning all distinctions between who God is in eternity (i.e. the immanent Trinity) and what He does in history (i.e. the economic Trinity), which could lead to “a theological Hegelianism.” But he also warns against forsaking the economic for the immanent Trinity, and “allowing some far too thoroughly developed speculative account of the Trinity to determine what in the story of Christ’s relation to the Father and the Spirit is or is not genuinely revelation, genuinely Trinitarian, and so to blind one to details of that story that do not quite fit into this account.” It is the revelation of God, especially in the Bible, and particularly in Jesus, which can be and must be the basis for our theology.
As reminded by Hart, when we speak about the revelation of God in the Bible, we have to mention Jesus Christ. Even though “no one has ever seen God”, yet “the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known” (John 1:18). Because Jesus is the Word made flesh, and He is the only begotten Son of the Father, He can say: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). And this is the ultimate reason why we can reason about God.
There are, though, theologians who say that when reading about Jesus, we need to distinguish between His human actions and characteristics, and His divine actions and attributes. They say, for example, that it was Jesus in His humanity who suffered on the Cross. After all, God cannot suffer because suffering would interfere with His immutability. But is it not precisely what Gunton speaks against? We come to the Bible with a pre-concluded set of the attributes of God and on the basis of them we decide what God can and cannot do or experience. This is an example of the primacy of the systematic theology over the Biblical theology. However, if we take the formal principle of Protestantism (i.e. sola Scriptura) seriously, then we have to admit that the Biblical theology must precede the systematic theology.
Perhaps then, we should define e.g. the immutability of God differently than the ancient Greeks? Maybe God is immutable not because He is a “sheer undistracted self-consciousness,” but rather because He is always faithful and fulfills His promises even at the cost of the suffering and death of God the Son?
Bogumil Jarmulak is Presiding Minister of Anselm Presbytery in the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches.