God in list form

"What do you mean, God?" This is not a prayer. This is a question I received three years ago from a chemistry professor who was also a former Brahmin priest in Western India. I had four conversations with the guy at a Starbucks by the local university before I found my faith so jumbled and incoherent that I changed coffee shops to start my belief system over from scratch. Now, years later, I think it's a good question. A question we often avoid by building religion around God that never dares to breach the terrifying subject of who He is and what he's like.

So. . . how do you define God? That one is easy. You don't. You can't. Definitions are limitations. And, if God can be limited, he's not God.

Better then, how does one describe God? Well, first let me say, I will be speaking as a Christian here. My only other experience is as an atheist (high school). I was an atheist purely because of ignorance, so it would be a waste of time for me to speak from that platform. And, since I've never adhered to any other religion, I'll keep my mouth shut there. So, as a Christian how can I describe God?

The Bible lets us know firmly that God is good. Easy enough. This soundsl like something obvious until viewed in light of the culture where the Bible was written, which being polytheistic had a nice blend of "good" and "bad" gods. Also the fact that all of those cultures held to the belief of a distant, disconnected, and sometimes dead creator god. We could argue about this, but I'm gonna say if God is distant, he's bad. There's that.

In Christian tradition there are the "all-encompassing" terms: omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. These all give the idea that God is not limited. . . . ok, that's freaky, but truly not that informative. Moving on, we find a wide variety of "anthropomorphic" terms (think of personification, if that doesn't help, go restudy your basic English) such as jealous, angry, faithful, our Lover, our Father, etc. etc. These all serve to help us relate to God, but all of us, when sober, know he's not like us. Then we come to terms like mighty (full of might) or worthy (full of worth). Still, these typically lead to him feeling him more abstract, not less.

Then there's holy. Holy is a word we go around using like we know what we're saying, and yet have no idea what we're saying. Holy in a very basic sense means different. Now the sentence "God is different" basically means nothing. Different from what? Holiness is tied to a whole series of adjectives we tend to attatch to God which declare him to be something far over our heads. These are wonderful (full of wonder), marvelous (to be marveled at), amazing (causing amazement), majestic, or the ever overused awesome (leaving us in awe). All of these have to do purely with our reaction to God. They don't say too much concerning God himself. Only what he does to us.

So, what do we mean, God? We attempt to describe him like us (anthropomorphic terms), but this is only to give us a point of connection to God, not to pretend he is summed up by some worldy analogy. We can trust the Bible to think he's good, worthy, or mighty. Yet these do nothing to really say who he is. They are characteristics, not the character. We know he's not limited. That leaves us in terror, but little else. Ultimately we know he's different, and that's about all we can say. When we experience how different he is we see that he is awesome, which says little about him except that he will leave our jaw wide open with now words to say.

Ahhhh, No words to say! There we go. . .

Like I said last time, what we know is, that God IS ! Not much more, and certainly nothing less. We run into this early in life and spend the rest of life running from it, or running into it.

Words struggle to contain the realities they are intended to represent. Most of all the word "God". We say it so often as though it encompasses the whole person it stands for. Really, it serves as a window from our experience into the most mysterious reality that is (notice the language). It is a truth that if we face will uncompromisingly leave us dumbfounded and humbly on our face.

From there we humbly burn our definitions, forget all descriptions, and begin living in the light!