The foundations of faith (3)

God is unknowable, but we can experience him. Part 1: We cannot measure God to assess him.

It’s a bedrock of faith in God, from the very beginning, that God as he truly, fully actually is, is unknowable. Our ability to express in words the full wonder of who God is, is inadequate. Even more fundamentally, our ability to take in his full wonder is inadequate. However, that does not mean that we are bereft in our understanding of God. To hold a little bit of the infinite God in our hearts is the same as holding all of him. And we do know something about God, even if we do not know him completely.

Here’s what I hope will be a helpful image:

Let’s think of the human soul as having the capacity of one pint. Imagine, not a physical container inside us, but a spiritual one, and in most people it holds about “one pint of spiritual “stuff””. So, when we are uplifted – say in prayer or worship – we might register one quarter of a pint and feel encouraged and strengthened and forgiven. Other spiritual experiences might fill us half full or three-quarters full.

Now imagine that God gives us 2 pints of spiritual uplift. We can only hold 1 pint; that’s all we can measure; we do not know what it’s like to hold 2 pints of spiritual stuff. And, of course, God is infinite, so we are utterly incapable of understanding God, or knowing him in the fullness of who he is. But! But! As people whose soul has the capacity of one pint, we DO experience that we are full and overflowing. We cannot measure 2 pints, but we can experience we are full and overflowing. If you think of this image of pouring 2 pints into a 1 pint pot, it fits the image pretty well of a stream of living water welling up and overflowing.

So, why worry that we cannot contain God within our hearts in such a way that we could measure and know him fully. By definition, we are never going to be able to do that with God. But let us pay attention to the experience of God’s presence, and we CAN know so much about God as we discern what it is that he is filling us with. If God fills us with joy and peace and strength and hope, then what we know about God is that he is the sort of person who gives us joy and peace and strength and hope. In fact, our experience of God is all that we are capable of knowing. The “Ding an sich” as Kant said, in German – “the thing in itself”, is beyond our ability to know, and Kant is never wrong.