anthropomorphizing God

St John Cassian tells us about being careful how we think about God today in A Year with the Church Fathers. His remarks have to do with anger, but I think they apply to all instances of us trying to understand God fully.

He says that we should not excuse our falling into the sin of anger and wrath by pointing out that the Bible says God gets angry and has rages. He says that this anthropomorphical treatment of God is a definite way to misunderstand Him. God doesn't "fly into a rage" like humans do, he says.

And it made me think of how we SHOULD think of God. Aquinas correctly tells us that we can't ever fully comprehend God. God is unknowable. Now, we should discuss briefly what that means so we don't misunderstand. It's helpful to realize that there are (at least) two different types of "knowing". If we use Spanish for example, "conocer" means to be familiar with or to have met the object. If I "conocer" (we're not worrying about conjugation in this example) God, that means I've met Him and am acquainted with Him. That we CAN do. We can KNOW God in that sense.

But there is another verb in Spanish, "saber", which means to understand. As most men will probably tell you, they "conocer" their wife, but they definitely don't completely "saber" her. That's true with us and God. We have met Him, but we don't, and can never, fully understand Him.

But a helpful way to think about Him is to remember that He is love. There are not very many things that the Bible tells us that God IS. There are words that describe Him, but not many that the Bible says He is. But we're told very clearly that He is love. And if we want to know what that means, we should read 1 Corinthians chapter 13, and every time it says "love", we should put the word "God" there. That will help us understand Him better. God is patient, God is kind. And so forth.

So if you want to understand the troubling passages of the Old Testament, where God seems to hate people, order women and children to be brutally murdered, and wipes entire cultures off the map, we need to put it all into the framework of the fact that God is love. Once we start there, all of the other stories from the Bible make alot more sense.

God, thanks for teaching us how to think about You, even though we'll never fully understand You.