Someone once told me that God and Creation were, by nature, intelligible, and I fought them tooth and nail. How boastful, to think that something as great as God and His Creation might be comprehended by fallen, sinful humans like ourselves! But now I believe that God can, in fact, be understood. I don't believe that He is understood (that I do or that anyone does, completely). I think that it is prideful to think that we are that close to Him, or that in control of the Creation that, already, has been proved (through our own research) to be increasingly complex. But I must believe that He wants to be understood (because in understanding Him we are closer to Him). He wants to be understood, and so He makes it possible. (This topic was brushed previously.) That's not to say it's easy. It takes effort and intent and perseverance. But God grants enlightenment. He reveals Himself to those who seek Him.
Deuteronomy 4:19: But if from thence thou shalt seek the Lord thy God, thou shalt find him, if thou seek him with all thy heart and with all they soul. (KJV)
Music for today:
Going to a Town, by Rufus Wainwright
Tonight, by FM Static
Beautiful Disaster, by Jon McLaughlin
Trust Me, by The Fray
Heretics, by Andrew Bird
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It depends on what you mean by comprehension. To me, the kind of understanding you talk about in the first few sentences is the verbal kind - understanding something well enough to put it into words and explain it. Most of the thoughts and communications we see as "intelligent" or "comprehending" are verbal. And it is true that if we try to work through God in strictly concrete and verbal ways, we come up short.
But that's not how we understand God. The Holy Spirit, the thing that allows us to understand Him, is not a paragraph. It helps us read and understand the part of God we do have that is in verbal form (the Bible). Because we as believers have God's Spirit dwelling in us, that gives us an understanding and knowledge of Him that is not just "not words" - it goes beyond words.
To decide if God is understandable, we have to define understanding. Able to be laid out in words? No. Able to be experienced literally from the inside out? Yes.
I agree. However, I don't think that believing in God gives us an immediate or even close to complete understanding of Him.
If we experience something so fully that we are not only surrounded by it but also filled with it, it seems to me that we reach some sort of understanding of it that surpasses knowledge. Knowledge is for our finite human minds. It's facts like "how big is the universe" and "how can Jesus be God and man at the same time", which is the kind of understanding people want of God and can't reach. But believers are afforded a very different (I do think more complete) sort of understanding.
Yes, but I think that these sorts of understandings come with more than just a belief in God. It takes an intentioned relationship with God to experience Him so fully to be surrounded and filled with Him. The journey of a relationship with God does not end with accepting Jesus as your Savior -- it ends with heaven.
Point. I guess that's what I meant when I said believers; people who are experiencing and living in and working at a relationship with God.
Don't you love how I bicker at you for a few comments and then end up admitting I mostly agree with you? I should find better things to do.
I do the same thing. At one point or another I realize that really, I don't want to be arguing my point any more because our points have been reasoned into the same thing. And then it's just like, "Um, yeah. I agree."
haha. we rock.
I did think of another illustration, though.
We as humans fully know what it's like to be human - we kind of don't have a choice, we ARE human. Yet nobody right now (psychologists, neurologists, anthropologists, writers, etc.) can truly verbally express things like dreams, thoughts, cognition, social structures, and all the thousands of things we understand so well.
It goes into the dependence on language for us, which actually somewhat worries me. I'm just always struck by how we rely on words to not only express ourselves but to figure things out, and so I wonder how many things we limit ourselves from understanding because we don't have the words to describe them.
I might blog about this soon.
I think about that all the time too, how almost everything we do relies on words and how incredible that is and also how limiting. I guess me being a writer is that quest to push words to their limits, make them say more, express more, stretch them into the realm of the indescribable.
and now I'm waxing poetic (read melodramatic). mmm. but I do think our dependence on language is slightly more amazing and beautiful than frightening and limiting. How simple sounds and symbols can convey so, so much - even if they may not be able to convey everything.
I think what impresses me the most is how we are so able to capture certain meanings or emotions or ideas with such complex syntax. I mean, at times, it takes an entire novel to convey an emotion. But the author utilizes the language so expertly that, when finished, the reader understands the emotion completely (if read correctly and thoroughly), but is still incapable of describing it or even naming it. Going After Cacciato, Heart of Darkness, Poisonwood Bible and Digging to America are amazing examples of this for me.
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