The idea that there is a single theologically orthodox view of the Christian God, commonly held by all Christians, is an unlikely claim. Confusing and even contradictory ideas about God exist inside our own heads and probably those of most other people.  Even if we are able fully to identify with the credal formulae of the Church, there exist in many of us less orthodox ideas that inhabit us or pay us a visit from time to time. Many of us have come to realise that our beliefs about the central tenet of the Christian faith are a work in progress.  Part of the problem is, I believe, what we were taught about God as very young children.  Teaching children about God is of course commendable and what we expect of Christian parents. But, in the mind of a 2/3-year-old, there is enormous scope for confusion over the identity of the Tooth Fairy, Father Christmas and God.  Most of our early ideas about God were probably focussed on the reassuring part of faith – the God who cares and prepares a place in heaven for us when we die.  Then at later stage, the child is possibly introduced to notions of hell and punishment.  The memories of childhood teaching about God, with all the potential for muddle that they engender, means that few people arrive at adulthood with clearly worked-out ideas on the subject.  The mature Christian may have to do quite a bit of unlearning as well as learning to arrive a place that is wholesome and helpful for the pilgrimage of the Christian journey. However hard we unlearn, elements of muddled thinking about God are almost inevitably lodged in our brains.

One of the problems I remember having, when I first encountered the Bible around the age of seven, was the different notions about God to be found in the Old Testament. There was the God who walked in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the day, calling out to Adam and Eve. Then there was the God who sent terrible plagues to terrify the Egyptians. Further, there was a God sitting in heaven surrounded by celestial beings in Isaiah 6. To a small but growing child trying to wrestle with and find a workable notion of God, these wildly different pictures of what he was like were confusing. It is not surprising that Christians can grow up with some very strange beliefs. Some children, and I count myself as one of these, were left to wallow in these difficulties and contradictions in the biblical record. In many ways I was fortunate that no one tried to iron out all these problems by suggesting that such issues could be sorted out by applying a dogmatic formula.   The very untidiness of my understanding allowed me to be receptive to fresh ideas as a young adult.  These completely changed my perceptions.

 What were the ideas about God that released me so decisively from my childhood semi-fundamentalism?   At the age of 19, I was introduced to the idea of mystical vision.  Suddenly all the biblical physical descriptions of the deity ceased to be problematic.  All the writers, whether biblical or within the mystical traditions, had been struggling with the same problem.  They had to work with limitations of human language, while at the same time knowing that this was an imperfect tool.  To put it another way, all these writers were using language to evoke spiritual reality rather describe it.  The quasi-physical language about the nature of God was not to be understood as the final word or clung to as infallible teaching.  It came as a relief to be able to hear and appreciate the mystics’ teaching that the experience of God is something that inevitably goes beyond language.  Language, even biblical language, can only take us so far in the exploration of the divine.  The place of mystery, the place of unknowing was the portal into a new way of encountering God.  It dawned on me that this unknown God would provide guidance and support for the life-long journey of spiritual discovery.  This journey of discovery is one which continues to this day.

My graduate studies exposed me to the thought and language of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Even before that stage I had become familiar with one particular word used by Orthodox theologians.  This word allowed me to sense a freedom from some constraining Western ideas about the doctrine of God. The word is apothatic. It is a word which links Christian ideas about the nature of God to the teachings of a writer called Pseudo-Dionysius and through him to other Greek theologians of the first centuries.  He was an anonymous Greek theologian who was writing in the fifth century A.D. The basic idea of Dionysius was that God is beyond all human description and even words. We cannot add anything to our knowledge of God by using words of description; all we can do is to say what God is not. It may seem strange to cease to rely on words in talking about God but this tradition does find many echoes in Western theology from the mediaeval period onwards.  Apothatic theology is a healthy counterbalance to what appear to be, in the West, attempts to control what Christians think about God by what might be, sometimes, thought of as a coercive use of language.  No language or words should ever be allowed to exhaust the mystery of the divine being.

All the mystical writers, East and West, seem to have grasped the notion that God cannot be defined, or his nature described in words. In one way this inability to talk about God using words is a potential source of frustration. We are used to words being used extensively in sermons and expository preaching over the centuries. The thought that such words may be merely a pale reflection of the divine reality may appear to be making light of the work of people who have given years of effort to the study of doctrine.  But, on the other hand, apothatic theology is a gateway into a freedom and creativity. Theology is allowed to become, not a quasi-science but something more resembling poetry, an endless travelling into a deeper and deeper reality. Of course words, and especially biblical words, will continue to be used in our pulpits and in Christian teaching. But these words will be used against the background of a keen realisation of the restrictions involved in such forms of human expression.  Because God is, in some sense, beyond knowledge and human concepts, the words that are used to talk about him will always be offered with a certain humility and provisionality.

For those who write about the vision of God, there has to be a considerable reticence.  One way of conveying that unknowability found in the encounter with God is to speak of a great and all-embracing silence. This word silence is used here, not to describe the absence of sound, but more to convey the absence of human symbols and concepts. The biblical proclamation of John 1 is that out of the silence came a communication – that which is described as the Word. God speaks to us in Jesus. The eternal indescribable and unknowable God comes into a world to reveal himself in a human life. It is this extraordinary, even unexpected mystery that we celebrate at Christmas. In all the pictures and symbols which we are given at this time – light, stars and angelic hosts- there is expressed an encounter with somebody or something that goes beyond anything we can put into words. The Christmas message should help to draw us out from our normal partial understandings of God, steeped in words and concepts, to contemplate something which is so wonderful and so infinite that we recognise that we can never really get close to it.

My brief excursion into a tradition for understanding the divine nature in a different way, is a reminder to me and perhaps to my reader that it is important to understand how much about God is unknown and unknowable. When we refuse to surrender to tidy theological definitions found in the systematic textbooks, we are better able to grasp the profound mystery even in the word God.  If God ever ceases to be beyond knowledge he becomes, as the Old Testament would recognise, something like a graven image. When the early Israelites were grappling with their own battles against such false gods and the temptations of idolatry, they were helping us with our own contemporary struggles to make sense of the language connected with the divine.  I much prefer to believe in a God that defies my attempts and capacity to imagine.  I certainly do not want a God who can ever be used as a tool of coercion or fear.  That is not the God I can believe in. The God I do believe in is one who reveals himself but does not allow us ever to claim to understand or fully fathom his nature.  He will always be a God beyond knowledge.