When I was younger (as in my teens and twenties) I had an abiding need (perhaps compulsion) to argue the veracity of scripture, to reduce all mystery to sensible candor. In my thirties, my great uncle (a Duke Divinity M.Th. and M.Div.) told me that when the answer to every question is faith, the explanations become irrelevant. Now in my forties, the more mature that my faith has become, the more comfortable I am with uncertainties and unanswerables. My faith is now rooted in the fact that God is so far superior to me that my mortal mind could never satisfactorily explain God. Scripture endeavors to communicate the nature of an infinite God through inadequate words. And so I find myself happier with an understanding that every articulable thought is completely and utterly irrelevant. In fact, the more abstract the thought, the more comforting I find it. Everything understandable must be wrong so only in recognizing that I am wrong can I know that I am correct.
A multilingual collection of intellectual and evangelical musings