While we were out guitar shopping/dreaming a few days ago, my 7-year-old spotted a  red sports car out of the truck window as it whizzed by and said, “Dad, red cars are the fast ones, y’know?”
“Really…?” I responded.
“Yep. The red ones are. Cuz they’re red.”

Flashback: I said the same thing when I was young. Exactly. I remember saying it. It’s perfectly acceptable logic for a first grader.

How much of our understanding of God (theology) is like that? We glimpse a little bit of God working somewhere…doing something, and build an entire construct around what God is like. Next thing you know, we’re spouting off mis-truths like ‘red cars are the fast ones’. And we can easily have our world jacked.

First, God is limitless. Exponentially and infinitely huge. Knows all. Sees all. Nothing slips by Him. His reach extends into eternity. His love is boundless. His mercy wider than can be measured. His grace is deeper than we can ever exhaust. Yet he feeds the sparrows and knows the number of hairs on your head. Huge. Infinitely huge. In fact, he’s beyond words–the  name he has given himself is I AM, because it perfectly and completely defines him. 

Second, we are created, however, with an amazing-but-amazingly-limited brain. Our understanding of anything….everything…is absolutely 100% colored by our perceptions, environment, culture and moods. We can never be objective about anything. When we spot a red car, we call it ‘red’ only because we relate it to how we perceive some former object that someone deemed ‘red’. Of course, that person called the former object ‘red’ because someone told them that something similar was ‘red’…and so on and so on. (Of course, it should go without saying that none of this means that the item is NOT red!) Our understanding of anything is ultimately based on our understanding of other things and assimilating those thoughts into something new.

And to further muddy the waters, our language seems to be even more limited than that. Language is an ever-evolving organism. Ever had a tough time putting something into words? Your heart could express it but English (or Spanglish) just couldn’t get it done?

So we’re stuck trying to express and understand a limitless God with rickety facilities. Like trying to build a staircase to the moon using only Legos. And as an aside, this is my struggle with worship music these days: the greatness of God can never be fully explained in worship…yet we must worship.

The Good News in all this is that God revealed Himself in the person of Jesus. If you’ve seen him, you’ve seen the Father. You can’t read the Gospel of John without hearing how we ‘can know the truth’…God has revealed Himself to us by His limitless Holy Spirit, through Holy Scripture and through the whole of the person of Jesus. As we see and begin to piece together what we know of God, we tend to build theological systems based on those glimpses. Of course, we filter them through our culture. Our perceptions. Our interpretations. Our environment and our mood.

The danger is that we sometimes grasp a (true) nugget of God’s truth and paint a (flawed) picture of what we’ve seen. Without the perspective of ancient church fathers and the abundance of God’s grace, we’d get it wrong even more often than we do. We see the Red Car and how ‘fast’ it is.

I’ve seen this on my own blog. Lately I’ve perused some of my archives and thought, "wow. ..really? I said that?". And I’ve thought of deleting them…a sort of revisionist history of where I am spiritually today. but that would paint a false picture of my journey and it would take glory away from God as he continues to mold and shape and redeem me. More and more I resonate with NT Wright’s quip, "I’m confident that half of my theology is wrong at any given moment…I’m just not sure which half."

Thank you, Jesus, for grace that not only fills in the gaps, but that covers the whole thing.