The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law. | Deuteronomy 29:29
Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!
“For who has known the mind of the Lord,
or who has been his counselor?”
“Or who has given a gift to him
that he might be repaid?”
For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen. | Romans 11:33–36
This week, I watched two Christians argue online about certainty and mystery. This seems to be a very common topic of debate. While there are very few who would argue that Christianity is ALL about certainty, or those who believe that it is ALL mystery, the conversation tends to end up in accusations: charging one another of being too fundamentalist or liberal in their theology. Rather than this being a helpful back and forth, it often becomes a way for those involved to score points (and for them to become further extreme in their own position).
If you spend time in your Bible, it becomes very clear that Christianity calls us to both stand firm and to have faith. There is a need to both hold on to truth and to admit our inability to know everything. The two verses that I posted at the top help to frame this for us. God has revealed His truth to us in His Word – this was so that we have something to stand on. He has also, purposely, kept things from us. These secret things act as an invitation for us to come back to Him again and again, and they are described as concepts that are simply too much for us to know (unsearchable and inscrutable). God has given us enough to trust Him, while reminding us that what we know is only a small part of who He is.
Both ends of this conversation would do well to add the category of imagination into their theology. I mentioned this in my sermon Sunday on Psalm 30: the way that God gives His truth to us encourages the use of imagination. When we interact with God, He expresses Himself in a way that purposely leaves gaps for human beings to engage with. God designed the right part of our brain to experience the world and to fill in the blanks with a poetic language that does not speak of facts in a rational way. This is not only for us to be creative, but for us to be able to engage with the truth of God that mere human reasoning does not have the ability to deal with. The words of the Psalms describe the things of God in a way that calculated doctrine has a hard time with.
Beyond just leaving some things open to interpretation, God has actually spoken to us in a way that encourages the use of our imagination. He even shows us how to do it. The book of Revelation is God using an imaginative form to speak to truths that mere human terms can not express. Rather than just saying that it will be greater than you can imagine, it paints images of buildings encrusted in jewels and streets paved in gold. This gives some experiential backing to the concept of grandiose. This does not mean that Revelation falls into the realm of imagination, because it is still the Word of God, but it means that God used part of His inspired Word to encourage us to go beyond the walls of mere reason.
This does not mean that God has turned the tools of construction over to us. Truth is still truth, and it would be foolish for us to attempt to engage God without using the certainty that He has gifted us to do so (and this would quickly lead to forming a God of our own making). The structure for our imagination comes from the concrete realities that He has stated. Our imagination is not meant to compete with or overwhelm the certainty, but to accompany it. While this puts limits on how we think of God, they are gracious limits. They are the limits that keep us from believing that God is other than who He has proclaimed Himself to be.
This concept of imaginative theology also helps us to put the right amount of weight on certainty and mystery. Those things that are certain and revealed by God can be leaned upon and trusted fully. Those places where we have used our imagination to help describe the mystery are an important part of the faith, but they are wispy, like fog. We aren’t meant to stand on clouds, nor is it helpful to pretend they are not there. Instead, the way for us to both know and sense God is to get the right and left parts of our brains working together.
Certainty helps us to learn to trust and mystery teaches us to hope. These two bring us to God to provide both what we know He will (certainty) and that we know He can (mystery). As God does what he has promised, our faith is solidified, and as he shocks us with His grace our faith is grown. To pit certainty against mystery is foolish, because to mature in the faith requires both.