We always have to keep in mind is that whatever we think or speak, we use human language. This applies also to religion.
Human language cannot adequately express divine realities because it derives from our limited human experience and is entirely constructed round human categories.
A nightingale can produce a beautiful sound, but it will never be able to sing Handel's Messiah. Foraging ants pass on signals to one another with the help of their antennae; an attempt to reproduce Shakespeare's Hamlet in ant language would result in disaster. Whenever we speak about God, or about realities related to him, we should be conscious of the inherent inadequacy of the words we use.
Every word is a symbol, an image expressing a human experience.
Take for instance the word 'father'. It conveys a precise meaning in human relationships, but when we apply it to God, the meaning is entirely symbolic.
When Christ employed this term, calling God his 'father', he did so to affirm about God a wealth of notions that are important and meaningful: God's authority, God's concern for us, God's new relationship to us, and so on. The parable of the Prodigal Son elaborates the image of God's fatherhood in a striking and moving manner. But at the same time we know that God cannot be called a 'father' in any carnal sense, that God is as much female as male, that God's father-like qualities exceed anything we can imagine about human fathers, that in fact God is a very exceptional father, ''the father from whom every family in heaven and on earth receives its true name" (Ephesians 3, 14).
While affirming whatever is positive in the symbol 'father', we have to go beyond it to a far greater reality than can be expressed by this human symbol.
When we say about God that he knows, or loves, or wills, or does something else, we are ascribing to him typically human actions. The all-perfect God is not distinct from his acts. He is his knowledge, his love, his will. God need not perform one action after another, as we mortals have to do, nor does he have separate faculties for understanding, memory, decision making or affection.
The absoluteness of God's inner affection, the unchanging dynamism of divine power and action which always remain at their climax, are totally beyond our imagination and our powers of expression. When we make affirmations about God's knowledge, love, will, and so on, we should be aware that we are using symbolic expressions. Constrained though we are to use them, we should go beyond them in mind and heart.
Conscious of these limitations of religious language, we should feel a great desire to reach out beyond the symbols to the mysteries that lie behind them, beyond our human expression about God to the living reality of God himself.
We may well ultimately find that silence is a better medium of union with God than spoken words. We are closest to God's light when we have realised the darkness of our own limitations. We are nearer to grasping God's greatness the more we have become speechless and over-awed in his presence.
Text from: JOHN WIJNGAARDS, Come and See, Bangalore 1983.
