DID YOU KNOW?
Excerpted from Chapter 6 of a book titled, “God and Spirituality,” by a prominent professor with longterm sobriety: In the early Christian period, St. Macarius (author of Fifty Spiritual Homilies) and St. Augustine taught a deeply personal God. But that same period of history (fourth and fifth centuries A.D.), St. Denis (the early Christian theologian who wrote under the pseudonym of Dionysius of Areopagite) gave an interpretation of God which was even more impersonal than the Hindu system, and St. Gregory of Nyssa asserted that the ultimate vision of God was that the only ultimate vision of God was that only of a bottomless abyss of No-thing-ness which threw us into vertigo and total disorientation. Theism vs. atheism: personhood is not the issue, but Mystery. The real issue which has divided theism from atheism down through the centuries had not been a debate over whether God is a personal God or not. That is important to recognize but what is fundamentally at stake is something very different. Theism recognizes that the ground of being is a Mystery of which the human mind can never grasp more than hints and reflections of God. Atheism—the kind of repudiation of God which has flourished in the modern western world since the 1840s—is, on the other hand, above all an attempt to deny the mystery. Modern western atheists want to reject the notion of human powerlessness in the face of anything at all. Human science, they desperately want to believe; will ultimately be able to explain all things. The universe will eventually be proven to be an adequate explanation of it. Human beings will then be able to control all things and solve all of their worldly problems—on their terms, not God’s terms—with machines and scientific instruments, and with pills which we can swallow, which will fill our minds with sanity and bliss. And back the other way around, theism in all of its forms recognizes that whenever we attempt to describe our service at the alter of the Agnosto Theo (the unknown God), whom we encounter within the Cloud of Unknowing, we will always end up having to be involved with what the Hungarian philosopher Polanyi called tacit knowledge, and various kinds of indirect ways of knowing and speaking: metaphors, symbols, allegories, and other such devices. As we saw from Locke’s example of the taste of pineapple, we will always eventually run into real experiences of God’s reality for which we have no words, where we know that God is there but cannot explain what it is we know to those who have never felt or sensed it. We will be able to see the concrete evidence that God’s works of saving grace have been manifested in the world, when we observe human beings undergoing major psychic changes as part of their encounter with God’s grace, but in our scientific accounts of what happened, all we will be able to talk about is some kind of strange x-factor at work, disrupting the normal sequence of cause and effect. And above all, whenever we approach that ultimate power which heals and saves us, we will be thrown into awe and overpowering wonder at the numinous reality which shines through, the mysterium tremendum which is the power of the sacred and is incomparably greater than anything in the created world. For now the most important thing we can say to modern western atheism, is that God is real—something is out there, distinct from us and the scientifically observable universe—which can be shown to exist. God is the great Mystery out of which the universe has emerged in the Big Bang. God is the power of the numinous shining out of that primordial abyss and filling all of the created world with the light of the holy and the sacred. Full God-consciousness—fully sensing that sacredness and bringing its numinous power within ourselves—is what we mean by salvation.
> Read More Information About Us
> More Articles Written By Our Staff
- Whatzup Honors Dan Ross With H. Stanley Liddell Award - December 5, 2025
- Step Back In Time For A Traditional Christmas - December 5, 2025
- Holiday Drive-Through Light Display Supports Local Youth - December 5, 2025