Culture Quote of the Day - Questions God Can't Answer

"Can a mortal ask question which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask – half our great theological and metaphysical problems – are like that."

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

I guess what strikes me about this is that in our human, cultural, world-building endeavors, in which we construct views of reality, and ways of dealing with reality, we do quite a bit (within what we consider our "religion") that amounts to constructing "answers" to questions which may be (from God's perspective) mostly nonsense. We spend so much time and energy, it seems, on what is tertiary, building groups and institutions around minor points of difference, "straining gnats but swallowing camels" (as Jesus said).

Culture Quote of the Day - God the great iconoclast

Images of the Holy easily become holy images – sacrosanct. My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence?

Not my idea of God, but God.

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

How true this is. This is human nature, to create images of God, and then to focus on, I would say to exalt, and in the worst of times, to idolize (i.e., to worship, to commit idolatry) those images.

I love the image of God as the “great iconoclast.” And often, he uses other people – sometimes, the very Other, e.g., people from a different religious tradition altogether – to shatter our images.

May God “show up” (as some people put it) and shatter our images of Him, whenever and however necessary.