Paying Attention To The Sky

Axgrrl wrote: You said “the Church teaches that Revelation gives rise to mysteries that are unanswerable or understandable by man the creature.” but if that’s the case, then how can any believer dare claim to have any ‘understanding’ of these mysteries?
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Derek Jeter: As I wrote to sfon earlier, when a theologian speaks about mysteries it is different from a detective novel. The former may, for example, be speaking of the nature of God, a well known example of a “mystery.” How can anyone truly know God’s nature? It requires us to use a certain kind of speech, analogical speech, and to speak both kataphatically (positive) and apophatically (negative) about his nature because any expression applied univocally to God can distort reality. Through God’s grace we can enter into the mind of God but we can never know it on our own.

“Humans in touch with their own existence, for example, can properly speak of God as their “maker.” But God is surely not to be understood as making heaven and earth in the way a watchmaker constructs a timepiece, or a carpenter builds a house. To speak only “affirmatively” about God runs the risk of creating God in our own likeness, to engage in a sort of verbal idolatry.

The theological tradition demands that we also speak of God in a second way, called “negative” or “apophatic.” In this way the positive affirmation we can legitimately make is nevertheless denied. The denial derives from the conviction that God’s absolute otherness demands silence rather than description. In the apophatic way we respond to the positive affirmation that “God is the maker of heaven and earth.” with the denial that “God is not the maker of heaven and earth in any manner known to us.” The denial serves to protect us from reducing God to the level of our human ideas.

The positive and the negative are joined dialectically in the third way of speaking about God which the tradition calls “analogical.” In this way statements about God can be considered as true, but true in a way different from the way they are true in the case of creatures. In analogy two things are both alike and unlike, but more unlike than alike. Thus we can say that God is a “maker” but in a manner that is as much unlike as like the way humans are “makers”.  Analogical speech preserves the truth of the positive affirmation, (“God is maker”) and of the negative (“God is not a maker”). Analogy helps solve a real problem with the Apostolic creed’s language because it enables us to see how we can say the words even though in the strictest sense we don’t know what we are saying. Even as we affirm the statements of the creed as true, we know they point to a reality beyond our understanding. We profess our faith not in the words but in the reality to which they point.”
Luke Timothy Johnson,  The Creed

Jesus spoke of the nature of God the Father in the parables of the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan. We both “understand” but at the same time “don’t understand” there also. “Mystery” might actually be a poor word in many ways for this, paradox might be a better description. We grasp it but then we don’t, like in a Chess match where we flip back and forth from seeing ourselves attacking an opponent but at the same time needing to see ourselves under attack also. The Japanese game of IGO is a better example of that where the black and white pieces lend itself to this kind of seeing.

The Christian embraces mysteries in such a manner. The scientific materialist atheist, by outlawing any discussion about God, a supernatural agent, from the beginning is the one who refuses to engage in any discussion or consideration of mystery or miracles.