We would not know that God stood infinitely above us unless God in Christ had decisively bridged that infinite gap. It is not natural or obvious to think that God is profoundly other; in fact, most of the deities of the ancient world look like big human beings, and nowadays we worship normal-sized human beings, which is to say, ourselves. It is only by making infinite descent that God reveals himself to us as the one who dwells in unapproachable distance. It is only by taking on our nature in Christ that God shows his nature to be qualitatively different from ours.
The ironic result is that it is only from a position where God has enabled us to speak of him in very human terms that we see that our human thinking and speaking is entirely inadequate to grasp him. We don't first know God as infinitely different (how could we? what concepts would we deploy?) and then breathe a sigh of relief that he accommodates himself to us. We see God in Christ in the manger and on the cross, and then we understand that this God whom we see here in the flesh is beyond us, utterly beyond us.
The only reason we know that there is a stark distinction between the Creator and the creature is that Jesus Christ has in his own person united the two.
No comments:
Post a Comment