“I am a Person, but I am also much more.”

“Lord, you have taken me through a story that is completely unorthodox and embarrassingly anthropomorphic.  What am I to make of that?”

I am not interested in what you make of it (or) in conforming My account to your prior, fixed beliefs.  Be more specific in your future questions.

I am using literal language because that is the only way to explain the experience of being God.

“But ‘experience’ is also anthropomorphic.”

Not really.  I am a Person, but I am not only a Person.  I am also much more.  There is something you might call “what it is like” to be God.  That is what “experience” refers to.

“But, Lord, You are admitting serious limitations as You scramble to create order out of chaos.  This is not our idea of God.”

Limitations only from My perspective.  Don’t be misled.  By your standards I already had unimaginable power and knowledge.

“But You say you knew nothing.”

There is another side to the story.  In one sense I knew nothing.  But, in another sense, I was viewing everything from another level—as when your senses are confused but your mind is clear and is noting with precision and even analysis the nature and contours of the confusion.  Think of waking from a dream while analyzing the fact that you just had a dream.

Or, I suppose, like a researcher taking an hallucinogenic and carefully noting its effects.

 

A Purified Theology Tended to Empty Out the Concept of God

My experiences with God were personal and intimate.  Philosophers drain the life out of Him.  God the Person becomes God the Abstraction—the Unmoved Mover, the One, the Absolute, infinite substance, the perfect being, the being whose essence is to exist.  The poet  William Butler Yeats describes the result:  “High on some mountain shelf/ Huddle the pitiless abstractions bald about the neck.”

The great Jewish scholar, Gershom Scholem, explains the phenomenon.

“The philosophers and theologians were concerned first and foremost with the purity of the concept of God and determined to divest it of all mythical and anthropomorphic elements.  But this determination to … reinterpret the recklessly anthropomorphic statements of the biblical text and the popular forms of religious expression in terms of a purified theology tended to empty out the concept of God ….  The price of God’s purity is the loss of his living reality.  What makes Him a living God … is precisely what makes it possible for man to see Him face to face.”