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.”