Sorry if the title of this post fooled anyone, but I in no way intend to discuss the question of Jesus's race. What follows are simply some of my not-so-intellectually-rigorous musings some questions concerning epistemology and the philosophy of language as they apply to broader theological issues.
As I see it, in LDS theology we often overemphasize our ability to know God. Yes, there is much comfort in the idea of a close relationship with a loving Father, and it doesn't do anyone any good when we downplay the distinct LDS doctrines concerning God's corporeal nature. That being said, we often speak of God in a way which does violence to his transcendence. Sometimes our way of addressing deity is guilty of making divinity into a banal commonality. Perhaps we have lost something of what Rudolf Otto referred to as 'the numinous' experience in religion in his seminal theological work The Idea of the Holy. In the appendices to this work, Otto includes some quotations from F.W. Robertson which I think can help point in a direction helpful in avoiding reductionist attitudes towards God. I will provide two quotations after which I will give a few of my thoughts on their relevance and application.
1) "There is a sense in which darkness has more of God than light has. He dwells in the thick darkness. Moments of tender, vague mystery often bring distinctly the feeling of His presence. When day breaks and distinctness comes the Divine has evaporated from the soul like morning dew. In sorrow, haunted by uncertain presentiments, we feel the infinite around us...It is true, even literally, that the darkness reveals God: every morning God draws the curtain of the garish light across His eternity, and we lose the Infinite."
This resonates with me in a number of ways. I have always preferred overcast and rainy weather to the sunshine, and counted the early morning and evening as the most beautiful times of the day. If God is so often associated with light in scriptures and in writings by Christian authors such as Tolkien's Silmarillion then how does one explain feeling closer to him as a result of the darkness? Robertson's eloquent observation puts that all into perspective.
At the aesthetic level, this also has very important implications. For instance, it was always puzzling to me how to harmonize my love of Gothic and Horror fiction with my vision of the Gospel. If perfect love casteth out all fear, then is it appropriate to find aesthetic pleasure in seeking out literary fear? After pondering on this insight from Robertson however, I think that it is not a stretch to see the pleasure that I naturally get from certain imaginative kinds of fiction as rooted in the awe in the face of the infinite that the uncertainty and fear that literature and other kinds of art can evoke. Related to this in some ways is my love of certain kinds of literature which could be considered cynical, such as existential and postmodern literature. But that is a topic that could be elaborated in its own post. This could all of course be fleshed out with much greater clarity, and as things stand I have made some basic outlines of assertions without much defense. But for now it suffices me to say that Robertson's idea of God dwelling in darkness opens up areas of discussion which I had not previously considered.
2) "Who does not know how we satisfy ourselves with the name of some strange bird or plant, or the name of some new law in nature? It is a mystery perplexing us before. We get the name and fancy we understand something more than we did before; but in truth we are more hopelessly ignorant:for before we felt there was a something we had not attained, and so we inquired and searched--now, we fancy we possess it, because we have got the name by which it is known: and the word covers over the abyss of our ignorance."
This passage reminds me of many different aspects in continental philosophy. First and foremost I am reminded of Jacques Derrida's critique of what some have referred to as 'logocentrism'. We put so much emphasis on signifiers that we can end up thinking of symbols of knowledge as if they represented direct knowledge itself. Thus we cut ourselves off from the infinitely demanding call to interpret and reinterpret the vast spectrum of experiences we receive from day to day. Closely related to this idea are the some of the important aspects of the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Taking both of these Robertson quotes as a whole, we can find some important parallels in Levinas's ideas concerning 'the Other' and our infinite responsibility to this Other. According to Levinas, another human being is infinite in the sense that we can never completely reduce their humanity. When we treat another Being as though we had reduced them to our own concepts, we in a real sense commit an act of violence against their humanity. With this is mind, we can see both how God's Otherness can cause us to shudder in our limitations, and how none of our words or concepts for God could ever fully contain his alterity.
The thought of Jean-Luc Marion also comes to mind, inasmuch as we can apply his idea of a 'saturated phenomenon'. A saturated phenomenon is what fellow philosopher John D. Caputo described by saying that "there are phenomena of such overwhelming givenness or overflowing fulfillment that the intentional acts aimed at these phenomena are overrun, flooded—or saturated." God is of such a nature that he overflows any mortal concepts we employ to experience and describe him.
In the course of this post I have not reached many firm conclusions. I am okay with that, for in my judgment it is folly to get too caught up in our desire to taxonomize( the dictionary says that this isn't a word, but I am going to go on the authority of that great master of language William F. Buckley Jr. and just go ahead and use it anyways) and reduce our experiences to systems of knowledge. Of course we have to be cautious that we don't go so far down this road that we end up espousing obscurantism and needless esotericism. Thinking analytically is indeed a marvelous thing, yet we must always keep in mind the limited contexts within which our mortal perspectives leave us.
