We Know in Part

My heart is not proud, O Lord,
my eyes are not haughty;
I do not concern myself with great matters
or things too wonderful for me.
But I have stilled and quieted my soul;
like a weaned child with its mother,
like a weaned child is my soul within me.
O Israel, put your hope in the Lord
both now and forevermore.
—Psalm 131

Carolyn was trying to help Sarah, one of our granddaughters, become a little less dogmatic. You see, Sarah is certain about everything. The issue, as I recall, had something to do with whether the movie The Lion King was available as a video. Sarah was sure that it was, and she said so.

Carolyn, trying to set a good example, replied softly, “Sarah, I may be wrong, but I don’t think it’s out in video yet.” “Yes, Nana,” Sarah replied, “You are wrong!”

Sarah’s assertiveness is kid stuff. She’s only six and young enough to be too sure of herself. As we grow up, however, we usually become less certain. Too much of life is beyond our ken.

Paul said, “We know in part” (1 Corinthians 13:9), and I suppose we always will. Even in heaven when perfection has come, the joy of discovery will surely continue. We won’t know everything there is to know there; we’ll be taught of God and learning—learning better and faster, I assume—going “further up and further in,” as C. S. Lewis said.

(I once remarked to a friend that we might not have Bibles in heaven because we’ll be taught by God Himself and won’t need them there, to which he replied, “Then what will we Christians have to argue about?”)

We have an English word, weird, that refers to things that are odd or strange. The word is derived from an Old English word, wyrd, which meant something a little different: It had to do with things that were unaccountably mysterious and uncanny and better left that way.

We don’t allow much wyrd these days, at least in the circles I frequent. We have a place for everything and everything is in its place. All things are neat and tidy and tucked away.

I must say, however, that a lot of my certainty has begun to evaporate lately, simply because I don’t understand as much as I used to. It’s not that I lack conviction about the reality of God, but rather I’ve come to see that in my attempts to explain Him I’m mostly in the dark. His ways are “beyond [my] understanding” (Job 36:26).

One of the church fathers, Ireneaus, pointed out that the essential difference between orthodoxy and heresy is that orthodoxy is rooted in paradox and mystery. Heresy, on the other hand, is rooted in clarity and precision. I find a lot of wisdom in those words.

I used to have clear and precise explanations for most things, but when I finally got around to thinking about my explanations, it occurred to me that I really didn’t know what I was talking about. I had the right words, but I didn’t know what the words meant.

Now I don’t know as much as I used to. In fact, as I often say to Carolyn, I find myself believing more and more ardently in fewer and fewer things.

It came to me one day that my mind was much too busy and argumentative to know the peace of God. Always reasoning and worrying—I had no time to cultivate that silence in which God speaks. The main thing for me now is not to know all the answers, but to know God, made real and personal in Jesus. What I hunger for is a purer vision of Him through His Word and a greater love for Him. Theories about when, where, how, and why don’t bother me much anymore. Oh, I think about such things from time to time, but they don’t hang me up the way they used to.

I like the portrait David paints of himself in Psalm 131.

This isn’t Nirvana’s “never mind,” but rather the thoughts of a man who has his mind right—no longer restless, searching, craving, struggling with the mysteries of life, but quietly abiding in his Father’s love.

I pray often for David’s spirit and for the realization that only a few things are necessary—as Jesus put it, really “only one” (Luke 10:42 NASB).

“But,” a friend of mine once observed, “questions imply answers. If God put questions in our minds, doesn’t He have the answers in His?”

Of course He does, but we don’t have to have the answers—that’s the point. We can live with paradox and mystery. We can know “in part” and be comfortable with not knowing the whole.

“But doesn’t God draw lines?” you ask. Indeed, He does. He draws straight lines, but they’re “pure” lines, as George MacDonald said, “without breadth and consequently sometimes invisible to mortal eyes.” (MacDonald was thinking here of theological lines. God’s moral lines are very clear.)

Those lines—theological lines that sometimes divide us—are most often lines that aren’t meant to be noticed at all. They’re better taken lightly or set aside if we can’t see them well.

I often think of this idea—that some of God’s lines are drawn invisibly—these days when I sit down to write. It has made me more reticent when I write and I hope a little more humble, lest my writings merely add to the sum total of ignorance in this world. That would be a futile achievement.

Theologian Karl Barth imagined entering heaven with a pushcart full of his books and hearing the angels chuckle. “In heaven,” he said, “I shall dump even the Church Dogmatics [his primary work] . . . on some heavenly floor as a pile of waste paper.”

Furthermore, the fact that I know “in part” affects the way I look at other believers—especially those not exactly like me. Most things about which we disagree don’t matter to me anymore.

It occurred to me one day, while reviewing our church doctrinal statement, that our assertions were so inclusive they were exclusive. It included a lot of things over which Christians have differed for centuries. I wondered why we included them. Augustine, John Calvin, Martin Luther, and a host of other heroes could not have enjoyed our fellowship. Our creed, which sheltered us so well, would have stifled them.

Our honest desire to think accurately about God can move too easily into a conviction that our doctrinal statements contain everything there is to know about God, which, in turn, has the effect of reducing God to our creed. Without humble uncertainty, our statements can evolve into hard dogma that isolates us from one another. Certainty can breed intolerance. “No one damns like the orthodox,” as they say.

Modes of baptism, forms of church government, versions of the Bible, end time scenarios—issues that have been up for grabs from the beginning—become the main things, the distinctives that divide us physically, emotionally, and spiritually. The whole business makes me sad.

In our efforts to give away our faith, we must, in the midst of our certainty about some things, humbly acknowledge the mystery of all things. We’re dealing with matters we don’t fully understand; in truth, we know very little about God. This means we don’t have to have all the answers. We can be awed and perplexed. We can be befuddled. We can be at a loss for words. We can say, “I don’t understand this, but . . .” We can even be silent.

In his book The Trivialization of God, Donald McCullough, former president of San Francisco Theological Seminary, said that humility should so encompass our statements about God that we are driven to speak “with the tone of a high school sophomore telling what she knows about vectors to a Nobel prize-winning physicist. What we say may be true enough, but so obviously spoken out of ignorance that we dare not chatter on in blissful confidence. Perhaps,” McCullough goes on to say, “it is time for a deferential hush.”

Finally, this understanding—that we know very little—has something to say about the way we look at our own growth in grace. The main thing is not to know more things, but to live out the things we know: to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, and mind and follow Him in grateful obedience. We do not need to know the secrets of God. We just need to love Him and do what He shows us to do.

At the end of his life, Paul said that he had only one thought: “to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death” (Philippians 3:10). That just about says it all.

I recall hearing a story about that wonderful saint John Newton, whose mind, as he aged, began to fail. “I recall but two things now,” he said. “I am a great sinner and my Jesus is a great Savior.”

It’s a blessing, I think, that we forget most of what we once knew. I can hardly wait for that day.

Taken from Seeing God, ©2006 by David Roper. Used by permission of Discovery House Publishers, Box 3566 Grand Rapids, MI 49501. All rights reserved.