If we try to imagine God, it’s easy to become an atheist. Why?

Try imagining this: We believe that one Person, God, is the sole creator of all that exists. Now, all that exists, although itself finite, is already beyond what we can imagine – billions of galaxies, trillions of planets, and billions of people stretching back through thousands of years. As well, we believe that God knows every rock, insect, animal, and plant not just on earth, but everywhere in the universe. How can we wrap our minds around that? We can’t.

And there’s the further issue of trying to picture the scope of God’s love. Today there are more than eight billion people in the world and our faith asks us to believe that God loves each one of those eight billion individually and intimately, as if he or she was the only person in the world. Moreover, through millions of years God has loved intimately every man, woman, and child on this earth, right back to our ancestors who lived in caves. How can one mind, one heart, one person do this? It’s beyond the mind.

However, and this is the point, it’s not intended to be imagined or conceptualized.

God is infinite. Infinity, by definition, is impossible to imagine. (For example, what’s the highest number it’s possible to count to?)  Infinity takes us beyond what can be conceptualized. To conceptualize something, the mind needs to start somewhere and God has no beginning. Indeed, to the extent that we do create for ourselves an imaginative picture of God, we always have something less than God, and often an idol.

And the problem is that we are forever slimming down God to fit the size of our imagination when, by its very essence and definition, God is ineffable, unable to be pictured, imagined, or captured in a concept. This is a dogmatic teaching in of all Christian Churches and in Judaism. As the prophet Isaiah says, God is holy, meaning, beyond all visualization and all conceptualization, beyond anything that can be imagined. That’s why scripture asserts that in this life “no one can see the face God and live.”

However, as Christians, we believe that Jesus came to us and in his person and teaching gave concrete expression (incarnation) to God so that we can grasp, imagine, and speak truly about certain aspects of God. To know Jesus is to know his “Father.”

 However, that’s not the same thing as capturing God in a concept. Indeed, we can “know” God, but we can’t “think” God. We can never create a “picture” of God.

Why is this important? Because whenever we do create a picture of God, we always end up with something less than God – and invariably something that works for our self-interest.

Critics of Christianity accuse us of forever creating God in our own image and likeness. There’s a lot of truth in that. That’s why the God we create for ourselves invariably likes the same people we do, hates the same people we hate, makes the same judgments we make, likes us better than other races, favors our country over others, and assures us that our religion (and our own interpretation of it) is the true way to heaven.

Whenever we capture God in a concept, we end up with a God who is no more intelligent and compassionate than we are, whose heart isn’t larger than ours, and who is unworthy of Jesus and Christianity.

For a dozen years I taught a course to seminarians entitled A Theology of God. The course looked at many things: how God is presented in scripture, the historical development of our dogmatic creeds about God, theological speculation about the nature of God, the salient critiques atheists have made about our Christian belief in God, and insights from the mystics and popular piety vis-à-vis how we might relate more affectively to God.

But throughout the course and particularly at its end, I would say this to the seminarians: Whatever else you do in your teaching, preaching, and pastoral practice, try not to make God look stupid!

In essence: try not to make God look tribal, racist, nationalistic, legalistic, denominational, sexist, rigid, petty, vengeful, angry, defensive, and anything less than unimaginable wisdom, unimaginable love, unimaginable embrace, and unimaginable forgiveness. Try not to make God just another imaginable human person with all our flaws.

I know sincere, good-hearted atheists and agnostics who don’t believe in God because when they try to imagine a Person who is creating millions of universes, billions of people, and trillion upon trillions of minerals, plants, and animals, and who is knowing and loving each element in existence intimately as if it were the only thing in existence, they can’t imagine it. Neither can we. It’s not meant to be imagined. It’s meant to be known in a cloud of unknowing, to stretch our minds and hearts beyond their natural limits and bring us to an awe that bends our knees in genuflection.