Canine theology

Self-styled rationalists attack the Christian faith on putatively grounds. This takes various forms. They attack the logic of the Trinity. They attack the logic of the Incarnation. They attack the morality of predestination, penal substitution, original sin, justification by faith, male headship, special redemption, everlasting punishment, the execution of the Canaanites, &c.

Their objections boil down to the position that “If I were God, this is what I’d do instead,” or, “If there were a God, this is what he’d really be like.”

I’d like to make one small, but significant observation. Rationalists are viewing God through the wrong end of the telescope. What’s remarkable is not that we understand so little about God, but that we understand so much. We understand God far better than we have any antecedent reason to expect.

God isn’t human. God isn’t a creature. God is inconceivably great. A different kind of being. Given the categorical difference between God and man, it’s remarkable that we are able to understand as divine revelation as well as we do.

Science fiction movies about intelligent aliens are always a letdown because the alien mind invariably bears an unmistakable resemblance to the mind of a Hollywood screenwriter. Intelligent aliens, however advanced, can never be smarter than the screenwriter. Worse, they can never be fundamentally unlike you and me. They can never surpass human imagination. Even gifted science fiction writers can’t make alien characters truly alien, for, in the nature of the case, that would be alien to human experience. We have no alternate frame of reference.

Given the fact that God is so unlike you and me, it’s astonishing that we can understand God at all. Astounding that so much of God’s revelation in word and deed falls within the outer limits of human understanding.

Dogs probably understand humans better than any other subhuman species. But consider how much of what we think and do must be utterly incomprehensible to a dog. Imagine “theology” written from a dog’s perspective.

It would be interesting to compare a canine understanding of the world with a human understanding of the world. They would be so different. Almost incommensurable. Indeed, they are so different that we, as humans, are incapable of ever assuming a dog’s point of view. Not only are dogs far less intelligent than humans, but they experience the world in a radically different way than we do. If sight is the dominant human sense, scent is the dominant canine sense. We have an essentially visual model of the world, whereas a dog has an essentially olfactory model of the world. Two very different ways of representing reality.

Now, someone might object: “You’re just retreating into the trite old ‘mystery’ canard. Playing the last-ditch ‘mystery’ card. God is so far above us, so utterly different, that he’s bound to be unintelligible to us lowly humans.”

But, no, that’s not what I’m saying. Rather, I’m saying it’s quite surprising that in spite of how different God is from us, in spite of how much greater God is than you and me, that we are still able to make as much sense of divine revelation as we do. Far from demanding that divine revelation should be even more comprehensible, we ought to be startled, humbled, and grateful that we know so much.