See God’s Word is strange. Is peculiar. It’s a higher kind of thought world. We can’t simply translate it without remainder into mere human speech. Rather, think of the word now, “to translate” – it means to “carry across” in Latin. Rather, we have to be translated into the Biblical word, into the Biblical world.
~ Bishop Robert Barron
Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But, as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love Him”— these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual… The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. “For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct Him?” But we have the mind of Christ.
~ paul, The Least of The Apostles, in 1 Corinthians 2
All that I have written seems like straw compared to what has now been revealed to me.
~ The “Dumb Ox” and Doctor of the Church, Thomas Aquinas, in remarks on being requested to resume writing, after a mystical experience while saying mass on or around 6 December 1273
Oh beloved, it is true.
There is, most definitely, an end to our knowledge. We are far and away unable to comprehend The Infinite. And beings with strength and wisdom well beyond our own are overcome as they fly into His Near Presence.
And even as we have the Deus Dixit, The Word of G_d. Literally: “God has spoken,” we come up against it and our faculties fail. We. Just. Can’t. Think. Big. Enough.
Oh, there are dozens more… but, try these on for “mind blown” material.
Grace,
Chesed,
Mercy,
Eternity,
G_d becoming man, and staying Man after the resurrection,
man participating in the very Life of G_d.
We just can’t. It’s like an Everest of Everests. It is like trying to shoot to the moon with a pogo stick.
Yes, we can turn the Bible into a little machine. We can turn the dials, and we can come up with a (fairly large) number of coherent systematic theologies. But none of them can survive the process of time, or culture, or pervasive interpretive pluralism.
And, in creating our little models of what the Bible says, we strap on an incredible load of pride, that weighs us down and pulls us away from the Truth we are trying to find in the first place.
Can we see it?
We can’t translate Scripture. We were never meant to do it. Yes, we study. Yes, we labor. It is the life’s work of someone who is in Love with Him. We want to know Him. Yes!
But something else has to happen.
Just as a dad needs to lift his little child up on his shoulders to give a kid a view over the crowd. The Author and Finisher of our Faith, needs to carry us up to a completely different level, for us to begin to understand what much of the word is about.
He lifts us up,
He gives Light to understand,
He shows us His heart,
He provides the lessons.
So, are you having trouble understanding the Bible? It is a common problem. But the problem is easily remedied when we go to The Author of the same and ask Him to change US, that we might begin to understand.
Tonight is your night, beloved. Time to be translated, that you (and this fool of a writer) might understand.
Suddenly I feel myself transformed and changed; it is joy unspeakable. My mind is exhilarated; I lose the memory of past trials; my intelligence is clarified; my desires are satisfied. I grasp something inwardly as with the embracement of love.
~Hugh of St. Victor (1096-1141)
