All theologians are liars

I am a theologian. Therefore, …?

St Gregory of Nyssa put it rather more gently: ‘anyone who attempts to portray the ineffable Light in language is truly a liar – not because of any abhorrence of the truth, but merely because of the infirmity of his explanation’ (quoted in Jean Daniélou, From Glory to Glory, p. 105).

Every positive statement we can make about God is utterly inadequate and dangerously misleading. Ultimately, whenever we state confidently that God is X, we are setting up an idol.

And this leads us directly to the apophatic tradition in Orthodox theology. The encounter with God forces us to admit the inadequacy of all our images of God. It calls us to repent of all those confident positive statements and to confess that God is infinitely greater, more dynamic, more alive than any of those statements suggest. So, for example, when we say ‘God is love’, we must immediately admit that the ‘love’ referred to is something infinitely greater than we can imagine given our limited and deeply flawed understandings of love.