What is the relationship between mystery and understanding in your mind? I can remember balking at the way some Christians waxed eloquently about embracing the mystery of the Christian faith. To me, mystery was something that I would never understand, which meant it was unknowable. So the mystery of God meant that I could not know God. Like when you say about a person, “he or she is a mystery to me”, aren’t you indicating that you do not understand them, so do not really know them? Actually, the phrase is “he or she is a complete mystery to me.” And maybe that is key. A complete mystery is unknowable. A mystery, or something that is mysterious, can be something that is not easily known, but can be more known with deeper engagement. It may be inviting that engagement.

In the NT, mysterion appears 27 times, but in almost all of those cases, it is hidden knowledge that is now known. An example is what Paul writes in Eph 3:4-5 When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit. So the mystery is not unknowable, it was hidden and, even after being revealed, can be hard for people to understand.

So mystery can be an invitation to a deeper knowing rather than a barrier to knowing. Mystery means there is always more to learn and discover. It also means that what I think I know may not be as true as I think. We have a desire for certainty when we are looking for a truth to build upon. We need to be certain of that truth, to know that it is solid. We are not going to be comfortable building on mystery. That which invites us to go deeper is therefore not solid. I guess there is a place for both certainty and mystery, but they are often at odds with one another.

And a quest for certainty can be a stumbling block on the journey into deeper knowing. Mystery frustrates our desire to easily grasp the truth.

In his book Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, Ross Douthat observes

Mysteries abide at the heart of every religious faith, but the Christian tradition is uniquely comfortable preaching dogmas that can seem like riddles, offering answers that swiftly lead to further questions, and confronting believers with the possibility that the truth about God passes all our understanding.

Douthat then says that the desire to have a Christian faith that is more understandable than mysterious has produced the most Christian heresy. “The great Christian heresies vary wildly in their theological substance, but almost all have in common a desire to resolve Christianity’s contradictions, untie its knotty paradoxes, and produce a cleaner and more coherent faith.”

Christianity’s contradictions and knotty paradoxes are evidence to me that it is spiritually true. If people were to make up a religion, it would make a lot more sense! And the truth of God should be beyond our understanding, beyond our grasp for certainty. But that does not mean that God is unknowable. He has given us revelation (full of apparent contradictions and knotty paradoxes) that is a path to knowing Him. If we resolve the tensions of this revelation in a quest for more certainty, we are not being faithful to Scripture, and we stray from the path of knowing Him. It strikes me that there is an important difference between grasping a truth that we can build our lives upon and being on the path of knowing God.

I would love to connect with you about these posts if they have stirred any thoughts or questions. Take a minute, shoot me an email at bo@leavenedlives.org, and let’s see where that takes us.