Machinery vs Language

My thoughts have been a bit scattered as of late, but I hope, and pray, that they are slowly beginning to come together, piece by piece; if not, then I suppose I will continue to live in the mystery :) Here's a thought:

In our modern world, we as a society have made an image of God as a machine operator. With the induction of the industrial revolution, our concept of the world became one that was run by rules and laws, from Newton's laws about how the world works to Darwin's proposition about the beginning of life; so, we altered God to fit into this concept. The highest "rank" you can give to someone in this arena is that of engineer or machine operator; he is one who is in charge, decided when to change things, when to fix things, and is supposed to take the blame whenever things fall apart.

These laws seem to make things so much simpler, at least at first; but we soon run into a problem, a big one. With all of the laws coming into place we remove all mystery about the world and God. We feel entitled to know all the answers and insist on an explanation for every situation. This isn't quite how God works, at least not in my experience. We can make all the rules and titles we want for Him, it doesn't mean any of it is truly applicable or that He will cooperate.

It is impossible to know God without being able to accept the mystery; He has made us purposely incomplete so that we will crave more. More from our community of believers and more intimacy with Him. By reaching out to and living alongside our fellow brothers and sisters, along with God's creation all around us, we are given the gift of finding a lost part of ourselves restored to us again. If everything in life could be explained away with some nice little textbook answer, we would never have any reason to look outside ourselves and look into another person.

When looking at laws and the world, one suggestion has been to discard the machine approach and look at it more as language. Language is a functioning entity, and it is made up of grammatical rules of all sorts. These rules are important, but they pale in comparison to what they accomplish, what they produce: words, poetry, music, speech, meaning. What is made possible is so much more important than what makes it possible; this is the mystery. We need rules and laws, yes, but to place them in the position of utmost importance is foolish; we do this only because we are most comfortable with what we most understand. It is so much easier to live amongst the rules alone, but eventually one would go mad if trying to answer spiritual questions solely with reason.

"Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite." One cannot explain God and how He fits into our world using our own terms, our own logic, our own rules (whether one is speaking of how the world was created, why there is so much suffering if God is a loving God, what does it mean to live in the world but not be of it, where can there be hope in a world gone to pot, or any other of the innumerable questions we wrestle with). It would be like trying to play a treble clef instrument when reading bass clef music; everything would sound ridiculous and it wouldn't make a bit of sense! But I think that we as Christians are called to step up to the plate, let go of our society's insistence on complete knowledge, and live our lives embracing the mystery.

To call God simply a machine operator is near insulting. He is the great poet, fluent in all of our languages, astute in all of our laws. Our Abba ;)

I'm not sure if this makes sense at all outside of my head, hopefully it's not complete rambling! Btw, I need to give a lot of credit to Tony Campolo and the books Generous Orthodoxy and The Story We Find Ourselves In by Brian Mclaren for sparking this conversation.