Trying to understand the full meaning of the words and images one uses to speak about God is like attempting to assess the quality of a translation without knowing the original language. No one speaks “God.” Not I. Not the pope. Not even Stephen Colbert. Defending the theological use of metaphors, Aquinas wrote that “what He is not is clearer to us than what He is. Therefore similitudes drawn from things farthest away from God form within us a truer estimate that God is above whatsoever we may say or think of Him.” For instance, believers use words like father and mother to refer and relate to God, but without being able to compare and contrast such language with the reality of God, they cannot have a clear sense of the analogies they employ. No one can. Aquinas wrote a lot about God, but he later likened it all to straw. This is the religious condition.

Consequently, religious doctrine has to be understood without the benefit of knowing the whole. As it’s only in the context of the whole that one can fully make sense of the parts, the meaning of religious doctrine will always be ambiguous. Imagine readers trying to understand a novel having only a few sentences of the text. They’d have to work with what they have knowing that there’s far more to the story and that they might not even have a solid grasp of the few parts they’ve been able to read. If they discovered additional fragments, they’d have to revise their understanding. If religious believers are serious about the infinity of God, then they should be modest about their doctrines, interpreting and sharing them with conviction and critique, faith and doubt. No one knows what’s beyond the horizon.