Effing the Ineffable

Recently attended a debate on the existence of Satan. Two of the panelists were Mark Driscoll (of Mars Hill Church in Seattle) and Deepak Chopra (famed new-age guru). I have many thoughts about the debate, but I wanted to write down this one small reflection fairly quickly since it’s both simple and essential to the heart of my disagreement with Chopra and much of what passes for “spirituality” in our age.

Several times in the course of the debate, Chopra described “god” as “transcendent and ineffable”. With the first adjective, I have no problems; assuming we are talking about the same God and using the same (western) meaning of “transcendent”, the statement stands in agreement with the heart of Evangelicalism, Puritanism, Lutheranism, Roman Catholicism, Augustine, and the church fathers. My complaint is with the second adjective.

“God is ineffable” is a popular saying in present-day “spiritual” circles. The compact OED gives us only two (only two, a paltry sum indeed!) meanings for ineffable: “too great or extreme to be expressed in words”, and “too sacred to be uttered”. Let’s consider each of these in turn.

If God is completely and truly ineffable in the first sense, then — catch this, it’s subtle — even calling Him “ineffable” is a contradiction, because it expresses something about Him in words. Similarly, if we call Him ineffable in the second sense, we have similarly contradicted ourselves, because — again, this is subtle — we have attached a word to the sacredly unutterable Identity and uttered it, thereby demonstrating that we think it is not ineffable after all.

Now, these critiques only apply if we treat “ineffable” as a first-class property of Divinity. It is quite a different matter to speak, as Christians often do, of the ineffable ages of God’s eternity, the ineffable depths of His love or compassion, or His ineffable power and mercy. With this we are saying something substantial, that God actually and truly possesses particular attributes and abilities and traits, but that He possesses them in measures which defy expression. There is no contradiction (with the first definition, anyway) in calling God ineffably Holy. It is only the “ineffable god” of vague spirituality which is, literally, nothing but nonsense.

Why is this important? For starters, the reason the “ineffable deity” meme is so popular today is that its own meaninglessness and nonsensicality invites its adherents to embrace equally irrational ideas about everything else. You are free to judge and condemn those who argue for an objective standard of justice. You are free to speak of rehabilitating that which you call irredeemably evil. You can champion education as the cure for wickedness even as you rail against any attempts to include efforts at moral formation in public education. You can adopt nonsensical spatial metaphors (“beyond” right and wrong, “beyond” liberal and conservative) to evade uncomfortable questions about the glaring inconsistencies in your own thinking or the dastardly ethical implications of your vacuous worldview.

If God is ineffable, then categories like “God’s justice” or “God’s will” or even “God’s existence” are likewise nonsensical. The mind consumed with the ineffable delusion reflexively dismisses such notions without regard for their merit. Consumed with vanity at having grasped the ungraspable, of having effed the ineffable, they exalt their own understanding and become futile in their own thinking, which (if we are willing to think Biblically) are the immediate forerunners to folly, idolatry, and judgement. “God is ineffable” is a cop-out, a word game played by those lacking the humility to allow that God might speak and that His words might mean something.