These days, I finally got around listening to the Bluffer's guide to Christian doctrine podcast. I don't really know the people behind the Bluffer's guide, but they seem to serve in the Anglican Church. In addition, I also started re-reading G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy.

The topic of the first installment of the bluffer's guide is God – why he doesn’t exist!. It talks about how God is not created, so the usual definition of existence does not apply. God remains a mystery, but also reveils himself to us. (They continue to talk about much more, so it's worth it to give it a listen.)

If you emphasise the mystery, you are in danger of ending up in gnosticism. However, and I only realized this while listening to this talk, if you emphasize revelation, you are in danger of humanizing God; that is, making an image of God that conforms to your human expectations.

Charismatics (and I am one of them) have this tendency to make God very available: He speaks to us through prophecies, his spirit “comes” if we only worship intensively enough (and judge the quality of worship according to the way we feel God is there), we pray for God to come down and do this or that — though these things are not wrong per se, we often end up treating God like a powerful human that has to be convinced to do something. In fact, even when we remember God's all-powerfulness and omnipresence, we sometimes imagine a sulky, humanly king that needs to be pacified by our doing the right things.

The first chapter in Orthodoxy also talks about the mystery that is God, and about faith having to cross seemingly paradox truths. It is a timely reminder that I should re-evaluate my relationship with God, and see whether I have not created an image of him. Something that we all have to do regularly, I guess.