I often tell my children an apocryphal story about Nicholas of Myra's courageous stand against blasphemy at the Council of Nicea in 325.

Here's how it goes:

"A long time ago--just a few hundred years after Jesus rose from the dead--all the Christian pastors went to a city called Nicea to talk about some important things. There were a lot of great men there; many of them had been beaten up for telling people about Jesus and some had almost died. Still, none of them ever gave up believing in Jesus because they loved him so much... and the people loved them too.

"One of the great men at Nicea was Athanasius of Alexandria. He told people the truth about God. You've heard of Athanasius because we named your baby brother after him. Another great man at Nicea was Nicholas of Myra. Today, everybody calls him Santa Claus. Nicholas was good--he was kind to the people, he gave money to the poor, and he too told them the truth about God. But there was also a very bad man at Nicea named Arius who told a lot of lies. You've heard of Arius because we named the iguana that used to live in our courtyard after him. (Remember how we would yell, "Get out of here, Arius, you ugly lizard!" as it crawled along our fence?)

In my last post, I referred to theologian Elizabeth Johnson's claim that God is "incomprehensible, unfathomable, limitless, ineffable, [and] beyond description." The key problem with her assertion is that she muddles two senses in which God is said to be incomprehensible. The first sense of divine incomprehensibility expresses the theologically modest insight that one can never possess exhaustive knowledge about God. He is too great and his being is too deep to be described in toto; he is ultimately incomprehensible. However, the second sense expresses austere skepticism with regard to one's ability to genuinely know or properly articulate anything about God. In other words, he is utterly incomprehensible.

There is a longstanding suspicion that claims about God go beyond the limits of knowledge. Is it possible to know that God loves us, or that he is all powerful, or that he is known through Jesus Christ, or that he is a "he," let alone that he exists? Some individuals insist that we can know a number of important things about God; Scripture, philosophical reflection, and mystical experience are typically thought to be essential sources of insight about the divine nature.

Others, however, are doubtful that we can know many significant things, while still others are downright pessimistic that we can know anything at all. Ironically, some of the pessimists have a lot to say about God. For example, the Catholic, feminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson expresses doubt about the viability of God-talk from the outset of her recent book, Quest for the Living God:

The very nature of what is being sought is incomprehensible, unfathomable, limitless, ineffable, beyond description. The living God literally cannot be compared with anything in the world. To do so is to reduce divine reality to an idol. The divine magnitude means that no matter how much we know, the human mind can never capture the whole of the living God in a net of concepts, images, or definitions, or preside over the reality of God in even the most exalted doctrines.... If you have fully figured out who God is, then you are dealing with something else, some lesser reality (Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God [New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc., 2008], 12-13).

Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris have recently published wildly popular books attacking belief in God. This Troika of Secularism emphatically rejects theism and insists that the rest of us should as well. They are, in fact, evangelistic atheists; or more precisely, "anti-theists."

It would be foolish to underestimate the impact that they and their ilk are having on the public's perception of faith, in general, and Christianity, in particular. Their works contain a tangled convergence of insightful criticism, sophomoric philosophizing, and raw, mean-spirited bluster which has served to, simultaneously, rally the skeptics and irk the saints. The most curious aspect of their collective project, however, is that they make almost no effort to defend atheism.

In my last post on prayer, I enumerated various ways in which we excuse our prayerlessness. Our excuses gain their strength from fundamental misunderstandings about both God's nature and the human predicament. In this post, I'll address questions about God's nature as it pertains to our excuses.

The Good News: God is personal.

God is personal and, as a divine person, he desires personal fellowship with us: the created objects of his love. He wants us to share our lives with him and prayer is a vital element in that sharing.

But what about "spiritual principles"?

Prayer is not about getting what we want from God; it's about exposing our hearts to his transforming presence and receiving what he wants to give us. This is particularly significant because sin distorts our natural appetites and so, despite a sense of certainty, we often don't know what we really need or want. God, however, knows precisely what we need because he knows how we fit together within his eternal plan, and he knows what we truly want because he has designed our hearts such that our natural appetites are ultimately fulfilled in him. Above all, God wants to respond to our prayers with good gifts (see Matthew 7:11).

Still, it's one thing to know the true purpose of prayer and it's another thing to cultivate a life of continual, fruitful communion with God. Richard Foster articulates our predicament: "We today yearn for prayer and hide from prayer. We are attracted to it and repelled by it. We believe prayer is something we should do, even something we want to do, but it seems like a chasm stands between us and actually praying. We experience the agony of prayerlessness" (Prayer: Finding the Heart's True Home [New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992], 7).

I recently came across a remarkable ancient Hebrew prayer which begins with an astoundingly crass complaint: "Yahweh, you deceived me, and I was deceived; you overpowered me and prevailed. I am ridiculed all day long; everyone mocks me."

Apparently, the writer blamed God for his lack of popularity. But who could be so arrogant as to slander a blameless and holy God for his own laughably insignificant troubles? The audacity! Who, exactly, did this ninny think he was dealing with? If he possessed a passable understanding of the Biblical God, he would never dare to utter such faithless words.

The accusation is so childish, so crude, that I was tempted to slam the text in disgust. Except that the text is the Bible and the whiner is Jeremiah... the prophet... who is in heaven with God. And as these things tend to go, the Bible slams those who are enticed to slam it.

Pop-theology is awash with conspiracy theories. We're breathlessly informed that the church (that omnipotent, crafty monolith) suppresses evidence that Jesus developed his philosophy in an Indian ashram, or that he survived his crucifixion, or that he fathered a child with Mary Magdalene, or that religious bullies hijacked his original message of peace and equality in order to illicitly place his imprimatur upon their own strange metaphysical theories.

On his blog, Five Sacred Crossings, Craig Hazen aptly calls conspiracy theories "the fruit of the soul's dark regions" and notes that such nincompoopery tends to emerge from the fertile ground of blind contempt. Once it has thoroughly poisoned a soul, this emotional vice creates dark regions from which bombastic conjectures grow like diseased fruit. That's why, to use his example, those who obsessively villanize George Bush find it easy to believe almost any outlandish rumor about his nefarious scheming. After all, if you're going to beat a dog, does it really matter what kind of stick you use?

After slaying the Bull of Heaven, Gilgamesh and his devoted friend Enkidu embarked on a long trek back to the palace at Uruk. Along the way, Gilgamesh boasted to Enkidu that he had installed an ingenious security system to protect his royal chamber from intruders: if anything larger than a gnat passed through a door or window, the system would give it a lethal electrical shock. He added that the system logged each instance in which it was triggered and security cameras monitored activity outside his room at all times. There was no safe way in or out, Gilgamesh warned, unless one carried the electronic key card that hung from his neck.

But when the Champions of Uruk arrived at the royal chamber they found that the furniture had been overturned, the king's clothes were shredded and strewn across the floor, certain valuable items--jewelry, statues of lapis lazuli, and his T.V.--were missing, a half eaten sandwich was left on the dining table, and the words "William Loftus wuz here!" were painted on the wall.

The phrase "perichoretic blue" comes from a poem that I wrote for my wife about the love shared by the sky and the sea, entitled "The Second Day". The final stanza reads:

The horizon dissolves into perichoretic blue,
Where there's no separating me from you.
And there's no separating you from me,
Because you are the sky and I am the sea.

"Perichoretic" is the adjectival form of "perichoresis": the theological doctrine pertaining to the interpenetration of, and complete fellowship shared among, the persons of the Trinity. Marriage, while not truly perichoretic, resembles the unity of the divine persons as two individuals become one flesh. In my poem, the horizon is a metaphor for "marital perichoresis" as an azure band where the sky and sea meet, becoming entirely confluent.