In my experience, the evangelical church was often too quick to make positive statements about God. Some of the positive statements were ignorant at best and destructive and hateful at worst.
It makes sense that the religious life can be envisioned as learning things about God, responding to those things in thought and action, and then perhaps telling other people those things. When I say “positive statements about God” in this context I do not mean positive as in “good”. Positive here means stating something that IS, and negative means stating something that IS NOT.
Positive: “God is like a rock.”
Negative: “God is not like a rock.”
Here is why understanding this matters in consideration of the evangelical church. The more than occasional arrogance and vacancy of the evangelical church is betrayed by the fact that it majors on positive statements and often fails to consider negative statements. It might be true that God is like a rock. However it is just as true, perhaps more so, that there are many ways in which God is not like a rock. The spiritual life needs the tension of this positive (katophatic) and negative (apophatic) way together.
If there is only negative then we cannot know anything at all. There is no use in this way, and this way on its own cannot be understood as Christian. Christian faith affirms that some things have indeed been revealed. There is a lot that we can know. If the only statements are negative, “we can’t know anything about God”, then there is no hope of connecting in any way with the transcendent. If there is only positive then we trade the wonder and mystery of God (theology) for the focus only on our thoughts and ideas (anthropology) about God.
In my experience the evangelical church carried a bit of a curse of the positive way.
It seemed that God could be easily understood and comprehended. “God is like this, and this and this, and this." From there the jump was quickly made to making statements about what God liked and wanted politically, socially, culturally. So God was “for this, for this, and this and this, and against this and this and this.” You don’t have to guess that God was for pretty much everything the evangelical church was for and against everything the evangelical church was against.
There was a book that made the rounds in evangelical circles years ago. It was by Lee Strobel who was embraced by a very conservative, nationalist, purity culture movement in the church. The book was called “What Jesus Would Say to Bart Simpson, Madonna, Rush Limbaugh, Murphy Brown … AND YOU"!” Now that’s some arrogant shit!
I find it disturbing and hilarious that Lee Strobel would assume to know what Jesus would say to Mother Teresa. Perhaps she read the book to find out.
This shows the concern of only positive statements. The church and its people begin to act is if they know just what God would say to everyone. Generations of people who have been open to faith have walked away from the church because of such thoughtlessness. To be sure, we can make positive statements about God from Christian theology. A church that offers only mystery does not offer much. It is likely that some churches and expressions of faith erred on the side of never saying anything about God. Evangelicals embraced a different mistake.
I offer an image from theologian Karl Barth to describe the helpful tension;
Doing theology is like trying to paint a bird in flight. It is always a hazardous task, one that never improves on the original.
An image from my friend Alwyn’s catalogue;
There is beauty in the stillness of the shot, but the real power comes from knowing what we can’t see, the movement of the wings, the flight and the soaring.