Hypernymous

Here’s a paragraph from Rollins’ How (Not) to Speak of God that’s worth thinking about:

What is beginning to arise from the discussion so far is the idea that God ought to be understood as radically transcendent, not because God is somehow distant and remote from us, but precisely because God is immanent. In the same way that the sun blinds the one who looks directly at its light, so God’s incoming blinds our intellect. In this way the God who is testified to in the Judeo-Christian tradition saturates our understanding with a blinding presence. This type of transcendent-immanence can be describe as ‘hypernymity’. While anonymity offers too little information for our understanding to grasp (like a figure on television who has been veiled in darkness so as to protect their identity), hypernymity gives us far too much information. Instead of being limited by the poverty of absence we are short-circuited by the excess of presence. The anonymous and the hypernymous both resist reduction to complete understanding, but for very different reasons.

So, God is concealed even as he is revealed. The very revelation of his glory conceals it at the same time. God remains hidden and mysterious, not because he’s withdrawn his presence from us, but because He is fully present.