Defining God By What God Is Not

The Heavenly Banquet

In this episode Chad Rhodes and Charlotte Elia return to one of Chad's blog posts on Osuna and the apophatic way or via negativa. While the kataphatic approach seeks to define God in positive terms, by affirming what God is, the apophatic way seeks the divine by dismissing those things which are not God. The apophatic approach is most often embraced by the contemplative and mystical traditions in their search for union with the divine.

“So ultimately you keep negating until the only thing left is God, but of course what happens when you do that is there’s nothing left with which to compare God.” -Chad Rhodes

“There might be a temptation to take our beliefs as if we can only have faith if we are certain of our beliefs. And I think that creates a lot of problems, not only for our own experience but how we view those who don’t believe like we do. What the apophatic way does is it helps us realize that how we think about God is provisional at best.” -Chad Rhodes

“One of the virtues that you don’t see enough of with Christians is what I call doxastic humility, that is humility about their own beliefs.” -Chad Rhodes

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