numinous

A Biblical Philosophy of the Numinous Aspect of the Arts

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The biblical conception of God as holy has profound significance for the philosophy of the worship arts. The biblical worshiper encounters the Lord as the Holy One. The basic connotation of holiness (Hebrew qodesh) is not the goodness or righteousness of Yahweh but the fact that he is encountered as one “set apart,” sacred or sacrosanct, unlike that which is experienced in the ordinary events of life. There is, in other words, a numinous aspect to the encounter with the Lord, a quality of mystery, dread, and fascination in his presence, which calls forth a spontaneous and intuitive response of worship. The rational mind cannot encompass his being, nor can human language adequately bear the majesty of his presence. Worship, like theology, must express itself through transforms of the experience of the holy, symbols that point beyond themselves to the real reason alone cannot grasp.

It is here that the fine arts make their essential and distinctive contribution to the worship of Almighty God. Whether visual, auditory, literary, choreographic, or liturgical, art forms can augment the worshiper’s sensitivity to the sacred in a way that common verbal communication cannot. Language, as a means of communication, depends on the premise that a symbol used by one speaker will be intelligible to another and therefore involves a rational process that issues in some kind of linear, conventional ordering of phonemes and thought units. Art forms, as well, require the application of rational processes in their creation and appreciation, but as a means of communication, they operate at another level, touching the intuitive faculties of the human psyche. Art may be a window into unseen realities. The Last Supper fresco of Leonardo da Vinci is more of a humanistic tour de force of Renaissance technique than a vehicle for grasping the passion of Christ. By contrast, the roughly contemporaneous Last Supper of Tintoretto, its scene shading from the table of Christ and the disciples into the heavenly host, is a numinous window into the eternal truth “This is my body”; and the Isenheim Altarpiece of Grünewald, with its massive, distorted depiction of the crucified Christ, conveys with compelling force the weight of sin and suffering borne by the Savior.

The Bible is full of artistic creations, symbols fashioned or enacted by worshipers as expressions of that which cannot be encompassed by ordinary speech: the tabernacle and the temple, with their furnishings; the vesture of the priests; the ark of the covenant and its cherubim; the symbolic acts of liturgy and sacrifice; sacred gesture such as bowing down and lifting hands and festival processions; the many word symbols of covenant liturgy, hymn, and psalm, prophetic song and vision, parable and preaching. The colors used in the Mosaic tabernacle and its priestly vesture are sometimes interpreted as prophetic, standing for some theological truth or concept; in fact, their “meaning” is to serve as artistic expressions of the numinous quality of the house of God.

As an art form, even unintelligible speech, or speaking in tongues, conveys such a meaning in relationship to the presence of the holy and is not an ecstatic or emotional activity as some nonpractitioners suppose. The most numinous of the arts is music, which speaks most directly to the intuitive capacities of the worshiper, bearing a sense of majesty, wonder, mystery, and delight, and bringing a release of the soul even without recourse to words. It is well to recall, in this connection, how much of the Bible is poetry and song. God is not an idea but a reality encountered at the deepest level of being; from this perspective, art is not only permitted in biblical worship, but it is also mandatory.

Holy Places, Holy People in Biblical Worship

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Although holiness belongs to God, it may be imparted to objects, or even to people, which become the bearers of the holy.

The Holy Place

The men and women who first received the biblical revelation were acutely conscious of the ways ordinary things could take on an extraordinary, numinous quality as bearers of the sacred. The concept of the sanctuary, or holy place, comes readily to mind. The Old Testament records many occasions when the fathers of Israel worshiped at holy places. Some of these places were already sacred sites for the Canaanites, but they became Israelite sanctuaries as the result of a theophany of Yahweh God. When he appeared to one of the fathers to give or reaffirm the promise of the land, the patriarch would mark the site by erecting some holy object such as an altar or a memorial stone.

Altars. At Shechem Abraham “built an altar there to the Lord, who had appeared to him” (Gen. 12:7). This location continued to be a holy place where Joshua later led the people in the renewal of the covenant with the Lord, erecting a stone as a memorial to this event (Josh. 24:1–8). Thus, the Israelite sanctuary was “a token of the covenant and a guarantee of its blessing” (Johannes Pedersen, Israel: Its Life and Culture, 2nd ed. [1959], Vols. III–IV, p. 214). A classic expression of the significance of the holy place occurs in the account of Jacob’s dream at Bethel, in which he sees a ladder reaching to heaven on which messengers of God are descending and ascending; the Lord appears and pronounces his promise of blessing, land, and descendants. Awakening, Jacob exclaims, trembling, “Surely the Lord is in this place.… This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven” (Gen. 28:16–17). Before leaving, Jacob sets up a sacred pillar, the stone on which he had been sleeping, and anoints it as a bearer of the holy, “God’s house” (Gen. 28:10–22). The sanctuary is a place where earth and heaven meet, where “angels ascend and descend”; for this reason, ancient temples were usually erected on hills or, in flat country, on artificial elevations. Ascending Zion in pilgrimage, the later Israelite worshiper cries, “I lift up my eyes to you, to you whose throne is in heaven” (Ps. 123:1). The sanctuary is a place bearing a numinous aspect where the divine can break through into the ordinary, where man can sense the presence of the holy and communicate with him.

Mount Sinai. The archetype of the holy place in the biblical narrative is the desert sanctuary of Sinai. Here, the Lord appeared to his people in full and fearful theophany, in a presence of such intensity that only the specially consecrated could approach the mountain. After the Lord had set forth the stipulations of the Book of the Covenant (Exod. 20–23), Moses and the priests and elders of Israel went up the mountain to meet with Yahweh and to eat the covenant meal; there, in a further manifestation of the numinous, they “saw the God of Israel. Under his feet was something like a pavement made of sapphire, clear as the sky itself” (Exod. 24:10).

Ark and Tabernacle. These numinous aspects of the Sinai sanctuary were transferred to the ark of the covenant, where Yahweh was “enthroned between the cherubim” (Pss. 80:1; 99:1), and to the tent of meeting, as the place where Moses “entered the Lord’s presence to speak with him” (Exod. 34:34). Not only the sanctuary structure with its altar, but all its furnishings and utensils, as well as the offerings presented there, were consecrated as “holy,” set apart for the exclusive use and service of the Lord.

The Temple on Zion. Before Israel’s entrance into Canaan, Moses spoke of “the place the Lord your God will choose from among all your tribes to put his Name there for his dwelling” (Deut. 12:5). This unnamed place turned out to be Jerusalem and Mount Zion, which David captured as a center for Israel’s worship (2 Sam. 5:7). Zion had long been a Jebusite holy place, the “Salem” where Abraham had paid a tithe to Melchizedek, the king and “priest of God Most High” or ’El ‘elyon (Gen. 14:18–20). But when David transferred the ark to Zion and when Solomon’s temple assumed the role of the tabernacle, the sanctuary on Zion became, in effect, a continuation of Sinai, where the Lord “appeared” in theophanic majesty in the worship of Israel. Several of the psalms celebrate the numinous appearance of the Lord in his temple or in Zion with imagery that reminds us of the giving of the covenant on Mount Sinai (Ps. 50:1–6). Exactly how the Lord “appeared” in the worship of the temple is not clear, but there are indications in the Psalms that the liturgical recitation of the covenant Law, associated with a procession of the ark of the covenant, was a high moment when worshipers might experience the Lord’s presence in an especially compelling way.

“Holiness adorns your house,” sang the Israelite worshiper (Ps. 93:5). Israel’s theologians understood, of course, that the sanctuary was inadequate as a bearer of the sacred. “But will God really dwell on earth?” asked Solomon. “The heavens, even the highest heaven cannot contain you. How much less this temple I have built!” (1 Kings 8:27; cf. Isa. 66:1). In the New Testament we meet with the concept of the heavenly sanctuary, of which the earthly one is but a copy (Heb. 8–9; cf. 2 Cor. 5:1; Rev. 11:19). No human edifice can convey the fullness of the presence of the holy. As Jesus explained to the Samaritan woman, the deepest and most authentic worship of the Father could occur “neither on this mountain [Gerizim] nor in Jerusalem” (John 4:21). Although Christ spoke of Jerusalem as “the city of the Great King” (Matt. 5:35), he foretold the impending desecration and violent destruction of its sanctuary (Matt. 24:2), a judgment on a religious establishment that had violated the Lord’s covenant.

Jesus and the Holy Place. Nevertheless, Jesus understood and accepted the concept of the holy place in its deepest sense. He questioned the focus of the Pharisees, who swore by the gold of the temple or by the offering on the altar—in other words, by the products and symbols of man’s religious commitment. To the contrary, said Jesus, it is the temple that sanctifies the gold and the altar that sanctifies the offering (Matt. 23:16–19). Jesus’ language, incomprehensible as it may seem to us, was not incomprehensible to the early church, which continued to respect those places where God had manifested his presence in a numinous experience. Thus Peter speaks of that time when the apostles were with Christ “on the holy mountain,” by which he meant not Sinai or Zion but the Mount of Transfiguration (2 Pet. 1:16–18). The proliferation of holy shrines in the Orthodox and Catholic traditions, however fanciful it may seem in Protestant perspective, is a witness to the persistence of this biblical concept.

The Numinous Aspect of the Church

When we appreciate the importance of the sanctuary in biblical worship, we can understand why the New Testament authors draw upon the imagery of Jerusalem and its temple to convey the significance of the church. Addressing Christian believers as a body, the apostle Paul asks, “Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him; for God’s temple is sacred, and you are that temple” (1 Cor. 3:16–17). Again he declares, “we are the temple of the living God” (2 Cor. 6:16). (In both these passages he uses the plural form, speaking not to individuals but to the church collectively.) As a temple, the church of Jesus Christ is “a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit” (Eph. 2:22). These are not simply moralistic expressions; they point to a reality that transcends the idea of the church as a mere human association.

John the Revelator most fully develops the picture of the church as “the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God” (Rev. 21:2). As the bride of the Lamb, the new sanctuary displaces the harlot “Babylon,” the old temple, and its religious establishment. The appearance of the new holy place brings a renewal of the covenant, in the declaration that “the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people” (Rev. 21:3), words that echo the covenant formula of the Israelite prophets. The sanctuary is a picture of the covenant God living among his own, enthroned on the praises of his people (Ps. 22:3). As John takes the concept further, we are brought face to face with the numinous brilliance of the Holy City (Rev. 21:10–11), “for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp” (Rev. 21:23). So overwhelmed is John by the vision that his description strains at the limitations of language. The Holy City is a temple yet not a temple: “I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple” (Rev. 21:22). There is a numinous, awesome aspect to the church as a bearer of the holy, a vehicle through which we may encounter the fearful presence of the King of kings.

Holy People

The mortal who would trespass into the territory of the sacred runs the risk of wrathful outburst and sudden destruction. It is paradoxical, then, that human beings can serve as bearers of the holy, vehicles through whom the numinous makes its presence felt. Study of the history of religions brings to light many instances of “holy” men and women, people whose presence is “larger than life,” awesome, commanding, not to be trifled with. In such personages, the worshiper senses the workings of the divine. Biblical faith, too, is familiar with the concept of people as bearers of the holy.

Priests. The Pentateuch takes pains to spell out the procedures of vesture, sacrifice, anointing, and life-style by which a priest may become and remain consecrated, in order to enter the Lord’s presence (Exod. 28–29; Lev. 8; 21). Through his consecration, some of the holiness of the Lord is imparted to the priest, enough to “inoculate” him against an outbreak of the wrath of the numinous. A special aura of holiness rested upon the high priest. He alone could enter the Holy of Holies, the inner sanctuary containing the ark of the covenant, on the Day of Atonement (Lev. 16). A person accused of manslaughter was protected from the avenger of the deceased, provided he remained in a city of refuge until the death of the high priest then in office (Num. 35:25–28).

Prophets. The Scripture often calls the prophet a “man of God”; the term is applied to Moses (Deut. 33:1), Samuel (1 Sam. 9:6), Shemaiah (1 Kings 12:22), Elijah (1 Kings 17:18), Elisha (2 Kings 4:40), David (2 Chron. 8:14), and to a number of unnamed prophets or messengers of the Lord (Judg. 13:6; 1 Sam. 2:27; 1 Kings 13:1). In these instances the term man of God (or woman of God) does not mean a righteous person but one of special endowment, a bearer of the numinous, even one to be feared. The people’s reaction to Moses when he returned to them after speaking with the Lord was one of great fear because “his face was radiant” (Exod. 34:29); as a result, he had to wear a veil whenever he came out from before Yahweh. The biblical narrative ascribes miracles to prophets such as Elijah and Isaiah as the distinguishing mark of the “man of God” (1 Kings 17:24). Especially noteworthy is the numinous aura associated with the person of Elisha; he raises the dead son of the Shunammite woman by lying upon him, body member to member (2 Kings 4:32–37), and even after his death a corpse, thrown hastily into his grave, returns to life upon contact with Elisha’s bones (2 Kings 13:20–21). The earlier prophets seem to have been distinguished by special appearance, having a tonsured head in a manner similar to later Christian monks (1 Kings 20:35–42; 2 Kings 2:23). A man or woman of God can make mistakes, disobey the Lord, and pay the penalty but still be known as a man or woman of God (1 Kings 13:26; 2 Kings 23:17). Samson was consecrated to God by the Nazirite vow (Judg. 13:7) and was moved by the Spirit of the Lord (Judg. 13:25); even when he turned away from the Lord, he remained an awesome man, capable of exploits larger than life.

The Apostles. Although the New Testament uses the expression “man of God” more in the sense of a godly person equipped for the service of the Lord (1 Tim. 6:11; 2 Tim. 3:16–17), it also portrays the apostles, like the prophets, as bearers of the numinous. People laid their sick friends in the street in the hope that Peter’s shadow might fall on them (Acts 5:15); it was enough for Peter to confront Ananias and Sapphira with their duplicity, and they fell dead at his feet (Acts 5:1–11). The people of Lystra acclaimed Paul and Barnabas as gods and were prepared to sacrifice to them (Acts 14:11–13). Handkerchiefs or aprons from Paul’s body were carried to the sick, and they were healed (Acts 19:11–12). In recording such incidents, Luke is not simply chronicling the ignorant superstition of ancient peoples. The awe-inspiring aspect of the apostles, despite their lack of formal education, is a recognizable quality in their lives, the result of the fact “that these men had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13).

Jesus Christ. The powerful, wondrous impact of the holy is evident throughout the gospel portrait of Jesus Christ himself, from his birth to his resurrection and ascension, and requires no lengthy demonstration here. To those already mentioned, we would add only a few examples. As a woman, suffering from a persistent hemorrhage, touched the hem of Jesus’ garment, Jesus immediately sensed that “virtue,” or power (dunamis), had gone out from him (Mark 5:25–34). Led to the edge of a cliff at Nazareth by a mob angry at his indictment of their lack of response to the love of God, Jesus was able simply to pass through their midst and go on his way. When soldiers came asking for Jesus the Nazarene to arrest him, Jesus replied, “I am he,” and “they drew back and fell to the ground” (John 18:6). The first preachers of the Resurrection referred to the miracles of Jesus, familiar to their audience, as acts that attested him as specially endowed and set apart by God (Acts 2:22). In his own preaching, Jesus spoke of the kingdom of God, a realm breaking into present time and space in supernatural manifestation. We can understand much about the principles and operation of the kingdom of God when we view it as another expression for God’s covenant with his people. As to its inner dynamic, however, the kingdom is a mystery. It cannot be completely comprehended in rational argument and detail; its principles of growth can only be hinted at through picture and comparison, its power suggested through miracle and sign. Above all, it is present in the person of Jesus himself, as the bearer of the holy.

Like the prophets before him and the apostles afterward, Jesus was opposed, vilified, and persecuted by those who could not, or would not, look beyond the external to the reality of the unseen. Yet the final vindication of Jesus’ identity as the incarnate revelation of the holy is that most awesome of all events, the Resurrection, which not only displays the workings of the Creator in the person of his Son, but releases in his worshipers some measure of that same quality of sacred and mysterious power. Thus, the New Testament frequently refers to the body of believers collectively as “the saints” or “the holy ones” (Greek hagios, equivalent to Hebrew qadosh). Scripture makes it clear that the entire covenant community is “a kingdom of priests” (Exod. 19:6), “a royal priesthood” (1 Pet. 2:9), consecrated to approach the Presence in worship. The awesome encounter with the living God is not the preserve of a spiritual elite but the inheritance of all who call on him.

Conclusion

This survey has attempted to demonstrate that in biblical worship there is a numinous dimension of awe, dread, majesty, transcendence in the presence of the Holy One. The worship of God is not confined to the flatness of the rational, the sentimental, or the moral. The error of much of both orthodox and modernistic Christianity is that it has tried, by default or by design, to constrain worship within these limits. Religion has been reduced, in the words of the nineteenth-century theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, to a “feeling of dependence,” or more crudely, to “morality tinged by emotion” (On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers [New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958]). Or it has become a matter of words and statements, precise definitions, carefully crafted confessions. Or it has degenerated into a mere social ritual, an exercise in group identification. In such a domesticated form, it lacks the intensity, depth, mystery, and abandon of biblical worship and so fails to speak to the deepest instincts of the soul.

The Numinous As the Holy One in Biblical Worship

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The worshiper encounters God as the Holy One, who is beyond rational comprehension. There is a quality to this encounter that transcends revelation in terms of language, symbols, or concepts.

The Sense of the Numinous

The biblical worshiper experiences the holiness of God—holiness, not in the moralized sense of that which is perfectly good, but holiness in the primitive, generic sense of that which is “separated, set apart.” This is the underlying meaning of the Hebrew root q-d-sh as the basis for qodesh, “holiness”; qadosh, “holy”; qadash, “be consecrated”; and miqdash, “sanctuary.” As applied to the Lord, his holiness means that he is unlike anything pertaining to the common or mundane. He is overpowering, majestic, fascinating, mysterious. He is beyond the grasp of rational comprehension yet directly sensed in his dreadful and awesome aspect. His presence compels a spontaneous and intuitive response of worship.

For this original and basic element of the holy, in 1917 the historian of religion Rudolf Otto coined the term the numinous, from the Latin numen (Das Heilige; English translation, The Idea of the Holy [New York: Oxford University Press, 1923], pp. 5–7). Confronted by the numinous, the worshiper experiences the mysterium tremendum, the wonder, dread, or trepidation in the presence of the incomprehensible and the uncanny, the sense of creaturehood and nothingness before the Creator, who is all. The numinous overwhelms with its mass and unconditioned majesty; the Hebrew word translated “glory” (kavod) means “mass, weight.” The holy pulsates with life and energy; it can break out in wrath or fury. Before its sublime radiance and commanding worth, the worshiper is rapt, in a state of transport.

The confrontation with the numinous is a direct apprehension in the inward being of the worshiper; the intellectual, moral, and even psychological categories that describe and define it are secondary to this intuitive encounter. Awareness of the numinous issues from the deepest level of apprehension in the human soul, transcending the rational mind. Otto writes that “though it of course comes into being in and amid the sensory data and empirical material of the natural world and cannot anticipate or dispense with those, yet it does not arise out of them, but only by their means” (Otto, p. 113). In other words, for the biblical worshiper, God is not an idea; he is a compelling reality encountered at the deepest level of being.

It is typical of biblical faith (in contrast to faith of other religions, such as Islam) that the numinous is usually qualified through the word of revelation, which makes it possible to speak of the Holy One and his purposes in rational terms. However, this is not always the case, even in the Scriptures.

The Numinous, Interpreted

When the numinous appears in Scripture, the awesome confrontation at the direct, intuitive level is almost always accompanied by some form of interpretation in categories that can be grasped by the mind and communicated in language. At Mount Sinai, the Lord appears not only in the compelling phenomena of thunder, lightning, smoke, fire, and the sound of the trumpet (Exod. 19:16–19), but also in the declaration of his identity—“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt”—and in the declaration of his will—“You shall have no other gods before me” (Exod. 20:2–3).

Such interpretive revelation usually comes through the word of gifted prophetic voices, as “men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Pet. 1:21). The person who has been overwhelmed and captivated by the holy, although perhaps brought to trembling silence during the encounter, frequently emerges from it as a speaker anointed with a message, a vision, a proclamation of judgment, a declaration of divine purpose. In Amos’s words, “The lion has roared—who will not fear? The Sovereign Lord has spoken—who can but prophesy?” (Amos 3:8). If the more introspective Jeremiah is at all typical, the revelation is formed in the crucible of inner psychological processes, as the numinous impinges on the prophet “like a fire … shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed I cannot” (Jer. 20:9). The revelation that accompanies the manifestation of the holy forms the basis for the covenant relationship between the Lord and the worshiping community, which may be summarized in the prophetic formula, “I will be their God, and they will be my people” (Ezek. 37:27; Isa. 51:16; Jer. 31:33; Ezek. 11:20; Zech. 8:8). The covenant, with all its theological ramifications, forms the rational content of the encounter with the holy.

The Numinous, Noninterpreted

The rational content of the encounter with the Lord is secondary to the basic confrontation, which occurs at a deeper level. Hence the Bible records numinous encounters in which little or no interpretation is provided. One instance is found in the account of Jacob’s night at Penuel, where “a man wrestled with him till daybreak” (Gen. 32:24). The identity of this presence remains an enigma; even when pressed, Jacob’s mysterious adversary refuses to identify or explain himself in any way. It is left for Jacob, and those who transmitted the story to infer the meaning of this event: “I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared” (Gen. 32:22–32). Another such incident occurs in the account of Moses’ return to Egypt, during which “the Lord met Moses and was about to kill him” (Exod. 4:24); his wife Zipporah’s response in circumcising her son and touching Moses’ “feet” (that is, his male member) with the foreskin does not really clarify what was happening here (Exod. 4:24–26).

The holy, in its aspect as the numinous, can break out in wrath on the careless worshiper. The priests on Mount Sinai are warned to “consecrate themselves, or the Lord will break out against them” (Exod. 19:22). In the incident recorded in Leviticus 10:1–3, Aaron’s two eldest sons offer “strange” or unauthorized fire before the Lord; as a result, “fire came out from the presence of the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord” (Lev. 10:2). Moses interprets their death as the consequence of their failure to regard the Lord as holy. The saga of the ark of the covenant also recounts outbreaks of the fury of the numinous resident in a holy object. When placed in a Philistine sanctuary, the ark causes the image of the god Dagon to fall over and shatter into fragments (1 Sam. 5:4); while the ark is being transported in an oxcart, an outburst of energy kills Uzzah as he reaches out to steady it (2 Sam. 6:6–7). These incidents depict the numinous almost as a kind of impersonal electricity, manifesting itself in wrath with no revelation of rational content.

Some relatively unexplained numinous encounters are described also in the New Testament. In particular, the Transfiguration of Christ (Matt. 17:1–8) is enigmatic. In the presence of Jesus’ three closest associates, “His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light” (Matt. 17:2). Obviously, this is a manifestation of the Son of God, perhaps as a confirmation of Peter’s recent confession of Jesus as the Christ (Matt. 16:16). But except for the voice from heaven that repeats the declaration of divine sonship, no further explanation is provided; the disciples are left wondering about the meaning of what they have witnessed, including the appearance of Moses and Elijah with Jesus. Jesus orders them to say nothing about the incident until after the resurrection, a concept that also, for the moment, remains unexplained (Mark 9:9–10).

The Holy As the Unrevealed

Since the biblical confrontation with Yahweh as the Holy One is not confined within the rational, moral, or sentimental categories of the human mentality, to a great degree the holy always remains the unrevealed. There is always that quality in the encounter with God which transcends the ability to comprehend or communicate it in the symbolism of meaningful language. The experience of the prophet Elijah on Horeb (1 Kings 19:1–18) is a case in point. As the prophet stands upon the mountain, Yahweh passes by in the violent manifestations of wind, earthquake, and fire, similar to the phenomena that accompanied the Sinai covenant. Yet, the narrative states, Yahweh is not in any of these things. He is there, yet he is not there! But now the prophet senses something else: an eerie stillness, a silence so silent it could be heard, as though some tremendous pent-up energy were present, ready to burst forth again in overpowering force. And out of this stillness, Elijah hears the voice of the Lord of hosts, renewing his commission as the spokesman for the God of the covenant, the Holy One of Israel. No revelation of hidden truths about the Lord has taken place, yet in an experience of the numinous, Elijah has met with God with a life-changing impact.

There is ever the tendency to mistake the biblical revelation or the Christian system of knowledge that is theoretically based on it for a complete revelation of God. This is understandable, since Scripture speaks of Christ as the “Word of God” (John 1:1–14; Rev. 19:13), and throughout the Bible God’s self-revelation is usually accompanied by a prophetic word of explanation or command, sometimes greatly extended. What is often forgotten, however, is that God’s self-revelation is at the same time his nonrevelation, for there is that aspect of his being which surpasses our ability to grasp it in terms of human reason or communicate it in words. “Who has known the mind of the Lord,” wrote Paul, “or who has been his counselor?” (Rom. 11:34, quoting Isa. 40:13). “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways” (Isa. 55:8). Human language can only hint at the meaning of the divine encounter through the use of “ideograms” (Otto’s term), intellectual transforms of the divine self-revelation that can point to it and explore its implications but cannot encompass it. God is one, he is eternal, he is good, he is just, he is love, he is Spirit, he is light. The concept of the holy or sacred is itself one of these ideograms, an attempt to categorize the most fundamental and distinctive aspect of the divine presence as it impacts our consciousness. But not even the idea of the holy can fully convey the impact of the meeting with God. On the mountain Elijah received a word out of the “voice of stillness,” whether inwardly or outwardly we cannot tell. But there was more. There was the stillness itself, a silence that spoke of that which cannot be expressed—a silence pregnant with the mystery of the unrevealed, a silence before which people must also keep silent in reverential dread, for the Holy is in his Holy Place (Hab. 2:20).

This appears to be the point of Job’s extended dialogue with his three friends, together with the final interruption by Elihu and God’s answer to Job. Initially, Job demanded an explanation of the ways of God in terms he could comprehend—a futile quest. What was to his credit, however, was his insistence on holding God personally to account and his refusal to be content with the secondhand arguments of God’s defenders. Job did receive an answer from God, but when it came, it did not convert him with its logical coherence. As a rational argument, God’s speech is not noticeably more impressive than that of Elihu, who spoke before him and of whom neither Job nor God seem to take any notice. What moves Job to repentance is a realization of quite another order. He and his friends have been exchanging their arguments, their “ideograms,” as though these could somehow encircle God and tame him. But now God has spoken to Job, confronted him in his majestic mystery, and Job is brought to silence in the face of the holy. “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know” (Job 42:3). Job’s questions are not answered, but the unrevealed has met him, not in the sterility of intellectual arguments, but in the depth of direct encounter, and so purged the darkness from his soul.