When I was in fifth grade I used to sometimes sit in the back of my dad’s tenth-grade classroom while he read morning devotionals and went through algebra lessons on an overhead projector to a room full of 16-year-olds sporting side-ponytails and plaid shorts.

I watched the studies and flirtations and conversations of the students, and I saw that they were bigger than me. In size, yes—but that wasn’t what I noticed. Instead I saw a universe that was so much bigger than mine, people who were on the verge of the immense adult world. There was so much they knew and did and said that was beyond me. It’s hard to describe, but I had an unquestionable sense of their Great Age. Oh, those grown-up tenth-graders!

We believe, of course, that God is bigger than us. Not that he weighs more or leaves a bigger footprint (except maybe metaphorically); but rather, that he’s not limited to the dimensions we know; that he sees a bigger picture; that he exists on a larger scale than we do. It’s hard to describe. So, especially now as we strive for open-mindedness, tolerance, and a cosmopolitan sense of reality, some Christians resort to using general, grand-sounding, and often rather vague terms to describe our God.

I admit, though, that discussions in which God is talked about this way – where anything other than “infinity,” “love,” and “immensity” are considered crass, limiting terms that only a non-intellectual dogmatic believer would use, leave me feeling disconnected, more distant from the God who is the core of my existence.

I’ve been trying to figure out why this is. Why doesn’t the term “infinite” seem to describe a God big enough, when it’s the “biggest” word we know?

Handily enough, along comes C.S. Lewis with a fascinating chapter in his book Miracles. As our post-modern minds hastily scrap traditional imagery for the easier-to-swallow generalities, Lewis has a suggestion: That maybe we should reject some of the old, concrete images of God—not because they’re too strong, but rather, because they’re too weak.

“He is the opaque centre of all existences, the thing that simply and entirely is, the fountain of facthood,” Lewis writes (88). “The ultimate spiritual reality is not vaguer, more inert, more transparent than the images, but more positive, more dynamic, more opaque” (92).

So maybe we need to be a little more open-minded—not only to the spiritual broadness of those all-encompassing descriptors but also to the old images, the old terminology for God, the old analogies. None of them, of course, will really portray him; most of them, though, are useful for portraying some aspect of him. They give us a way, in the midst of our concrete human life, to relate to a God who’s bigger than us—bigger, even, than amazingly mature tenth-graders.

- C.S. Lewis. Miracles. New York: Macmillan, 1960.