Talk about God.  Some ways in which we can get our understanding of God wrong

One of the legitimate concerns in current debates is to know and speak of God correctly. In other words , we want to get our doctrine right.  However, one of the risks we have is that we can be so concerned about making one mistake that we make another.

Here are some dangers in how we talk about God that are perhaps getting less attention at the moment.  These are dangers that come when we are concerned to emphasise the otherness of God.

1. We may be so concerned to not say anything wrong about God that we focus on the negatives, what God isn’t.  This risks  minimising God’s revelation.
2. We can emphasise the oneness of God  in a way that loses emphasis on the distinct persons.  If we combine this with an over distinction between the moment (God in eternity) and economic (God as revealed to us in his acts, notably the incarnation) we can give the impression that the true God is hidden behind the Trinity so we are left with a kind of puppet show
3. We can push God to a distance through those things and by wishing to guard his timelessness so that we miss the ways in which God is imminent and interacts with us in time.
4. We can focus on emphasising God’s  sovereignty, independence,  infiniteness etc, in other words his Greatness that we to risk giving less attention to his goodness as seen in his love.

The converse is true as well. It is possible to be so concerned to emphasise God’s goodness that we forget to talk about his goodness.  We end up with a God who is near and small.  We also end up with a God who is finite and shallow of we  assume that all that there is to God is what he has revealed in Scripture.