Dave Brisbin 10.26.25
Book of Genesis tells us that God gave Adam permission to name all the animals in the Garden. It’s not a casual detail. For the ancient Hebrews, authority to name something like a child or an animal, was a symbol of dominion over that something. That’s the point. Control. To this day, Jews do not speak the name of God. But the rest of us continue to name everything in sight, including God…and the theology we build around God.
God told Moses from the burning bush that his name was hayah asher hayah. That is, I am that I am. How can we get any closer than that? How do we describe raw, ultimate existence any more clearly? How do we, using finite tools such as language and logic or even the mathematics of physics, describe what is by definition infinite? Our limited language, concepts, and equations melt all over the dashboard long before temperatures and velocities ever reach the neighborhood of infinity.
But we keep trying. Control is an aphrodisiac.
To be fair, the scriptures are always talking about knowing God. Ezekiel uses the phrase over seventy times in his short book. Jesus says that some of us, knocking on the door of kingdom, will be refused because God never knew us. Really? Once again, entering the Hebrew mind helps us square this circle. To know—yada in Hebrew—comes from the root for hand, so to know is not to think, but to handle. Jesus is saying that some of us, for all the religious work we do, have still never been intimate with God. Now God won’t throw us out for that, but God is intimacy personified. If we’re too unripe, immature, traumatized to enter the defenseless vulnerability that intimacy requires, we don’t know God. We can’t know what we’ve never experienced.
God occupies space beyond thought and performance. If we can stop naming God, trying to understand and dominate for just a moment, we enter God’s space and experience what we’ll never understand. Relax... Understanding is overrated. For Jesus, a precognitive child is the embodiment of kingdom.
Trust beats certainty the way rock beats scissors.
Once we experience God, there is no name that can hold or express what we know.
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Dave Brisbin 10.26.25
Book of Genesis tells us that God gave Adam permission to name all the animals in the Garden. It’s not a casual detail. For the ancient Hebrews, authority to name something like a child or an animal, was a symbol of dominion over that something. That’s the point. Control. To this day, Jews do not speak the name of God. But the rest of us continue to name everything in sight, including God…and the theology we build around God.
God told Moses from the burning bush that his name was hayah asher hayah. That is, I am that I am. How can we get any closer than that? How do we describe raw, ultimate existence any more clearly? How do we, using finite tools such as language and logic or even the mathematics of physics, describe what is by definition infinite? Our limited language, concepts, and equations melt all over the dashboard long before temperatures and velocities ever reach the neighborhood of infinity.
But we keep trying. Control is an aphrodisiac.
To be fair, the scriptures are always talking about knowing God. Ezekiel uses the phrase over seventy times in his short book. Jesus says that some of us, knocking on the door of kingdom, will be refused because God never knew us. Really? Once again, entering the Hebrew mind helps us square this circle. To know—yada in Hebrew—comes from the root for hand, so to know is not to think, but to handle. Jesus is saying that some of us, for all the religious work we do, have still never been intimate with God. Now God won’t throw us out for that, but God is intimacy personified. If we’re too unripe, immature, traumatized to enter the defenseless vulnerability that intimacy requires, we don’t know God. We can’t know what we’ve never experienced.
God occupies space beyond thought and performance. If we can stop naming God, trying to understand and dominate for just a moment, we enter God’s space and experience what we’ll never understand. Relax... Understanding is overrated. For Jesus, a precognitive child is the embodiment of kingdom.
Trust beats certainty the way rock beats scissors.
Once we experience God, there is no name that can hold or express what we know.
Dave Brisbin 6.22.25
Chances are, if you were raised in a Christian tradition, you learned that doubt was the enemy of faith, the opposite of faith, if you had any doubt at all you had no faith. Such learning goes deep and doesn’t go away without a fight. Makes us so hard on ourselves, feeling the inevitable doubts of uncertain human life only to pile on the condemnation of childhood.
Making matters worse, we read the gospels to see the first followers of Jesus drop their nets, their entire lives, to follow him at their very first meeting. These were men with wives and children, livelihoods supporting their households. They left all that at the first meeting with a stranger? Is that the bar for faith?
We make a fundamental error in assuming that the first mention of a person meeting Jesus is also their first meeting. In Matthew and Mark’s gospels, Andrew and Peter are first mentioned following Jesus immediately, but was that their first meeting? In Luke, Jesus walks into Peter’s house as if he lives there and heals his mother-in-law a chapter before he calls Peter to follow. And in John, Andrew meets Jesus first, then persuades Peter to come, while other disciples are gathered over time. First mention is not the same as first meeting. The decision to follow Jesus was a gradual process as with the development of any human relationship. They met, got to know one another, sat in each other’s homes with a growing realization of who Jesus was.
Luke relates that Jesus gets in Peter’s boat at the end of an unsuccessful day of fishing and asks him to put out a little way from shore so he could address the pressing crowd. After speaking, he tells Peter to put out into deep water where they catch more fish than they can haul. Putting out a little way, little risk, to hear the logos or propositional truth is always the first step. Putting out to deep water to hear the rhema or living call to action is the moment truth becomes more than we can haul. Even then, Peter is still wracked with doubt.
Doubt is not the opposite of faith.
Faith needs doubt as courage needs fear.
Answering the call in spite of our doubts is the best humans do.
theeffect Podcasts
Dave Brisbin 10.26.25
Book of Genesis tells us that God gave Adam permission to name all the animals in the Garden. It’s not a casual detail. For the ancient Hebrews, authority to name something like a child or an animal, was a symbol of dominion over that something. That’s the point. Control. To this day, Jews do not speak the name of God. But the rest of us continue to name everything in sight, including God…and the theology we build around God.
God told Moses from the burning bush that his name was hayah asher hayah. That is, I am that I am. How can we get any closer than that? How do we describe raw, ultimate existence any more clearly? How do we, using finite tools such as language and logic or even the mathematics of physics, describe what is by definition infinite? Our limited language, concepts, and equations melt all over the dashboard long before temperatures and velocities ever reach the neighborhood of infinity.
But we keep trying. Control is an aphrodisiac.
To be fair, the scriptures are always talking about knowing God. Ezekiel uses the phrase over seventy times in his short book. Jesus says that some of us, knocking on the door of kingdom, will be refused because God never knew us. Really? Once again, entering the Hebrew mind helps us square this circle. To know—yada in Hebrew—comes from the root for hand, so to know is not to think, but to handle. Jesus is saying that some of us, for all the religious work we do, have still never been intimate with God. Now God won’t throw us out for that, but God is intimacy personified. If we’re too unripe, immature, traumatized to enter the defenseless vulnerability that intimacy requires, we don’t know God. We can’t know what we’ve never experienced.
God occupies space beyond thought and performance. If we can stop naming God, trying to understand and dominate for just a moment, we enter God’s space and experience what we’ll never understand. Relax... Understanding is overrated. For Jesus, a precognitive child is the embodiment of kingdom.
Trust beats certainty the way rock beats scissors.
Once we experience God, there is no name that can hold or express what we know.
