God, The Eldritch Horror: Reflections on the Terror of God

“We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.” – H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

I don’t remember the moment I “became a Christian”. I’m told that I was around five years old when my dad led me through “the prayer” and I “gave my life to Christ”, “accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior”, or otherwise walked the evangelical road to salvation, but aside from this minimal hearsay I can’t tell you much about it. I can, however, tell you about the night I became an atheist… almost.

I remember leaving the local drive-in theater with my family after watching who knows what, looking up at the stars and thinking, “there’s just no way.” There’s no way that there is a God who exists beyond all of this, a being who stands before space and time and has no need for either, whose very existence depends solely on the fact of it, who just is (later, I would learn the fancy theological term for this is aseity). My mind reeled away from the thought of an unbelievably ancient yet ageless One who swallows eons in a breath and drips universes without blinking. It wasn’t just incredible—it was impossible.

Now, friends of mine are familiar enough to know that this moment didn’t stick. Actually, it’s unlikely it lasted more than five minutes, but even a few seconds as an apostate can be deafening for a committed youth group acolyte. Those brief and silent moments passed in the car, stilling looking up at the midnight stars, and a second realization hit me heavier than the first: why does anything exist at all? The same eternity that took God off the table took the table, too. Either God is eternal and necessary, a se, or the universe (or multiverse or quantum field or whatever) is eternal, and that gives me the same problems, except now we’ve got the issue of an infinitely regressive past and a present that never presents (google “Hilbert’s Hotel” when you get a chance). It’s impossible. It’s absurd. Existence itself is impossible and absurd.

And yet, here we are. So, I didn’t stay an atheist. Ultimately, the idea of a God who stands before the laws of the universe was just more compelling than a logically inconsistent and incoherent gymnastics necessary to make for an eternal universe (or the morally questionable move of calling a quantum field nothing). But this isn’t a post about apologetics and why you need to believe in God; this is a post about terror and why I totally understand why you wouldn’t.

Barefoot Angels and Outer Gods

One of my dearest and oldest friends realized they were an atheist in seminary and, whether for the nostalgia or the morbid curiosity of it all, stuck it out to graduation. They are also one of my most constant conversation partners. Recently, we were complaining about American Christianity over Barefoot wine on their back patio (only the finest for us) and the conversation slowly transitioned into geeking out about angels and demons.

My friend loved their angelology (three guesses what that’s about) class, except that the culmination of the course was reading Out of the Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis. They wish they’d read H. P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu, which opens with a profound statement on the unknown.

“The most merciful thing in the world,” the narrator ponders, “is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.” Lovecraftian horror is a forceful confrontation with human limitation, the limits of both our capacity to understand and to control, a world with inhabit that is complete beyond ourselves.

According to my friend, this is a better way to end a class on angels and demons. Cthulhu, the embodiment of the Unknown Other, that terrible dweller of non-Euclidean cities of impossible angles and indescribable geometry where the laws of physics and mathematics break open to reveal a chaos untraversable by anyone save the old outer gods, the mere glimpse of whom induces insanity, is a better exploration of the so-called spirit realm than an exploration of Christianity in space.

I have never read Lewis’s Space Trilogy, but I think my friend has a point. Biblical angels are not altogether unlike one of Lovecraft’s eldritch abominations. Cthulhu is described as having a “vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.” Ezekiel, in his vision of the chariot throne of the Lord, describes a similarly horrifying admixture, an amalgam of faces human, lion, ox, and eagle, cloven hooved with four wings spread wide above towering eye-covered spheres and wheels. It is no wonder, then, that people throughout Scripture cower at angelic visitations.

And yet, more terrifying still than the ones above the wheels is the one upon the throne.

Moses met this God in an unburning bush and had the audacity to ask for a name, but God has no name to give. “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” is the reply, but this does not satisfy Moses. Names give people a sense of ownership, of control. There is great comfort that comes with the familiarity of a name, but God is the Nameless One. God has no name because there was no one there to name him. There was no point at which God came into existence to receive a name, and so the famous response: “I am who I am.” Yahweh, a name that is in the same breath no name at all, warning Moses that there is no one before or above the Lord, the holiness of God.

The Horror of Holiness

Holiness in contemporary imagination elicits pictures of saints or gurus, or worse purity culture and people who don’t drink, smoke, or associate with the sinners. But this is not holiness.

To be holy is to be set apart, or to simply be apart from something or someone else. For God, to be holy is to be wholly other than that which God created—incomprehensible, ineffable, inexorable. Throughout Scripture, God is the one upon whom no one can look and live, hidden above the mountains in storms and fire. Ezekiel met this God in a whirlwind that flashed with lightning along the river Kebar. Isaiah was caught up into the heavenly court, as the six-winged seraphim shouted “Holy! Holy! Holy!” to the one who sits on the throne, and his only thought was, “Woe is me! I am undone!” A better translation might be, “I am about to be destroyed” by the one so utterly other than anything imaginable.

The holiness – wholly otherness – of God is terrifying. Mountains are big, but you can climb mountains. The moon is far away, but we can go to the moon. Monsters lurk in the shadows, but we can beat the monsters if we just find the right stuff (garlic, or perhaps some silver bullets). God, on the other hand, is beyond all of that. Isaiah saw upon the throne what Ezekiel saw in whirlwind and Moses saw in the unburning bush, a God who cannot be contained not because he is so big but because he is beyond and before dimension. We cannot reach him, not because he is so far away but because there stands an impassable canyon between the created and the Not-created. God cannot be beat, not because he is so strong, but because he is who he is, the only necessity of any reality. There is, has never been, and will never be, a Without God.

If I think about the depth of God’s aseity, holiness, and ineffability, my mind reels away from the thought. Cthulhu has no horror like the shapeless, dimensionless, eternal, spaceless, formless, beginningless God. That this God is at all is wild, unbelievable, and strange. It is unfortunate that many Christians don’t seem to get that, but it is the inescapable dilemma of theism.

Nowhere and everywhere, this Dweller of Oblivion inhabits the bones of the reality he created out of Nothing. Before there was, he is, existing in perfect Triune harmony completely satisfied in the eternal communion of what is. No substance, no form, no shape or dimension, no words, no sounds, no time, and yet, God and God together alone. Truth be told, I have yet to hear of anything more horrifying than the Triune God who just is and always will be, for no other reason than that he must.

My friend and I found the bottom of the Barefoot bottle and with it other, less frightening conversations. It seemed like we talked about everything under the sun and everything above, as well. We disagreed on almost everything, but there was one thing on which we were in total agreement.

God is terrifying.

Cover Image Attribution: Sofyan Syarief – gambaryance.deviantart – artstation.com/artist/gambaryance – behance.net/gueyance – instagram.com/sofyan.syarief, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Modified to fit.