A niggling thought on godhood in general and Christianity in particular

EDIT: Eva has reminded me that the various branches that make up Christianity have no set, universal definition of "God." The point is well taken; please do not take my use of the word "Christianity" in this post to mean "every single Christian denomination ever to exist." I use it to mean "the faith of conservative-leaning practicing Christians within the United States" (and the Vatican, I suppose).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_god#Christianity

“Christian theologian Alister McGrath writes that there are good reasons to suggest that a ‘personal god’ is integral to the Christian outlook, but one has to understand that this is an analogy: ‘to say that God is like a person is to affirm the divine ability and willingness to relate to others. This does not imply that God is human, or located at a specific point in the universe.’”

So on the one hand, omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience, yet on the other, He is both willing and able to relate to beings which could charitably be described as ants before Him. I mean, of course, humans, as within the Christian framework there are no other gods and the Bible makes no mention of intelligent non-human mortals.* How to put this…it seems very fantastical and far-fetched, the idea that a single being can be both all-knowing, all-powerful, and ever-present, and yet also be able to genuinely relate to such puny things as humans. "God loves you"--really, when He's got an entire universe to run?

The natural reply is that such is God and we can never hope to understand Him—there are realms of existence, ways of thinking, logic beyond logic, that we could never hope to grasp, one of which explains this apparent contradiction. So, to my complaint that “this is inconceivable,” the devout smile and reply “you couldn’t be more right.” I can respect this sort of thinking--that there are concepts so disconnected from the human experience as to be impossible for human brains to understand. Enshrining the idea at the center of one's belief system, however, requires an awful lot of...well, faith. Must the Lord always and invariably “work in mysterious ways”?

This is by no means my primary beef with traditional concepts of a higher power, but it struck me very clearly and strongly while I was browsing that Wikipedia article. Besides, I find the idea of the literally inconceivable--for our brains, anyway--rather intriguing.

By the way, pneumatology is the study of "spiritual beings and phenomena," or within Christian contexts the study of the Holy Spirit. Pneuma meaning "breath" or "air" in Greek (pneumatic, anyone?), which in this case "metaphorically describes a non-material being or influence."

*All right, nitpickers, the nephilim qualify, but anyone who knows what a nephilim was will also understand why they're a meaningless outlier.

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On a totally unrelated note, the John Birch Society’s web site is surprisingly slick. (Found it through a fascinating New York Times piece on the group, which makes the same observation).