Anthropomorphosis -- An Extra
While taking a long [very-]early-morning drive to the airport today, I was cogitating over my bemoaning our lack of a scripturally-inspired vision of the "place" we go between the end of earth-life and the Resurrection. I spoke then of Thornton Wilder's Our Town imagery as what we seem collectively to hold as that picture -- somewhere between Sheol and instant admission through "Pearly Gates."
And then, I picked a scab off a worry I've had, and one that Todd shares, about anthropomorphizing God. It's a natural tendency. It's how we think.
We do it to nations: we can't understand how, for example, terrorists can blow themselves up to make a point; it doesn't make human sense. More exactly, it doesn't make sense to Western human thought. Those who are willing to blow themselves up, on the other hand, think that westerners are not committed to their Western deals.
We do it to our pets: why is the dog looking at me like that? What does he want? Intellectually, we know that he wants to eat, he wants to go out, or he wants to find his familiar place in the pack, or perhaps to move up a notch by getting us to submit to him. Emotionally, we are warmed by his looks or enraged by his actions.
We ought not do it to God.
In my early graduate studies, I was introduced to a famous equation that has the quantity [one minus the mach number] in the denominator of a fraction. It is a truly elegant equation; it is simple and describes very well the behavior of wings at speeds that were achievable into the late 1940s. It was obtained by thinking hard about observations made experimentally.
We have many observations made about our lives, and some fundamental conjectures about God that haven't yet been disproved.
Those aeronautical experimental results, all taken at airspeeds lower than about 500 miles per hour, allowed us to arrive at a very good equation. In fact, the equation unequivocally tells us that it is impossible to achieve or exceed the speed of sound! The difference term including the Mach number will become zero, and division by zero is not defined, mathematically. Impossible.
What's more, the difference is contained within a square root symbol, and if you will recall, the square root of a negative number is imaginary -- a mathematical construct only. Perhaps Wonder Woman can fly in an imaginary airplane, but we can't. If the Mach number is greater than one, indicating supersonic flight, we will wind up dividing by an imaginary number, and it can't be done.
Of course, we all know that's a bunch of hooey. Concorde was in regular service for decades. Any number of supersonic aircraft are in the sky right now.
Some interesting things do happen when an airplane crosses from subsonic to supersonic: the boom, for example, and some aerodynamics that aren't explained using easy algebra. That's what the early equation was really telling us. Things really change when the Mach number is greater than one.
And that's what Scripture tells us in its silent way. Things really change when we draw our last breath, think our last thought. There are the tunnel of light and the beckoning white person reported by many who have had clinical death experiences and then been resuscitated; whether they are some genetically-programmed means of easing us from life, or are in fact angels welcoming us, we just don't know. But that is certainly a different experience!
What happens thereafter, and what our relationship will be with God, remain hidden from us, even anecdotally. What we do know for a fact is that our current equations all have that same "one minus" term inside a square root sign in the denominator of our lives.
It's not defined. Our experimental observations to date give us the equations and the rules-of-life by which we conduct ourselves and have expectations, here and now -- not in a realm in which we've had no experience whatsoever.
As Todd reminded me, God is not exclusively of this dimension, as we are. We cannot even imagine what some other dimensions might be in which God also exists.
What we do know is what Jesus tells us. We are called to love God and our neighbors as he loves us. That's enough, for now.
11:04:22 AM 
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