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I'm not Catholic, and I share your distrust of religious institutions. So with that disclaimer, I think my answer would be that God chooses, at times, to teach us things in a "small enough" way that we can understand them. For example, consider when the Bible gives concrete statements about what God wants us to do or not to, or when Jesus uses analogies and parables. Do we necessarily get the full picture? No, and there's a lot about the Christian life that one only learns through experience. One of those things IMO is that some questions have unknowable answers. E.g. "why did this particular tragedy occur?", or perhaps more fundamentally, "how could a holy and perfect God ever show mercy to us imperfect humans?". Or maybe even more directly to the thrust of your comment, "how could we ever hope to understand anything about God?". Something else that comes to mind is that God became human Himself, and I imagine that—at least in part—this would be to allow us to understand Him better. Through Jesus' life, we got to see what it would look like for God to live a human life. (Admittedly, the question then becomes, how does God become man in the first place, which I have to categorize under "questions with unknowable answers".) Finally, the Bible often talks about the Holy Spirit helping Christians to understand "spiritual" things. That is to say, it's not quite a matter of us trying to reach logical conclusions on our own, since—as you say—that wouldn't be possible for a God that's beyond our limits of comprehension. Rather, we get some supernatural help in the matter. Maybe the tl;dr is that, just because we can't understand everything (or maybe even most things) about a God that is fundamentally greater than us in every way, doesn't imply that we can't understand anything. |