11d • Theological Thoughts
God Why Are You So Vague?
Epistemology meets Resurrection Theology
God isn’t vague. God is layered. And the layers are an invitation to encounter, not a fog of confusion. God reveals and people recognize. In John’s Gospel, resurrection faith doesn’t come from abstract clarity. It comes from recognition through encounter. For example, Mary Magdalene recognizes Jesus when He says her name. The disciples on the shore recognize Jesus in the abundance of fish. Thomas recognizes Jesus through wounds. Peter recognizes Jesus through restoration. Paul recognizes Jesus through blinding confrontation. This is the same Christ with different points of access. God is not vague here. He is precise to the person. The layering is relational tailoring.
Vagueness vs. depth (Timothy Williamson)
Williamson argues that vagueness isn’t just linguistic fuzziness, it’s about the limits of how concepts map onto reality. Some things feel vague because reality is richer than our categories. Scripture works the same way. The Bible is not vague in the sense of being unclear about who God is, or unclear about what love is and neither unclear about justice, mercy, repentance, and the resurrection. Scripture is layered meaning you can read it shallowly and miss the depth or you can read it deeply and be undone by it. This is why Jesus speaks in parables and said, “Seeing they do not see and hearing they do not hear…”. This is not God being unclear at all rather it is God revealing in a way that requires posture. Revelation responds to desire not to intelligence, not to status, not to proximity to religious power but to hunger.
Let us consider Mary Magdalene and the disciples from the perspective of closeness versus conceptual belief, tethering this back to the tomb of Jesus. According to John’s gospel, the disciples (Peter and John) see evidence and leave the tomb while Mary stays in relational ache and gets revelation. The difference isn’t IQ here it is nearness of desire. God’s revelation in John is relationally precise in that Jesus doesn’t explain resurrection theory to Mary; He says her name. That’s not vague at all, it’s simply intimate specificity. Layered truth demands proximity. Let us expand this for further rumination. Saul/Paul, and how his following scriptural teaching blindly meets undeniable clarity, Saul is not vague minded at all in fact he is hyper-certain and unfortunately tragically wrong. He follows Scripture without encounter, is this successful ministry? He has theological clarity without relational recognition. So, what does God do? God does not give him a riddle. God knocks him flat with clarity of a voice, a name, a confrontation and a mission. Beloved, Paul’s conversion is not ambiguous at all it is violent clarity.
Let us continue deeper. Understand Saul is blinded externally so he can finally see internally. God meets the blindly following person not with layers, but with shock. The layers come later. First comes encounter and then comes interpretation. Scripture is layered because God wants pursuit, not passivity. If Scripture were truly vague, it would produce endless relativism, no accountability and create absent transformation. What Scripture produces when followed faithfully and closely is conviction, clarity about sin, clarity about love, clarity about resurrection and clarity about Jesus as Lord. The layered nature of scripture causes casual readers to get moral stories while close followers get existential exposure and the devoted to get personal confrontation. This is why Mary gets her name spoken, Peter gets his wound named, Thomas gets his doubt named and Paul gets his sin named. God is not unclear in fact God is unavoidable once you are close enough. Beloved, vagueness hides and layered revelation invite pursuit. Here’s the distinction:
Vagueness
· Avoids commitment
· Allows endless reinterpretation
· Produces distance
· Keeps God abstract
Layered revelation
· Demands response
· Deepens with pursuit
· Produces encounter
· Makes God personal
Scripture is not trying to make God mysterious in the sense of unknowable.Scripture is making God knowable only through relationship. This is why those who skim get confusion and those who follow close get confrontation. Those who oppose get interruption and those who stay (like Mary) get recognition. The epistemology of resurrection is the central theme of recognition. Resurrection faith is not built on vague concepts. It’s built on recognition scenes. You don’t deduce Jesus is risen. You encounter the risen one.
This is why Christianity survives centuries of critique because it is not a philosophy first, it is a series of encounters that become testimony. The clarity of God is not always informational, it is relational. And relational clarity always costs you something. For Paul it was pride and for Peter it was shame. For Mary it was grief and for Thomas it was control. God is not vague. God is precise enough to wound and heal at the same time. Revelation is not one-size-fits-all. It’s calibrated.
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God Why Are You So Vague?
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