David Edward Jenkins Quotes

In the past some of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians, such as Maimonides, Aquinas and Ibn Sina, made it clear that it was very difficult to speak about God, because when we confront the ultimate, we are at the end of what words or thoughts can do.

Divine Nature cannot be apprehended by human reason.

The meaning of the universe lies outside the universe.

Because we cannot know what God is, but only what He is not, we cannot consider how He is but only how He is not.

God cannot be reduced to a sample for analysis.

A God that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words?

God is best known in not knowing him.

One cannot comprehend Him through reason, even if one reasoned for ages.

God should not be called an individual substance, since the principal of individuation is matter.

Having refuted, then, as well as we could, every notion which might suggest that we were to think of God as in any degree corporeal, we go on to say that, according to strict truth, God is incomprehensible, and incapable of being measured.

God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive.

God is not anything human. God is a force, God is chaos, God is unknown. God is terror and enlightenment at the same time.

The infinite God can not by us, in the present limitation of our faculties, be comprehended or conceived.

It is not good to talk about Zen, because Zen is nothingness... If you talk about it, you are always lying, and if you don't talk about it, no one knows it is there.

God's inexplicable. God is beyond the everything. And yet we can't cease to blather about it.

What is god, what is not god, what is between man and god, who shall say?

Heaven is beyond our imagination . . . . At our most creative moment, at our deepest thought, at our highest level, we still cannot fathom eternity.

The best things cannot be told because they transcend thought. The second best are misunderstood because they are the thoughts that are supposed to refer to that which cannot be thought about. The third best are what we talk about.

There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.

There's no way a human being can escape his or her human-ness to be able to imagine God. We can talk about how we've experienced God, not what or who God is.

Often poetry, especially the sort of poetry I write, is concerned with looking at the borders between the sensual and the spiritual and seeing them as divided, equivocal, that mystery somehow can break in to the ordinary. And we read poetry I think in part, to gain a sense of that intimacy with things that we can't understand that are unable to be understood but that buoy up our lives.

Let us now speak according to natural lights. If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible. . . . We are then incapable of knowing of either what He is or if He is. . . .

Some things are beyond human understanding.

God is simple, everything else is complex

Your thoughts of God are too human