I have a theory on this, see what you think:
Without immanence, without essence, God, totally transcendent, becomes unknowable. This form of religiosity is limited to obeying God rather than knowledge of Him, thus: “Islam leads to Agnosticism”. In such a system, God is named from His effects, but he is not to be identified with any of them; God’s relationship with the ultimate cause (God) and His creatures is extrinsic, not intrinsic. Thus God is called good because He causes good and not because He is good.
We can trace, in history, the pattern of this trend to agnosticism when we study the most primitive peoples of Africa, America, the islands of the Pacific Ocean, India and China. Here we see an almost universal belief in an almighty, all-good creator god who is primarily manifest in the infinite dimensions of the sky. The utter transcendence of such a deity is uncomfortable and often people consider themselves unworthy of the attention of such a being. Thus this deity is rarely called upon in prayer and is not the centre of a sacrificial cult. Ultimately, this deity is seen as too aloof or irrelevant and is therefore replaced by, or transformed into a more immanent anthropomorphic god, responsive to human needs, manipulable through sacred rights, and even guilty of human faults and crimes. Yet they now lack the transcendence of the heavenly god they replace, they are no longer almighty and all good and their power is limited by other gods and by the human faults and crimes they display.
It is against this backdrop the God of Israel reveals Himself as transcendent, almighty Creator, all holy and all good, yet despite this transcendence, He does not withdraw, nor does He yield His place to other gods. This is, in many ways, the great mystery of the Judeo/Christian tradition. The God who is wholly other than all else and who transcends time and history, in various ways acts in time and history in relation to the Hebrew people. He reveals His presence and the fact that He is active in their midst. He called the Hebrews, through Abraham, to be His own people so that He would be their God. To Moses He revealed His very name. He saved the them from slavery in Egypt, in doing so, revealing that He was their All Holy Saviour. He made a covenant with them and procured for them the Promised Land. In the Temple in Jerusalem, He dwelt in their midst. Despite the infidelities of His people He draws increasingly nearer to them, eventually becoming Emmanuel, “God With Us”, in the Incarnation. In this way God’s transcendence is transformed from apparent aloofness, remoteness and irrelevance into
…the almighty power of divine love that bridges the chasm between Creator and creature, God and humankind, without confusing their distinct identities.
An identification of the divine with the whole or with a part of finite reality inevitable results in a loss of the transcendence of the divine and a loss of a distinct reality and value for the finite world. This can be evidenced in religions which remove the divinity completely from the realm of speech, imagination and comprehension; Zen Buddhism’s unspeakable experience of satori, the identification of the universal Buddha nature with every human being and everything in this world in Mahayana Buddhism, or the fact that our world has no reality of its own, rather it is the merely the external form of the incomprehensible and ineffable Brahman flowing out into our world, according to a major trend of Hindu thought.
The full force and magnitude of the Christian dogma of the Incarnation is amplified when considered in the context of this background. Jesus Christ becomes man by a union of a human nature to Himself, not by any abolition of the metaphysical distinction between divine and human natures. The Incarnation heralds a new era of immanence where the truth of the hypostatic union becomes intelligible as the necessary metaphysical presupposition for God’s acceptance of ultimate solidarity with sinful humankind. Thus we can see an essential connection between the Incarnation and salvation history.
(My own view is that although accepting the wisdom and authority of our parents and elders has value, if we can do better than that in our religious life we should. Some are not in a position to do so.)
