Karl Rahner: The Mystery of God

One can forget that the small, limited region of the determinative word lies within the vast, silent desert of the godhead . . .

Hence words must be spoken to him . . . till he understands that their whole meaning is to utter the unutterable to make the nameless mystery touch his heart gently, to make the unfathomable abyss the foundation of all that the foreground supports. Christianity needs such words; it needs practice in learning to hear these words. For all its words would be misunderstood, if they were not heard as words of the mystery, as the coming of the blessed, gripping, incomprehensibility of the holy. For they speak of God. And if God’s incomprehensibility does not grip us in a word, if it does not draw us on into his superluminous darkness, if it does not call us out of the little house of our homely, close-hugged truths into the strangeness of the night that is our real home, we have misunderstood or failed to understand the words of Christianity. For they speak of the unknown God, who only reveals himself to give himself as the abiding mystery, and to gather home to himself all that is outside himself and clear- home to him who is the incomprehensibility of silent love.

(Theology quote: 'Poetry and the Christian' in Theological Reflections volume 4, 359.