Melinda Penner at Stand to Reason had a good blog post

yesterday on the cliché, “Don’t put God in a box”. Among her various criticisms of this cliché she wrote:

The box is one of God’s own nature we’re all just trying to figure out what the box looks like. God should be in a box. What’s the alternative? God has no limitations on what He can be like or act like? That is frightening. God Himself is limited by His own nature. He can’t lie. He can’t sin. He’s can’t go out of existence. God’s box – the definition of what He is like – is what makes Him God and a Person we can love and trust and glorify. If God isn’t in some kind of a box, He would be arbitrary. … Our goal is to get the best idea of what that box looks like.


I love it! God is in a box because God is an ontological reality, and as such there are certain things that are true about Him and a lot of things that are not true about Him. The task of theology is to separate the false notions about God from the true so we can get an accurate picture of who God is, what He is like, and what He wants. So the next time someone tells you “Don’t put God in a box” tell them, “He’s already in a box. I’m just trying to delineate what that box looks like.”