Dionysus on a Bike

Psalm 93 – 5/15/2026

Who is God? What can truly be ascribed to God? Christianity operates in a space of tension regarding this question. On the one hand, Scripture, tradition, and the indwelling of God’s own Holy Spirit are supposed to reveal to us, the faithful, what God is like, what God’s nature is. On the other hand, God is thought to be transcendent in a way that exceeds human understanding or the ability of human conceptual categories to apply. This tension leaves us in a bind with respect to our ability to know what God is like. God is revealed to us in part but mysterious and beyond us in part. One response to this tension is to stay silent, preferring to say nothing at all rather than risk being wrong about the nature of a transcendent creator. The opposite response is to fall back on the idea of revelation and claim that God’s mysterious transcendence does not negate that God shows God’s self to us, making knowledge of the divine possible.

The Psalmist seems blissfully unaware of this tension. In Psalm 93, like most of the Psalms, God is described in rich, evocative terms with no sense that there is a distance between our cognition and God’s true, unmediated self. At the same time, while the Psalmist shows no hesitation in naming God, ascribing attributes to God, and describing what God is like, the Psalms are not the works of a theologian. The author of Psalm 93 describes God as everlasting, a king, clothed in strength. These images and attributes of God, while painting a vivid picture of God, do not give us knowledge of particular specific traits that God possesses in a straightforward way.

Recognizing the tension between God revealing God’s self and God’s hiddenness and transcendence of human categories and cognition, Christian theologians can be quick to jump on texts like Psalm 93, looking there for statements that are supposed to give us definitive knowledge of God. The problem here is that the Psalmist is not in a privileged position regarding knowledge of God. Instead, the author of this Psalm is using limited language not designed to refer to the transcendent to try to give expression to an experience of the divine. What the Psalms show us is not God in God’s very nature, giving us access to knowledge of the divine essence; the Psalms show us how faithful, expectant people who are longing for God to act react when they have an experience of the divine.

God, for the Psalmist, is indeed king, robbed in majesty and girded in strength. We cannot therefore conclude that God is all-powerful or other some kind of theologically precise term. Worship, praise, testimony of God’s works, and prayer, these are central postures toward God in the Christian life. The Psalms are examples of these. These postures toward the divine are not ones of knowledge or philosophical/theological precision. Prayer and praise evocatively express a subjective experience where God is encountered, not as an object of knowledge but as a transformative event. In capturing these moments of transformative encounter, a Psalm tells us about the event of being changed by God, but this does not somehow give us insight into God’s innermost nature.

The Bible, especially the Psalms, shows itself to be so much richer when we stop reading it as a textbook of true propositions about God’s essence or nature. What is offered in the Biblical text is a narration and expression of various people’s experience of God throughout a portion of human history. We miss the power and majesty of that experience if we try to turn it into knowledge that describes God literally. Christianity is not primarily a body of doctrine, and God is not a being with particular attributes that we can understand. On the contrary, Christianity is a life-changing orientation toward that which is seen as ultimate and toward our fellow human beings in community. God then is the indescribable, at the same time present and absent, site of our being changed.

Theologians read Scripture as a treatise for knowledge. The Psalms cry out to be read as poems of longing and joy, hope and sorrow that can give voice to our own experience of these and related emotions and affective responses. To cry out that God is robed in majesty is to experience one’s own finitude in the face of the vastness of all that is not us. It is to express one’s own weakness and helplessness in the face of the unfolding of time and fate. The prayer and praise of the Psalmist express the experience of the divine in the face of our need and lack. What is communicated here in this ancient writing is not knowledge describing the traits of the divine, but joyful expectant longing. That is what prayer and praise are for the Christian, a longing for restoration of all things out of an intense, unquenchable love for all that is.

Reflections of a Dionysian Lutheran, comments on the daily readings of the Revised Common Lectionary.