"No statement about God is simply, literally true. God is far more than can be measured, described, defined in ordinary language, or pinned down to any particular happening"

Language strains and breaks when it reaches for the divine. Any sentence about God risks turning the limitless into something manageable, domestic, and finite. The assertion that no statement about God is simply, literally true challenges the assumption that theological language functions like ordinary description. Ordinary words evolved to track objects, events, and relations within the world; they falter when aimed at the source and ground of that world.

This view resonates with negative theology: we know more truly by recognizing what cannot be said. Affirmations about God are not empty, but they are analogical, symbolic, and partial. They point without enclosing; they guide like maps that confess their own scale and omissions. The more confident the formulation, the more crucial the humility that accompanies it.

Claiming that God exceeds measurement rejects the idea that divine reality could be captured by scientific or historical verification alone. It does not disparage science; rather, it marks a category mistake. Measurement is superb for quantifiable phenomena; the divine, if real, is the depth-dimension from which measurability itself derives. To insist on empirical capture of God is like trying to net the ocean with a butterfly catcher.

Refusing to pin God to any particular happening also resists reductionism. Identifying God wholly with a miracle, a nation, a doctrine, or an inner feeling collapses transcendence into one finite expression. Events, doctrines, and experiences can mediate the holy, but none can exhaust it. This stance safeguards both reverence and critique: it honors genuine encounters while questioning idolatries that mistake the sign for the source.

Practically, such a vision nurtures intellectual modesty, openness to other traditions, and attentiveness to mystery. It encourages prayer and contemplation, where silence becomes a truthful mode of speech. It also anchors ethics: if no formulation owns the divine, then mercy, listening, and self-correction are not optional virtues but the proper posture before an ungraspable, ever-greater reality.