The extended quotation below is from Gerald McDermott in Can Evangelicals Learn from World Religions? Jesus, Revelation and Religious Traditions.
I quote it with an eye to Emerging Church interest in apophatic theology – for example, the Pete Rollins book “How (Not) To Speak Of God”, but there’s also a biographical angle to this, in that I have been highly influenced by Zen in the way that Gerald McDermott describes in this passage. I was into Zen before Christianity and a significant part of my early Christian formation was centered around how to engage with Zen in the manner of Paul Hiebert’s model of critical contextualization.
God beyond Thoughts and Words
Once we recognize that Buddhist traditions differ from Christianity in both goals and methods, we are ready to see that nevertheless they may help us understand the reality of God in Christ more clearly. In particular, their experience of the distance between ordinary perception and reality can help check our natural presumption when talking about God.
Gotama Buddha and his successors always stressed that transcendent truth lies beyond sense perception and intellectual conception. From the standpoint of our ordinary experience and thought, final truth is what they call ‘empty’. It cannot be filled with any of our conceptions (at least with any degree of precision) because it lies beyond them. Similarly all events and objects measured against the standard of ultimate truth are also empty, they argued, because they are limited by space and time whereas final truth transcends both categories. Hence perfect wisdom means seeing that ultimate reality is void (Sunya), which means not non-existent but beyond all powers of discrimination. The Buddha never denied the real existence of what we call final reality; he only denied the existence of a name for it. For him the attempt to identify Reality with a word or concept was presumptuous – akin to anthropomorphism. He insisted we cannot penetrate ultimate reality (what Christians would call God) by exercises of will or intellectual formulas. He denied a one-to-one correspondence between thinking and being.
Thomas Aquinas saw a similar distinction between God and our thinking about God. “The mind is found to be most perfectly in possession of the knowledge of God,” he asserted, “when it is recognized that his essence is above everything that the mind is capable of apprehending in this life.” God is not understandable in terms taken from this world. Language about God therefore, “is not confined by the meaning of our word but goes beyond it” “Therefore, the knowledge by which God is seen through creatures is not a knowledge of his essence, but a knowledge that is dark and mirrored, and from afar.”
Aquinas and other scholastics showed us that we know God best by way of preeminence, which comes only after affirmation and negation. For example, we affirm God is beauty but then deny that God is beauty in the way that we ordinarily experience beauty, for all earthly experience of beauty is only a dim and broken refraction of original beauty, which flows like a fountain out of God. Who defines the meaning of beauty. Thus we affirm that God is beauty but only in a preeminent way: careful not to contaminate God by identifying him with our finite creaturely standards and noting that human affirmations about God are not to be absolutised or converted into idols. Discourse about God has no terms of comparison since it is by definition unique and therefore incomparable. “Purely affirmative theology without negative theology makes God a creature of our intellects, a projection of our imagination.” On the other hand, negative theology without the further turn to the way of preeminence leads to an epistemological agnosticism that denies the biblical testimony that “the Word became flesh and lived among us”
This method can also help us understand what it means to think of God as a person. Aquinas would remind us that God is not a person as we ordinarily think of persons. Buddhist thinkers would add that none of our ideas of personhood have exact correspondence in God (Of course while Mahayana and Tibetan thinkers would agree that the divine is personal, Theravadins would deny the existence of any deity such as Christians profess). Neither is God impersonal, for Jesus showed us that God incarnate is a human person. Nor is God both, since God is simple and not a composite. In some mysterious way that is beyond our grasp, then, God the Person is infinitely more than we can conceive when we use the word. And he is certainly no less…
.. Sometimes we evangelicals worship an idol and call it God. We think of Jesus as our buddy, or call God “The Big Man” or “The Man Upstairs.” The Buddhist traditions can remind us that God is infinitely distant from what we claim we worship and may in fact have no relation to the object of our prayer and talk. Buddhist insights, despite falling short of the true God, can teach us reverence before the mystery of God and more respect in the face of the ultimate and ineffable in God. They can remind us that all positive statements about God must be negated in order to be lifted up finally in the infinite: God is immeasurably ineffable, infinitely good, absolute goodness. Hence God simultaneously transcends and permeates the world and human beings; he is infinitely far yet closer to us than we are to ourselves, “intangible yet we experience [God’s] presence, present even when we experience [God’s] absence.” Every statement must pass through the dialectic of affirmation and negation before it can be conceived as preeminent.
Chew on that!
Where I differ with guys like Pete Rollins is that in my opinion he stops short. He does not move through affirmation and negation to preeminence but gets stuck on negation, on how (not) to speak of God without moving though to the other side.
Where I also differ with him is in thinking this sort of theologizing is unprecedented and unique to the Emerging Church movement. He projects a reified picture back onto earlier and contemporary manifestations of Christianity that are not entirely warranted. Gerald McDermott himself is a prime example. While I’ve been involved in discussion boards with him and can thereby say he has some Emerging Church contact they were not Emerging Church boards and he does not himself identify with the Emerging Church movement. His prime influence is actually the revivalist preacher Jonathan Edwards. So, our understanding of Christianity does not always match the Christian reality either. None of us are exempt; we can only strive to minimize the gap.
Curious Christian 
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