John Polkinghorne on the doxology that ends Paul's great argument — the proper response to encountering the God whose ways exceed human comprehension, affirmed by a physicist who spent his life studying the intelligibility of creation.

From the writers we read together

John Polkinghorne

Physicist and Anglican Priest

Polkinghorne spent decades as a theoretical physicist before becoming an Anglican priest, and he argued that both disciplines share the same fundamental drive: to understand reality as it actually is. Romans 11:33–36 does not contradict that drive but clarifies its limits. Paul has just completed eleven chapters of rigorous theological argument — and then breaks into worship precisely because the argument has led him to a God who exceeds it. Doxology is not the failure of reason; it is reason's proper conclusion.

The final verse — 'from him and through him and to him are all things' — is one of the most compact theological statements in Scripture. All things originate in God, are sustained by God, and find their end in God. This is not an abstraction; it means that everything you experience today — joy, difficulty, beauty, loss — exists within the movement of a story whose Author is also its destination. What would it mean to live today as though this were literally true?