What If Knowing Has a Shape?
A meditation on divine revelation, epistemic inversion, and the topology of grace
What if truth isn’t a ladder to climb, but a shape to be turned inside out?
We often conceive of knowing as a straight line — a steady path of progression, adding layer upon layer until clarity arrives. But the way God reveals Himself does not always follow that trajectory. Divine revelation often comes not by addition, but inversion. Not by rising, but entering. Not by constructing a view, but having it flipped entirely.
In Scripture, truth rarely unfolds in neat, expected lines. It bends. It turns. It confounds. It reverses what we thought we understood. The proud are laid low. The lowly are lifted. The crucified one becomes King. God doesn’t simply teach: He disorients first, then reconfigures.
This is not just paradox. It is not contradiction for its own sake. It is a pattern. An epistemic architecture. And strangely enough, it has echoes in how mathematicians describe space and transformation through topology: the study of continuity through change, not through fixed shapes.
This essay is a meditation on divine inversion and revelation — not as abstract theology, but as a structural reality. Epistemological. Almost geometric. Because perhaps the Gospel doesn’t just change what we know. It changes how we can know at all.
Divine Inversion: The Pattern of God
Throughout Scripture, God moves in ways that do more than subvert expectation. He does not merely reverse outcomes. He reshapes very structure beneath them. The weak do not just triumph over the strong. The barren do not merely bear life. The rejected are not just restored. Instead, they become the very centre of revelation. These are not isolated reversals. They are dimensional folds in the fabric of redemptive history.
This is not literary irony or symbolic drama. It is a theological topology: a reconfiguration of the underlying and foundational terrain on which meaning itself rests. God does not simply replace high with low or rearrange the existing layers. He warps the surface. What seemed far becomes near. What looked disjoined is revealed to be continuous, once the twist is perceived.
He chooses Jacob, the younger. David, the overlooked shepherd. Mary, the unwed virgin. A crucified Messiah. These are not mere exceptions to the rule — they are the rule rewritten in another geometry.
Revelation comes not through a linear unfolding of divine data, but through a turn in the fabric of reality itself. To see rightly is not merely to look harder. It is to realise the surface has curled, and we must walk it differently.
This is why the proud are confounded and the humble are lifted. Not because God swaps positions on a two-dimensional ladder, but because the frame itself is higher-dimensional. In this case, what seems to us a two-dimensional ladder might actually be a three-dimensional Möbius strip. What looked like ascent was always a return. What looked like loss was always the entry point to continuity.
Image: Möbius strip visualisation by gt6989b, via Math Stack Exchange
To encounter divine revelation is to undergo topological transformation: a shift not just in position, but in frame, perspective, shape, and orientation.
What if this is not merely a narrative theme?
What if it’s the very structure by which God transmits reality?
What if inversion is not a dramatic flourish, but the primary logic of how God reveals?
Topology: Form vs Continuity
In philosophy, the pursuit of knowledge often assumes a linear path: reason builds upon reason, premise upon premise, until one arrives at truth. This is the classical epistemic model: one of ascent, clarity, and coherence.
But what if God’s way of revealing disrupts this model entirely?
Much like in topology — the branch of mathematics that studies properties preserved through deformation — divine revelation is less about building static structures and more about understanding through transformation. In topology, a coffee cup and a doughnut are considered the same because they share a single hole; what matters isn’t the shape but the structure and essence beneath.
Likewise, revelation does not always come by adding new facts. It often comes through being re-formed through the disorientation that exposes a deeper continuity we couldn’t see before. It’s less “line upon line” and more “turn inside out until you see.”
Hence in this sense, to encounter God is to be reshaped. Not merely informed, but transformed.
Epistemic Disruption
As stated earlier, most systems of knowledge assume a steady ascent: from confusion to clarity, ignorance to understanding. But in Scripture, revelation doesn’t follow this pattern. It doesn’t ascend. It undoes.
When Moses encounters God, it is not through explanation but through a paradox — a bush that burns yet is not consumed. He removes his sandals not in comprehension, but in awe. Isaiah enters the temple, sees the Lord high and lifted up, and immediately declares, “Woe is me! I am ruined.” The vision of holiness doesn’t clarify him; it shatters him. Job, after demanding answers from God for chapters, is met with a divine storm and rhetorical whirlwind. There is no explanation, just encounter. And in the end, he says not “Now I understand,” but “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”
Paul, on the road to Damascus, is not persuaded into the faith. He is blinded by it. His theology is not refined through study, but demolished by divine confrontation. And John, the disciple whom Jesus loved and the one who leaned on His chest at the Last Supper, does not greet the risen Christ in Revelation with familiarity. He “fell at His feet as though dead.” The beloved is not exempt from unraveling. Revelation does not reinforce what John knew. It overwhelms it.
Image: The Incredulity of Saint Thomas by Caravaggio (1601–1602), public domain. Via Wikimedia Commons. This artwork beautifully illustrates the paradox of revelation and doubt in Christian theology.
Even Christ’s closest followers rarely recognised Him at first after His resurrection: Mary mistook Him for the gardener and the disciples on the road to Emmaus couldn’t see until He broke the bread. Revelation comes not by mastery, but through disorientation… followed by reorientation.
This is not incidental. This is the shape of divine communication. Nowhere is it more fully epitomised than in the Incarnation itself. God reveals Himself not in upward transcendence, but in kenosis — self-emptying. He enters our reality not as a conquering force, but as a fragile child. Not as a victorious general, but a humble carpenter. The Word becomes flesh. The Messiah is crucified. The fullness of God is made known not in power, but paradox: not contradiction, but truths held in supra-positional tension, resolvable only when observed from a higher dimensional vantage that God alone inhabits — and glimpsed only when our vision has first been turned.
Revelation, at its deepest level, is not the delivery of information. It is the collision of presence with perception. It is inversion, not just in content, but in form.
So while renowned thinkers like Aristotle and Descartes framed knowledge as a linear, progressive path toward certainty, Scripture and several modern philosophers suggest something more disruptive.
Søren Kierkegaard, in Fear and Trembling, challenged the notion that true understanding comes through rational accumulation. For Kierkegaard, the deepest knowledge of God and self requires leaps of faith — disruption of reason and ruptures in continuity. The act of faith itself, according to him, is one marked by surrender, not steady progress. Knowledge, in this sense, doesn’t build from certainty but emerges through paradox, tension, and undoing.
Similarly, Simone Weil, in Gravity and Grace and Waiting for God, describes a form of knowing that is more about receptivity than construction. She posits that true knowledge comes not from imposing our frameworks onto the world, but by humbly receiving what is revealed to us, often through suffering and upheaval. Not as resolution, but as disruption. Revelation, for Weil, requires a humility and openness to the unexpected, a willingness to be undone in order to be reformed.
This is why revelation cannot be reduced to content. It is a topological event: one that bends the plane of understanding and meaning until a new surface emerges. It does not just reframe what we see. It reshapes how we see at all.
To know God, then, is not to climb toward certainty, but to walk through the undoing. To let our structures be broken, our frameworks overturned. Truth is not granted to the strong, but to the poor in spirit. Not to the wise in their own eyes, but to those made ready through unmaking. This is not a detour from truth.
It is the method.
Implications for Faith, Theology, and Self
If revelation comes not through steady ascent but by inversion, then faith, theology, and the self are not simply built. They are first interrupted, then remade.
This does not mean clarity has no place. At times, faith arises from a piercing insight, a moment where the pieces align and truth feels near. Theology, too, can provide a kind of scaffolding: a structure for naming God rightly and holding mystery well. And the self can be strengthened through clear conviction and understanding.
Yet Scripture reminds us that the path to truth is not always through coherence. Sometimes, faith is formed in the dark, when understanding has collapsed and trust is all that remains. Theology must occasionally loosen its borders to make space for the God who exceeds it. And the self is often revealed not in its strength, but when it is unravelled.
We live in a culture that prizes mastery — over ideas, over emotion, over outcome. But divine revelation resists mastery. It instead invites humility rather than control, and encounter over certainty. Knowing God does not always feel like climbing a mountain. Sometimes it feels like walking through a storm, or sitting in silence, or watching everything you thought you knew give way.
This changes how we view doubt — not always as a flaw to be fixed, but sometimes as a threshold. A liminal space where something deeper might be born. Obedience, then, becomes less about executing perfect knowledge and more about staying near, even when undone. Spiritual maturity shifts from appearing strong to being willing to be held when you are not.
Therefore, to follow God is not merely to rise into truth, but to be reoriented by it. And that turning may be the very shape of transformation.
Think back to the example of the Möbius strip: a flat ribbon with a half-twist, whose surface loops back onto itself with only one continuous side. What looks like two becomes one. What seems disconnected is revealed to be whole, not by stacking or extending, but by turning. Revelation, like the Möbius strip, is not just a path we walk. It is a structure that reshapes us as we move through it.
Image: Fractal spiral artwork by Matthias Hauser, via Fine Art America
This topology is not isolated. It is also fractal. The same inversion we see on the cross repeats itself — in the barren womb, the overlooked shepherd, the quiet act of surrender. The macro pattern imprints itself on the micro, not as metaphor but as continuity.
Faith, too, might also be conceived a spiral. Not a ladder of progress, but a return that deepens. We revisit the same truths not because we failed to learn them, but because revelation always has more to show us as we descend into trust.
Moreover, the Gospel does not just reveal a topology. It invites us to inhabit it. In Christ, we are taken, blessed, broken, and given. Not once, but continually. This is no abstraction. This is bread. This is body. This is the shape we are being conformed to.
Truth may follow these shapes. Not linear. Not layered. Not up. Not down. But folded. Twisted. Inverted. Through. And in that unexpected turn, a deeper coherence emerges… one we never could have built, but only received.
The Gospel as the Grand Inversion
Thus, at the heart of the Christian faith lies not just a truth, but a turn. The Gospel is not merely the climax of divine revelation. It is its deepest inversion, and its highest dimensional fold.
God does not save through domination, but through descent. The infinite enters the finite. The Holy becomes flesh. Power is made perfect in weakness, and glory is revealed through what the world discards.
At the center of history and eternity stands a cross, not a throne. A broken body, not a triumphant banner. Christ does not ascend by rising first, but by descending into death, into silence, into the deepest form of undoing. And it is through that descent that resurrection comes.
This is not a one-time event. It is the pattern beneath all redemption.
The Gospel is not a ladder we climb, but a Möbius turn, a topology of grace we are invited into. A surrender, a death to self, a letting go of mastery and merit. The path curves downward, inward, then through. And in that turning, in that surrender, we are raised. Not by our strength, but by grace. Not to the top, but reshaped into a new creation.
The Son becomes servant. The Lamb becomes Lord. The grave becomes a gate. What seems like the end reveals itself, impossibly, as beginning.
And it reshapes everything. Faith becomes less about certainty, and more about trust in the turn. Theology becomes less about control, and more about yielding to the shape of grace and Divine Will. The self is no longer a project of perfection, but a vessel to be turned, broken, and made anew.
In the Gospel, we don’t rise by striving. We rise by dying. We see by being blinded. We live by losing. And in every paradox, every inversion, the whisper remains: this is the way.
I had to learn that the hard way. For years, I strived in church, trying to serve faithfully, say the right things, keep my life “in order.” I thought clarity would come from rising — by stepping up, leading well, being seen. But it was not the spotlight or the structure that taught me who God was.
It was when the roles fell away. When I was unseen, uninvited, and unsure if I still belonged.
That season did not add knowledge. It inverted it. It broke the linear frame I thought was faith, and revealed the cross in its place What I thought was a breakdown became a revelation: that dying to self was not about shrinking, but about seeing rightly. That the kingdom does not rise like Babel. It descends like Christ.
The Gospel had always moved upside-down.
I just hadn’t seen it… until I was turned.
Author’s Note:
This is neither a theological treatise nor a philosophical thesis. It is a personal meditation. A turning, and a way of tracing the shapes and structures through which revelation seems to move: not always linearly, but folding back, undoing, inverting.
The structure of this essay mirrors its subject. It is not a ladder of conclusions but a spiral of insight, a Möbius walk of faith, turning what we thought we knew inside out.
It is written not from the heights of clarity, but from the in-between — from the moment after the ladder breaks and before the new ground is seen.
If it feels at times like it disorients more than it resolves, that is intentional. That is the invitation to sit with and hold the tension between what has unravelled and what has not yet taken form. Between the breaking and the remaking. Between the God we thought we understood and the God who reveals Himself otherwise.
Because it is often in those spaces that true transformation commences.