On Knowledge and Faith

Themes: Faith, Gospel, On Knowing God, On Language

“For God, who said, “Light shall shine out of darkness”—He has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ.” (2Cor 4:6 HCSB)

There are lots of different ways of using the verb ‘know’. It can be a slippery little word.
If I say, ‘I know the history of Ballet’, I mean something slightly different to when I say ‘I know Bob the Ballerina’. When I say ‘I know…’ I might mean anything from being able to repeat facts, through a claim about having had certain experiences, to relationships, sexual intimacy, recognition of objects, and who knows what else! Humans are incredibly creative when it comes to playing our language games.

Generally however, you can work out what I mean by ‘I know’ by referring in the context to the object I’m speaking about. That’s how you can tell the difference between my uses of ‘know’ in ‘know the history of ballet’ and ‘know Bob’.

The thing I’m claiming to know tells you something about the kind of knowledge I might have.

How does this work with God?

If I claim to know God, what kind of knowing is this?

We can only work out what kind of knowing it is by working out what kind of object it is that I’m speaking about – in this case, God.

But God isn’t an object. He’s a He. God is a being. God is a person…
…actually The Person.

We know this because he reveals himself.
We are capable of understanding this Self-Disclosure, we are capable of knowing God as The Person, precisely because he made us with this capability.
[There is more on this here]

What we find, as God makes himself known to us, is that God is a Unique Person, A Unique Being.

God is an utterly Unique object of human knowledge.

And therefore, when I speak of ‘knowing’ God, I’m speaking of knowing a unique kind of thing. It won’t necessarily be like knowing the history of Ballet, or knowing Bob the Ballerina. The only thing knowing God can be like is… knowing God.

So what is ‘knowing God’?

The strange answer in the pages of the Bible is this:
Knowing God is what happens when the gospel is proclaimed.
Knowing God = the effect of the gospel.
Human knowledge of God is defined as that which is created in human minds through the preaching of the gospel.

(there is more to be said at this point about the work of God the Spirit in the words of the gospel preaching and in the mind of the hearer, but another time)

This is a unique form of knowledge – a unique definition – for a unique object of knowledge.

What does it mean for me to ‘know God’? It means that I have heard the message of the gospel, and that the gospel has had its proper effect on me.

What does it mean for the gospel to have had ‘it’s proper effect’. What is the effect produced by the gospel?

Faith

The gospel produces faith in those who have heard it (in the truest sense).
Therefore, the heart of Christian knowledge of God is faith in God.
To know God is to trust God, believe God.
Faith is the uniquely characteristic form of the Christian knowledge of God.
We are truly knowing God when we trust him.

Trusting God sends us outwards again to the words of the gospel because to have faith in God means to have faith in his words. And this is precisely what is demanded by the gospel which comes to us in the form of a promise:

““For God loved the world in this way: He gave His One and Only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16 HCSB)

It is a promise secured by the death and resurrection of Christ, and therefore a ‘better promise’, but a promise nonetheless:

“But Jesus has now obtained a superior ministry, and to that degree He is the mediator of a better covenant, which has been legally enacted on better promises.” (Heb 8:6 HCSB)

To know God is to have faith, which is to say, to trust God’s word of promise.
Abraham’s trust in God was a belief that he would carry out his word of promise to Abraham.
Of course this was not simply a static, mental affirmation. Abraham’s faith in God led him on a journey to a foreign and unknown Land, led him to the point of sacrificing his promised Son, of refusing to let his Son leave the Land, and lying dead in a bought burial plot.
The knowledge of God produced by the gospel is faith – the action of trusting in God’s word. The word produces the response which acts in accordance with the word.
Word-Response-Word.
This is the double-action of gospel preaching.

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On what we don't know… (II)

Themes: Apologetics, Forgiveness, On Knowing God, Prayer, Sin

How do we not know what we are made to know?

‘If humanity is made for the knowledge of God, why is it that many people do not feel the need of this knowledge, or seek God out?’
Original Post

We need to step back again for a moment. It seems at this point every step forward needs careful prodding with the toes first to make sure we are on firm ground.

To say ‘I know’, could equally be a statement about facts or about relationships.
“I know how many elephants live in the zoo” and “I know Bob the Elephant keeper” are two different forms of knowledge.

In the Biblical world view (and increasingly in the post-modern world view) both these forms of knowledge are bound together. There aren’t any such things as ‘Facts’ bare, naked, and objective. There are only interpreted facts, given in relationships, through testimonies, and in the context of experiences.

Our lack of knowledge of the ugliness and evil of sin, and of our dire need for restoration to friendship with God, is an ignorance of certain primary facts about the world and it is ignorance of our primary relationship.

In every sense our knowing is broken.

How did this come about? How did knowledge get broken?

If Christ is the self-evident Word of God, [the way in which God is known] why do so many people reject him? The answer lies in original sin, that original rejection of God’s word by Adam in which the whole human race is involved.
Graeme Goldsworthy, According to Plan, p. 60

It is interesting to note that the first time Knowledge is mentioned in the Bible it is not in the context of the relationship between Humanity and God. It is in the description of the forbidden tree as ‘the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’.

(What a strange plant, was it a weed?)

It certainly wasn’t an Apple Tree – this tree has no species, it is unique – named for its unique fruit. This is the tree – the fruit of which gives knowledge of good and evil.

As Adam stretched out his hand to take and eat he was wreaking a change upon the world that was profoundly to do with knowledge. Human rebellion against the word of God had fundamental consequences for our knowledge because, at this one point above all others, our knowledge-as-facts and our knowledge-in-relationship was intimately bound together.

There is a long history of speculation about what it means to have the ‘knowledge of good and evil’. Some have understood this to mean factual knowledge, i.e., what good and evil are, (what the rules are). Others have taken this knowledge to be experiential, having the first hand experience of good and evil. Still others have taken this to have some sort of sexual referent.

The difficulty for all these understandings is that later in the Genesis narrative we hear God saying,

“Since man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:22 HCSB)

The forbidden knowledge at the heart of human rebellion seems to be, knowing good and evil, as God knows them.
What is God’s knowledge of good and evil?
God’s knowledge is autonomous knowledge. It is not knowledge of what is good and what is evil as defined by ‘the moral law’, it is not experience of good and evil (God has no evil in him).
God’s knowledge of good and evil is the knowledge that defines good and evil.
God knows good and evil because he decides what good is, and what evil is.

For Adam and Eve to eat this deathly fruit was an arrogant grasping at the prerogative of God.
Rather than to continuing to know God (and through knowing God to know the world)
Adam and Eve sought to know like God.
Humanity sought to decide for itself what good is, and what evil is.
They did this, first, by deciding that it was good for humanity to eat a fruit of which God had said, ‘don’t eat!’

The knowledge of good and evil is a colossal thing. It is fundamentally a narrative, a system of meanings that locate our identity and purpose. This narrative had begun with the First Word,
“Let there Be…”
…And there was.”
God had given us identity and purpose. He told us the story into which he had placed us.

But in the Fall, Adam substitutes his own story, a new framework of meanings, and thereby deafens himself to the word of God.

The conclusion of this long answer is that our darkened understanding of who we are (that we are fallen) is a consequence of our grasp for moral autonomy. We have so thoroughly substituted our own definitions of good and evil, which is to say, our own fundamental narrative, that we cannot correctly identify our state from God’s perspective.

And all this is a very long winded way of restating Paul’s conclusion in Romans 1.

“For though they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God or show gratitude. Instead, their thinking became nonsense, and their senseless minds were darkened.” (Rom 1:21 HCSB)

Which finally, wearied I’m sure, and very much overdue, brings us back to the really important question:
How do I show my friend that our rebellion against God is horrifying, evil, and disgusting – not just intellectually credible? And how do I do it with humility and gentleness?

We live faithfully, in faith, with faithfulness.

We trust and remain loyal to the Creator who is alone able to utter those decisive creative words that can utterly alter our thinking.
This trusting of God is expressed in speech, life, and prayer.

No actions on our part alone can bring a fellow human to knowledge of God,
but they are the vehicles through which the Creator God has chosen to express himself.

So we trust God through speaking the truth, which is ultimately the true story, the gospel announcement of the Death and Resurrection of God’s King through which the God’s Kingdom has come, meaning that the hour of judgement is at hand, though there is salvation for those who seek it.
Already it is an incomprehensible story.

And in the light of this story we will live incomprehensibly. As the Christian begins to comprehend the world and our place within God’s future, our values and priorities are derailed from the tracks in which they used to run. Certain things which appear to others as insane sacrifices are now ‘worth it’ for the Christian. The shape of our thinking is changed, the centre of our hope moves forward.
For the person who is not a Christian, watching as these lives are lived, they do not make sense, the Christian life will be simply incomprehensible.

And we pray. This sounds like such a weak answer after such a long build up. However, I’m more and more convinced, through reflecting on God’s word and seeing my own perversity, that unless God acts to change something in our perception of the world we can never see him. Our minds really are darkened – this is not just a nice turn of phrase.
Unless God gives us the interpretive key, this world-of-a-text remains a mystery, indecipherably encoded.

No one comes to know the truth about God or themselves without God taking a prior action to give this knowledge. The individual is powerless. In fact, all the individuals involved, other than God, are powerless. We are as equally powerless to stir up another person from their blind danger as that person is themselves.

Which is why we are to be humble and gentle in our prayers, and in our speech and action.

In our humble prayers we admit before God that we are unable to save the people that we love but that we trust that he can and that he desires to do so.

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On what we don't know… (I)

Themes: Apologetics, On Knowing God

‘If humanity is made for the knowledge of God, why is it that many people do not feel the need of this knowledge, or seek God out?’

What I’m wrestling with at the moment is why that one thing doesn’t seem so self evident most of the time.[humanity is made for the knowledge of God] Perhaps I am suppressing the truth by my wickedness. Perhaps that’s really the essence of sin—not really believing that and acting accordingly. I guess it is then in my own sinful self-interest to avoid that particular piece of knowledge.

I know a couple of my friends are wandering away from the faith at the moment, because they don’t really see why they need God. Knowing that our primary function and greatest good is knowing him is completely opaque to them. Deep down they don’t really believe that they’re all that bad, and for the most part they’re happy in their comfortable middle-class, tertiary educated lives. How do I show them that our rebellion is horrifying, evil, disgusting–not just intellectually credible? And how do I do it with humility and gentleness?
original post

There are a lot of questions here, but I want to think about the final one first. How do we show our friends, and the lost world at large, the enormity of the evil and ugliness resulting from the Fall?

I’d be tempted to talk about the homeless couple who sleep outside our door. We talk to them (Emma more than me), we keep the Church toilet open, we try to connect them with the various refuges and drop-in centres around the city. Every night when I get up to go to the toilet in the night I can hear them coughing downstairs. Every time I think about it I’m ashamed, and guilty, and frustrated. There is very little I can do but I know that the world shouldn’t be this way. People aren’t meant to live like that. Something went wrong somewhere. And it’s the height of ugliness and arrogance to think, ‘my life’s ok’, when other people sleep on doorsteps. All our lives are somehow not ok when people live like that.

But I doubt that’s the right way to approach the question with a friend. If I was that friend it would either drive me into guilt and self-sacrifice to try to make things better, or it would just make me angry with God and avoid my own responsibility.

For the same reason, though the ugliness and evil of human rebellion is blatantly evident in every edition of every newspaper (and even more evident in the Daily Telegraph) This evidence, or any recitation of the litany of pain that is everywhere being uttered in our world, is unlikely to convince someone who doesn’t already see it through the knowledge of Christ.

We could point to the hidden ugliness within each individual, the secret shame that we bury deep down, and which are still there even for comfortable, educated, middle-class Australians. No one ever goes through life without standing in front of the mirror and thinking ‘failure’. At least no one you could even begin a conversation with.

But we would run into more problems. What right have I to point out the failures of someone else and tell them to repent before God. I know well enough the ugliness inside me. If it is a friend I’m talking with, they probably know my inside ugliness as well. I’d only end up sounding like a pompous hypocrite. Or they would hear and despair; or hear and try to work harder; or hear and think that in the end the good and the bad in them will probably balance out.
But the reality is, the last thing we’d do is turn to God for an answer.

Maybe if we were to wait for the right moment? I’ve heard Christians express this thought plenty of times, I’ve probably said something like it myself. If we wait, maintaining our friendship and witness until that moment comes when the fiction slips and breaks down. Maybe standing beside a grave the ugliness and evil of the world will become apparent.

But lots and lots and lots and lots of people stand beside graves and look bleakly at the ruin of a world, but not many look to God, even when they have Christian friends beside them.

C.S. Lewis gave us an image in the Narnia Chronicles which expresses the tragedy very well. It’s the Dwarves in The Last Battle who are thrown into a smelly old stable and find themselves in Aslan’s Land. But they’ve told themselves so firmly and so long that they have been thrown into a stable that they are unable to see anything else. The evidence is all around them but they interpret everything through the grid of what they believe should be there – seeing a great banquet as donkey slops.

We read the facts and evidence that is presented to us in the world through an interpretive framework which shapes all these things into a story. A story that explains what is wrong, how it could be fixed, and where we fit in. But if you have the wrong framework, if you are telling yourself the wrong story, no amount of evidence will change what you see. You will simply read it into the shape of what you already know. (this is the point at which the post-modern critique is so profound).

As Christians however we know (there’s that word) that the world has a real, true story. There is a correct interpretation but it can never be arrived at through deduction (adding up 1+1=2) or induction (gathering evidence), the key to truly understanding the story only comes through revelation. Revelation is the foundation of Christian knowledge, and the foundational form of all knowledge.

The truth is that the knowledge of Christ in the gospel interprets our world for us, just as it interprets the Bible for us. Christ is the wisdom from God through which we learn to see the world; through which the events of experience are given coherence and relationship, to form a story.

Without knowing Christ, there is no true knowledge of the world.

But that fundamental question keeps drawing me back. How do we not know what we are made to know?

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On Non-Christians and the Existence of God

Themes: On Knowing God

The current existence of a humanity that does not ‘walk with God’ or feel any need to even know God throws our claims about the Creator God and his purpose for creation into complete jeopardy. People who do not know God, or care to know God, are a walking statement against the Christian view of God and creation.

The existence of non-Christians is proof that either:
God does not exist,
or, that he is weak (and therefore not the Christian God),
or, that something has gone badly astray from his original plan (and then we must ask, how? and, how is it possible?)

The Christian will obviously wish to opt for the 3rd possibility (or cease to be a Christian). What makes this a valid choice?

Every individual human being that I have encountered, both in the flesh and in writing or other media, share a particular trait. We perceive events in the world to be linked by cause and effect. Causality isn’t something that we can see in the world. It is something that happens in our minds as we relate different events. It happens on a very small scale when we connect the gas flame and the saucepan boiling. It happens on a much larger scale when we link chains of causes to create narratives – stories about how we came to be here, why we behave in certain ways, why some features of our world are specially significant and others not so.
Every single person I know sees themself in some sort of narrative. I’m not saying that we all live in a dream land of epic quests and heroic deeds, although that might be true for some. I mean that we all structure our lives by see a causality into the world around us. We use it to explain and situate ourselves. Concepts like ‘good’ and ‘bad’ refer to this narrative structure of our world, and specifically to our ability to achieve our objectives.
But the crucial question comes when we zoom back the lens a little. Why? Why do we view the world in this way? It is not at all clear that any other living being on our planet has this approach to reality. Why do we believe we have objectives? And by objectives we often mean something much grander than food, shelter, reproduction (all of which are very efficiently achieved by species who have no consciousness of them as ‘objectives’).
Of course, these things can be adequately explained as ‘epiphenomena’ – by products of an evolutionary process preoccupied with passing on genes. So Richard Dawkins believes. Honestly, it’s a patronising fudge to say that the things which nearly every person would say are most important to their thinking and identity are in fact weird by-products of another process – but if it works for you, hey!
The real problem is this, why do we all think something is wrong. Every narrative centres around a problem, if a piece of writing is a narrative, rather than just a list or description, it must have a problem somewhere for a character to overcome.
We all think of our lives as a narrative,
(one of our weird epiphenomenal developments has been the writing of narrative literature)
all narratives involve a problem.
Everyone thinks there is something wrong.

Feel free to test this claim.
Everyone one I have ever met, read about, read/heard/saw something by – from numerous cultures spanning thousands of years, agree on this: there is something wrong.
We do not control our environment (big deal) – but we think we should, why?
In spite of overwhelming experience we still get disappointed when people betray us or demonstrate a lack of integrity in pursuing their own interests. why do we, why shouldn’t they?
The list is virtually endless.

A person who does not have any belief in God’s existence, or desire to know him, will happily engage me in a discussion of the ills of our State political system, the problem of climate change, or our need to find a solution for homelessness.

It seems to me that one of the most fundamental experiences of any human being is discontent. Any theory about the phenomena of human reality (world view) that does not account for this experience is fatally flawed. And a theory that explains this fundamental experience as merely a by-product is pretty crook.

Back to our three options:

The existence of non-Christians is proof that either:
God does not exist,
or, that he is weak (and therefore not the Christian God),
or, that something has gone badly astray from his original plan

The first two options can never be proved or disproved conclusively. So what can we say about the quality of the third option? Well, it concurs comprehensively with the universal human belief about reality. The Christian explanation for the existence of non-Christians makes great sense of the world as we know it, and explains a great deal more to boot.

If Paul the Apostle is correct in saying of Christ that,

“all things have been created through Him and for Him.
He is before all things, and by Him all things hold together.” Colossians 1:16-17 (HCSB)

then without Christ
all things have been created through infinitely extending causality, and for what?
we really cannot be sure that anything was before us,
and we have no reason to believe that anything can hold together or will continue to hold together.

Without Christ we are consigned to live in a world without a narrative,

and that isn’t our world…

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On the Necessity of Knowing – II

Themes: On Knowing God

If God didn’t exist we’d have to invent him.
That’s what I mean by the necessity of knowing God.

It doesn’t require any great anthropological research to discover that belief in God, god, gods, the divine, is very nearly universal among Homo Sapiens. Even in our own secular society, belief in god is rampant – at most counts around 80% of the population.

I need to be careful not to collapse all these different kinds of religious belief into One Giant Phenomena. That’s the silly mistake of sociologists of religion and pop-pluralists. Believing in Allah is not the same as believing in Yahweh, they are not the same God under different names.

It’s also impossible to deny for a minute that people all around us happily get on with their lives without the least consciousness of God or desire for anything like what I would call ‘knowing’ God.

What is unquestionably uniform, even among those who don’t have any kind of articulated belief in God, is the sense that life should have a purpose, that there are right and wrong ways of living (and that this has something to do with our purpose)…
And, most significantly, whatever these things are We Don’t Know.
The very thing that would seem to be fundamentally important to know about life is the one major fact left in the dark.
Food, Shelter, Sex, we’ve got those all down,
Purpose… just go back and look again at all your angsty teen poetry.

Which is why, if God didn’t exist we’d have to invent him.

That’s not exactly a comforting thought for a Christian. After all, we are always being challenged by people who believe that God really is just an inventive by product of an aspect of human development. At the moment, Richard Dawkins is making his next million out of just such an argument.
If the necessity of knowing God would lead us to invent a god, just to fill this need, then how do we know that we haven’t done just that!
On the other hand, if there is a God and this God is the creative Subject behind the Universe, who had (and has) an intimate hand in our own creation, it is very likely that knowing Himself is fundamental to being ourselves.

In other words, if God really did make us it wouldn’t be surprising to find the need to know him at the core of our being.
And if we don’t know him to find that something fundamental to ourselves – our purpose – has become deeply obscure.

So how do we know God?

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Knowledge and Testimony

Themes: On Knowing God

We propose, rather, that reliance on testimony is fundamental to knowing about reality in general – as fundamental as perception, memory, inference, and so on. (Provan, Long, Longman, A Biblical History of Israel.)

This book is easily the best thing that I’ve read so far at college. It starts with a literature review of the current state of thinking in the area of Biblical History. Not the most engaging way to draw in the general reader but I was impressed with the rigor and quality of the writing style, as well as a sense of authorial humility that isn’t often found in modern work (we are far to casual with our use of the personal pronoun in scholarly writing – probably cause everyone’s been blogging).

The authors then turn to a brief history of historiography in general, looking at the rise of the ‘scientific’ method in historiography and its effects on our belief in what we can know of the past. After showing the great failure of the ‘scientific’ approach, not merely in history but in the broad question of ‘how we know’, the authors state that what is needed is a brand new approach to epistemology. At this point I would expect the next sentence to read something like, “but we don’t have time for that now”. Generally when you’re meant to be writing a history of Israel, you don’t just decide to go off on a tangent which involves the fundamental questions of human knowledge.
But I was wonderfully disappointed…
Instead the authors turn to the idea of Testimony, that is, belief in the witness of others, as a fundamental element of knowing anything at all. This bears serious thinking about.
In favour is the fact that our actual experience of life bears this out, as children we rely on the words of our parents, as adults, the vast majority of things that we claim to know are really things we have learned from others. We rely on testimony. We are not (and never were) islands of dispassionate, empirical investigation. Our knowledge is the weaving together of testimonies about our world.
Against the theory is the fact that testimony is a complex concept. There are any number of more basic concepts that need to be explained which lie behind testimony – right down to the mechanics of communication and truth.
But just maybe, this analytical emphasis (the breaking down of complexities) is what got us into trouble with our theories of knowledge in the first place. We don’t think from the simple to the complex. In our experience, Complex ideas don’t rest on simple ones (though they do have this logical relation). Rather, our complex and simple ideas are received, and then perceived to be such through their relationship to each other within the whole structure of our knowledge.

Now, I can see through my screen that you’ve glazed over. (sorry Trisho).
What it boils down to is this: we sometimes feel that if the sole basis for believing something is because we’ve been told, we’re on shaky ground. That’s what might be called ‘blind faith’. Our ‘scientific’ world view tells us that this kind of knowing should be subordinate to ‘real’ knowledge – the kind tested by experiment and experience. But the truth is: trusting another person’s story is fundamental to knowing anything – there isn’t a knowledge more ‘real’ than this.
This is a profound insight when it comes to our thinking about the Bible as the story of the human witnesses to the revealing of God. They tell us their testimony, and we trust their testimony. This is not a secondary, weak, kind of knowledge.

It’s fundamental to what it means to be Human and to know.

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