Faith Matters 35: For The Gardner News, March 24, 2007
How Do We Know God?
In our multicultural, multi-faith world, there are many competing understandings of who God is and how God is involved in our lives. But what is our understanding of God based on? One theologian, reflecting on the writings of John Wesley, has described our knowledge and understanding of God as like a quadrilateral with four sides, or the legs of a four-legged table.
Our primary knowledge of God comes from our personal experience of the world we live in. Through our senses and our emotions we experience and respond to the physical world, including the transcendent mystery of life and creation. Whether this comes in a breath-taking view of the mountains at daybreak, the richness of the night sky, or a more personal experience of God’s presence, this first-hand knowledge of God shapes our understanding of who God is and how God interacts with the world. The second way of knowing is through our ability to reason. We make sense of the world through our capacity to name, think, hypothesize, and conceptualize what we see and feel. Based on our experience, we make assumptions about the world and how it works, about cause and effect, and about ultimate reality, that which some of us name as God. These two primary ways of knowing are the basis of what is sometimes referred to as natural religion, a way of understanding the world that is not based on any particular religious orientation or assumptions.
But for those of us within many of the world’s religious traditions, we also understand God through God’s self-revelation. Although the ultimate mystery of God is beyond human understanding, we believe that God chooses to reveal aspects of who “he” is at specific times and places. For Christians, we understand that God is revealed in a very special way in the words of our scripture. The Bible is a record of God’s revelation across the centuries to the people of Israel and to their spiritual descendants. Often it includes their response to God’s revelation as well. For Christians, the culmination of God’s self-revelation is the life, ministry, teachings, healings, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God’s Christ or Messiah. For us, to know Jesus is to know God.
The fourth leg of the table, or fourth side of the quadrilateral of our understanding of God, is tradition. Not only do we have our personal experience and understanding of God, but we are also heirs to a tradition that goes back thousands of years. Faithful men and women shared their experience and understanding of God, and this has informed and shaped our own down through the centuries. Our understanding of Jesus Christ is shaped and informed by the creeds of the Church, the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed, for example, which summarize belief of our ancestors in faith at a particular point in time. Individual denominations and even local churches also have traditions that shape the understanding and belief of their members. Some traditions hold that God’s self-revelation ended with the last chapter of the Bible. Others believe that God is still speaking, still being revealed in powerful ways in the church and in the lives of faithful men and women.
All of these ways of knowing God are, in fact, interrelated, impossible to separate one from another. For example, our experience of God is shaped by our understanding of God. We talk about and describe our personal experiences using the narrative and language of our particular faith tradition; we read scripture and understand Jesus in the larger context of our understanding of God’s revelation to Israel and using our ability to reason and make sense of the world. And our tradition colors how we read scripture. Christians and Jews share much of the Bible, and yet, through the lens of our respective faith traditions, we often interpret the same scripture differently!
Behind all of these ways of knowing God is our deep desire to understand the ultimate mystery and reality of life itself and to understand our relationship to this ultimate reality. And each of these ways of knowing is part of us, some of it hard-wired into us, some of us shaped by our shared humanity, all of it in one sense or another God given, the gift of our creator. It makes me stop and think how much our Creator must have wanted us to turn our attention to the Holy and live our lives in relationship to God!