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Home > Resources > What Shall We Choose? Knowing God, Part Two: The Knowing of Faith by Thom Smith
It is the claim of the Christian Faith that God has revealed himself and can be known. But, because this is a claim of the Faith, it is also a faith claim. This is often misunderstood by those who make the claim and derided by those who regard the claim as arrogant or vacuous. The claim to know God is limited by certain realities that are inescapable. I am claiming to know something, or, rather Someone who is not subject to objective observation and scrutiny. The Christian God is not an Object. He will not permit himself to be objectified. This is the wild, untamed and uncontrollable God of the Bible. I am claiming to know Someone who is invisible. I cannot point to him in the same way that I can point to Mount Everest or the Wren Church in Fulton, Missouri. I am claiming to know Someone who is unknowable apart from his self-revelation. I am claiming to know Someone who is incomprehensible. Thus, while I may know him to the extent that he reveals himself, I can never know him exhaustively. Too, because of my own ignorance, weakness, and stupidity, my knowledge is always personally flawed. Because of each of these things and their collective effect, my knowledge of God is a faith claim. I believe that God is. I believe he is who he has revealed himself to be. I believe that this revelation compels a response of trust, love, and obedience. Christian faith is thus a faith created and sustained by God's own revelation of himself in Jesus Christ and witnessed to in the biblical narrative. It is created by God, the Holy Spirit, and sustained by him. It is rooted in the life and work of Jesus. It is witnessed to in the narrative of Scripture, the story of Israel culminating in the story of Jesus of Nazareth. When the focal point of this faith is the life of Jesus of Nazareth and the self-disclosure of God in that life, I find myself also disclosed, uncovered. I am a human being, aware of weakness, vulnerability, moral failure, and mortality (I am dying). I am a human being, desiring goodness, justice, beauty, and hope. Jesus of Nazareth claims to hold forth the promise of God to me. He promises enablement, protection, forgiveness, and hope in death. He promises an actual and achievable (though imperfect) goodness, justice, beauty, and hope. When I come to know him in faith I begin to see him as the embodiment of these things and I begin to see them-slowly and imperfectly-embodied in my own experience. This is a slow process: "the life is short and the art is long." It is marred by imperfection: There are times when my faith fails completely. All of this moves towards a confluence of love. To be known by God is (in biblical terms) to be loved by God. And, in the same terms, to know God is to love God. And to love God is to love what he loves. It is to love my neighbor as myself. It is to love justice, the fair and right dealings of men and women toward one another, especially the oppressed and needy. It is to love beauty, the physical beauty of the creation. It is to love goodness, moral excellence. And it means that I love all of these things when I see them in others, whether they are believers or not. This is what faith knows. This is what Christians claim when they claim to know God. |
