Gifts that Really Reveal

This is the second in a series on themes in the Doctrine of God. You can find the first post here.

In the first post of this series we considered how central knowing God is to the life of the Christian, in an attempt to justify why we should bother studying the doctrine of God.

To know God is a fitting desire of the Christian, after all God is our God, and we are his people, and the first and foundational blessing he promises us is to be with us, and to know us.

So, we can all (hopefully) agree that pursuing the knowledge of God is a good thing. But there remains a significant question:

If God is truly God, then is it even possible to know him? There exists between us an impassable gulf - he is creator and we are creature. How can the creature fit the creator into his understanding? 

Is there a way to truly know God? And what is it?

Mediated knowledge is still true knowledge

We are all somewhat familiar with the word 'media'. We use it to describe TV, books, instagram et al. and the word is fitting for all of those things. But the technical sense of the words encompasses much more. A medium is anything that carries communication of knowledge; the medium in any given situation is the means by which information is passed from one to another.

So, when communicating about an event across the world the medium might be TV news, a newspaper, or social media. The bearing of knowledge is so explicit there that it's easy to see, but less easy to see are the media at play around, let's say, the dinner table.

Around the table, a husband wants to communicate something to his wife, and so he speaks: "Could you pass the salt". Knowledge is communicated (he wants the salt) and the medium being used is speech. There are other media at play around the table as well. For example, a teenage son communicates (rudely I might add) that he is disinterested in all these losers, via the medium of his body language.

How do we find out about things going on around us? Always through media. How do we communicate about our needs and desires? Always via media. And how do we share knowledge of ourselves... always via media. Something created bridges the gap.

Our closest friends only know anything of us through the words we say and write, the things we do and have done, or our body language.

We are created beings, and we are individuals. And for created individuals to communicate knowledge of themselves (or anything else) to each other. There must always be media, something to go-between. There is no escaping it; it’s the inevitable outcome of there being more than one being in existence.

Media are the means of revealing things. However, from ancient days there are those who have seen media as the barrier to true revelation, as something that gets in the way of real understanding.

For some philosophers, mediated knowledge (knowledge communicated via intermediate things; speech, language, history etc.) was not true knowledge. The only way to know anything truly was to know it in an unmediated way. Media for them were at best shadows that hinted at the truth, but in many more ways were gross accretions that got in the way. 

For these philosophers, to truly know something you must have a direct perception of its essence, Soul-to-soul (as it were) with nothing between you.

But though this is how some have imagined reality, it is not the reality God has created. It imports into our imagination assumptions about what is good and true. It assumes a world in which creation is at the bottom of the pile of good things and a world in which having created existence is a prison to be escaped from. It assumes a world in which the limitations of being a creature must be barriers to true knowledge simply because they are created limitations.

In this assumed world there is no space for a God creating things that truly reflect him, there’s no room for a creator God fitting creation to be a good medium for revealing himself; because in this assumed world any good creator would be disinterested in that. Created media would, for this god, be antithetical to himself, and therefore unable to reveal anything positive about him.

The only way you could know this kind of God would ultimately be to be taken up into him. The end for all things would be the loss of individual existence and absorption into the great cosmic unity from which everything emanated in the first place. 

Thankfully, the real God is not like this. The real God is a creator, in a completely different category from us. A category we will never be part of. And the real God is not interested in the great annihilation that comes with knowing him in such an enlightenment as that. 

Our God is the Triune creator God, who creates beings who are not him, and will never be him, and yet he wants them to know him. And for creatures of a creator like that, all knowledge is mediated knowledge, and for creatures of a creator like that, mediated knowledge is no less true knowledge.

And so, for those of us who are not God, media are tools of revelation, not obfuscation. They are not barriers to true knowledge, they are the only means of true knowledge given to us.

How can we know God?

Now so far, this may have felt like philosophical abstraction. Why is this actually important for us as normal people?

Throughout the history of the church there has remained a temptation to imagine that true knowledge of God must be unmediated knowledge of God and therefore to downplay, denigrate, or despise the media which God has created specifically for the purpose of knowing the truth about the world, and especially for knowing the truth about him.

Some Christians have rejected scripture, for example, as a true means of knowing God. They say: ‘the bible is just words, printed on a page. It’s ink on paper that displays human, created, language’. For some the bible is such an obviously created medium of revelation that it seems unworthy for Christ to have chosen it to be his authoritative revelation of himself. They act as if true knowledge of God would not be able to come to us through such a mundane media. 

And yet, God himself does speak to us in the written word, and that knowledge of him is true knowledge.

Some Christians reject the church (particularly her task of preaching the word and administering the sacraments) as the means by which Christ is really making himself known to his people and to the world. After all, it seems such a mundane, human institution and true knowledge can only come through unmediated direct experience.

Or people reject history as a medium of God's communication of himself - events are just a medium, a random collision of cause and effect. How can God have truly revealed himself in history.

In the place of these things many of us seek a kind of direct spiritual experience, a direct spiritual intuition, or (since these things were considered hard to achieve even for such philosophical greats as Plato) a strong spiritual feeling so that we can transcend mediated knowledge of God and reach the great heights of true knowledge of God.

But here’s the reality:

The written words of the bible do not get in the way of true knowledge of God, they reveal. Christ has spoken them to do so authoritatively, for all time.

The church does not get in the way of true knowledge of God, she reveals. God has made her to.

Various events in history do not get in the way of true knowledge of God, they reveal. God has made them to.

The search for unmediated knowledge of anything is a futile one; it simply is not possible in a world like the one God has made. And the search for unmediated knowledge of God is a blasphemous one, for to have it we would have to be God ourselves.

Conclusion

The implication is hopefully fairly clear. If we want to know God we need to be content with the ways he has provided for us to know him:

• Let’s submit to the scripture, knowing that it is not too mundane to reveal God truly and authoritatively. He invented word and language to do just this.

• Let’s not try to abstract God away from his actions in history as if history is an unsuitable canvas for God to work in. He invented it.

• Let’s look through the authoritative lens of scripture at the world he has created, and realise it too tells us true things of God.

And most of all, let us look to Christ; who took on the medium of human flesh to reveal God. Something that has scandalised the sensibilities of pagan philosophers ever since, and yet that God did anyway.