Friday, October 07, 2005
Knowing God
But I think there is an important thing to notice here - whereas many philsophers want to distinguish between essence and existence or essence and accidence, Calvin is saying that we only know God's essence through His existence or accidence.Several really important points/comments/questions come out of this I think
A simpler way of saying this is to say that philosophers want to distinguish between what a thing is and what a thing does. Calvin is saying that you can only know who God is by studying what He does.
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Certainly we can see much further into God's essence, who He really is, through our study of the Scriptures. But Calvin's caution remains. Though God reveals more of who He is in the Scriptures, He does not reveal all of who He is. So, we must never attempt to go beyond the Scriptures in trying to figure out who God is.
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Still, this reminds us that, in our zeal to know God, there is a point of proper reticence, where we must stop seeking where God has stopped revealing, all the while realizing that what He has revealed is more than enough to satisfy all our seeking.
- We worship a being, not a set of ideas.
- "Why" questions about God are often pointless -- they place our understanding ahead of His person -- that's idolatry
- Despite our desire for it to be otherwise -- we are creature, not creator. Even if God's revelation were complete and utter, we could not take it all in.
- Statements like "God is Love" taken out of context are meaningless
The fact of the matter is, we can never truly know God. Even His fullest revelation - Christ Himself - is shrouded in history. God must, I believe want it this way. Else, He would have come in this age when we could record and replay each nuance of Christ, His every breath and syllable. For whatever reason, God demands of us faith -- full revelation would take away the need for faith.
But why is faith so hard? That is simple, because faith requires the sacrifice of control. Think about it, if God were fully revealed, granting control to Him would not be significant, for we would know with certainty that He was safe. We would in fact actually retain control on some level. That's not good enough -- we must give all control to God. He is, after all, Lord and Creator.
