Systematic Theology for members of Consistory IV

Who is God? How can we know Him?

a) Two little boys were playing ball in the street. When the ball went high up into the air, one of the small boys called out: "Look out, God, here it comes!"

b) A boy of six years of age was very talkative during meals so one morning at breakfast his mother said that she was not going to answer any of his questions before he had finished his meal. The boy went on talking and asking questions, but received no reply. Finally he said: "This morning you are just like God. You can talk to Him, but He never gives you an answer."

These two examples show how children think of God, the second one shows especially that even small children have already understood that although you can address God as if He were a human being that you cannot expect Him to answer you as humans do. As a rule we can safely assume that children brought up in Christian homes think of God as a venerable Old Man, with a long white beard, sitting in a golden chair. He is mostly kind and friendly, willing to listen to you and to grant what you ask Him (sometimes!). But when you have done something that you know you should not have (and you know that He knows that too!) stern, so that you have to cast down your eyes before Him. After children have grown up and later on think back of their "childish" ideas about God, or in their turn listen to children talking that way about God, they smile as those do who are convinced that they have the superior knowledge, also as those who understand that a child cannot have that "superior" knowledge yet. But -the question is: Are the children wrong or are we?

The point is that our whole mental climate, our way of thinking is determined by hidden presuppositions from which we start ' without knowing it. This way of thinking is made up of two elements: the Israelitic-Christian tradition and the Greek-Roman one. In the western world we are at present in the situation that the former has less and less influence upon the way people think and act and the latter more and more. This Greek heritage which has entered our very "flesh and blood" - during all the ages of Christendom - has exerted a profound influence upon our thinking of God. Of late that influence has demonstrated itself stronger than ever before. That means for us Christians that we have to concentrate harder and harder upon the endeavour to understand the Biblical message as it presents itself, in order to understand Who the living God is and how He is. If we take it for granted that we know that already, we ourselves may be the ones who obstruct the way to a real knowledge of the living God.

The God of the philosophers

When the Gospel was preached during the first centuries to those who were pagans, many became Christians. But before they became Christians they had already their definite ideas about God and "His divine nature". A standard example is Origines, a learned man, a Christian, who was in his thinking about God strongly influenced by Greek ideas. His "standard" for what is "divine" is as follows:

1. That God is God consists in the fact that He has the divine nature.

2. Not only God possesses this nature, but man, in so far as he is more than body, shares one way or another - in this nature.

3. This divine nature is spiritual, intellectual, in sharpest contrast to that which is only bodily, material, belonging to this world.

But now, especially in the O.T., you can find many places where God is represented as having the same organs as humans. We hear about His eyes, His ears, His powerful hand, His nose. Human feelings are ascribed to Him: He is moved with compassion, He is angry, He is sorry.

Well, those Greek thinking theologians were pious Christians, fundamentalists, accepting the entire Bible as the Word of God "from cover to cover" but to ask them, with their deep-seated Greek ideas about God, to take those human features of God seriously, was just too much! They repeated (what they had learned from a Jew who was deeply influenced by Greek thinking, Philo of Alexandria): "Look here, it goes without saying that this cannot be meant literally. God, as a pure spiritual Being has no body, consequently it is only "by way of speaking" that you can mention His hands, His feet, His nose. Moreover, emotions belong to the lower part of our human nature; a purely intellectual Being as God is, cannot have feelings. Therefore actually it cannot be truthfully said about Him that He is angry, that He is compassionate, let alone that He can be sorry about something He has done or promised: God is unchangeable in Himself and He does not Change His mind either. Therefore the fact that the Bible speaks about God as if He were a man was called "anthropomorphism" (meaning that He had the form of a human being) and it goes without saying that all the men coming from the Greek tradition were fiercely against ascribing human characteristics to God. They were violently anti-anthropomorphist.

And here you have a classical illustration of what we discussed last time namely: that people first form an idea of How God is (or better: as He should be!) and then approach the Bible. If their ideas about God are contradicted by what the Bible says, then they conclude - with all their formal respect for the Scriptures as the Word of God - that here the Bible is wrong, that the Bible cannot possibly mean what it says about God! As if there existed any yardstick apart from God's Word by which to judge the reliability of God's Word; without being aware of it, they indeed assumed that they had that yardstick in their Greek conception of what "divine nature" must be like! Now it may surprise you that even in our Reformed tradition this Greek way of thinking about God has occupied quite a place. You can trace it in the works of Calvin and Bavinck, but it is far stronger in the books and articles written by Abraham Kuyper and strongest of all in the books written by K. Schilder.

Knowledge of God

What consequences has this way of thinking for the question: How can a human-being know God? The answer is here that God adapts Himself to the human mind. A clear distinction is made between "How God is in Himself" and "How He reveals Himself to human beings". It is said: that is why He speaks about Himself in a "human way" in the Scriptures but the theologian (here that is: the man trained in Greek philosophical thinking) knows that actually He is different from the way the Scriptures speak about Him. He must be different from the way the Scriptures talk about Him, He cannot resemble man, because that is impossible (indeed, it is starting from the Greek idea about God!). Who then is the man who knows God, or anyway knows Him best? Well, it is the intelligent man who discovers God, who speaks about Him as if He were an Object that could be "studied". After all it is intellect that counts here and sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker the melody is heard that after all, our mind is related to God. It goes without slaying that the men just mentioned (that applies to the Greek fathers of the Church and the R.C. thinkers as well) were also taught by the Scriptures, but the fact that this Greek way of thinking determined to such an extent ,their thinking about God is serious and bad enough.

The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob

But the simple fact remains that the Bible does not know anything of the problems, with which the Greek thinkers and so many theologians after them have wrestled. The first sentence of Dr. Kuitert's book(*) reads: "The fact cannot be denied that the writers of the Scriptures do not know of any conception of God in which human features are absent." "The God of Whom the Scriptures speak and Who is confessed in the Christian Church as 'our God' has human features." And that God can be known by the "intelligent man' because of the fact that he is a rational being is most strongly denied by the Scriptures. God can only be known in faith; He has revealed Himself in His Words, in His deeds, as the One He is. There are not two Gods, namely the One we know according to our poor lights Who is different from God as the One He really is! No, not at all. As God reveals Himself in His Words, in His deeds, so He is! For Israel (and consequent us Christians as well) God is the God of the Covenant; He proves that He is God by means of what He does. The Bible does not offer any excuse for the circumstance that it speaks frankly about the fact that God resembles man, also not for the circumstance that emotions are ascribed to Him. Greek thinking has nothing to do with interpreting the Scriptures- the Scriptures are our one and only yardstick here. God and His deeds have to be proclaimed in accordance with the way the Scriptures testify about Him.

The men who wrote the Bible books did not know anything about a "pure Being of God" (as He is in Himself!) that could be separated from His Words and actions as Israel's Partner in the Covenant. "The difference between God and the idols is not that God does not have ears and eyes and the idols have. God and the idols nave eyes and ears, but the difference is: the idols do not hear with their ears, they cannot see with their eyes, but Israel's God can see, can hear. Therefore HE is the living God and they are "nothings" According to Scripture neither God nor man are respectively characterized by their "divine" and "human" natures but by their divine and human deeds! We can only learn Who God is and How He is by giving attention to what He says and by observing what He does! People, influenced by the Greek way of thinking tell us that in the Bible we have only "a human way of speaking -about God". Yes, in what way can a human being speak about anything but in a human way?

God has for Israel, strictly speaking (and NOT "by way of speaking"t) the form of a man, because man has the form of God. Man was created after God's image and likeness. According to the Scriptures what man is, is determined by the way he acts in his relationship to God, to his fellowman and the world. The fact is: a man can resemble God by acting as God acts. The righteous one in Israel is the man who acts in accordance with the Covenant, imitating God, the Partner of the Covenant, Who acts righteously and faithfully. Not difference in natures separate God and man but sin! Christ, the Son of God came to take away sin, to be the perfect, that is sinless, human partner in the Covenant-relationship between God and man. In Christ God Himself has taken upon Himself to fulfill also the human partnership of the Covenant, granting forgiveness and grace to all who accept Jesus Christ, granting them His Spirit Who seals the Covenant of God with man in Jesus Christ. The knowledge of God which the writers of the Scriptures convey to us is knowledge of communion: entirely practical. Knowledge of God is: knowledge of the holy will of Israel's Partner in the Covenant: His will to work our salvation the deeds, He has done to make this possible, and, at the same time: what He demands from us. Therefore knowledge of God cannot be separated from obedience or from expectation; it includes love as well as faith.

Therefore the peoples of the world have to learn the language of Israel and also the presuppositions of that language. All of us are steeped in the Western modes of thought which is the influence of Greek thinking in our culture. This does not help us to understand the Scriptures better, as nowadays is naively and arrogantly proclaimed, on the contrary, it hinders us tremendously. We have to undergo - again and again a renewal of our thinking; w e have to learn to think in the Biblical way, especially if we belong to those ordained to the service of the Word -and. the Sacraments.

After all: those children, who think of God as a venerable Old Man in a golden chair, were not so wrong as many adults suppose them to be; they know God far better than those who speak about Him as "pure Being", "the Ground of Being", and what have you. We cannot know God as an Object, we can only know Him the way we know our parents, our husband or wife, the way we know our children, that is: standing in a living relationship of love to Him.

Knowledge of God is acquired by the communion with Him, by His Word and His Spirit. A man, who was often invited by groups to read to them the 23rd Psalm because of his beautiful style of reading, once entered a small Church, where an old minister with a faltering voice was reading that same Psalm. In beauty of presentation it was a far cry from the pleasure the audience received when the famous man read this psalm. But when the man left the Church, he looked at his friend and said: "I know the Psalm; he knows the Shepherd!" Aye, that's the only thing that counts: that we, by studying the Scriptures in humble obedience may come to know the will of Him about Whom the Scriptures testify. And to see to it that it is indeed the Message of the Scriptures that is proclaimed, that is the high and great task of the right theology.

Footnote

Material for this piece was taken (sometimes literally) from Dr. D. M. Kuitert's excellent dissertation "De mensvormigheid Gods" (God's anthropomorphic character). There is a German translation available, but unfortunately not yet an English one. I am sorry but I cannot honestly urge members of Consistories to buy this book; too much knowledge of theology is required to make its reading fruitful for those who are not theologically trained. But no minister who still can read Dutch should be without it. It is a complete (corrective!) refresher course in the history of the doctrine of God, the most important item in Dogmatics. That means: the most important item in all the world, anytime, anywhere.