"DEAR GOD, YOU SURE DON'T ACT LIKE YOU'RE ALIVE" - Day 6

Day 6 – can God be known?

To say Thou art God without knowing what the Thou means–of what use is it? God is a name only except we know God.  –GEORGE MACDONALD

Yesterday’s reading urged us to cling to the existence of God even if His nature turns out different than expected. This leads us to another consideration: whether or not anyone can truthfully claim to know what God is like. Some people say that no one can know. If you were to try to discuss with them the nature of God, they would reply with something like this: “Isn't God too Wholly Other, too transcendent to be perceived by humanity? Doesn’t all the talk about the character of God amount to nothing more than our subjective opinions?” If the answer is “yes,” it would be best for us to stop now before we waste any more of our precious time. Why bother to explore the nature of God if what we are exploring cannot be known? If God is beyond our comprehension, why attempt to comprehend? For practical reasons, therefore, we must honestly look at this question before we take another step up the slope of God’s nature.

The saying goes that God created man in His image, then we created Him in ours, and one look across the landscape of history would seem to lend credence to the second half of that statement. Without much thought, I can quickly call forth the following list of people who believe in God:

            -pantheists (“God is Everything”)

            -polytheists (“God is Many”)

            -monotheists (“God is One”)

            -Trinitarians (“God is Three in One”)

            -Unitarians (“God is Father Alone”)

Within several of these, subsets exist, such as the division of monotheism into three main world religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—so different in perspective that extremists of each would wage war against the other. Within my own Christianity there is the great division, Catholic and Protestant, and within the latter a growing list of denominations that proclaim the nature of God in ways dissimilar to the others. Even an honest survey of one’s own life would yield the admission that the perception of God has varied from childhood to now.

Everywhere, then, that we look, God’s nature seems to be the subject of a merry-go-round of opinion that leaves those on it (theists) and those looking from the outside (atheists and agnostics) motion-sick.

The remedy lies in finding answers to three questions that are as simple as they are important:

     • Can we really claim to know who God is and what He is like?

     • If so, what things can we ascertain about Him?

     • Furthermore, if our view of His character differs from that of

          others, can we proclaim ours correct and theirs not? 

These are appropriate questions asked an appropriate time. Tomorrow, I will begin to give you my answers to them.

Daily Quotation

Quoted in C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2001), 17.