How Do We Know What We Know About God?

Almost every day, I exchange emails about God with a longtime friend of mine. Over the years, he has become reformed in his theology and literal in his reading of scripture. I am neither, and that makes for some spirited emails.

His last email reaffirmed his belief in sola scriptura (“scripture alone”) as the first and best source of knowledge about God. That led me to start wondering just what I believe. I see the Bible as too full of contradictions, counterpoints, and cross-currents for all of it to be entirely, literally from the finger of God. And yet I do think it contains enough sacred wisdom to be taken seriously and thoughtfully.

Then it hit me: maybe the best way to know about God is to know God.

Isn’t this true of our human relationships? We can hear about someone from her friends and professional colleagues. We can Google her to learn about her background. We can read what others have written about her. But there is no better way to know the person than to build a relationship with her.

That explains why prayer, especially silent or contemplative prayer, is so valuable to the life of faith: it puts us in touch with the Source of all things. We open ourselves to God. God opens himself to us. When we enter that space of prayer deeply, day by day, year by year, we become intimately acquainted with the God of all things.

It is a relationship.

And out of that relationship, we can begin to approach faith’s other “ways of knowing”: scriptures, the writing of sages and theologians, the wisdom inherent in tradition, and our own experience. We see everything through the lens of our deep connection with God.

Here’s an example. The book of Exodus tells a story (4:24-26) in which God meets Moses and tries to kill him. My literalist friend, taking this story as a historical account, seeks to figure out why God would, with no apparent motive, kill the servant he sent to liberate Israel the chapter before. Because the story mentions circumcision as the palliative that averts God’s anger, my friend ties it into the Jewish law requiring circumcision for the men of Israel.

Meanwhile, I read this story and see nothing that resembles the God I’ve come to know. I turn the story every which way, seeking some metaphor or symbolic meaning that I can draw from the text. I get nothing, so I assume the story was either an erroneous insertion or perhaps a fragment of a larger story whose context might make sense of it.

Notice something here. Both of us wrestled with the text. Both of us tried to find meaning in the story. I do think it’s important to take these stories seriously, because otherwise we might miss the great wisdom they hold. In addition, our reading of scripture, in its turn, can shape the understanding of God that comes from our personal connection—just as our friends’ insights into someone can help us see something in her that we might not have seen otherwise.

But by starting with the relationship and incorporating the rest, we give ourselves a more flexible way to understand our faith tradition and apply it creatively to a time and a culture that are so very different from the land of Canaan millennia ago. This “relationship epistemology” may, in the long run, make our faith more relevant to confront the world’s most pressing problems and more accessible to the seekers of our own age.

P.S. One other little twist about the developing a deep connection with God: it can turn your life upside down. We’ll dig into that in another post.