Christian Epistemology

11/08/09
Christian Epistemology
Hudson UMC

If you look in your bulletins, you will notice that this sermon has the title, “Christian Epistemology.” Now, you might have looked at that and said, “Christian Episte-what?” Epistemology is a word that talks about how we know what we know. And, even if you have never heard the term before, it is still relevant for your life, today. Trying to know how we know and what we know has dominated Western philosophy for hundreds of years. We wanted to be able to base all of our knowledge on absolutely certain truth so we could convince everyone else. Well, we can see that this didn’t happen. Instead of leading to absolute confidence in our knowledge, it actually gave rise to rampant skepticism and the incredible relativism of the postmodern culture.

So, why have a sermon on this topic? Because every religious person needs to come to terms with God and we need to know how we can trust what we know about God, even if this knowledge is built on faith.

I want to start by pointing out what many of you have probably already wrestled with in your own way: the problem of knowing God. How can we know God? After all, we cannot perform scientific experiments on God as we see time and time again. God seems to always be bigger, always just out of reach. The Bible itself tells us that God is infinite and that, it seems, should tell us once and for all, that we can never have any real knowledge of God. If God is infinite, and we are finite, and we cannot break God down into little pieces to study Him, how can we ever really know God?

This is not an abstract problem. If we look at the great non-Christian monotheistic religions, we find that they believe that, in the end, we cannot really know God. If you were to go up to a pious Jew, someone who is firmly rooted in and committed to the historical faith of their ancestors, and ask them, “Who is God?” They would answer like the Old Testament does. “God is the one who delivered us from slavery in Egypt; He parted the Red Sea; He fed the people with Manna from heaven; He led them into the Promised Land; He defeated their enemies.” But if you were to say, “Wonderful. You have told me what God does. Who is God in God’s own life?” The response would be a pious shrug of the shoulders. “I don’t know.” The same is true for a truly pious Muslim. God is radically “other.” If we claim to know God, it is more of human presumption than real knowledge.

If we hoped to bridge the gap from the Old Testament to real knowledge of God by drawing on secular philosophy, we are no better off. The Greek philosophers, on whom we still draw today, believed that God could not really be known, not only because God is so big and we are so small, but because they had what is called a “cosmological dualism,” which means that the were convinced, in their heart of hearts, that what is invisible (like God), cannot really ever interact with what is visible (like us). Not only can we not know God in this view, God cannot know us! If this is who God really is, may He have mercy on us, because any God that cannot know us cannot hear our prayer, cannot answer that prayer, and cannot finally save us.

And yet, as you might imagine, I didn’t bring up this whole topic to be depressing and discourage you. I actually brought it up because, first of all, it is a topic that shows up at this point in the Gospel of John, in the passage of the Good Shepherd, but also because Christian faith is utterly unique in the history of the world. We claim that we actually can have some real knowledge of God, that, though we cannot understand all of God, what we can understand is really real and that we can put our trust in it. Again, this is distinctively a Christian way of knowing because it has its beginning, middle and end in the man Jesus Christ.

Christian faith has always said that the man Jesus Christ is not simply a prophet, not simply a great moral teacher, but, more than anything else, God in flesh. The Bible talks about Him as Immanuel, God with us. For years, I grasped in my mind that I was supposed to believe that Jesus was really God, but it remained nothing more to me than something I could check off of my list of things to believe and go about my merry way. After all, if I affirmed with my lips that Jesus is God, what more is there? Well, I have discovered that it is actually a really big deal. God entering into our humanity in Jesus Christ has absolutely staggering implications, not least of all with how we know God.

When I was doing my preliminary preparation for preaching on this part of John, I noticed that, when Jesus is describing Himself as the Good Shepherd, He says this, “I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father.” Now, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read that, but it finally dawned on me that this is one of the most radical things that Jesus ever says. He is saying that He, as a human, has absolutely real knowledge of God; in fact, He says that His knowledge of the Father is the same as the knowledge that the Father has of Him. Yes, Jesus is fully God, so this might not surprise us all that much, but He is also fully human. If the man Jesus has real knowledge of God, it is knowledge that is rooted in a real human mind that is centered in a real human brain. What He has done is brought authentic knowledge of God into our human limitations.

This is exciting for us as Christians because we believe that we are not cut off from this real human knowledge of God. In the sending of the Holy Spirit upon the church at Pentecost, we became partakers of that real knowledge of God. Paul, in our reading from 1 Corinthians, poses the practical question, “For who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” Paul is asking the philosophical question, “Who really knows God?” His answer is astonishing. “But we have the mind of Christ.” I do not think that Paul is using “mind of Christ” as simply a nice image that makes us feel somehow connected to God. I think that he means it quite literally. Through the grace of God in the power of the Holy Spirit who lives inside of us, our minds are actually joined to the mind of Christ. We not only participate in Christ’s obedience and in Christ’s Sonship of God, but we also participate in Christ’s real knowledge of God. We, because we have “received the gifts of God’s Spirit,” have the “mind of Christ.”

Not only do we have some real knowledge of who God is because we have become partakers of Christ’s real knowledge of God, we also can have some real knowledge of God because, through the Holy Spirit, we see Jesus as the entirety of God living among us. There was a singer in the nineties who asked the question, “What if God was one of us?” The singer was of Jewish background, so we cannot be surprised that she finally leaves the question unanswered. However, for us as Christians, this is not an abstract question, but one that points us to the very core of our faith. God has indeed become one of us. In the man Jesus Christ, we do not have to do with just some guy who said some neat things, but with the fullness of God walking the earth.

What does this mean? It means that God has revealed Himself to us, not simply by telling us, but by showing us. God revealed certain things about Himself in the Old Testament, that He loved His people, that He was all-powerful, and that He hated evil, but those statements were always open to a wide variety of interpretation. After all, what is love? What is power? And what is evil? These words only have meaning if they are pointing to some kind of reality beyond themselves.

Let me give you an example. My Bible is burgundy. If I did not hold it up for you, you would simply have to take my word for it, and try to think about what a burgundy Bible might look like. When the time comes and I actually lift it up for you so you can see it, you realize that, even if it looks a little different than you thought it would, it is indeed a burgundy Bible, but now you have not only been told that it is so, you have experienced it to be so. Even in something so silly as the color of a Bible, the actual color burgundy is far deeper and far richer than simply the word “burgundy” and the word only really means something to you if you have some real experience of the color. In many ways, that is what the point of the Christian life is. You can read the Bible, you can go to church, you can do all kinds of Christian things, and you can learn all about how God loves you and forgives you, and wants to transform you, but it is only when you meet with God and actually begin to participate in those realities: feeling the love, knowing the release from guilt and shame that comes from being forgiven, and experiencing the transformed life that the Scripture bears witness to, that you really understand what the Bible is saying.

All of that is to say that real knowledge is not something that we read into things, but that we read out of them. Once we admit that my Bible is real and that we can actually have real knowledge of it, we are no longer free to say anything we want to about it. We are bound by how things actually are to say what is true. I am not free to say that my Bible is aquamarine or polka dotted. Why? Because we can point to reality and see that it simply isn’t so.

The amazing claim of Christian faith is that this real and knowable point of contact that we need to speak rightly about God has not been withheld from us, but comes to us in the man Jesus of Nazareth, Son of Man and Son of God. As fully man, Jesus is part of our human experience; we can look at Him and know Him in a personal way. As fully God, when we know Him, we begin to know God. If indeed God has become a human being, it gives us a controlling center, a way to know how we must interpret words like love, power and evil.

What we find is that, if we allow Jesus to be our definitive word from God, we find that God is both different than we might have thought, and also more amazing than we ever dreamed. We begin to see that God’s love is not some impersonal force, but something that is so other-centered, that it is willing to lay aside glory, power, and immortality for us. We begin to see that God’s power is not like human power multiplied by a million, but a power to overcome through suffering. And we begin to understand just how much God hates evil and wants to overcome it.

In fact, we can see all these things in the single event of the crucifixion. In that one action, God shows us that, because there is an unbroken bond of unity between the Incarnate Son and God the Father, that God Himself loves us so much that He has died for us. We see that God’s power is the power to enter into our limitations, to become one of us and one with us, so that He might overcome our trials and temptations from the inside. We also see that evil is such a powerful force that nothing short of God becoming a human being and suffering and dying, would wrench us free from the power of sin and death. If Jesus is really God, then we are indeed limited in what we can say about God. We cannot simply make God in our own image. However, it also empowers us to speak what God has revealed to us with boldness. We do not have to think abstractly about God because God has moved decisively and personally in our midst. We can proclaim to the world that God loves us, not just because God has said it, but because God has done it and has not held back His love, even when it drove Him to the cross.

You might be wondering where the place is for faith? With all this talk about real knowledge, where does that leave our faith? Our faith has never been an utterly blind faith, but it is a faith built upon what God has actually done. What did Paul say? “My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom but on the power of God.” We proclaim a faith that, despite the fact that it is utter foolishness to the other religions and philosophies of the world, we believe is based on the actual being of God as revealed to us in Jesus Christ.

When we come down to the brass tacks, we begin to realize that, in the end, everything hinges on this relationship between Jesus and God. Is the man Jesus God in flesh, living among us and showing us definitively and finally who God really is in God’s own life, or is He not? Everyone is free to either say “yes” or “no” to this, but everything hinges on it. If Jesus is finally not God, if the bond between the Incarnate Son and His Father is cut, it means one of two things. First, it can mean that we can finally say nothing about God. We can say that God is loving or merciful or anything like that, but we end up being thrown back to what we decide those terms mean because we cannot ground them in the very reality of God. At that point, nothing we can say about God bears any final authority. The other thing that can happen is that we can say anything we want to about God. It is like if nobody ever saw my Bible, anyone could say anything they wanted to about it, that it is green or that it is striped and five feet long. The statements are not any more true, but, if nobody ever really could encounter the reality of it, who could say that the statements are wrong? We are all gathered together in our ignorance and we can invent any kind of God that makes us feel affirmed. I think that this is exactly the God that some people want, but, if Jesus really is of the same being with God, it is not the God that really is.

What should we take from this? We should realize that Christianity is not just another religion that says the same thing as every other religion. Christian faith proclaims that God has done something that makes the angels laugh and makes the people of the world scoff. The logic of human beings says that God cannot become a man, and yet that is what we believe God has actually done. If it is not true, we should close the Bible, walk out of this building and never come back, because we could surely find a better way to spend our time than this. But if it is true, which, thanks be to God, it is, then God is not what we expected, but is better than we ever dared to imagine. Our God has laid His eternal life down for us, going to the cross, being raised from the dead, and having the man Jesus Christ ascended and seated at the right hand of the Father. God loves us so much that He has done the impossible. First, He has entered into our humanity, rescuing us from sin and death. But He has also taken our humanity back into full Trinitarian fellowship, uniting our humanity to the indescribable essence of God.

God has done all of this. He has acted decisively to transform the world and invites us to participate. Let us leave this building with joy, knowing that we have come face to face with God and join Him in His ministry to all the world. Let us pray.

AMEN