Growing up in the church, I was aware of the cerebral nature of my particular faith tradition from an early age. Little was talked about in terms of an actual faith experience. Our creeds and confessions and formalized answers seemed to protect us from anything that could be termed an actual encounter with the divine.
Today it seems that two (among many) of the various struggles that churches across the denominational spectrum have are: 1) how to reach young people; and 2) how to maintain a particular theological and denominational identity in a world that is increasingly pluralistic and post-denominational, and decreasingly concerned about theological particularities.
An important place to begin is to ask: "What does it mean to 'know' God?" Is it primarily being aware of the historical and theological distinctions of a particular tradition, or is it being aware of God himself in everyday life? For me, once I was able to open my mind to other ways of seeing and experiencing God, it seems I really began to know God. Once I realized that faith was something that you live, not something you define, it started to become my own. And in that moment, it really didn't matter how you defined it, or what they said about such encounters back in the late Middle Ages in Germany, or during church councils in the Byzantine era. This was real. This was now.
It seems to me that this kind of encounter was what captured the hearts and minds of the early disciples, and the early Christians in Jerusalem, Galilee and various parts of the Roman Empire. Knowing God had nothing to do with answering a bunch of questions about God. It had to do with a transformative encounter. The ongoing impact and relationship with the man from Galilee was what fueled the movement, not a precise definition of the second person of the Trinity.
Knowing for the early believers (in their Hebraic context) meant personal knowledge. It meant they were in a relationship rooted in an ongoing transformational encounter. It could be summed up in one word: love. That is how 1 John 4:8 can say, "Whoever does not love does not know God." This kind of knowledge is not the same as other kinds of knowing. A physicist can be a terrible neighbor and spouse, yet be a brilliant physicist with a terrific knowledge of science. His moral life and actions do not impact this knowledge. Yet knowledge of God is always transformational: "Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God." A person with this kind of knowledge is not concerned primarily with defining God, but with living a life that God is defining.
And so I wonder if our continued emphasis on doctrine, confessional statements and creeds might ironically be the very thing that protects us from encountering God in the first place. Much like an oft-repeated prayer can keep us from turning on our brains to have an actual conversation with God himself, so might our theological presumptions keep us from having to "know" God in the biblical sense. Knowledge of God is always partial. One theologian notes that it is much like an infant who knows and loves her mother, yet has no way to articulate that knowing, other than to be grasped and known by the mother. He rightly concludes, "It is ridiculous to imply that a baby can really only love her mother if she understands her."
It is God who knows us, and in being known, we know (in part). There is a world of difference between our understanding of God, and God as he really is. And it is precisely in our continued pride over theological correctness that we find ourselves in opposition to other Christians (not to mention other religious traditions) and disconnecting from young people who couldn't care less about theological precision but care an awful lot about questions of identity and purpose, and about the economic, political and social realities of their world. They want to know what faith has to do with the world they're actually living in.
I am not encouraging ignorance of, nor rejection of, our theological traditions. Rather, I am advocating moving beyond our preoccupation with theological knowledge and correctness, so that we might become more open to being engaged by the source of all of our speculation. And as he engages us, may we increasingly become the articulation of who he is to the world around us. That is a definition that matters to all of us.
Bryan Berghoef is pastor of The Watershed Church and facilitator of a weekly Pub Theology group. For past Perspective columns, written by area religious leaders, log on to record-eagle.com/perspectives.
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