What can we (you, I, or anyone) say about God? Plenty of us claim to know what God is like, how God is to behave, and what we must do to please God. Yet what is the source of this insider information? Mostly holy books, mystical visions, dreams, despots, religious figures, hallucinations, near death experiences, unique existential encounters, a still, small voice, a burning in the bosom, and many other non-replicable spiritual technologies. This is not to say that these modes of revelation are not within the realm of possibility to be used as means to the knowledge of the divine, the point is that they seem to be modes of revelation that have no universal content, instead only particularized content. For instance, The God of Israel is localized within the Ancient Near East’s religious culture so that this God is very much and in many ways like the gods of that time and culture. God is contextualized. And before I go too far in making hasty generalizations, I will simply say that God seems to reflect more of the culture in which God is talked about than God seems to reflect an independent mode of infinite reality who is completely beyond our understanding.
It is my opinion, at the end of the day we (you, I, or anyone else) can say nothing about God with any means of certainty. How can we say something about that which we know nothing, save what other people, myself included, think? Many consider God to be plural in expression. Many consider God to be singular in essence. To some God is near, to others God is far. God to some can be known and God to others is unknown and hidden. God is within and God is without. The dichotomies and contradistinctions can go down a seemingly unending chute of linguistic appropriation. As long as there are words and shades of meaning we can continue down the process of shaping God’s identity in ways specific to our context.
So what then is the point in talking about God? That’s just it, God to me and God to you are in need of community and in this way we come more to agree than disagree.
Who then is the God of my understanding?
The best place for me to start is by rehearsing what I have been taught about God.
I am the fruit of the Christian tree of faith. More specifically, I am the fruit of the North American, late twentieth century, early twenty-first century, white-male, middle-class Christian tree of faith. Particularly, I was born into a family where we identified with the branch of Protestantism called separatist independent Baptist fundamentalism (a highly conservative strain).
This form of Protestant Christianity taught very clearly and unassumingly that God could be known through taking the Bible at face-value, or as often said, taking the Bible “literally.” But of course, before you can take the Bible literally, you have to have a Bible. For us as Protestants generally speaking, the Bible itself was limited to the canon of sixty-six books in the Old and New Testaments. Having the deposit of faith in the Protestant canon I was given firm conviction that all I had to do was “take up and read.” This act of piety (or sacramentalism?) was the guarantor of my growth in faith and the knowledge of God and my ultimate salvation. Our firm creed was that God mediated to us the true grace of who he was in the writings of the Bible.
Of course, this should naturally raise the questions, “Who wrote this Bible? And how did they come to have secure knowledge of the Almighty?” This however, was not a question we were asking (or were taught to ask) because the ultimate dogmatism of our community was that though humans were involved to some degree God himself wrote the Bible, not humans. But all along I had missed the reality that my Americanized Jewish-Christian faith was particularly and primarily shaped by Jewish authors, all men (as far as can be known and assumed). The result of this was that it took years for me to realize that the one true God of ancient Israel and Jesus of Nazareth and the Jewish-Christian Church was believed to have revealed himself directly through the male-dominated, ethnically Jewish writers of an ancient near eastern religious tradition.
For us we believed (or were taught to believe) that these Jewish men, in one way of looking at it, were mere puppets of flesh while God’s Spirit commandeered control of their body and mind when they recorded their message. Or they simply codified what God audibly spoke to them as in the case of the Decalogue. Those ancient writings were, in our mind, instantaneously transformed into God-breathed, fully authoritative, without error, Holy Scripture.
Thus, I learned that knowledge of God could be ascertained through the devout practice and discipline of studying the Bible. For my tradition, this meant the King James Version. However, as my exposure developed, it was the original language of the scriptures that were the primary way to access God. Because the Bible was the source of revelation, the text was the bearer of all things divine. The clearest picture of God then could be found by studying Bible in the language that was used to talk about God (or rather that God used to talk about himself). In my case, I learned Hebrew and Greek (though no Aramaic). These languages, I believed, would unlock the insights and nuances held from the casual reader of colloquial translations.
Thus, I come from a stock who preached that the way to know God was through knowing the Bible, specifically the original languages of the Bible. The logic was that because the Bible was God’s Word, the way to know the Truth was linked in direct proportion to knowledge of what it said. And since God was the main character of the Bible, I would know God, if I knew the Bible.
Critics of this way of understanding the Bible point out very quickly that we (you, I, or anyone) can't actually take the Bible literally. We pick. We chose.
So, my genealogy of faith claimed that in order to talk about God with any sense of surety you needed to consult the text first. The roots of this belief are Martin Luther’s sola scritpura which was in part a reaction against the abuses of the Roman Catholic system that elevated Tradition to an equal level.
God was learned through a series of theological statements about God’s characteristics, the ones God shares in common with us and the ones God does not share in common as ascertained through various chosen texts. For example, we are told that God is good. We can understand this because we have some knowledge of what it means to be good. Good in the moral sense and good in the
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