RECOVERING A LOST WORLD-IV
RENEWING OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD
The last three articles have asserted that we modern people have lost something
precious that we need desperately to recover. The marvels of comfort, convenience and
affluence that have come to us through the scientific revolution have exacted a heavy
price. We have become deeply enmeshed in the great modern myth that there is nothing in
the universe except the "stuff" of the cosmos, all of which is regulated by
impersonal natural law.
While Christians will quickly affirm that they believe in something more than a material
universe, their common practice denies that. In public areas of scientific research,
technology, economics, politics, education, and the media, there is no longer, to quote
Harry Blamires, a Christian mind. We have settled for the assumption that in building
airplanes or computers, in educating children, or in making laws, religion is irrelevant.
There is a peculiar irony in the fact that the recent peaceful revolutions in Europe have
been largely nurtured in the seedbed of the church. Mikhail Gorbachev has been quoted in Time
magazine to the effect that "the moral values that religion generated and embodied
for centuries can help in the work of renewal in our country. . ." The Berlin Wall
has come down, but in the enlightened United States the wall of separation between
Christianity and public life is being assiduously reinforced. Democracy has forgotten its
roots in the Judeo-Christian heritage and served as a thing in itself. According to Romans
1:25 that is nothing but idolatry.
The first three articles dealt with our loss of the creation, of our relation to the other
people and of our proper relation to ourselves. All of these losses are reflective of the
deepest loss of all. We have lost an effective relationship to the living God,
particularly in and through the creation. To that topic we turn in this concluding
article.
THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD
"Knowing about" is not equivalent, in Biblical terms, to "knowing".
This is even true of ordinary physical things. Since all of creation is revelatory of God,
true knowledge of anything in it must involve a response to God. We cannot
"know" the law of gravity or the chemical composition of water in a genuine
sense unless our understanding includes some sense of reverential awe toward the God who
upholds them by His word and at least a beginning effort to respond to Him by the way in
which we use that understanding.If this is true of things in creation, it is doubly true
of the Creator. To know Him involves a personal relationship with Him in which we become
aware of our utter dependence on Him and in which we offer to Him a grateful response. To
know God means to be a friend of God. Given who he is and who we are, as finite, sinful
beings, this involves much more than a rational grasp of propositions about God. We may
believe that God is a Trinity and know the attributes of God without knowing God. The
relationship involves repentance and faith. It is a mystical passing quickly beyond the
bounds of the logical analysis of concepts.
To this kind of knowledge, the Bible clearly invites us. In Matthew 11:28-30 Jesus invites
us who are weary and heavy laden to come to Him, take His yoke upon us and learn of Him.
The rest He promises is obviously related to His own meekness and lowliness of heart. Thus
His friendship involves an intimacy with Him in which His characteristics become ours and
produce in us the restfulness, even under intense pressure, which they produced in Him.
Again, John 17:3 identifies the key ingredient in eternal life as the knowledge of the
only true God and of Jesus Christ His Son. Modern books on biology identify life in terms
of certain qualities possessed by inorganic matter (metabolism, growth, reproduction,
etc.). Living matter has these qualities. But life isn’t a mysterious substance
possessed by or dependent alone upon matter. God gives humans life through matter (air,
water, food etc.) but life comes from Him. An unending life consists in a relationship or
friendship with God which the Bible calls knowing. This relationship appears again in John
15:4 when Jesus says, "Make your home in Me, as I make Mine in you" (Jerusalem
Bible). This is manifestly much more than a cognitive matter.
THE CHANNELS OF KNOWLEDGE
This knowledge of God is mediated to us through three channels, activated always by the
Holy Spirit. We know God first and foremost in Jesus Christ. "And the Word became
flesh, and dwelt among us and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the
Father, full of grace and truth." (John 1:14 ASV). The disciples came to know God as
they saw Him in Jesus. In the humanity of Lord Jesus, they came to know what God was like.
And they learned to be His friends, to trust Him.
But we, in the twentieth century, must turn to the Bible. God has kindly given us a record
of His dealings with the human race, and particularly of His coming among us in the Person
of Christ, so that we can know Him. As the Holy Spirit speaks to us in the reading of the
Bible, we come to know what sort of being God is. We put our trust in Christ, and through
Him, in the Father and the Spirit.
There is, however, another way we may know God. It is in the way which Adam and Eve knew
God before they sinned. They knew Him in the creation and in each other. When God told
Adam to name the animals, He was really telling him to read in each one what God was
saying and to bless God for that. Schmemann says that a name " . . . reveals the very
essence of a thing, or rather its essence as God’s gift. To name a thing is to
manifest the meaning and value God gave it, to know it as coming from God and to know its
place and function within the cosmos created by God" (For the Life of the World
p. 15). In the naming process Adam knew God.
After mankind sinned, the creation no longer spoke clearly to people about God. So God
gave us the Bible. Even that wasn’t enough, so He came in the Person of Jesus to show
us Himself. But when we know Jesus and His redemption through the message of the Bible,
then the creation begins to open up in an entirely new way.
There are clear evidences of this in the Bible. In Job 42:5-6 Job responds to God’s
lengthy discourse on the stars, the weather, the animals, the light and the darkness.
Job’s response was "I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine
eye seeth Thee, and I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes." That is a
remarkable outcome from a lesson in natural science! It suggests that creation, properly
considered, can lead to more awareness of God’s strength and wisdom. It can lead to
repentance and faith, and so to salvation. Romans 1:20 says that "the invisible
things of Him are clearly seen, even His everlasting power and godhood, being evidenced by
the things that are made." The godhood of God surely must include His grace. Psalm
19:7 says, "the law of Jehovah is perfect, restoring the soul." The law of the
Lord includes his sovereign ordering of the entire creation, culminating in the two great
love commandments for humans.
It is customary to regard creation as God’s general revelation and Scripture as His
special revelation. If this means that we would not see God in the creation unless He had
given us the Scriptures and then come to us in the Incarnation, it is obviously true.
However, if it is allowed to blind us to God’s self-revelation in the creation, then
it does us a disservice. It plays into the hands of an ancient heresy now widespread but
unrecognized in the church. We need to look briefly at that heresy.
THE PROBLEM OF GNOSTICISM
A heresy known as Gnosticism arose very early in the history of the first century
church. There are clear evidences that Paul wrote some of the things in his early letters
to counter this teaching. Among the early church fathers, Irenaeus, a bishop of Lyons, (ca
130 - ca 200 AD), was outstanding for his dogged efforts to extirpate Gnosticism.
The word Gnosticism comes from the Greek verb "to know". The Gnostics, in the
words of Philip Lee, went beyond "belief as trust to belief as knowledge" (Against
the Protestant Gnostics, p. 282). They postulated a very complicated structure of
secret knowledge whose acquisition they made the key to salvation. Because they considered
the physical creation inherently evil, they imagined a long series of subordinate gods
beneath the true god, and they made creation the work of the lowest of these demiurges.
This doesn’t sound like anything we are familiar with in today’s church, does
it? Yet there are voices among us which insist that Gnosticism is a very modern problem.
Eugene Peterson, in Answering God, the Psalms as Tools for Prayer, spends several
pages describing twentieth century gnosticism, with its disdain for material things in an
effort to be spiritual, and with its proclivity for knowing secret spiritual doctrine in
order to be saved (p. 74 ff.). Virginia Stem Owens insists that "Gnosticism is still
the biggest lie of all" (God Spy: Faith, Perception, and the New Physics, p.
16). Philip James Lee has written a large, scholarly, yet highly readable book entitled, Against
the Protestant Gnostics. The introduction identifies the early Gnostic heresies as:
"promise of salvation by knowledge rather than by faith; stress upon secret or hidden
as against open and available, revelation; disregard and devaluation of nature in favor of
the pure, free, and unencumbered spirit; and concentration upon the radical individuality
of the self" (Foreword). Lee concludes his preface with these words: "As a
Protestant, I believe I have identified the elusive modern Gnostics, and they are
ourselves." Perhaps these modern prophets know something we need to pay attention to.
The particular aspect of modern Gnosticism we will look at here is its rejection of the
creation as something defiled and unspiritual. We modern Christians do not put it that
way, but we have lost the creation as effectively as if we did. The dualism whereby we
separate "spiritual" from "natural" is laden with this loss. Brand and
Yancey, in Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, say, "The created world has lost
its sacredness. Christians have abandoned it, not to paganism, but to physics, geology,
biology and chemistry. We too have cleaved nature from the super-natural" (p. 10).
Like babies drug-addicted from the womb, we have drunk in the Enlightenment view of
created reality as just "stuff" and have lost the holiness of ordinary things.
KNOWING GOD IN THE CREATION
In our effort to be spiritual, we have lost one of the major avenues for relating to
God. God made the worlds the way He did, and He maintains it with the specific purpose
that it should be a means of knowing, communing, with and responding to Him. Eating,
drinking, sleeping and waking, working and resting, even the hidden working of our immune
and excretory systems, are all reminders to us of our dependence upon God, the blessings
of His favor, and the dangers of our fallen world. Jesus chose bread and wine to remind us
of His death and resurrection as the means of our new life. He selected water in baptism
to speak to us of cleansing. These should be pointers for us in the direction of what
Schmemann calls the sacramentality of creation.
Peterson, in discussing the first Psalm, says, "Comprehension of the invisible begins
in the visible. Praying to God begins by looking at a tree . . . We are not launched into
the life of prayer by making ourselves more heavenly, but by immersing ourselves in the
earthly: not by formulating abstractions such as goodness, beauty, or even God, but by
attending to the trees and tree toads, mountains and mosquitoes" (Answering God.
P. 27). Alexander Schmemann puts this idea beautifully and powerfully in For the Life
of the World (especially chapter 1 and Appendix 1). "The world was created as the
‘matter,’ the material of one all-embracing Eucharist and man was created as the
priest of this cosmic sacrament" (p. 15). Again, speaking of man as fallen, he says,
"He does not know that breathing can be communion with God. He does not realize that
he can eat to receive life from God in more than a physical sense. He forgets that the
world, its air or its food, cannot themselves bring life, but only as they are received
and accepted for God’s sake, in God and as bearers of the divine gift of life. By
themselves they can produce only the appearance of life" (p. 17). Tom Howard’s
book, Hallowed Be This House, is a winsome, touching elucidation of the theme that
ordinary things are the holy things. He takes the home as his topic and moves from the
front door right through the house, illustrating in every room the possibility of
friendship with God in its deepest sense. "All the eating and drinking, and the
working and playing, and the discipline and serving and loving that go on here - they are
all holy. For these common routines of ordinary life are not only necessities and
functions: they are also messengers to us from the hallows. Nay, more than messengers,
they are those hallows, set hourly before us in visible, touchable, light-of-day
forms" (p. 14).
All of which is to say that we have work to do. We have to recover the knowledge of God,
friendship with God and communion with Him by recovering the created world as a channel
for that relationship. We have to counter the impact of modern Gnosticism, and demonstrate
to our weary age the real use of Ephesians 4:14, to "Awake, sleeper and arise from
the dead, and Christ will shine on you."
Editor: Al Greene
Alta Vista College
