Faith and Its Relationship to Knowledge

As human beings, we're suspended between two extremes: having no knowledge of God and having complete knowledge. We’re positioned between knowing everything and knowing nothing. Our knowledge remains partial.

If we had no knowledge of God, there would be nothing in which, and no one in whom, to place our faith. We might have a vague sense of something or someone greater than ourselves, an intuitive awareness of a higher purpose and power. But we would know no more about it. According to some traditions within Christianity, this intuitive awareness would be a gift from God, a divinely inspired inkling. But unless God granted us additional insight, faith would remain as vague and formless as our intuition.

Suppose, on the contrary, we knew everything about God and the universe, and like God knew what would occur in the future. Faith implies expectation, and if all expectation became meaningless because we knew what was going to happen, faith would also become meaningless. There would be no uncertainty and therefore no reason to have faith in anyone or anything else. Relying on God in the face of uncertainty is fundamentally what it means to have faith. Total knowledge would therefore work against the very thing God desires from us: love.

God wants us freely to respond to the love God has demonstrated by giving us life and beyond that by send us an ambassador, a savior. If we grasped the full extent of God’s energy and power, it would be like flying too close to the sun and we’d be terrified. You cannot love what terrifies you, which is why leaders of organizations who want to be loved and feared at the same time end up only feared. Loving a terrorizing God would be as paradoxical as trying to be spontaneous at precisely four o'clock this afternoon. We therefore perceive God only in the mist, or to change metaphors, through a gossamer veil.

It is reasonable to ask why anyone would believe God loves us, in view of the terrible things that happen to people. Although we will never know in this life why these things happen, the Christian hope is that someday we will understand, that from the vantage point of eternity life will turn out to have made sense. Christians believe God loves us because of what God self-disclosed through the actions, teachings, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus.

Christians make the astonishing claim that because of the alignment of Jesus with the Father, he agreed to submit to a hideous and painful death on a Roman cross. He had committed no crime, yet experienced a hideous execution. Allowing this to happen to God’s own son was God's supreme message of love to us. Jesus went to the cross to maintain an alignment to which we are also called.

By his life and death, Jesus provided a window through which we can see into the mind God, and apart from Christ this would largely remain a mystery. Every bit of knowledge we develop about God gives us a more solid foundation for faith and a deeper conviction of God's goodness.

There are two basic kinds of knowledge, physical and spiritual. Studying science at the best university on the planet might provide you with a great deal of physical knowledge, but it would not necessarily give you spiritual knowledge. The message of a self-sacrificing savior might remain irrelevant or seem ludicrous. Knowledge about God, however, is on a different plane than knowledge about the physical world.

We come to know God’s mind by encountering it as it indwells the minds of other people, whether in what they say and do, or in the case of the biblical authors, what they and Jesus said, did, and thought long ago. It is by God’s Spirit operating on the minds of these others that we are called to respond to and place our faith in God. When the Holy Spirit operates on our minds to bring us to a knowledge of God, our perspectives change, and we come into the only kind of knowledge that ultimately matters.