Religious (Spiritual) Knowledge As Personal

Philosophers draw a distinction between knowing how and knowing that.

You can know that to swim you must propel your body in a certain way in relation to the water, and you may even have studied in detail the movements of swimmers. But this would get you no closer to learning how to swim. Another example is that you may understand that driving a car successfully requires knowing how to operate the accelerator, brake, and steering wheel in a coordinated fashion. But, as with swimming, such knowledge would not enable you safely to operate a car.

It is also possible to distinguish between knowing that and knowing who. You may have an advanced degree in theology and be able to rattle off all sorts of things about God, but this would not mean that you knew God as a living force or presence in your life.

Christian faith is by nature interpersonal, a relationship between two persons, one of whom is subject to the other. To call God a person may be the closest we can come to grasping God’s nature. A personal God has intentions, which implies having some sort of consciousness. But again, even a concept like consciousness may be only a metaphor.

The nature of the human mind is that we seem to be able to be conscious of one, or at most a several things at the same time. In a crowded room, for example, we may know that many other people also occupy it, but it is debatable whether we can be conscious of all of them at the same time, or even of more than one. It may be that we take a series of lightning-fast mental snapshots, first of this person or group and then another, which creates the illusion that we are simultaneously aware of everyone in the room. God, Christians believe, is simultaneously aware of everything and everyone, which is why God can heat the prayers of many people. It also suggests why characterizing God as having a consciousness akin to ours is probably inadequate.

Some philosophers and theologians have suggested that God is by nature unknowable. This, however, does not seem entirely to square with the Christian belief that Jesus revealed the nature of God in a more complete way than ever before. Although conceiving of God as unknowable reminds us not to assume we know more than we do, we the Gospels indicate that when Jesus prayed, he was conversing with a being he related to as his father. Christians do the same thing in what we know as the the Lord’s Prayer.

There is a necessary subjectivity to Christian faith. It involves our consciousness (mind) relating to the one Great Conscious Mind. Many theologians believe that we only enter into that relationship when God chooses to inspire us, through God’s (Holy) Spirit, to do so. Other theologians believe that when people hear the gospel, out of their own free will they choose either to accept or reject God. Probably no theologian denies that faith involves a decision by one being to decide another being—God—exists and is trustworthy.

Coming to faith in God through Christ involves a fundamental change in consciousnesses, having to do with assumptions about God, the nature of other people, and how the world operates and will operate, in the future. It may also involve changes in a person’s perspectives about the origin and destiny of the universe, and their individual futures.