2011-05-17, 10:21 AM
Kalovale Wrote:How do they know about God with God being... unknowable?
Very easy.
God is the all knowing, all powerful, perfect being. We, as mere mortals and humans, cannot even imagine or come close to seeing or believing what God is like. But we know that he must exist because we see him present in every day life. We know he's around us, inside us, and helps us to guide our decisions. But actually trying to figure out who or what the almighty perfect being could be is impossible due to his divine stature.
Check out Karl Barth's "wholly other" theory. This is from a neo-orthodox perspective of Christianity:
http://www.ukapologetics.net/neoorthoxy.html Wrote:In contrast to this, the Neo-Orthodox approach to finding God is ethereal and mystical, and Christ is wholly 'other.' Karl Barth taught that the Scriptures were only a guide to the revelation of Christ and that we need an existentialist encounter with Christ in order to know Him. He rejected any place for proof or evidence, fully supporting the 'leap of faith' concept. He also rejected the concept that we can learn anything at all about God from the natural world (the apostle Paul, however, is quite clear that the natural world itself teaches us so much about God that we are 'without excuse' if we then reject Him! See Romans 1:18-20).
The Bible also supports this notion (John 14:6-14). Karl Barth conjured this idea of the wholly other while reading Genesis. At one point - before the great sin - God and Adam were one. Adam was created of God and God created Adam (Genesis 1:26-27). There was this connection that existed there. But then sin broke this bond between God and man, so the divine connection is broken (Genesis 3:7-8). It is therefore impossible for man to know God, because God has rejected man for his acceptance of sin. It is only by attempting to continually re-establish the wholly other connection that one can attempt to be closer to God. But this is impossible to achieve as the bond can never be restored - man can never be free from his sins of bondage that keeps him from God.
Barth went on to accept that the Bible is written by man, and man cannot know God due to our separation of sin. Therefore, biblical divinity (the bible as error proof - commonly held by fundamentalists) is a fallacy. Reading the Bible is God's word, but God's word is interpreted by man, and man is an imperfect being. So one should read the bible not as the true word of God, but as a means to an end. Reading the Bible is the best thing humans have got in order to understand God. So we must reach through the Bible to find Jesus and God, and hope and pray that by trying to re-establish the bond God reveals himself to us.