Of the Knowledge of God the Creator

As somebody who has devoted many hours to the study of theology, I'm often asked, "Why do you want to study that stuff?" Sometimes the question is asked out of genuine curiosity of what drew me into this field, other times there is a hint of incredulity of the sort that comes when people say that they are moving to L.A. to become an actor or singer. The worst response I've ever got was intentionally unsuppressed laughter, which was followed a moment later by a comment that I didn't know what I was missing by not having cable television. By the way, to the man who said this: Thank you, I'll still take my books though.

Appropriately, Calvin begins his work by answering the same question. For Calvin, true wisdom is knowing who God is and knowing who you are, though it is difficult to pull these two aspects of wisdom apart. On one hand when we truly see and face up to what we've become we can't help contemplate God. This not solely about sin. For Calvin this is as much about what God has endowed us with as His creation as it is about the Fall. He goes so far to say that we can't really know God until we know at least something of our true selves.

On the other hand we don't really know who we are until we have compared ourselves to God. Calvin sees a propensity in humans to always think of themselves as good and just. We need convincing that this is not the case and that convincing comes from contemplating how Good and just God is and then comparing ourselves to Him. Here again, this has both moral and amoral dimensions. We need to see that we are not only not as good or just as we might think, but also that we are not as powerful or otherwise as god-like as we might suppose as well.

There's probably nothing controversial in this chapter for an Evangelical. What my attention is drawn to are the amoral sides to his view of knowledge of self and God. I think that we leave that out of much contemporary evangelism strategy at our peril. Without it, we don't capture the drama of the human predicament: that we were created to relate to God in a way that the rest of creation doesn't, but then we are estranged from Him because of what we've made ourselves. I think much proclomational evangelism simply works at convincing the hearer that he or she is estranged from God, but often does not bother to answer the question, "Why should I or anybody else want to have anything to do with God in the first place?"

I'm back.

So I'm back. As most of you have guessed, my will for reading lots of theology and writing about it went out the window with the cares and psychological wear of unemployment, and stayed out the window when unemployment turned into 40+ hours a week of careening down the road with people who are still learning how to drive.

So I'm back because of Adam. Just before Christmas, we got to talking about a movie he saw about somebody who blogged through a French cook book. He thought doing something like that with either Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion or Augustine's City of God would be fun. We flipped a coin and Calvin won. So here I am. Well, there's more to why I'm back. Ever since I started college, I feel like I've been drinking from a fire hydrant. I've spent the vast majority of my adult life up to this point scrawling notes on paper at a pace that rendered what I wrote illegible and reading through books at a pace that said, "Don't worry about what was said, just read it enough to understand what the lecture will be about tomorrow." Even the Bible, that I claim is God's Word, was something I forced into my head in this manner. I'm back because now is the time for digestion. I want to learn what it is to read without a time limit. Our plan is to take a year and blog through Calvin's Institutes, but I'm trying very hard to not care if it takes me longer.

Despite the random selection process, I've decided that Calvin is indeed a good subject for this sort of study for me. He's probably the theologian that I'm most associated with and that I've read the least of. This fact makes me a little bit of a hypocrite. Many of my friends know of my love of primary documents, that is, the ones written by the people we study themselves, as opposed to those that are about those people or their thoughts. However, though I typically don't shy away from the moniker "Calvinist," I've actually read very little of what Calvin had to write. Calvin will be good for me because he will ease my conscience on this point. Secondly, I started this blog a year ago with the goal of thinking about how to get Christians interested in reading the works that have shaped how they think of God, Christ, the meaning and purpose of life, fellow Christians, and people who do not believe. My method was to simply share my love of these writings by describing them. Now I will go under the ideological knife I have sought to wield and do with Calvin what I have done with others: I will hear what he has to say from his own pen and stop pretending that I already know what he had to say, or that what he had to say isn't important.

I hope that you, my couple of readers, all five or less of you, come away from these future posts more interested in how we, as the Church, have become what we have become and in reading the story for yourself. The hearts and minds of its earlier participants are poured out upon paper for us to admire, argue with and relate to.