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?"