How Do Wwe Know God

Let my cry come before You,

O LORD; 

give me understanding

according to Your Word.

Let my supplication come

before You;

Deliver me according to Your 

word.

Psalm 119:169-170

     God being inconceivable and incomprehensible and can only be known partial, then how is it that our mind can form an idea of God. We are not gods, we are not divine beings, we are finite and effort to form the idea of God is limited. God being invisible to our eyes, and only visibly seen by means of His Son incarnate while here on earth who is now not present in form or body; then how do we form an image or idea of God? In reading the earlier Church fathers we find that the Church has always maintained certain aspects of God. It is by the way of negation, eminence, and causality. What is meant by this is that Christians, the Church, does not limit God and we ascribe to Him all excellencies. We refer to God as the great First Cause and all works are attributed to Him. We are His children therefore we are like Him. This does not mean in any way that we are like Him in form, or substance, rather that we are so constituted that we can form by means of our minds the idea of God. Why? Because we can and are authorized to ascribe to Him all of our attributes of our nature and as rational creatures we do this without limitation, and to the most infinite degree. Therefore, if we are like God (in this manner) then God is like us (in this manner). All religions have in some degree this principle giving further credibility to that fact. Paul in speaking to the Athenians used this principle in his address to them: "Therefore, since we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, something shaped by art and man's devising" (Acts 17:29). Let us not fall into the trap that many have fallen into, that is, that God is unknowable and is only a figment of our imaginations and give only the idea that God is an abstraction, a name give to and for moral order, for man and for the universe, that He may be the unknowable cause of the universe, the cause of all things, simply an inscrutable force. 

     If we are His children, then God is our Father, and we bear the image of our Father, and we partake of His nature. We are not making God to be nothing more than a anthropomorphism in the sense that it is used, mostly to describe any effort to give to God human aspects which is when the word is used in a bad sense. Many blame and for good reason that some people, even Christians see God in that way. Rather the word anthropomorphism used properly in this sense that the Church has always used the word is that it expresses, at least in our terms of understanding giving form to our mind of God. This is the doctrine of the Church. As we confess to anthropomorphism that is inseparable to our conviction that man bears the image of God, we do not maintain that anthropomorphism, which has always been called Theism, is nothing more that atheism or fetichism. God is not man, God does not carry in His person the form or likeness of man, He is a Spirit, and is infinite, and is more than the First Cause, He is God. But is this a trustworthy method and proof? This is our next discussion.

God, who made the world

     and everything in it,

since He is Lord of heaven

    and earth,

does not dwell in

    temples made with hands.

                      Acts 17:24

I will meditate On Your Statutes

Richard L. Crumb