How To Know God (and Two Ways That Don’t Work)

These things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. (1 Cor. 2:10-11)

The God of the Bible is, from start to finish, the God who makes himself known. Though not fully comprehensible by his creatures, God has given us the ability to know him truly and savingly.

But how? In what way does God make himself known? Before answering that question positively, let’s approach things negatively. Broadly speaking, there are two means by which Christians have wrongly sought to know God.

The first wrong way is rationalism. As an epistemological approach, rationalism “rejects any other source of knowledge than that which is found in nature and in the constitution of the human mind.”1 The problem with rationalism is not that it values reason or that it finds truth about God in nature. Christianity is not anti-reason; it is not irrational. But rationalism is something different. Rationalism admits no higher source of truth than reason. As a result, rationalism often becomes anti-supernatural and finds itself tied to the latest whims of science and tossed to and fro by the latest intellectual fads.

The second wrong way to know God is mysticism. While Christianity is “mystical” in that it deals with heavenly realities and spiritual truths than go beyond human comprehension and explanation, this is not the same as mysticism. As an epistemological approach, mysticism “assumes that God, by immediate communication with the soul, reveals through feelings and intuitions divine truth independently of the outward teaching of his Word.”2 Mysticism should not be confused with the Spirit’s work of illumination. When we pray for illumination, we are not praying for new information or looking to hear from God apart from his appointed means. We are asking for divine light to see and understand the Spirit-inspired Scriptures. Mysticism directs the Christian toward a subjective, inner light and away from the objective truth of the Bible.

Positively, the Bible teaches that the only proper way to know God is by way of objective revelation. Rationalism and mysticism may seem like opposite errors, but at the heart of both mistakes is an attempt to place the locus of authority in the human person instead of outside of ourselves (extra nos).

This is also the problem with liberalism. As one of the movement’s leading scholars puts it, liberal theology “is the idea that Christian theology can be genuinely Christian without being based upon external authority. Since the eighteenth century, liberal Christian thinkers have argued that religion should be modern and progressive and that the meaning of Christianity should be interpreted from the standpoint of modern knowledge and experience.”3

By contrast, historic Christianity has maintained that only God can adequately reveal God (1 Cor. 2:10–16). Modern knowledge and personal experience must be tested by God’s revelation (and not the other way around). We must apprehend God’s revelation by reason, and we need the illumination of the Spirit to lead us into truth, but reason is not independent of revelation, and the Spirit’s illumination is not independent of the Scriptures. We don’t want to be subject to our experiences at the expense of the intellect, and we don’t want to follow the intellect at the expense of faith.

Notes:

1. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology (James Clarke, 1960), 1.4.
2. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1.7.
3. Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion 1805-1900. Vol. 1. (Westminster John Knox, 2001), xii.

This article is adapted from Daily Doctrine: A One-Year Guide to Systematic Theology by Kevin DeYoung.