“I cannot …imagine a Christianity in which the would-be Christian has no sense, and never has had a sense, of the presence and love of God, of the reality of prayer, of their everyday, this-worldly life being somehow addressed, interpenetrated, confronted, or embraced by a personal being understood as the God we know through Jesus. I did once meet a man- a clergyman actually- who said at a conference that language like that had never held any meaning to him, but I confess with sorrow that I do not know in what sense the word Christian could describe such a person. Of course most Christians report times when God seems absent or distant, but this is regularly perceived as a break in normality, an interruption in the way things should be, rather than regular or ordinary Christian experience.”
NT Wright p208 The Meaning of Jesus
John Humphrys : I want to know if you believe there is a God or know there is a God.
Rowan Williams : I don’t know that there is God or a God in the simple sense that I can tick that off as an item I’m familiar with. Believing is a matter of being committed to the reality of God. The knowledge that comes, that grows if you like through a relationship. I believe I commit myself, I accept what God gives me, I try to accept what God gives me. Grow in that relationship and you grow in a kind of certainty or anchorage in the belief. Knowledge well yes of a certain kind yes, but not acquaintance with a particular fact or a particular state of affairs, it’s the knowledge that comes from relation and takes time. Rowan Williams 31 October 2006 BBC broadcast
In these excerpts, Rowan Williams speaks of knowing God in a certain sense; and NT Wright speaks of having a sense of God. Both notions are problematic.
What does it mean to say I know someone- say, John Howard (Prime Minister of Australia)? You might make such a claim in the following conversation
Do you know any famous people
I know John Howard
You do?
Sure! I met him in a shopping mall at Parramatta last week.
If your friend doubted you, you might elaborate your claim by saying that you shook John Howard’s hand, that he smiled and inclined his head at you, said ‘hello’ and asked about your health and your children. Your friend might still question whether you know John Howard: “these politicians, they all do that kind of thing but really, they have no idea who they are talking to.” You reply indignantly that you’re sure John Howard would remember you and invite your friend to ring him to confirm it. Suppose your friend does so and actually gets through to the Prime Minister. One possible response is “John Smith- lovely chap, met him last week, has a couple of nice kids, hope I’ll bump into him again.” Alternatively, the Prime Minister might say “I have no idea who you’re talking about- do you know how many people I meet?”
One point to emerge from this is that I can only be said to know John Howard if John Howard knows me ie knowledge of another person is necessarily mutual. If one of the parties denies that he knows the other, then neither can be said to know the other.
Secondly, the above example suggests that a claim to know somebody depends on bodily meeting. If I claimed to know John Howard and have never met him in the flesh- never seen, touched, heard or spoken to him- people would be unwilling to accept that I know him. What about an exchange of letters, or correspondence on the internet? These might be regarded as substantiation of my claim to know someone, even though they do not involve contact in the flesh- but if they do, it is by reference to our usual way of knowing someone. Our concept of knowing someone would be quite different if our sole method of doing so were by correspondence or the internet or some other means that did not involve bodily meeting.
Bodily meeting is a necessary condition of knowing someone but it is not sufficient. I could shake John Howard’s hand, catch his eye, exchange words about the weather and my children and he may still, when asked a week (or even five minutes) later, deny that he knows me. Some other condition has to be satisfied if our meeting is to support a claim that we know each other. The missing ingredient that seems to make meeting someone the basis for a claim to knowing them is recognition of that person as an individual human being ie not just a member of undifferentiated humanity. To say I know someone is to say that we have mutually acknowledged each other as individual persons. There are all the people on the planet but the only ones I know are those whom I have acknowledged and who have acknowledged me in this way.
In the light of this, it is very difficult to say that I know God.
The claim that I know God could only be substantiated if people who doubted my claim could ask God whether he knows me. As part of the verification of such a claim, I would have to be able to demonstrate that I had actually met God in the sense of having had some sensory interaction with him and both of us having identified the other as individuals.
There are a few cases in the Bible where individuals have in some sense met God; and mystics throughout the ages have claimed similar experiences. But these experiences are marked by the inability of the people involved to describe just what it is they have experienced. And it seems ridiculous to suggest that they could be verified by asking God.
NT Wright’s suggestion that Christians normally have
a sense, of the presence and love of God, of the reality of prayer, of their everyday, this-worldly life being somehow addressed, interpenetrated, confronted, or embraced by a personal being understood as the God we know through Jesus
is a lesser claim than that of Rowan Williams. You could have a sense of the presence of God in the way that , on waking at one in the morning, you might have the sense of someone in the house; or in a crowded room you might have a sense of someone looking at you. However, whereas Rowan Williams’ claim asserts the existence of that which it knows, NT Wright’s ‘sense’ of God’s presence makes no such claim: you could say that you had a sense of someone being in the house but go on later to say ‘but it turned out that in fact there was nobody there’. An amputee can have a sense that his leg is still there; and drugs may induce in someone the sense that he is surrounded by little green men.
In short, Rowan Williams’ claim to know God makes an existential assertion which it cannot sustain; and NT Wright makes a sustainable assertion which leaves the existence of its object open.
My feeling is that for most of us most of the time we have no direct knowledge of God. Rather, our knowledge of God is mediated- by the liturgy, our neighbour, the natural world.
Re: Can we know God?
Paul - your comments are based on naturalistic assumptions. Why should not knowledge of God, who by nature is a supernatural being, arise through supernatural communication? This is entirely the assumption of God’s historical dealings with people throughout the OT and NT, and that we are designed to be the recipients, respondents, and ultimately residence of such communication.
Such a supernatural communication would not be purely existential, but exists alongside a history of this God’s interactions with people in a purposeful historical process, which the apostles and NT authors claimed Christ came to fulfil. The framework for supernatural communication exists within this historical narrative account provided by the OT and NT scriptures.
In one point though, your exploration of the philosophy of ‘knowing’, as applied to relationships, coincides with that of your New Testament namesake, who said: “Now that you know God, or rather are known by God - - - ” - Galatians 4:9. Also of Jesus, who said of false prophets: “I never knew you” (never had a relationship with you) - Matthew 7:23. Knowledge within a relationship is indeed mutual, and in relation to God, by my understanding of things, is open to all who wish to receive it - eg John 1:12-13.
Is our knowledge of God direct or mediated?
Peter
I was prompted to introduce this topic by the difficulty that Rowan Williams had in answering John Humphrys’ question and this caused me to think about my 20 years experience as a Quaker.
The most distinctive thing about Quakers is their understanding of our knowledge of God. George Fox believed that “every man was enlightened by the divine Light of Christ.” That is, Fox believed every person had the capacity for the direct experience of God; and to be satisfied with second hand knowledge was not to believe at all. He saw the forms and institutions of Christianity, as they had developed over the centuries, as obstacles to arriving at such knowledge.
The idea that the revelation of the spirit comes from Christ has now largely been abandoned by Quakers. However most Quakers continue to believe in unmediated access to the Spirit, vaguely understood as the Beyond or the Transcendent.
George Fox had a prophet’s confidence in his access to the spirit and he thought everybody else had the same access. However I came to the conclusion that I personally did not know God directly, in the way that George Fox proclaimed. The doctrine of direct access to the spirit seemed to me to too readily ignore the mysteriousness and elusiveness of the human experience of God. It was for this reason that I left the Quakers, much as I admire them.
You ask Why should not knowledge of God, who by nature is a supernatural being, arise through supernatural communication?
This question is ambiguous. You could say you know of someone without claiming to know that person eg I don’t know John Howard (= am not personally acquainted with him) but I know of him ie I have heard of him etc. In suggesting that we do not ordinarily know God, I am talking about knowledge as acquaintance with God not knowledge of God.
I do not claim that direct knowledge of God never happens to anyone but I think it is the exception rather than the rule (your citation from Galatians 4.9 is interesting in this regard- it suggests mutuality conditions our knowledge of God but not God’s knowledge of us).
For most of us knowledge of God is mediated by the things of this world- the scriptures, the liturgy, our neighbour, the beauty of the world.
Which leads me to ask how would you answer the question put to Rowan Williams: would you want to claim that you know God directly?
Re: Is our knowledge of God direct or mediated?
In the interview with Rowan Williams (and the other religious leaders on the radio series) I felt that, despite his protests to the contrary, John Humphrys was committed to not believing there was a God that he could, in some way, know and relate to.
The immediate question to which Rowan Williams was responding in your extract was: “I want to know if you believe there is a God or know there is a God.”
I don’t see why Williams could not have given a straightforward “Yes” to the first part of the question. In the second part of his response, I think he is trying to say that one cannot “know” God as an objective fact, but that God is only really “known” from within a relationship with Him.
So the question then remains: How can one embark on a relationship with God? I would answer from my own experience, and also from the unique role informing that experience which is provided by the bible, and the active representatives of Christ and bible (guardians of tradition, preachers, friends) - especially concerning the person of Christ and events surrounding his coming.
The answer from the first (my experience) is a conscious opening of one’s life to God in the light of Christ: an invitation which also entails a yielding of the will to his control. There are many ways in which this can be expressed, but essentially, the meaning is always the same. But such a self-conscious action of the will is preceded by some form of belief in the one to whom a surrender is being made. The nature of this belief is crucial, and consists in more than information alone. It also becomes obvious when this sort of process takes place that such a surrendering of the will is actually a response to a preceding divine initiative. To whom is this initiative vouchsafed? My conclusion is that it is both a universal invitation, and a particular invitation - it is open to everybody, but not everybody will accept or even hear the invitation.
But given that God, by definition of His attributes of perfect purity and holiness, “lives in unapproachable light, whom no-one has seen or can see” - 1 Timothy 6:16, a conclusion we might reach on the basis of reason alone, how can we know Him directly? A further question might be: how can we assume that God would want us to know Him - in any kind of relationship? Muslims certainly do not assume this of Allah: a God who cannot be “known” in any kind of intimate way.
The answer to this is a Judaeo-Christian answer - that God not only superintended the movements of peoples and individuals in history, but also entered into the most intimate of conversations with individuals, and desired such intimacy of relationship - notably with those whose imperfections seem glaring. This was the experience of individuals before the coming of Christ, and evidently what he also desired of a people. With the coming of Christ, a unique access to God was given, modelled on the experience of Christ himself, facilitated by Christ’s actions, on the basis of God’s overriding feelings of benevolence to humanity and commitment to provide a means of expression of those feelings, in ways which had both individual and corporate ramifications.
On the level of descriptive proposition, we have statements such as in Paul’s letters - “through whom (Christ) we have access by faith into this grace in which we now stand” - Romans 5:2; “through whom (Christ) we have access to the Father by one Spirit.” - Ephesians 2:18. This suggests a direct access to the presence of God, in which Christ plays a unique mediating role, and the context of both statements in both letters is of unique charges which stood against us, which were uniquely overcome on our behalf by Christ, facilitating such direct access. “Faith” indispensably accompanies “Spirit” in facilitating this access - which suggests active co-operation by the human party in the transaction.
On the level of narrative description, we have the experience of the disciples in Acts, in which the giving of the Spirit was clearly the fulcrum between one mode of ‘knowing’ God, and another. The gift of the Spirit was nothing less than the gift of God’s abiding presence to all who would believe, but the substance of what was believed involved the person and actions of Christ through his death and resurrection on our behalf - something that, I suspect, the Quakers have tended to disconnect from their experience of God. This continued to be the case throughout Acts, and remains so today. The gift of the Spirit is the essence of our assurance of faith, and directness of experience of God. On his deathbed, John Wesley’s father is reported to have said to his son: “The inner witness, John; the true test of Christianity.” The “inner witness” has always been said to be the Spirit, given to those who believe not just anything about God, but the particular person of Christ and the events which he came to complete on our behalf.
George Fox is one of my heroes of the faith, his Journal a book that never ceases to be a source of inspiration. Fox came in a particular historical context, which he was uniquely equipped to challenge and change. I don’t see him operating in ways that rejected biblical thought and belief, rather he understood too well what biblical thought and belief entailed in terms of practical action and experience - in an age where belief had declined into formalism, theological controversy and doctrinal assent. I seek the faith that Fox embodied, but see it as directly connected with biblical roots. In our own day, the Spirit is just as significant in giving substance to a directness of experience of God, knowledge of and relationship to Him, as it was with Fox, but not without the mediating role of Christ, and the assumption of a threefold expression of God’s person. This theme is everywhere developed in the New Testamant, not least in the ‘access’ verses I have quoted, which provide the implied foundation and framework for a direct knowledge of God.