more on knowing about vs knowing

now that i've completed my internship with prisons, i have some time to read the books i've accumulated over the past year or so and start preparing for my exams in the middle of oct.

incidentally, one of the modules i'm being examined on is the philosophy of religion. there are interesting parallels between the readings i have for this module and the books i've accumulated over the past year or so. as the saying goes, theology is the queen of the sciences and philosophy is the handmaiden of theology.

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God cares about how we handle evidence for God's existence. We are to become, in the image of God's character, more loving in handling it. So, contrary to a typical philosophical attitude, knowledge of God is not a spectator sport. It is rather part of a process of God's thorough makeover of a person. It is, from our side of the process, akin to an active commitment to a morally transforming personal relationship rather than to a mere subjective state or disposition.

We come to know God only as God becomes our God, the Lord of our lives, rather than just an object of our contemplation, self-indulgence, or amusement. God refuses, for our own good, to become a mere idol of our speculation or entertainment. We manifest dangerous arrogance in assuming that we can have proper knowledge of God without undergoing profound transformation. In proper knowledge of God, knowers must be transformed to become like the known in character.

- Paul K. Moser, Divine Hiddenness Does Not Justify Atheism

In A Preface to Christian Theology, John Mackay illustrated two kinds of interest in Christian things by picturing persons sitting on the high front balcony of a Spanish house watching travellers go by on the road below. The 'balconeers' can overhear the travellers' talk and chat with them; they may comment critically on the way that the travellers walk; or they may discuss questions about the road, how it can exist at all or lead anywhere, what might be seen from different points along it, and so forth; but they are onlookers, and their problems are theoretical only.

The travellers, by contrast, face problems which, though they have their theoretical angle, are essentially practical - problems of the 'which-way-to-go' and 'how-to-make-it' type, problems which call not merely for comprehension but for decision and action too.

Balconeers and travellers may think over the same area, yet their problems differ. Thus (for instance) in relation to evil, the balconeer's problem is to find a theoretical explanation of how evil can consist with God's sovereignty and goodness, but the traveller's problem is how to master evil and bring good out of it.

Or again, in relation to sin, the balconeer asks whether racial sinfulness and personal perversity are really credible, while the traveller, knowing sin from within, asks what hope there is of deliverance.

Or take the problem of the Godhead; while the balconeer is asking how one God can conceivably be three, what sort of unity three could have, and how three who make one can be persons, the traveller wants to know how to show proper honour, love and trust towards the three persons who are now together at work to bring him out of sin to glory. And so we might go on.

Now this is a book for travellers, and it is with travellers' questions that it deals.

- J. I. Packer, Knowing God

links: knowing about vs knowing (2 sep 09), even more on knowing about vs knowing (9 sep 09)