TheKnowabilityandExistence.mp3
👆Click and listen to this training as you get ready or drive somewhere.
When we talk about building a full, carefully ordered understanding of the Christian faith—a systematic theology—there are a few pillars that everything else rests on. One of those pillars is the authority of the Word of God, which we’ve already considered. Another, right beside it, is this: God truly exists, and we can truly know Him.
If God did not exist, or if He were completely unknowable, then all of theology would collapse. It would be like writing a long, detailed book about a fictional creature that never has and never could exist—interesting, maybe, but not real. Christian theology insists that God is not a projection of human imagination or a philosophical idea. He is the living God, and He has made real knowledge of Himself available to human beings.
To explore this, we have to deal with a few big questions. Where does theology even start? How much can we actually know about an infinite God? What kind of evidence has God given us—inside of us and around us—to show that He is there? And what have Christians throughout history said about these things?
Let’s walk through these questions slowly and clearly.
Before we talk about what God is like, or what He has done, we have to ask a deeper question: Where do we begin the whole theological project?
Do we start with God Himself—trying to prove that He exists and describe His nature? Or do we start with the Bible—explaining why we trust Scripture and how God has spoken there? This is not just a technical question. It affects how the whole system of theology is built.
Some theologians in the past tried to start with God’s existence using reason and observation, without referring to the Bible at first. They wanted to build a foundation for belief that even non-Christians might accept. This approach took two main forms.
One form relied on what was called “rational intuition” or “first truth.” Thinkers like Augustus Hopkins Strong argued that the idea of God is built into the human mind at a basic level. Just as we assume that the external world exists or that logic is valid, the belief in God, they said, is a fundamental, inescapable starting point for all other knowledge. According to this view, the existence of God is something so obvious and basic that it does not need to be proved by evidence.
Another form of the “God-first” approach is natural theology, especially as developed by Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas believed that the existence of God could be demonstrated by pure reason, using arguments drawn from the world around us. By observing motion, cause and effect, design, and degrees of perfection in the universe, he argued that the human mind could logically reason its way to the conclusion that God exists—all before opening a Bible or hearing a sermon.
In this method, the typical order goes like this:
First, use rational arguments or first principles to show that God exists.
Second, argue that this God has revealed Himself in a special way, especially through the Bible.
Third, study that revelation to build the details of theology.
This approach has some strengths, but it also runs into serious problems.