TO KNOW SELF WE MUST KNOW GOD

By Job Ayuba, December 22, 2016

People of faith all through the centuries gave a unified testimony to the need to know God and self. John Calvin made the statement, “There is no deep knowing of God without the deep knowing of self, and no deep knowing of self without the deep knowing of God.”[i] Blaise Pascal wrote, “The Christian religion … teaches men these two truths; that there is a God whom men can know, and that there is a corruption in their nature which renders them unworthy of Him. It is equally important to men to know both these points; and it is equally dangerous for man to know God without knowing his own wretchedness, and to know his wretchedness without knowing the Redeemer who can free him from it. The knowledge of only one of these points gives rise either to the pride of philosophers, who have known God, and not their own wretchedness, or to the despair of atheists, who know their own wretchedness, but not the redeemer.”[ii]

To know God is to know his attributes and character through the revelation of his acts and word. For God’s attributes and character are revealed to us in his acts and words. A.W. Tozer wrote, “To most people God is an inference, not a reality. He is a deduction from evidence which they consider adequate; but He remains personally unknown to the individual. ‘He must be,’ they say, ‘therefore we believe He is.’ Others do not go even so far as this; they know of Him only by hearsay.”[iii] The three major ways to knowledge are tradition (being told), experience (encounter with the empirical), and reason (deductive and inferential). These are connected and interdependent. Each of the three has a place in our coming to know God. Yet we cannot reason our way to God for the knowledge is not a product solely of reason. And knowing God involve more than knowing what others say about Him.

To know self is to discover who (identity) and what I am (character).

Whether we start with knowing God or with knowing self (e.g. Socrates, “Man, know thyself”), we will all arrive at the realization that one cannot be known without the other. Thomas a Kempis, “a humble self-knowledge is a surer way to God than a search after deep learning.”

The right to privacy is our claim to have something hidden about ourselves. We want aspects of our lives to be lived without the watching eyes of other people. But we cannot make a claim of privacy from the all-knowing God. To some, knowing that God is aware of all of their lives is agonizing. But it need not be so. For the knowledge that God is aware of our lives can bring a huge sense of relief and release us from the burden of self-protection.

The knowledge of God is a transformational knowledge. For as we get to know who and what God is our self will become transform in response to that knowledge. This knowledge is transformational because it is an “experiential involvement with what is known … actual engagement with it.”[iv] The nature of personal knowledge differs from that of objective knowledge. Thus, the approach and method of inquiries also differ for the two types of knowledge. It is possible to study and know a material object without engaging with it (an objective knowledge). But that cannot be done with persons. We study persons by engaging with them and through that engagement we can arrive at the point where it can be said ‘I know this person.’ The difference between a person and an object is in the ability of persons to make choices or take self-determined course of action – self-determination. Even where factors (external and internal influences personal choice the individual human person has to co-operate with the deterministic conditions before they can affect the course of action. This ability for self-determination, and for voluntary co-operation, is the reason why human individuals can be held responsible for their actions.

Because we are embodied beings we do not have the means of knowing and discovering disembodied reality. We can only know of that reality when it enters into our embodied material reality or experience. Therefore, what we can know of God is what God reveals to us – what He allows us to know about Him. It is because of this fact that theology speaks of the incomprehensibility of God. First, he cannot be known unless He reveals Himself in our embodied material reality, and that material reality is inadequate to contain or reflect God completely. Second, we cannot have exhaustive knowledge of God, for He is greater than what our ability to comprehend is able to grasp. These two points calls for the need to always be humble with our orthodoxy.

But God revealed Himself. He did it at/in creation, in the exodus or redemption of Israel from Egypt under Moses, and supremely in the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

To know God is to know Him as the God who knows who and what we are and have become (good creation turned wretched, because we are affected by sin) and still accepts us (Grace). It is actually the knowledge of what God is to us – His treatment and behavior toward us. We get to know His attributes and character only in relation to His treatment of us. What matters in this engaging transformational knowledge is the fact that God knows us. We only know that God knows and accepts us. Jeremiah 9.24 says “… let him who boasts boast … that he understands and knows me … the LORD, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight ….” J.I. Packer in Knowing God writes, “What matters supremely, therefore, is not in the last analysis the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it – the fact that He knows me. We are graven on the palms of God’s hands and never out of the Divine mind. All our knowledge of God depends on God’s sustained initiative in knowing us. We know God because God first knew us and continues to know us.”[v] To know God is to know Him in how He relates with us and in His works. Therefore, knowing God goes beyond knowing and acknowledging His existence. A person that knows God knows and enjoys the benefits of His works.

To live one’s life privately from God, or as if God is not relevant, is what it means to not know Him. For God to be relevant to one’s life there must be appropriation and receptions of the benefits of God’s works in one’s life. Thomas Merton said, “to be unknown by God is altogether too much privacy.” Not to know God implies one believes that God does not know them, either because God does not care or He does not exist. David Benner puts it this way, “If God does not know us, we do not exist.” In other words, not knowing that God knows us will also imply not knowing oneself. In knowing God lies self-knowledge. In finding God is also self-discovery. In response to the vision of God, the prophet Isaiah cried, “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts” (Isaiah 6.5). His privation and depravity only became apparent when He saw and discover the majesty and holiness of God. But in atoning and cleansing his sin, he encounters God’s grace. God’s treatment of him is a revelation of grace and mercy. And this is the nature of the knowledge of God. It is personal, experiential and acquire in our encounter with God’s revelation.

The life of faith is founded on the knowledge of God. Saint Augustine asked, “who can call on You, not knowing You? For he that does not know You may call on You as something other than You are.”[vi]

The goal of the spiritual life is in knowing God. Saint Augustine prayed, “You awaken us to delight in Your Praise, for You made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”[vii]

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[i] John Calvin, The Institute of the Christian Religion.

[ii] Blaise Pascal, Foundations of the Christian Religion, 102-3.

[iii] A.W. Tozer, The Best of A.W. Tozer, Book 2, 97.

[iv] Dallas Willard & Don Simpson, Revolution of Character, 45.

[v] J.I. Packer, Knowing God, 45.

[vi] Saint Augustine, The Confessions, 11.

[vii] The Confessions, 11.

SIN AND GRACE (1)

By Job Ayuba, 21^st December, 2016

The problem of evil is the fundamental problem of humanity seen from a theistic perspective. Evil is a reality and this poses a problem for faith in a benevolent God who is active in creation. It will be easier to resort to the idea of a God who is a blind watchmaker (Dawkin’s) or a creator of an automaton (Mechanistic).

Epicurus (300 BCE) summarizes the classical argument of the problem of evil this way in what is referred to as the Epicurean Paradox[i]:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able to? Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?

Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

It is true that God will not be omnipotent if He is not able to prevent evil. And God could be said to be malevolent if He is able but not willing to prevent evil, even though that could be explain in other justifiable ways. If He is both able and willing, then why is there evil? This sharpens the question of the problem of evil. If he is neither able nor willing, then he is not God as we understood God from the classical theistic perspectives of philosophy and theology. The Epicurean Paradox only succeed in defining and delimiting the problem of evil.

Saint Augustine defined sin as the absence or negation of the good. Thus, evil is not a thing. It is the poverty and the abnegation of substance or material quality: when a fruit began to deteriorate we say it is spoilt; when life ceases we speak of death; when people without affection from others, we speak of lovelessness. Thus, we consider all phenomena that are abnormal as evil. Evil can be broadly classify into natural evil and moral evil. Natural evil are those abnormal phenomena that occur in the course of nature independently of direct and immediate human intervention. Moral evil on the other hand, are does ones which are link to human causality that is not too remote.

Of more practical interest to our topic is the human responsibility for evil. When free and rational human beings are responsible for bringing evil about it is called sin. These are human actions to which God will hold humans individually responsible. Human autonomy is not independent of God’s sovereignty superintendence. God holds autonomous human beings responsible for their free actions. It is only actions to which an individual has personal involvement with that he can be held responsible for. Responsibility implies the ability to answer for a thing or action. Also, it implies the burden to give personal response to actions carried out within one’s power or control. The idea of autonomy implies free choice and independent actions. To make our decisions means we can take pride in the good things we do and be blamed for the bad things we do. To argue from necessity, we can ask: without an all-knowing, all-powerful and transcendent Being that is called God, who or what will hold autonomous human beings responsible for their bad actions?

If evil is the negation of the good and sin is evil then sin has no place in a good creation. Sin is a negative (bad) and harmful action performed independently by an autonomous human being. A sinner is an autonomous human being whose independent action is devoid of the quality of goodness and who can be held responsible for such an action. The action is devoid of the quality of goodness because it harms creation and the creational order. The responsibility for the action lies with the individual human being who has personal involvement in occasioning the action unless the individual human being is released from bearing responsibility. A sinner is a human being that stands in need of grace. Grace releases the sinner from the culpability of sin. Grace is an act of release of the sinner by the self-determined kindness of a sovereign God. In grace alone is the hope of the sinner.

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[i] Thank you R. Scott LaMorte for bringing this paradox to my attention. I hope to do a more focused write-up on it subsequently.

THE COMPASSIONATE IDENTITY

By Job Ayuba Shagaiya, 21^st December, 2016

Human compassion is simple but rare. Compassion is said to be the co-habiting of identity and suffering in the human soul. It arises from a deep understanding of the sufferings borne by humans and the need for personal connections in addressing these sufferings. To show compassion to another person is to acknowledge the person’s sufferings and to see oneself as having a shared responsibility in easing them. It is to tell the other person that I understand your pains and sufferings and I feel personally responsible because of our shared humanity. The idea behind this is that, though individuals are responsible for their actions, we are collectively responsible in easing the sufferings of any individual human being.

  

The question of blameworthiness has no place in the art of compassion. So we should not be heard asking the causal question “what have you done to have merit this dessert?” Whether the suffering human is responsible for bringing the suffering about or another person unjustly caused them to suffer, compassion is only concern with the fact of the suffering. To the question “who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus replied “neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him” (John 9.2-3). What can be done in this man instead of what happened appears to be the concern of Jesus in his work of mercy and compassion.

In Galatians 6, Paul uses three phrases in his instruction to the church: “Carry each other’s burden, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ” (v.2); “each one should test their own actions … for each one should carry their own load” (v.5); and “let no one cause me trouble, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus” (v.17). Paul acknowledges individual responsibility for human actions. But he went further to teach that the follower of Jesus suffers (identifies) with the sufferings of Jesus and that the follower should voluntarily share in the burdens of others. From this, acknowledgement of individual responsibility for human action is not a bar to participating in the sufferings that the action results in and alleviating it. The New Testament’s concepts of mercy and grace are built on this idea of compassion. Mercy is expressing goodness to someone in need irrespective of our relationship to them (whether hostile or friendly). The basis for showing mercy is solely the recognition of human need in the person. Grace is expressing goodness to someone who deserves the opposite of it. It is a free act of a free being – an act of sovereign freedom and a self-determined kindness (J.I. Packer). The motive of grace is the magnificence of a benevolent personality. It is given from a source of a rich soul. A person with a rich soul freely reaches out to enrich another person whom human suffering impoverishes and crushes.

The capacity for compassion is developed by experience and inspiration. The experience of a suffering person develops the capacity to understand and to be sensitive to others who are suffering. Through inspiration, the capacity to give compassionate care is developed by the experience of how God behaved toward us in our conditions and moments of need. Compassion is not how we feel toward those in need. It is our behavior toward them that sensitively seeks their happiness and comfort. Understanding God’s treatment of us in our needs becomes a pattern for how we are to behave toward other human beings and the creation at large.

This interconnection between self-understanding and behavior toward others is at the heart of developing a compassionate self. In becoming compassionate one has to understand one’s needs, and how God behaved(s) toward us in our conditions and moments of need, and the heuristic implication of the God-human relation. A needy person is not the object of my judgment and theorizing, but someone I am in the position to identify with. According to Henri Nouwen, “Compassion is a way of living together. The compassionate life is a life together. It is community life.” From the etymology of the word (Latin, com meaning with and passio meaning suffering) we can infer that compassion is the fellowship of suffering. It involves identifying and listening to a sufferer with the aim of understanding their condition and sharing one’s personal and material resources to alleviate the person’s plight. The art of compassion does not allow for condescending behavior toward others. It is an occasion for genuine human connections and collective self-understanding. The goal of compassionate care for others should be to foster human flourishing in the life of the individual who is suffering. Caring for another human being is focusing love for humanity in the life of one human. Loving humanity may be a vague idea but it becomes concrete when we care for one human being. Mother Teresa said, “I do not love humanity. I do not even love the poor. I love one person at a time.”

The starting point for becoming compassionate is in attaining a self-identity that is defined as the recipient of pure goodness and that is flourishing as a result of that goodness. Identity is self-perception. Perceiving oneself as the recipient of pure goodness which enables flourishing frees one from the crippling self-love that exhibits aggrandizing greed and the pride that demeans. From this self-perception we can extend that goodness to others in need with the objective of relieving them of their sufferings and miseries and enabling them to experience human flourishing.

GRACE TOWARD THE RELIGIOUSLY DIFFERENT

By Job Ayuba, 20^th December, 2016

 

Religion at its best is seen in human compassion. Its beauty is seen when a human being put aside his interest to serve the needs of others. What matters in religion is not my right but human responsibility for others and all creations. The most important principle of the religious life is self-sacrifice. Sacrificing oneself for the benefit of others is the essence of the religious life.

In our time, what is conspicuous in the human landscape is difference – human diversity. We define people by how different they are from us culturally, racially, economically, and religiously. We suddenly discover that others are different from us and we find it difficult to handle such difference that we just want to recreate a monolithic world. But the question is: how should such a monolithic world look like? Should it be structured with a common culture, and if so, what should that culture be? It is the contest of human difference and human sameness. The world should be like me a little bit. When it turns out to be different somehow I should insist it becomes like me anyway. It is like I have suddenly realized I am that Nietzschean “superman” and all of us are now that Orwellian “Big Brother” watching against difference.

This same mindset has crept into our practice of religion. The quality of the religious life has been affected by our tendency to see how different other people are religiously. And we interpret that difference as less humanity – which occasions reduced human dignity. If the other has less humanity then killing that other has less consequence for me, and it is an act of favor for the world. A much better incentive to kill the religious other is to see it as a religious duty approve by divine revelation and carrying the promise of divine reward. That is the state of religious thinking in our world today which daily continues to destroy human lives and afflicting pains to families around the world.

An attitude of grace will change how we see others who are different from us. In demonstrating grace, God gave his son for those who deserve only his wrath. A holy God should have no relations with sinners. But grace moves holiness to reach out to the sinner (who is different) for the good of that sinner. As those who believe in God, we should also reach out to those who are religiously different from us for their good. They are the objects of God’s love and it is our responsibility to love them as God does. Without an attitude of grace the world will progress in its path of violence. Healing our religions of hate and bigotry may be the way to save humanity and the world.

The poor are just not fortunate in life. This unfortunate state is shown in all of life including religion. Easter is suppose to be the vindication of powerlessness and weakness, but the world still turn it to another symbol of oppression. Thereby, denying the poor of hope and sending them to a state of eternal despair. When Jesus died on Good Friday, it was the powerful oppressors and the powerful rich that join hands to killed Him so as to maintain economic and political status quo. His death brings hope to the poor that God has paid the price for sin. The consequence of sin is at the heart of the problem that create their condition in all its aspects. By this, Jesus died to give the poor a certain hope that God will save them. Save them from their spiritual condition, as well as their economic and political condition. They are no more slaves to either sin, the world system, other human beings, Satan, or even themselves. They are free, and they are to serve God just as that was the original purpose of their creation. God saves them by loving them, and now they are to live their lives paying the debt of love which cannot be finished. And to love is to realize one's highest joy and fulfilment. But today, easter event is used to tell the poor that Jesus died so that they will be made powerful. Powerful enough to have others cower away at their presence. What a pity to believe that Jesus deal away with the old oppressors so as to establish a new class of oppressors. Jesus died to give hope to all men - to give the poor a reason to hope in God, and to dissuade the rich from hoping in their riches and power. For salvation belongs to God.

Good Friday