“The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our sons forever, that we may observe all the words of this law. -Deuteronomy 29:29
No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him. -John 1:18
For I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. 12 For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. -Galatians 1:11-12
16 For we did not follow cleverly devised tales when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of His majesty. 17 For when He received honor and glory from God the Father, such an utterance as this was made to Him by the Majestic Glory, “This is My beloved Son with whom I am well-pleased”— 18 and we ourselves heard this utterance made from heaven when we were with Him on the holy mountain. -II Peter 1:16-18
The theme of the above passages ought to be apparent: the Christian God is absolutely a revealed God. Knowledge of the Christian God is not grounded in speculation, as we get from the philosophers about the actus purus (‘pure being’). The Christian God, particularly as we encounter Him in the burning book, the Bible, just is. In Holy Scripture Deus dixit (‘God has spoken’), and because He has first spoken, those with eyes to see and ears to hear, have a God who just shows up, and thus we have someone to respond to. We aren’t reliant on an active intuition, or an active intellect in our knowledge of God; we don’t epistemically precede Him only to come to know His ontology as a matter of self-discovery; we don’t speculate like Thomas Aquinas does in his Prima Pars with reference to proving God’s existence five different times. No, we are fully reliant upon the God who simply shows up without explanation; He speaks and does, and thus we have a God to respond to; a God who is allowed to explain who He is for us and with us. Like Job, we simply sit there in our pain and squalor and are confronted with the God who just shows up without explanation. This becomes the Christian’s way, and mode of existence all the days of their lives; viz. we wait on God to speak, and we respond to His speaking by the Spirit in Christ. Eberhard Jüngel captures the sentiment this way:
Regardless of this logical problem, however, Christian theology cannot ask the isolated question about the existence of God. For Christian theology is the explanation of what faith sees itself to be. So it presupposes faith in God and, of course, the existence of God. That is what distinguishes it from philosophy. Schleiermacher was right in demanding that dogmatics match the Scripture and the symbolical books, which ‘do not prove but simply assert’ the existence of God. ‘Dogmatics must therefore presuppose intuitive certainty or faith; and thus, as far as the God-consciousness in general is concerned, what it has to do is not to effect its recognition but to explicate its content.’ The faith which is presupposed by dogmatics is, however, by definition faith in God, revealed in Jesus Christ and revealed as a gracious God.[1]
This kicks against many an apologetic and theological effort to find God in the vestiges of the created order. But if the Christian is going to have a genuinely Christian notion of God it will wait and listen to God as He comes to us afresh anew over and again in the face of His dearly beloved Son, Jesus Christ. This runs counter to the analytically and scholastically minded, whether antique or modern. Nevertheless, this always already is how the genuinely Christian God has been known; that is, through His Self-exegesis in Jesus Christ. Any other attempts at knowledge of the Christian God will necessarily flounder and end up with syntheses that present us with a Feuerbacherian god of self-projection, no matter how hallowed its traditions are.
The industrial theological complex is bent on proving God’s existence as the preamble to their theologizing. It is determined to affirm a natural law, and natural theology wherein its centripetal movement is shaped by its own machinations and genius to think God abstract from God, and then name this abstraction the Christian God after the theologians and philosophers of religion have had adequate time to synthesize this abstraction with the God they finally get to in Holy Scripture. This is not the way, and it should be repented of post-haste.
[1] Eberhard Jüngel, Justification: The Heart of the Christian Faith (UK/USA: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2001), 46.