Tuesday, February 24, 2015

We know God by knowing propositional statements about Him

"Of course Jesus is the living Word of God. We do not for a moment deny it. Of course God has in these last days revealed himself to us in his Son. But if the person of Christ is divorced from what Jesus of Nazareth said, and if the person of Christ is divorced from what God said about him through the apostles, how can we know what Christ has done for us? A mere encounter would leave the terms regeneration, imputation, and justification meaningless. Indeed, if there were no intelligible speech or thought, we could never know whether an encounter was an encounter with Christ the Son of God or wehther it was Kierkegaard's encounter with an idol. The very identification of Jesus as the Son of God cannot possibly be made without intelligible thought.
Knowledge by acquaintance, in the anti-intellectual sense of encounter, begegnung, or Erlebnis, will result in no religion other than some emotional entertainment. Theology there cannot be."

- Gordon H. Clark, God's Hammer

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