Do we know through doing or do we do through knowing? This is a paradigm that the Emerging Church (EC) seems to be struggling with. They’re disillusioned by all the ‘God-knowers’ who just seem to have no out working in their lives of the mission of God (and they should be deeply disturbed by this fact). So they begin asking the question ‘do we know things about God first and then begin doing? OR is it perhaps possible that through doing we begin to really know God?’ From just a general reading of EC literature you might begin to pick up that for some this shift has already taken place where knowing no longer constitutes primarily gaining knowledge but the emphasis has shifted significantly to doing in order to know. Now upfront I want to affirm that knowledge of God is much more than merely gaining intellectual knowledge about him, yet at the same time I’m disturbed that gaining intellectual knowledge is becoming highly unpopular.
My reading of the Bible seems to be saying to me that first and foremost we need to come to a recognition and understanding of God’s revelation and respond appropriately. I’ve been reading through the book of Isaiah and I’ve become extremely aware of how many times God makes statements like this:
‘…this is a people without understanding so their Maker has no compassion on them, and their Creator shows them no favor’ (Isa 27:11b)
There’s always direct relation then between this lack of understanding and the moral decay of the people being judged. The New Testament continues this idea in places like 1 Thess. 4:5, 2 Thess. 1:8 and Titus 1:16. And yes, there is an experiential side to this knowledge which is worked out as one ‘does’, but that doesn’t do away with the fact that people must gain this knowledge first. So you come to a passage like 1 John 4:8 that says we don’t love because we don’t know God and God is love. Why don’t we ‘do’? Well because we do not ‘know’.
The EC should react against intellectual knowledge about God that never translates into intimate and experiential knowledge of God, but it should be careful about how it frames the whole concept of knowing God. We don’t know God simply by going out and doing a whole lot of social work – we know God through revelation. Going out on the basis of revelation and then doing social work can greatly enhance and add experiential depth to that knowledge, but in and of itself it does not constitute the necessary knowledge.
We need to be God-knowers, proceeding from revelation into all of life.
Recent Comments