Review Essay, Keeping the Balance
Why isn’t everybody certain? The logic of Christology. It may be reasonably asked that, “if there is a God who wants people to know of his existence, nature and purposes, would he not have made himself clear”? In other words, “would not religious certainty be our common experience”? It is true that “neither divine inability nor divine unwillingness fit in with a Christian view of God as personal”. But does it necessarily follow that if there is a personal God he would be universally known? Williams doesn’t pretend to provide a comprehensive response to this question, but some important points are made:
To begin with, assessing “the breadth or nature of religious conviction” is difficult because people may hold beliefs or know things that they do not disclose to us. People may, in fact, persuade themselves of something so thoroughly that, on a conscious level, they believe it, and it would require “some unusual confrontation, trauma or therapy to reveal something suppressed”. There is also something fitting about the fact that God can be hidden as well as revealed: “there is enough light for those who really seek God to find him, but God does not reveal himself to everyone, being hidden from those who do not seek him”.
A significant barrier, however, to receiving the knowledge of God, is what has commonly been called “the problem of pain”. “For many people, suffering or evil is hard to reconcile with the existence of God, but if God himself is immune from suffering, the situation becomes intolerable”. But supposing God is personal, He wants to show Himself, and He is concerned to share in human suffering. True, He might communicate with everyone to tell them that He is personal and assure them the He suffers with them. But, as Williams observes, we might just turn around and say “Prove it!” What, then, would be the highest proof? “The highest proof”, Williams concludes, “is to make a personal entry into his own world in human form, if that is possible, to show through humanity his own being and nature and to suffer as a human being”. Of course, this would mean restricting himself to a particular space and time. (It makes no sense to talk about doing it over and over again, for God as man could only be in one place at one time anyway, even if He incarnated Himself more than once in human history. And this is to say nothing of the Christian doctrine of a once-for-all supreme act of atonement). So the apparent arbitrariness of God—namely, “special revelation in particular space and time”—turns out to be the very “condition of revealing his nature and sharing human suffering”. And what better way of telling all of us about this “historical appearance” than by someone writing it up? It turns out then that “when people believe in an incarnation and in its testimony in Scripture, it has a logic to it which we can describe in response to those who say that if there is a personal God, everyone would be sure of it”.
Category: In Depth, Spring 2006
Followers
Fans
