Knowing About GodOr Knowing the Father

"Do You Know Jesus?"

A number of years ago, a Catholic lay evangelist came to speak to a group of young believers and, predictably, ruffled feathers when she insisted that "many Catholics don't know Jesus."  What was at stake, it was clear, the failure to distinguish knowing about Jesus and knowing Jesus.  When cornered with the question of how they relate to Him, the response was a flabbergasted grasping for words.

That Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the Incarnate Word of the Father, and the Redeemer of the human race does not necessarily count for the theological virtue of faith; St James wrote that "The demons believe, and tremble" (Jas 2:19).  To speak of that which Jesus is places the speaker somewhere with respect to an object; to speak of who Jesus is places the speaker in a personal relationship with a Subject, and there lies the difference between knowing 'about' Jesus and 'knowing' Jesus.

Even saying as much leaves out a crucial part of the puzzle which undercuts the claim to know Jesus.  To begin, we must go back to that primordial relationship which existed prior to the Incarnation:

...no-one knows [ἐπιγινώσκει] the Son except the Father, and no one knows [ἐπιγινώσκει] the Father except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal [ἀποκαλύψαι] him" (Mt 11:27).  

This is an absolutist statement made by Jesus Christ--the mutual knowing between the Father and Son is singular and exclusive.  More than that, it is a very particular kind of knowledge, a personal acquaintance and recognition that comes about by way of a relationship.  The Father and Son are able to have this kind of relationship because they are divine Persons.  Since this 'knowing' is a loving knowing, it is correct to say that the very knowledge between the Father and Son is a substantial knowledge, namely the Holy Spirit, whom St Augustine describes as the "love between" them.

It is in this sense that we are to understand those very impolitic words of Jesus (in our prescriptively pluralist culture):

I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life; no-one comes to the Father except through Me (Jn 14:6).

Though it is possible to know something about "God" (cf Rom 1:19-20), this remains strictly within the praeambula fidei and does not count for theological faith (hence praembula).  To have faith is not to be situated with respect to God as God but, rather, to God as Father.   Being the Son, the Incarnate Word always reveals God as "Father"; were He to reveal God only as "God," Jesus would in fact be un-Sonlike.  In the above passage from Matthew 11:27, the Greek word that stands behind "to reveal [him]" means, literally, to unveil, and to unveil the Father.  Anyone can come to God; but to have God "unveiled" to us as Father comes from the absolutely unique and absolutely unrepeatable only-begotten Son of God, because only a son can know his father; a brother and a nephew cannot, and certainly not an acquaintance.

Classical doctrine refers to faith as a response to Divine Revelation; we must understand this in its most exacting sense:  theological faith re-orientates our lives to God the Father who has been revealed to us in the Person of the Incarnate Word.  As we read at the end of the Johannine Prologue,

...grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.  No-one has ever seen God; the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known [ἐξηγήσατο] (Jn 1:18).

In one of its rare translational bulls' eyes, the New American Bible translates ἐξηγήσατο as "has revealed him."  Again, the Incarnate Word does not simply reveal God, but as Son reveals the Father.  Interestingly, the Greek word ἐξηγήσατο is related to the word 'exegesis,' that discipline whereby we interpret the Bible in such a way that the text speaks for itself.  As the Father's "exegete," Jesus Christ is the only authoritative interpreter of the Father, the "interpretation" being precisely as consubstantial with us in His Incarnation to speak to us in human language and in human idiom about the Father.  More than that, the palpability of the Incarnate Word allows us to "see" the Father in the humanity of Jesus (cf Jn 14:9-10), a palpability that continues in the Church's liturgical worship.  (Which is why claiming to "know God" away from the Sacraments is eloquent nonsense.)

In His conversation with the Samaritan Woman who claimed to "worship" on Mount Gerizim, the enfleshed Son countered by concretizing the implied "God" as Father:

Woman, believe Me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father.  You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know...  But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in [S]pirit and [T]ruth, for such the Father seeks to worship him (Jn 4:21-24).

 From the vague sense of Samaritan "worship," Jesus gives crystal-clear clarity that it is the Father whom "we" worship--a subtle allusion by the Evangelist to the "Johannine community" who, in contrast to the various Torah-observant religious people, have come into a relationship with God as Father by way of "Spirit" and "Truth"--a reference to the Third and Second Persons of the Trinity, respectively, and a prolepsis of the Johannine appellation of the Holy Spirit as "Spirit of Truth" (cf Jn 14:17, 15:26, 16:13).  This is why, at John 4:24, Jesus says that "God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth"--pulling the proverbial rabbit out of the hat by relating "the Father" to the Godhead.

In the Holy Spirit

The astonishment of Jesus' resurrection was, surprisingly, insufficient to spur the Apostles to mission.  Think about it--they had seen with their own eyes that "Man of Sorrows" flogged, dragged, and crucified.  Even after the excitement of realising that Jesus was, in fact alive, some "still  doubted" even as they were worshipping Him at His Ascension (Mt 28:17).  The miracle of Easter was not enough for the Apostles; when Sts Peter and John exclaimed to the Sanhedrin, "For we cannot but speak of the things we have both seen and heard" (Acts 4:20), they were not speaking of the astonishment of Jesus' resurrection, but of that intimacy with Jesus occasioned by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.  Notice, more specifically, what the nascent Church did when they spoke in tongues, they were not preaching but, in praise and exultation, telling "the mighty works of God" (Acts 2:11).  In so doing, they were addressing the One with whom they were in relationship, and it was in overhearing in their own languages that the bystanders sought meaning to the spectacle.  Only after did St Peter preach (Acts 2:14).  The first movement resulting from baptism in the Holy Spirit, then, was a personal relationship with the Father, his Son, and their Holy Spirit.

When the Risen Lord told St Mary Magdalene not to "cling" to Him because He was "...ascending to My Father and your Father, to My God and your God" (Jn 20:17), He was not merely telling her to 'let go' but, rather, that she would be able to cling to Him even more dearly once she received the Gift of the Holy Spirit, the Gift who would bind her to Him, and from Him to the Father.  Then, and only then, would she have been able to pray the "Our Father" with any meaning.

Therefore it was only with the indwelling Holy Spirit that the Apostles were incorporated to the Body of Christ (1 Cor 12:13).  It is thus as 'co-sons in the Son' that Christ lends us His voice to call God "Abba!  Father!" (Rom 8:15-16; Gal 4:7; Eph 2:18).  To call upon God as "Father" hardly means that Christians are equipped with a newfound vocabulary--like the pagans who thought they could control the deity by using the deity's name as an incantation--but that our newfound personal relationship is such that our hearts swell to call upon the One who loves us so, like a baby's first words "mama" or "dada."

The knowledge of God afforded by the indwelling Holy Spirit is not meant to be an "epistemic" kind of knowledge, as if St Thomas Aquinas' Five Ways would be able to engender faith.  It is, rather, an intimate knowledge, concomitant with a personal relationship with the Father since Christ has granted us a share in His own Sonship:  "...and no one knows the Father except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him."  It is only in Christ that we can know the Father; outside of Christ, only "God" is known, and as an object, not a Subject, and only with respect to the attributes of the divine Essence, not as a Person who begets the Son and from whom proceeds the Holy Spirit.  As the Byzantine theologians (rightly) love to remind us, we cannot have relationships with essences, only persons.

Theological faith yields the gifts of Understanding and Knowledge, for example, the gifts which enable us to grasp the faith and to relate the world to the Triune God.  Theological charity yields the gift of Wisdom, which enables us to contemplatively gaze upon the Holy Trinity, the very thing that makes a relationship to be a relationship.  Since the Seven Gifts always appear as a cluster or a network, they are never isolated from each other, though we may be more or less adept at one gift in comparison to another.  With Fear, then, we cling to God as Father, Jesus as the Firstborn of the human race and Son of God, and the Holy Spirit who sweetly indwells us, anxious to safeguard this relationship.  The gift of Piety moves us to regard our Father lovingly and obediently and listening to the Holy Spirit remind us of what Jesus revealed of him.  Fortitude gives us a courageous heart to forsake the world and to resign from vice in order that we may "walk as He walked" (1 Jn 2:6).  Counsel enables us to supernaturally 'calculate' the best route towards our heavenly homeland, so that, ultimately, "Christ will hand over the Kingdom to God the Father" (1 Cor 15:24).  These Seven Gifts are precisely that modality whereby we may know, personally and intimately, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  "But the anointing which you received from him abides in you, and you have no need that any one should teach you; as his anointing teaches you about everything..." (1 Jn 2:27).

Theological Gnosiology

A famous theologian began his multivolume series on Catholic dogmatic theology with a treatise on "theological epistemology."  Most of the dogmatic handbooks from the Baroque period onwards spoke (rightly) of "Revelation and reason," though with an insufficient caveat emptor.  Such a schematic runs the risk of reducing God to an "object" of study with an accumulation of "dogmatic facts" and a "system" of collected truths.  I am afraid that "theological epistemology" presents a deeply problematic method, one that accounts for the open secret among many theological faculties as to why there are learned dogmaticians who have little use for prayer.  It is, I am sad to say, a 'dirty little secret' in the 'industry' of dogmatic or systematic theology.

But the New Testament hardly ever (if at all) speaks of an epistēmē tou Theou, an 'epistemic knowledge' of God.  It speaks, rather, in variants of gnṓseōs tou Theou (cf Rom 11:33; 2 Cor 4:6; Phil 3:8, &c).  It is the same word used in Matthew 11:27 above regarding the Son's "knowledge" of His Father, and vice versa.  What makes this word, γνῶσις, -εως different from ἐπιστήμη is that the former is related to γινώσκω (ginṓskō) referring to an experiential knowledge--as opposed to a logical deductive knowledge that forms "epistemology."

To "know" this table I'm sitting at is to know about its shape, colour, size, and so on.  This "knowledge" of the table is not a relationship, but a series of predicates (cf Aristotle's Ten Categories).  But we cannot know God like this, as though God were an object.  God is a communion of three Persons, each in relationship with each other, each of whom experience each other--and invite us to share in this Trinitarian communion experientially, by having a relationship with him, namely with the indwelling Holy Spirit, as co-sons in the Son, and thus empowered and invested with the right to call upon "Our Father, who art in heaven..."  To apply the Ten Categories to God without being in relationship with him would be discourtesy in its finest form, like speaking about someone as if he weren't in the room.

A Personal Relationship with the Holy Trinity

"Do you know Jesus?" is a challenging question, and as a Catholic theologian, I am troubled when Catholic believers mock our Protestant friends for asking the question.  But such mockery is a deflection tactic which, in reality, betrays the relationship with God that one is supposed to have but barely has.

It also betrays the general Catholic attitude with respect to the Mass:  "No more than an hour!"  But to be in a relationship with God means to enter into worship, and surrender to praise, and to prostrate one's self in adoration.  A distaste for liturgical worship on the part of lay believers, and a tendency to 'cut corners' with liturgical rubrics on the part of clerics, are sure signs of a relationship with God in sore shape.  So is negligence when it comes to private prayer, meditative reading of the Scriptures, and reaching out to "Christ in distressing disguise."  Even devotionalism can disguise a rather thin personal relationship with God, as if by rattling off the rosary we can distract God from the meeting of hearts we're avoiding.

I have also seen ebulliently florid addresses to God--"Most Compassionate One...the Divine Other...the Heavenly Mr Nice..."--all of which evade calling upon God as "Father" or, more recently, refraining from praying "Through Christ our Lord."  Most, if not all, of these signal a suppression of the indwelling Holy Spirit's cry to Abba, Father, a suppression which, in turn, shows a relationship with God in need of healing.  Perhaps the ultimate indicator of a lack of a personal relationship with God is refusing to surrender to the Holy Spirit's sovereignty in our lives, as if being our own masters is somehow better.

To know God, therefore, requires first the invitation of grace and, second, a response by asking our Lord Jesus Christ simply and persistently, "Jesus, show yourself to me, so that I may know the Father!"