Wednesday, December 12, 2012

An Approach Towards Revelation

Boy I wish I had come up with this phrase.  It is from Georg Huntemann in The Other Bonhoeffer.  Everything we do as Christians must eschew the pursuit of anything but revelation from God and our acting on revelation.  If we pursue knowledge of Scripture it must be so that we can know that the revelation we think we have received is from God.  If we pursue understanding it must be so that we can understand God's revelation to us.  If we pursue a woman or a man it must be so that we can act on the revelation from God that we have received.  If we go to work it must be so that we can make money to act on God's revelation to us or to implement His revelation in that setting.  Everything must be "an approach to revelation."  Bonhoeffer was not nearly the first to embrace a "mystic" point of view by any means but he is one of the very few evangelicals who have blessed, sanctioned, taught that knowledge is not the key.  That "a Christian worldview" is not the answer to our ills both in the church and without.  He is one of the few evangelicals who not only accepts "mystery", not as an unfortunate spiritual blindness that we must try to figure out, but as a great grace.  We cannot learn enough.  We cannot understand enough.  There is no system that has God figured out.  There is no theology that is correct.  There is no "squaring" God with our understanding.  We are not equals to God and His revelation, though complete enough to get us to heaven, it does not give us a complete picture of God.  So, we must depend on revelation.  We must humble ourselves and wait on God.  We must, like Joshua, ask God for directions and then respond with a "Yes Sir," with a cavalier disregard for  Kant's "religion within reason".  Hard for westerners.  We want our relationship with God strained through the sieve of analytics so we don't do anything stupid or unseemly.  God wouldn't ask us to do anything dumb. 
Really? 
Read your Bible again more slowly. 

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