Even as a committed Christian I have problems with organized religion and church services, not Christian theology. So much of what so many ministers or priests say about God, His mind and purposes, presented as absolute truth, must be specualation or interpretation. I am convinced that they claim to know, and doubtless believe that they know, much more than they do and that God is considerably more mysterious and inexplicable than they think He is. Given the difficulty of understanding how television works, let alone Einstein's theory of relativity, it seems very unlikely that any human being, smart as the species is, can really know very much about God on his own initiative.
When a sailor in the mid-Pacific or the wayfarer in the Sahara or a tenement-dweller in New York, looks up at the sky and exclaims 'how great is God' he probably has come close to stating about all he can really know on his own, except for a few ideas originated by philosophers, about God being omnipotent, omnipresent, and all that. "Oh God, How great is thy sea and how small is my boat", the sailor's prayer, just about does it though we can embellish it a bit with the child's prayer; "Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so", which is a simple affirmation of all that may really matter in the end. How He reacts with someone else is something I probably can never know, or know completely, and may be something I couldn't understand anyway.
We can know some things about Jesus because He was here and was written about by persons in a position to know. But I submit that God the Father, the Great Spirit, the Emperor over the Sea, the ineffable Creator of the Heavens and the Earth, is beyond our intellectual capacity to know or ferret out. Didn't Jesus Himself suggest as much to Nicodemas? Speculation is all right I suppose (anyway, we will continue to do it) but it is very adviseable to recognize its limited value. Yet we can know a fair amout about Jesus Christ, His life and work, His promises and expectations. And the belief that God chose to limit Himself temporarily in order to take the form of that same Jesus, in part so that He could cause mankind to understand some things he needs to know is both reasonable and supportable by a very high level of evidence. Added to the 'leap of Faith, we begin to see the way to Salvation.
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