Ideas About God
LETTER BY GRACE POUCH
A little boy asked his very pregnant mom how the new baby would come out of her tummy.
Unsure of how to answer without giving her 3‑year-old too much information, she turned the question back around and asked him, “Well, what do you think?”
He thought for a minute and then answered, “Maybe she will get a balloon and float out!”
This little boy was my husband, and the story gets dusted off at family parties every now and again because children’s imaginations can be quite entertaining.
I’m happy to report that accurate information was eventually provided, and my husband no longer believes that babies emerge via balloon tricks. Childbirth is a category of knowledge. The way babies are born isn’t something we have to perpetually wonder about, but rather an observable reality. And people’s willingness to study that reality and form accurate ideas about it can mean the difference between life and death.
As cute as a balloon narrative is, it won’t help in the real world when a baby’s safe delivery hangs on the mercy of someone knowing what to do.
Unfortunately, people tend to treat ideas about God with more of a “What do you think?” approach, as if there is no way of knowing and no right or wrong answer. (The word “answer” has even fallen out of favor because people are so allergic to the idea of treating the spiritual realm as a category of knowledge.)
“People know things over there in the shopping center, they know things at the bank, and they know things at the school…,” wrote Dallas Willard. But when it comes to ideas about God, there is often “no knowledge, just faith.” Willard goes on to explain that people mistakenly assume faith to be anti-knowledge. But faith, in Willard’s view, is trust and action on the basis of real information, which God has provided.
Helping people approach theology as a category of knowledge was a great concern for Dallas because he understood how critical our God-ideas are. Nothing has a greater impact on how we live than “what comes to our minds when we think of God.” Just consider the divergent consequences of thinking:
- that God exists or that God doesn’t exist
- that God is good or that God is not good
- that God depends only on himself to exist, or that God’s existence is somehow tied to the existence of the universe or people or something else
Accurate ideas on these questions can mean the difference between life and death — that is, a with-God life or a without-God life.
“Mental blanks and oblong blurs might enjoy some academic prestige, but they don’t serve us well as persons in the real world who are at the mercy of our ideas,” writes Michael Stewart Robb in his new book Dallas Willard on God.
Willard undertook thinking about God as one would undertake any form of research, looking for evidence in the places suited to the field of knowledge: the Bible, metaphysics, and direct encounter through prayer and interactive cooperation with God in daily life. Sure enough, inquiry into these things yields observable realities. Knowledge.
Of course there are pieces of our God-picture that will never be filled in. But it’s essential that we attend to what has been revealed so that our thinking about God does not remain blurry — or worse, full of our own inventions.
God in his wisdom has made certain parts of his nature and existence discoverable so that by knowing about him we can come to have life with him. The point of developing accurate God-ideas is to grow our desire and capacity to interact with Father, Son, and Spirit — “to pray, to worship, and also to act with him in the real world.” That’s the treasure at the heart of Jesus’ promise, “Seek and ye shall find.”
Grace Pouch
Content Manager
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LET’S DIVE IN...
CURATED BY GRACE POUCH
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1.
On Life with God, Michael Stewart Robb talks with Nathan about his new book Dallas Willard on God and his work through the Sanctus Institute to support a robust, beautiful, and growing Christian presence in Europe.
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2.
Dallas Willard explains that aligning our thinking about God and reality with the mind of Jesus Christ is essential for spiritual formation.
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3.
Understanding what God is like guides everything… especially our concept of what we should be like. Chris Webb describes our high calling to love as God loves in “To Bear the Character of God.”
– Grace
WORTH QUOTING
“We cannot, even by a miracle, believe a blank or a blur, much less act on it. There is no ‘what’ for our minds and lives to lay hold of in such a case — or it is the wrong ‘what.’ To trust in God, we need a rich and accurate way of thinking and speaking about him to guide and support our life vision and our will.”
– Dallas Willard
The Divine Conspiracy
(source)
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TO CONTEMPLATE
Detail, Madam Anna Seekamp, the Artist’s Sister
Bertha Wegmann (1881-1882)
(source)
One little wrong idea can twist my thoughts and create such a tangle. Sometimes the prospect of keeping my thinking straight is so daunting! But as I do my best to understand and apply God’s truth, I mustn’t view the task as mine alone. Dallas Willard explains: “We will be assisted by God’s grace in ways far beyond anything we can understand on our own; and the ideas and images that governed the life of Christ through his thought life will possess us.”
TO PONDER
From “Holy Communion” in Celtic Daily Prayer
Lord, unveil my eyes,
let me see You face to face:
the knowledge of Your love
as you live in me.
Lord, renew my mind
as Your will unfolds in my life,
in living every day
in the power of Your love.