Knowing With the Heart

Fourth Quarter 1999

by Lynn Boliek

Get ready for a roller coaster ride—from the axioms of science and the rules of logic to self-evident knowledge of God. This is the sweep of Roy Clouser's new book, Knowing With the Heart: Religious Experience and Belief in God (InterVarsity Press, 1999).

Perhaps surprisingly, Clouser's use of axioms and rules is not for the purpose of constructing a proof of God's existence. Rather, it is to show that knowledge of God is like the knowledge of basic axioms in the sense that it is self-evident, a starting point rather than a conclusion of reason. And its self-evidency is related to the fact that God is self-revealing and not first of all the end point of an intellectual or emotional quest by human beings. Pascal's beautiful distinction between axioms known by intuition of the heart over against reason is a theme fully developed by Clouser, a professor of philosophy at the College of New Jersey in Trenton.

Clouser begins by asking about the 'status' of that which people believe is divine. Whatever people believe has independent existence is what stands for God or the divine. In the case of dualistic beliefs, two gods may be involved. All religions are either theistic, pantheistic, or pagan. Pagan religions identify some part or aspect of created reality as divine. Pantheistic religions identify all of reality as god. Theistic religions identify God as distinct from—transcendent to—the rest of reality. Whatever is given divine status becomes the fixed point (or points) in terms of which the whole of reality is understood.

Christians should recognize that the experience of God comes not by logical proof but by self-evidently real experience with a self-revealing God. This is what the Scriptures teach and our experience confirms.

Clouser's book is an invitation to those interested in critical philosophical thinking to see the central and rightful place of worship and simple evangelism. At the same time he invites those committed to evangelical experience to understand that they have been entrusted with the foundation for a critical Christian philosophy that respects the fullness of God's creation order and the dependability of God's self-revelation.

[Dr. Boliek is a pastor (retired) in the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., and lives in Carlsbad, California.]

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From Roy Clouser's KNOWING WITH THE HEART

God is the only absolute being, the one on whom all else depends. According to Scripture, God called into existence everything found in creation with no exceptions. In that case, God is the Creator not only of every thing and every event, but also of every kind of property they have and every law that governs them. This means that God transcends time and space and is above all laws. That is not a widely held view in theology. Most theologians have found ways to understand the biblical doctrine of creation so that it doesn't regard God as the Creator of every kind of property and all laws. The reason for this is that accepting the doctrine that God created everything found in the universe means that the uncreated being of God doesn't have to have any property found in creation. This is why when Scripture says that God is personal, loving, just, forgiving, all-knowing and so on, it doesn't say he must have those characteristics to be God or that he just can't help having them. On the contrary, the doctrine that God brought into existence everything found in creation strongly suggests the reverse. So I take it that the attributes ascribed to God in Scripture, which he shares in common with creatures, are created qualities God has assumed to himself in order to relate to us.

In other words, because it is God who called these qualities into existence, we should not suppose that any of them have to be true of God's uncreated being. Nor should we suppose that any law governing creatures must apply to God. Rather, God's having the attributes he does is the result of his accommodating himself to us so as to enter into the covenant. Ditto for the way any law found in creation applies to God: he freely abides by it for the sake of relating to us. On this position, then, God became for us personal, loving wise, just, merciful and all the other attributes that constitute the nature he reveals himself to have.

The view I just described is not the prevailing view found among theologians, [but it is the view held by] the Cappadocian Fathers of the fourth century—Sts. Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa...[and by] Luther and Calvin [among others].