Face to Face, Volume Three: Sharing God’s Life

FACE to FACE

Volume three

Sharing God’s Life

Marty Folsom

Face to Face

Volume Three: Sharing God’s Life

Copyright © 2016 Marty Folsom. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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Scripture quotations taken from the New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations from THE MESSAGE. Copyright © by Eugene H. Peterson 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

Part 1: Coming to Know Persons

Chapter 1: Walking Again in the Garden with God

Chapter 2: The Act of Knowing

Part 2: Challenges to Personal Knowing

Chapter 3: Science as Faith and Faith as Science

Chapter 4: You Are Not Alone

Chapter 5: Sleight-of-Hand Thinking

Part 3: The God Who is Known

Chapter 6: Heart and Voice

Chapter 7: Kaleidoscopic Relations and the Triune God

Chapter 8: Living Into the Story of God

Chapter 9: Puzzle Pieces

Chapter 10: Final and First

Epilogue

Concluding Postscript for Agnostics

Afterword

Further Reading

Dedicated to

James B. Torrance,

who first opened the gates of heaven

that I might glimpse the face of the triune God on this earth;

and Alan Torrance,

who embodies the delight of grace in expounding theology,

fully living the pleasure of the gospel in this world.

I have studied with the father and the son,

and now live in their spirit . . .

Preface

The greatest joy in life is the fulfillment of personal relationships. This book is about discovering a personal relationship with the triune God. Because relationships shape who we are as persons, there is a feast to be enjoyed in human relations as well. Using common language and images, and explaining ideas simply, this book is intended for anyone to read.

Our discussion will take very seriously the question of how to relate to the God revealed in the Bible. Though our language is modest, its implications are deep. We will maintain an appropriate space for mystery in order to affirm hearing God’s voice so we might indwell God’s life with intimacy. This book addresses everyday people who want to live fully. Thus, it contains no philosophical arguments for God’s existence. It is not written to provide better academic language to talk about God or to describe God’s attributes and character. It will not even teach you how knowing God will make life better—except for how we are fulfilled through our most significant relationships.

I wrote this book to recover the possibility of sharing life with the wild and transforming God of the Bible revealed in Jesus Christ. We are changed when we come face-to-face with God in wide open spaces, away from the fenced places that churches can become. Wanting to find the visible God, we often hear only rumors of a separate reality where God hangs out. We must move on, from trying to know about God, to experiencing the knowing and being known that constitutes a life of shared love.

In an age of spirituality and world religions, I hope to revitalize the craft of paying attention to the God who shocked the world, specifically through the appearance of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is the voice of God, who stepped on the scene to perform surgery on the heart of humanity. He pulled the mask off abusive, binding religion and self-made spiritualities to expose the human actors at work and their destructive ends. We must still pay attention to distorted visions of God in our own time. But most significantly, Jesus reintroduced the blind world to its freeing Creator in order to facilitate a family reunion.

The one Jesus calls Father sent the Son to call God’s family home, not merely to heaven in the future, but to share a life together here on earth. This familial vision invites humans into a life of authentic relating. Thus, this book addresses relating on this side of death rather than after death. It points toward sharing God’s life within the span of our lifetime.

Jesus did not come to serve the academy, but his Father. Toward that goal, he has invited the church to be a community returned home, together extending God’s life into the world. In concert with—and as a fulfillment of—Jesus’s invitational mission, humans are intended to share God’s triune life, coming to the Father through Jesus, and walking in the Spirit. This book seeks to avoid false relations, and, most importantly, to understand the meaning of a personal relationship with God-in-three-persons.

The project of God in this world is the restoration of relationships. This book rides on that current of love that flows from God and draws us in. My primary hope is to facilitate a face-to-face gaze adequate to serve the God-human relation.

Like human relationships, growing into a mutual understanding with God has enormous complexities. At the core, we must know that we are known and loved. That is what the history of God demonstrates. For many, this is a theory to believe, but not a life to practice. Love is already there, but colored in mystery that is separated from life. We need to reenter this adventure that brings lasting joy and purpose to life.

God is on many people’s extinction list. They do not experience a personal, divine being, only religious traditions that lack a personal God. Looking around, they do not see God, and therefore conclude that God is absent. Human experience is limited, and always reasons from a narrow point of observation. This book opens entrances to know the heart of God and to share God’s family that situates our lives in the God who gives meaning to the word love.

God is not a genie who will physically appear on command. God is not part of the observable universe, although, according to the Bible, God is its Creator and Sustainer. God is personal, but exceeds the limits of existence as a physical presence available for human scrutiny. Humans are observing knowers, believing that the world is the only appropriate object for observation. That belief misses the world of the personal. For many people, God has not shown up to the party for some time, and thus appears absent. But God is a subject who both steps into history, and also functions outside history. Therefore, God cannot be reduced to an object for our laboratories. The good news is that God is personal and able to engage us as persons. We need to prepare to hear God’s voice instead of studying God’s volume, velocity, attributes, composition, or other physical properties that are often measured in the impersonal world.

Interpersonal knowing—the gist of friendship—with God is a real possibility. But the process is not obvious. Unfortunately, even with humans, we lack a clear understanding of the course of development regarding how we come to know others. We can see the objective side of humans—their bodies, but not the personal world that exists inside and between humans. Personal knowing requires methods appropriate to our personal nature. This feature of our existence is invisible to the untrained eye and ear—many feel unheard by those who are closest to them. Even more difficult is reading another’s mind, a mystery that requires suitable tools. However, knowing the heart of another is essential to fulfilling our deepest desires. That is where we are going.

Face-to-face relating does not mean to stare at another’s facial features. We see the facade, but not much beyond. Personal relating reaches for deep things. Tears and smiles begin to orient us to general conditions, but leave much unsaid about what is going on inside. The opposite is true with God. With God, we must discover the heart and purposes that begin within God’s life and extend outward. Then, by the Spirit, we are able to read God’s face as a present speaking. We come to embrace that we are known. Consequently, this book facilitates heart-knowing so that your life will be an experience of knowing the presence that abides. We cannot pursue a starting point other than the affirmation that we live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.¹ We must learn how we come to know persons, and especially the personal God made known by Jesus.

This book moves the task of theology from talking about God to letting God talk. Its orientation requires focused attention on the mystery of God displayed in Jesus—his speaking must take priority over human opinions. This is an ongoing, unfolding process of discovery. Like sitting to enjoy the mystery of friends and lovers, we need to learn to share God’s table of friendship and daily conversation.

With enthusiasm—not skepticism—we must raise the scope of our awareness regarding God’s availability for meaningful relationship. Those who believe that no one will ever love them usually have their expectations met. However, in a meaningful relationship, each person values the other and acts to engage in mutually beneficial ways. A meaningless job leaves one feeling invisible and not valued for one’s contribution. But in a meaningful marriage, both parties invest in discovering the uniqueness of each other and how to share a common life. Life with God discovers the deep source of all loving so that God’s love might irrigate all our relationships.

The meaning of life is found by locating our place within the relational networks that encircle us. To reject God is to lose touch with our context for meaning. We can choose lesser substitutes that leave us searching. But within the following pages we will hear again the meaning that God has gifted to us—the offer to share life together.

This book takes seriously the meanings of words and metaphors. When allowed to breathe, words vary their meanings within different contexts. We must learn to hear the rich diversity of challenging words like worship, covenant, and atonement, as well as everyday words like love and freedom—all exploding with newness for the purpose of entering the life of God. Metaphors can be engaged as wonderful, complex links that touch the heart. They prepare the means for attentive listening that opens the way for life to pass between us.

Sharing God’s life is a phrase that addresses who we might become when engaged with the presence of a creative, connecting, empowering God. Thus, this book addresses a central question: Who is this God, and what does it mean to have a personal relationship with this unseen being? Delightfully, in sharing God’s life, we discover how much we were missing in other relationships as well.

Relational theology, as affirmed in this book, goes back to the Bible. We discover Jesus as the fulfillment of his Father’s heart of love, rather than as the founder of a religion. We find that the Spirit was given to show us how to share God’s active, loving life today. We cannot change the past abuses in Christianity or the misreadings of the Bible, but we can learn from the errors and missed opportunities. Hearing the God of the Bible, we will find ourselves relocated from intolerant religion into relationship with the living God.

Sharing God’s life is to theology what singing is to music theory. I find that neither theology nor music theory are ends in themselves. At their best, both can unravel complex subjects for inquiring minds in order to vastly improve our practices. At their worst, they are dense and impenetrable. Our journey here will attempt to dispel the fog and clarify the landscape as light dawns on the field of our relations.

This third book is longer than the first two in my Face to Face series; it takes on the most important connection in life. The first book discussed our disconnection, both from God and within our human relationships. The second book focused on our human life in reconnection with each other and with God. This present volume takes on the complexities of a whole life of relating with God in intimate connection. It draws from theologians and philosophers, but tries to mostly leave their complex conversations in the kitchen in order to serve you a meal that is tasteful, nutritious, and provides a relationally transforming experience. Enjoy the meal, but do not eat too fast.

This invitation to share God’s life is intended to move the sphere of your daily life into God’s. It is practicable theology, recognizing that you are not alone. God is present with you, and you can join in what God is doing. This book is not a call to do mission projects. It does not want you to merely speak an occasional kind word. Rather, you must learn to look through the eyes of Jesus, hear his Abba’s heart, and be empowered by his Spirit to sing the song that concretely lives God’s life through you, within your context. You have been adopted into a family in which you can be nurtured, and subsequently care for others.

This is intended to be a healing book. Many have been damaged by those who force God on them. God has been used to justify a myriad of crusades that are an affront to human dignity and violate the exercise of love. But healing comes as we listen to the God revealed in Jesus; listening facilitates a healing reunion for estranged humans. God has been questing after us for a long time. Stories that present God in other ways have been tragic, based on misunderstandings. The day has dawned in which we may discover that human health comes when the door between us is flung wide and we begin sharing the triune God’s life. This book is a long walk from the front porch, or wherever you are, into God’s family room.

1. Matthew

4

:

4

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Introduction

This book is not so much an argument as an invitation. This invitation is not from me, but from the triune God. I will help you hear the invitation to personal knowing—issued from the one who has preceded all human attempts to find God.

The course we will travel assumes that humans were created to enter into dialog with the self-revealing God. In response to God’s initiative, we are intended to develop as knowing beings. In varying degrees, we discover the meaning of our lives within the mystery of connection we call personal relationship. Everyone enters this field of persons, which we experience as the human network of relating. But not all discover the larger field of God’s life of relating. That discovery is the goal of this book.

In this book you will learn to enter the life of others while respecting their mystery. We cannot master a complete knowledge of another person any more than snorkeling allows us to grasp the whole of the sea. However, we can dive into the process of coming to know in personal ways. We can learn to discern the problems that hinder personal knowing. We can make great strides toward knowing and being known in a manner appropriate to persons—especially God—who intend to share a life of love.

I am a theologian, which means that I am one who helps humans hear God’s voice addressing them and learn how to live in loving response. I trained for twenty years through higher education. But I have also worked on staff in five churches, so I care for these diverse communities that serve as family. I have been a marriage and family therapist for over fifteen years, so I engage people right where they struggle or succeed. My goal is to be more like a specialist in relationships than a philosopher or lecturer.

I affirm that God provides our understanding for relating. The theological claims I will make need to subsequently marinate through all aspects of our lives. Good theology is practical and changes our lives.

Theology is most enjoyable for me when done in a restaurant, coffee shop, garden, or around a table at home. The best companions are those who have a child-like wonder and a thirst for wisdom. For these friends, discovery is more important than deciding who is right. God’s friendship, expressed through Jesus, extends in the practice of spending time with sinners, tax collectors, and confused disciples. This book engages with seekers of all kinds who prefer a meaningful journey over the rat race that strains our cultures.

Read this book as an artful science of relating to God. But the method of investigation must fit the subject we are to comprehend—interaction with a living personal God. We will pursue the kind of science that investigates persons in their natural habitats. We will not study God or humans under a microscope. We need a science that engages the study of persons, not just bodies. And it must be artful enough to capture our imaginations in order to revision our lives.

Our investigation harnesses science to help us become world whisperers, capable of listening to both impersonal and personal elements, and consequently living in a care-filled partnership. Not attending to our personal relations with God and other persons leads to fragmentation and alienation.² This has increasingly tragic consequences.

The science we will pursue engages the uniquenesses as well as the generalities in the world; we cannot neglect the miracle, the exceptional, or the single occurrence of anything or anyone. We must value the particularity of each person, for we are all different. You are human—that is general. But you have an unrepeatable story—that is distinct. We must learn to understand both.

Any proper study of theology must recognize that God is both infinitely different from us, and yet intimately related to us as our Creator. God relates to the whole of the world in general; the orderliness of the universe makes science possible. However, God is a specific, distinct being who cannot be reduced to human generalities—the artist is always different from their art. In our study, we will aim at enlarging our view of science. We will quest to attune our understanding to the nature of either who or what is studied; that is a full-bodied science.

This book invites you to see life as a field trip—to live in the wonder of all God is and has—for us and with us, and to see the world through God’s eyes, and finally, to act collaboratively. This is not an escape from human existence; it is to live fully as humans with the God who created us.

All human knowledge is the work of humans; and it is all acquired knowledge. We reflect on what we encounter. Rain teaches us about rain as we observe its characteristics. Some elements—like air—are more difficult to study because they are harder to see. The study of persons falls into this category. When we come as those willing to be taught, we pursue reality to be transformed. What varies is the focus of what or whom we study. God is hard to see; but, contrary to air, God has spoken.

By definition, science is always imperfect and open for progress in understanding. This book contends that science needs to expand its boundaries of study from the physical world to include the personal. Traditional science has drawn a line—it will not investigate where it cannot achieve certainty in its findings. What does this leave out? It excludes the whole dimension of personal relating. As humans, scientists propose, we can be studied as physical objects, but not as personal subjects. Additionally, the whole spiritual world—including God—is excluded from study, even though the great universities of both Europe and the United States were founded upon theology as the queen of the sciences.

We need to continue with a more insightful scientific quest, recognizing that many experiences are open to a confident knowledge that is not absolute. The questions are too important to ignore; foremost among these is how to achieve healthy personal relations. We cannot achieve certainty or perfection, but we can build confidence and trust. Confidence, as we will use the term in this book, is faith placed in a person, along with all the dynamics that go with that relation. This confidence is contrasted with certainty, which attempts impersonal absoluteness.³ If life is meaningful, searching for whom we might have confidence in will ground our meaning in our search for personal assurance to guide the way. We don’t need as our gatekeepers scientists who study only sterile objects and not living persons, and who prefer to warn us of life’s uncertainties while living in sterility. Instead, we need trustworthy guides. Science cannot give us all the answers we need. But it can tell us about the things of which we can be relatively certain. My point is—that is not enough.

For too long we have neglected the fact that all scientists follow a philosophy that guides their tasks. We have been negligent in asking the question as to what guides each scientist. But each investigation in science is the result of a choice to select some things to study, and—partly unintentionally—to exclude a vast amount of what constitutes human life. This blind spot is the Achilles’ heel of modern science. Science is so certain of its methods and findings that it has not questioned the consequences of ignoring what it is missing.

If we invested as much in communication skills, conflict resolution, forgiveness, and cooperation as we invest in STEM education or our military, what would the world look like?

We need to learn how to understand each other and the mystery of thought and emotion that pervades our lives. Understanding history’s complexities and how they shape our belief systems is vital. We need to understand the nature of religious beliefs and patterns that shape human communities. Some of our defaults in thinking are dangerous, like separating the spiritual from the material aspects of life. Science does not address even a fraction of the many realities that pertain to daily existence. A larger vista point could change everything.

The starting point for understanding the universe is the God, revealed in Jesus Christ, who made it all. This standpoint does not require throwing out science, but it necessitates rethinking what a complete education requires. Christians especially need to have confidence in the God who pursues us, and to discover how we are to be stewards in the whole of the world, not just the spiritual.

And non-Christians, I hope you will see that all who claim to be speaking for the Christian God need to be assessed and corrected. Just like the scientific community, clear accountability and scrutiny is also necessary to confirm the reliability of their claims. Even as non-Christians, you can overtly ask Christians to be more like the God revealed in Jesus. This will serve the world better than criticism ever could. Christians also need to understand and accept non-Christians, learning how to love them as neighbors—as God has already done in Christ.

In this book, I intentionally try not to repeat traditional theology, but I am not throwing out the old discussions. Rather, I attempt to find new lenses to translate the thrust of ancient truth applied to today’s setting. I do not discuss many of the classical doctrines that easily become philosophical and abstract. I do constantly refer to God in the manner in which God is addressed in the Bible.

The writings of the Bible suggest that twenty-first-century readers ought to hear and obey God, but in a setting very different from the original. Our cultural lenses need to be shifted. The heart of God still addresses human persons, but as those whose cultures morphed over two thousand years. It is very possible that our modern renderings have gone astray with regard to personal relationships.

I will try to clarify the meaning of personal relating in the biblical world without the domination of Greek and Roman modes of thinking. If we trace the lineage of our thinking back to its roots, we realize that, without knowing it, we are still Roman at heart and Greek in our thinking. Additionally, we ought to not miss how these cultural impacts shaped the lens called the Enlightenment, when humans threw God out of intellectual discussions and made humans the measure of truth. Elevating individual humans stunted our growth in the pursuit of relations. The result of this slight shift of the attention-directing spotlight was a huge loss in our understanding of being human.

In the centuries since then, the world has become increasingly complex. In a changing world dominated by politics, economics, science, and media presenting the truth, we have lost an understanding of our place in the world. It is hard to decipher what it means to be a person, or to live a meaningful life; we have lost our point of reference to address these issues. Who we are is too easily reduced to fitting into a political camp, an economic class, an educated level, or aligning with a network news channel we love or hate. We are generally blind to what this has cost us in our experience as persons, and what is lost in human relating.

In the quest to be relevant to our time, we allowed God to fade in our rear-view mirror. We zealously raced into the future with an information-saturated, meaning-starved humanity, trying to find an oasis of hope in the mounding sands of cultural artifacts and distractions that flow around us. We are lonely, and too busy to care or repair.

My story is a dynamic element of this book. I want you to let me guide you in discovery, helping you find the goal the Bible intends—a life immersed in knowing and being known by the loving God revealed in Jesus—and to find meaningful wholeness there. This strategy allows you to observe the unfolding of relational theology as it has integrated with my life, and explore how it might permeate yours.

This third book in the Face to Face series is most overtly about God. We will discover that God loves humans—that is part of God’s identity. Thus, the flow of chapters is about the relation between God and humanity, not describing God or defining the human. As our voyage progresses, we must keep our eyes on God and humanity in relation. It is an illusion to think that either exists apart from the other. There is only a God who loves humanity. There is only a humanity that is the object of God’s love. Too long have we conceived of a distant deity who, most people think, has abandoned us. But we have neglected God. Tragically, we have regarded human life as adequate without God. It is past time to dispel those myths.

Evangelicals are famous for proposing that one have a personal relationship with God, especially Jesus. What that means is not clear. What we get from school or family seldom helps to achieve clarity. Even lifetime Christians cannot always articulate what a personal relation with the triune God might look like. Some are content with only Jesus. Some flock to the Spirit. Many collapse the Father into a generic God out there. Few follow the Jesus of the Bible to know his Father and, by the Holy Spirit, come to find the Abba of Jesus. But that is what the Bible envisions for us. The personal life presented is one of participation between persons. Discovering the joy of a personal God—and learning to share life together—is critical for human flourishing. This goal of connecting with the initiating God has shaped the course of my life’s quest. In the insights that follow, I hope to make a contribution to humanity in general, but especially the church—those intended to share the triune God’s mission in the world. We are not just called to save people from their hellish existence; we join in the task of introducing them to the heaven in our midst that is personal—knowing daily the God who made and loves us.

There are three major parts in this book. The first discusses how we come to know persons in a life-long process and in our moment-by-moment acts of knowing others. The second part engages the challenging and misguided paths that contest or confuse our knowing of God personally. The final and longest part delves into the process and practices of sharing God’s life. Don’t miss the Epilogue to walk through a labyrinth that maps a kind of whole life walk, indwelling the presence of the three-personed God.

This book is not a novel to rush through; it is more of a mini-series to engage, ponder, reengage, and assimilate. There is a logical progression to these chapters, and each chapter is rich enough to be a book in itself. Don’t rush—instead, relish and reflect. The book is meant to be chewed and savored, not swallowed whole. Read with a ready marker in hand. Devouring entire chapters at one sitting may be too big of a mouthful. Read a subsection within a chapter and muse over until it becomes music to your soul.

In chapter 1, I will prepare you to recognize the personal practice of knowing that I refer to as a face-to-face relationship. In our human experience, we all begin as agnostics with regard to God. This is due to an ancient loss of relation with God, a loss of which we are unaware. The story of the Bible begins with humans walking in the garden with God in a state of companionship and connection—that was God’s intention. However, the desire to "know like God" led to a fracturing of the God-human relation.⁴ That grasp at knowledge as power is a problem still at work in our breakdowns in human relating. Tragically, the intimate kind of knowing—that could flow between persons through mutual self-giving—was lost. Consequently, all humans must now go through a long process of intertwining our lives with others before we can become who we are to be as relational beings instead of solitary souls. This linking is not an individual task. We grow together—both into the network of human relations and with God. This chapter is a familiarizing tour through the process of becoming attuned to our personal context—similar to tuning in music—to share its joyful harmonies. To share God’s life, we must each become attuned as God’s companion.

In chapter 2, we look closely at our in the moment experience of knowing the world and others. Knowing is not just about our five senses working; they are necessary, but inadequate for personal connection, although they connect us with our surroundings.⁵ Knowing is far more personal and complex than we realize. By carefully unpacking our experiences, we realize that within each knowing act there are many layers at work in our perceiving and interpreting. These include seasons-of-our-life experiences that deepen our understanding. We have also developed unique skills—such as in school and parenting—through which we read our world and relationships. For complex reasons, we value certain persons, selecting them for deeper connection as a layer to safely surround us. We deselect many more influences as we discern who will be our partners and friends, based on what they might add to our life. This merging process is the leading edge in our growth as persons, finally fulfilled in the nurtured interplay of life together. To enter God’s grace is to come into this interchanging dialog with Jesus, growing to discover God’s gift of an unexpected shared life. God works through our many layers of learning to link our lives together. Our task is to learn to perceive God as the context of knowing in our present moments.

Chapter 3 envisions a meaningful collaboration between the human enterprises of faith and science. Rather than being competitors, both may inform us in investigating the world. Unfortunately, their competition for control leads to a fracturing of humanity.⁶ People feel they must side with either science or religion. We must expand the scope of human understanding in order to reconcile all the human disciplines to serve God and human thriving. We need both faithful science and thoughtful faith. Our central concern must be the regeneration of human community within the Creator’s world. This is an investment in stewardship to value and care for our future lives together. To appropriately achieve this collaboration, we must begin with God—rather than the biased selectivity of human concerns. Our goal is to share God’s science in this mission—knowing and loving the world as God does.

God does not make God’s self known through physical presence today, so chapter 4 deals with how we comprehend God’s presence, even when bodily absent. God promises to be present; we must learn to live with God’s invisible presence. God became tangibly present in the history of Jesus. At the end of Jesus’s ministry on earth, he took up residence in heaven. He now cares for us and lives with us by his Spirit, though not visibly. Visual perception is only part of knowing persons. To penetrate into sharing life with God and one another, we need new skills. We still occupy God’s history, but need to awaken to our place within it. In order to satisfy the yearning of our souls for relationship, our conceptions of personal presence must go beyond physical presence.

Chapter 5 helps discern pitfalls in personal knowing. It makes clear those approaches in which many are led astray in their pursuit of knowing God. When making claims about God, many presentations fool us. Distracting elements enter the process—sleight-of-hand movements veil certain clues while attempting to make other points appear obvious. For example, anyone who begins a sentence with, If God is good, . . . is not talking about God; instead, they are essentially assuming human ideas of goodness, and seeing if God matches those ideas. The human assumption of goodness is slipped in, and God is judged by that standard.

But in order to actually know another person, we need to discern how we can appropriately attain our beliefs about other persons. Pitfalls like gossip and biased attitudes result in unfavorable reports, and are a constant threat to building healthy relationships. We need to appropriately learn by letting the other inform us. Inappropriate learning simply caricatures the other, rather than listening to them. Our questions will engage ways to know God truthfully. If our understanding of God comes only through the lenses of our needs and desires—the God who is only there to answer our prayers—we are likely to be distracted from authentic relationship with God. Thus, our task will be to distinguish what humans project onto God from what God says so that we can pursue the possibility of a genuine relationship.

In this book, I assert that God wants to speak with us, but we must learn to hear God’s heart and voice. In chapter 6, we will focus on learning to hear God’s address to us. To tune in to God’s wavelength, we must study what is meant by voice and heart. Once we hear the heart from which God’s actions and speech are motivated, we can enter into dialog. All meaningful expressions of face-to-face relating—both divine and human—utilize these skills of deep listening. We must learn to enter these heartfelt interactions that facilitate relationships with God and one another.

In chapter 7, we rediscover how language facilitates knowing as we enter the world of another. Language is so second nature to us that we forget how it works. Language does not just name the world; it also enables our relationship with the world. Words do not just label objects and actions; they are verbal tools in a constantly flexible game. Words form conversations that facilitate our interactions with the actualities we encounter—especially persons. Like any sport, engaging in dialog requires players and practiced skills. Communication requires just such a process in order to connect meaningfully with other persons. We will pay special attention to metaphor—using visual phrases and images to bridge between us. Like few other tools, these word pictures help to accomplish the goal of insightfully knowing other persons. To know the mysterious God in our space and time, we need creative language. We also need to discover how the meanings of words derive from God’s life. When we let God inform our God-talk, we can see how metaphorical images attune us to see and hear God anew. With appropriate listening, we can know God personally. We must move beyond impersonal metaphors commonly used to describe God. Instead, we must discover interactive images that allow God’s mystery to unfold and draw us in, heart-to-heart.

Chapter 8 orients us to see that our life is best understood within the story of God’s life engaging humanity. Meaning always comes from discovering bigger contexts. The majority of Christian teaching focuses on what we are to do and be. Therefore, we miss what God has done and is doing. We miss God’s faithfulness to God’s promises. However, God’s covenant of love sets both the background and foreground for understanding the life of Jesus, who appeared in order to bring us into an attuned life of covenant relating. We live storied lives, but need to see our story once again reset in its original context in God’s story.

Having discovered our place in the history of God, we turn to see God as our original family of origin. Our human families are echoes sourced from God’s familial life. As the biblical story tells us, we have been dislocated from our true family home.⁷ Thus, re-entering our shared family life with God is the thrust of chapter 9. The Father, Son, and Spirit created us to live within their family. That divine family contextualizes, permeates, and transforms our human relating whenever they enlighten our encounters. We will distinguish that being a Christian is not merely a choice, a self-guided practice, or affirming a set of beliefs, but a free response to what is already given—living as children who are loved and belong in God’s family. This does involve believing, making choices, and following practices, but these are not self-determined. Rather, we find that love awakens and motivates a free lifestyle in response. The joy of this beloved connection with God consequently transforms our nature. Hence, the gift of love in this relationship inspires love toward others that shapes our practices.

Chapter 10 is an adventuring glimpse into God’s future, which is mostly unknown. But it is a mystery, not a blind alley; it is a known path with a guide who is wise in traversing its challenging terrain. We know with whom we go, and thus we proceed with eagerness. From this partnership with God, we learn to progress imaginatively—building faith as we discover hope in God’s dynamic faithful love, face-to-face.

Our conversation concludes with a postscript addressed to open agnostics. No one is completely agnostic; we all believe things about the world and our place in it—everyone is a believer. The question is, Whom do we trust? This is one last conversation to consider why an agnostic might believe—not in Christianity, but in the God who will not stop loving us.

The future of both the world and the church is changing. Generations who walked with God are dwindling, and the organized church in the Western world is afraid to lose what it gained in glorious days gone by. New generations prefer their agnosticism and self-empowerment. Most people are afraid to let God personally lead the way to the healing of the nations and of human persons. That bad news need not define us.

The relational revolution I advocate is about moving beyond generations of power struggles. We need to live out of the good news of what God has done and is doing. Our new agenda must be to invest in personal relations as gifted by God. Only when we learn to respond appropriately to those who shape our lives—especially the living God—can we begin to experience the restoration of all things. The church must stop trying to control and clean up the world. We cannot trust politics, economics, or the military to save the world. Only as we begin to share God’s life in simple enjoyment and service as a community will change occur.

This book invites you to contribute to this conversation by becoming attuned to God’s life and sharing its delight . . .

2. Gunton, Enlightenment and Alienation.

3. See Newbigin, Proper Confidence.

4. For more on the fracturing life between God and humanity that ripples out into all our relationships, see Folsom, Face to Face: Missing Love, Volume

1

.

5. Leithart, Traces of the Trinity, chapter

1

.

6. Turner, The Roots of Science.

7. Genesis

3

.

Part 1

Coming to Know Persons

The two chapters in this section help us to understand what knowing persons means.

First, knowing is a growing in relation to the world and others. It is critical that we understand the process through which all of us must pass to become personal knowers. Otherwise, we will think we are separated, individuals who observe the world instead of living in relation to it and to other persons.

All knowing is focused in the present while rooted in past experience. The second chapter investigates the act of knowing in our present experience to see both its complexities and its possibilities. Lacking an ability to discern, we think we know in the moment, through our senses instead of recognizing all the layers of our past as larger contexts that shape our present knowing.

Chapter 1

Walking Again in the Garden with God

Growing apart doesn’t change the fact that for a long time we grew side by side; our roots will always be tangled. I’m glad for that.

—Ally Condie

I am convinced that most people do not grow up . . . We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are still innocent and shy as magnolias.

—Maya Angelou

Growing up is hard, love. Otherwise everyone would do it.

—Kim Harrison

Growing in Knowing

Something new is already present with us, but we are blind. We do not know how unaware we are of what is around us. We have been taught to be observers of the world, but unfortunately, we have not been taught to be engaged in knowing relationships with the world and with other persons—especially God.

Despite our conditioning to the contrary, wonder still nudges us to open even more to the mystery of living a meaningful life in a society that is addicted to money and busyness. The bottom line for personal fulfilment is not summed up in numbers—how much income we can make or the size of the crowd that shows up for our life events. Rather, it is found in devoting ourselves to knowing and playing with significant others who will align with us during the course of our lifetime. But we must grow into this adventure.

We are all born agnostics. Agnostic means not knowing. I am agnostic about the location of the edge of the universe and millions of other things I will never know. We think agnostics are those who don’t know whether God exists, but we all begin life needing to discover everything. This book focuses on one significant quest—finding God, who already knows us—in order to live in a sustainable personal relationship with the triune God.

On the day of her high school graduation, my daughter shared with me that she considered herself agnostic because she could not necessarily see God in the world around her. If God is not self-evident, then it is easy to say, I do not know if God exists. I understand this admission. But when we work solely from our own resources, bereft of the understanding we discover when relating with the living God, we miss much in all our relationships.

I am grateful for my daughter’s honesty, for I know that God loves her no matter what. The fact that she could be open was a gift to me; allowing herself to be known created a moment to be cherished. Now I can stay in a conversation to keep current in knowing her. This conversation would otherwise be as hidden as the God she cannot see. That day’s conversation sparked the writing of this book—to enable knowing God in an agnostic world. My goal is to create space for personal communion and connection with God and others—space that transforms how we live in relation to what surrounds us.

Look at the room or space you occupy, and notice if there are people near you. Upon observing them, you might be able to name those who are included in your personal theater. But do you really know those persons in this moment? Do you understand the complex interactions at play in their lives? Can a person fully know about all the forces at work right outside their door—including the ecosystems, cultural issues, or their place in history? All these elements could be known if we had interpreters for each of these realms to lead us into insight like tour guides at an art museum. But who can help us to see the invisible God? And is God just an object in the world, to be known like any other thing, or is God a personal being? Distinguishing between these possibilities is critical. We know objects by observation. But we know persons by interacting in ways appropriate to personal relationships.

My journey to discover the personal life began in a home that was overtly Christian. During my teenage years, my father converted out of Christianity, but my mother’s sustaining, simple faith nurtured my experience of faith in God as she cared for me. At the time, science and faith looked like two roads separating toward different destinations; it appeared that I must either choose between them or be torn asunder—doing the splits with one foot going down each road. The tension experienced in this dilemma of choosing between science and faith can distract to the extent that personally knowing God fades from one’s attention. Many resolve this tension by leaving God in order to pursue the reasonable life. However, God invites humans to a different kind of reasoning¹ that lives from loving attunement to the other in the world, rather than out of our usual reasoning that operates from amassed information and mental arguments.

Before we begin knowing God face-to-face, we need to understand how we become knowers of persons in this world. We must encounter persons as those who are to be known personally, and not merely as objects. In this section, we will explore five phases in the process of becoming knowers of persons.

The word science can simply mean sensing or knowing. This definition is key because, unfortunately, some have limited science, making it an advanced skill for specialists rather than a whole life of learning from cradle to grave intended for all of us. It would be more helpful to see that science is involved even in unassuming acts in the early stages of life’s journey, as a child learns the dance betwixt experiences of hot and cold, gentle and rough, and like distinctions in an ongoing game of recognizing differences. Science involves building an understanding of our relationship with the world. Eventually, science needs to embrace the personal world as well.

Over time, this learning process becomes more complex as knowing becomes a task of spotting subtle variances between every little thing, then naming them to remember the differences. Milk is distinguished from water or juice, and we choose what we desire. Personal preference is a form of a developing science that serves us so that we can reenact our pleasurable experiences and avoid regrettable ones.

Further, once we notice that wet is different from dry, we are able to relate to an object in ways that are appropriate to it. When the paint is dry, we can touch the picture without messing it up. We learn to relate to paint in all its states. Worthwhile learning helps nurture respect for our embeddedness in our particular place and time.² This intentional engagement in real time is to be preferred over amassing disconnected memorized facts that we store in the abstractions of our minds.

Science can be understood as the accumulation of all human observation harvested as we take part in life. As Homo sapiens, we distinguish things and processes, and then place what can be known into an organized body of facts. We are always learning. Using the scientific method, the fields of modern science restrict one’s focus because they admit only reproducible knowledge gained about objects. I value what science can certify, but I question what it may exclude. Its narrow focus does not help us connect with all the parts of life we need to engage. And it should not be the domain of only the few, or of only the specialist. A richer science could be a process of learning for all, serving all life—meaning all our relations.

Babies are scientists in action. They sample everything within reach to see how they like it, whether it fits in their mouth, tastes good, or gets them into trouble. With helpful tools from our parents, as infants we begin our long pilgrimage to discover the world. That is the first phase of our journey—or so we think.

Incarnation

From our inception, we are formed in an environment in which we do not create ourselves;³ each of us is the result of the actions of others who created us by coming together. Our conception is a beginning that takes two to create a third. This initiation is our incarnation⁴ as we become flesh like others in our world. For about nine months we are sustained, nourished as a gift by one whom we do not and cannot know intellectually, but whom we know intimately. It is important to note that human knowing is more comprehensive than merely remembering or having conscious awareness; it is the whole process of being attuned to what is other than ourselves. Growing in complex ways prepares us for our next steps in being able to function in the world. At this point, knowing is an immediate participation inside another’s life and physical structure. But our existence is already recognized by trained knowers—medical professionals and mother—who anticipate the next phase in our knowing process.

While in our mother’s belly, each of us is blind to the one who sustains us. We all come from the field of the womb—a personal place to which we cannot return.⁵ We have no recollection of that time, but we cannot deny its happening. Inside this nurturing field, we respond to music, to vibrations, to what our mother consumes, to whatever activity intersects us. Our use of the term knowing becomes richer when it includes this developing conscious awareness that is too dim to remember, but is at the roots of our capacity to know. But inside our mother we are agnostic in the practical sense: We do not know God, the world outside, or our mother who carries us.

I cannot remember my mother’s womb, where I became a membered being who was human and precious. I did not know it then, but I have confidence—not certainty—that I was known and loved.⁶ I discovered I was being known through sharing life with Mom, with myself as purely recipient at the start. Developing as a knower in an another knows me environment is also a necessary component in relating with my family and God. In the composition process of our formation, we develop a formative knowledge. In the same way that music begins with a process of tuning in preparation to play with others, we are also passively shaped to enter a resounding, interactive world.

The fact that we all begin life as agnostics is only one side of the coin of not knowing. The other side is that we are known. Even as not-knowers, we are recognized and valued. This reality of a loving presence—called mom or dad, or some other caregiver—sustains our development as persons.

God is at work in our mother’s womb, although we do not remember or recognize God in our frame of reference.⁷ We are woven by God into beings created for relationship. In the same way that we cannot go back to the garden of Eden—we are blind to its form of existence—we must recognize that we came from somewhere, or even someone—our place of origination. Our existence is not mere chance; we are the result of God’s action in a personal universe.⁸

Re-creation

In the next step to knowing—our birth—we enter the world. We are born with a first giant gasp of breath and an incomprehensible dawning of new awareness. Every human birth is a re-creation that specifically reenacts Adam’s animation in our own history, vivified in body and spirit as intended by God.⁹ Entering as persons into the created world, we blurredly meet the others who brought us into existence. Each of us enters the world as a fresh being. Although humans have been around a long time—for the world is ancient—we reenact the beginning of life. We arrive to share our short stretch in the impressive story of humanity’s history.

We enter the world inexperienced, naive in every way. Our attention is suddenly seized by the whirl of sensate experiences in the fresh air, bursting forth into new kinds of interaction. Being dependents, we are sustained all the while. We could not survive alone.

So continues our long journey of becoming attuned to the complex world, driven in part by instinct and in part by interaction. This interface with the world tunes our sensibilities as we become familiar with our environment. We begin to recognize the musical quality of voices that become familiar and hopefully desirable. Developing a sensible knowledge of the world, we learn from all that our senses take in and habituate within.

A key component of this process is our attachment to other loving beings—usually parents—but at this point these connections cannot be our logical choice. Logic is a secondary capacity that develops as we grow. Once we have been fed by breast, bottle, and eventually by spooned baby food, it is logical for us to know our source of nourishment. Logic develops as we learn to distinguish through the experience of being provided for. In this phase of life, we are coming to know as we touch and are touched in our emerging development. We are dependents unleashed into the field of creation, fed by and responding to other persons. If they are harsh or resistant toward us, our patterns of attachment will be negatively impacted.¹⁰

Like sedimentary rock formed over time, knowing is layered into the results we call knowledge, as well as observed in the exposed layer—the coming to know of our present moment. But the process of coming to know is forgotten. Memory fails us in re-cognizing all the instances of touching and wondering retained within us. Eventually, we come to know the world’s contents through books or another’s reports, losing touch with our firsthand experience of our environment. Growing older, many become more constrained by schedules and electronic screens, losing the play that connects them to the tangible world as they live in cyberspace—a digitized layer of knowing.

Children at play are the most involved learners. But adults are forever on a slimming diet, yielding to the demanding priorities of life’s everyday jobs. For us grownups, the world becomes a separated object, a playground intended only for others with time and energy, while we stay focused on our priorities; our knowledge narrows like squinting eyes. So much of what is right around us is missed. The fortunate have others who give them eyes to awaken wonder again: grandparents, teachers, biologists, librarians, or historians. Each of these guides shows us more of the unseen or forgotten. However, when we understand the expansive world of people and things, we become attached to them, one encounter at a time. Knowing connects us to our time, place, and people.

In the garden of Eden, God whispered a word, and life came into being. Creation was a life-giving gift. When the paradise called Eden was created, and the earth developed as a garden planet, God already knew there would eventually be a partner fitted to that place. This garden was where God would be hospitable with created covenant companions Adam and Eve, who were fashioned to respond in love. They were correspondingly made in the image of God as male and female, a complementary pair.¹¹ Each needed the other to touch, to know, and to share a life with God. The couple was filled with wonder and attunement toward the world and each other.

Even naming the animals was an act of knowing the other. Naming was not to create categories. The naming process in Eden was an act of coming to personal knowledge. Names acted as a bridge enabling Adam and Eve to relate to their world by encounter and reflection: Meet an animal (encounter), and name it (reflection). Knowing through naming forms attachment. When you name your pet, it is more truly yours.

God sustained life in the garden. Not all could understand this provision; even Adam and Eve were given instructions on what they could eat. The key thing about the garden was that humans met their maker. From the day they were created, they were equipped to walk with God. Belonging was nourished through a sustaining attachment of love.¹² This crafting of suitability did not set a limitation on knowing the world; they were free to explore and learn. The plan was that they would know God and enjoy the world with wonder.

God’s only exclusion from the menu was the fruit from one tree; eating from that tree would break their relationship. Humans thus separated from God would become judges of what is good and evil, fracturing their relationships.¹³ To the modern individualist, this capacity to judge may feel like progress, but in reality it was a loss of shared community.

In the beginning, knowing was solely wonder, enjoyment, and connection with the world and God. Tragically, what followed was a self-serving kind of knowing: judging, controlling, and standing over the world as master and dictator—knowledge as an act of domination. This sounded the death rattle of healthy relations. Separated by our own self-interest from the person who is the source of life, humans lost the posture of standing-under—or with—the world in mutual under-standing. Peace in the world can only return once we regain the shared respect that was present in the beginning. Harmony was lost. However, it can be re-found from the same source that fashioned it.

I cannot remember my birth. I do have dawning memories of riding a tricycle, my sister taking my hand on the first day of kindergarten to walk me into school, and the pain of stepping on a nail. Several times over the years, I dreamed that a genie poked me in my foot. My body still remembers this resurfacing memory sourced