God reveals himself to us (1)

Fr Ian reflects on one of the foundations of Christian spiritual life: that the God we are called to know and love has not left us in ignorance about who he is and what he's like, but has revealed his nature and character to us. 

Mark 12: 28–30.

And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, ‘Which commandment is the first of all?’ Jesus answered, ‘The first is, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength”...’.

I think these verses from Saint Mark’s gospel, where Jesus talks about a wholehearted, all-encompassing love towards God as the first or greatest commandment, get to the heart of what we, as Christians, mean when we use the expression ‘the spiritual life’.

Men and women who have no belief in God sometimes object to the fact that religious-minded people have monopolised the expression ‘spiritual life’, or ‘spirituality’, whereas they argue that their lives also have a spiritual dimension - their philosophical reflections, their appreciation of art and music and literature and so on, none of which depends on belief in God.

There’s no reason for us to deny other people the use of the word ‘spiritual’ to refer to those aspects of their activities, if that’s the word they want to use!

But for our purposes, which is mainly a shared reflection among fellow-Christians, I would suggest that fundamentally what we mean, and what the Christian Tradition means, when we talk about ‘the spiritual life’ is our person-to-person relationship with God, with all the ramifications that having a personal relationship with God brings.

We can’t aim for a remote acquaintanceship with God, something we hardly spend time or attention or effort on. We can’t claim to be followers of Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son of God and Saviour, but then in reality treat Christ like a stranger, giving him an occasional nod as we expend all our energies in pursuit of other goals.

Jesus’ answer to the question, ‘Which commandment is the first of all?’ tells us the opposite: that our relationship with God - the relationship with God that we have to aim for throughout the whole course of our life - is a deep, intimate friendship that encompasses every aspect of our being: intellect, emotions, appetite, will, energy; and it has to be a relationship around which every aspect of our life increasingly revolves. Even our closest human relationships aren’t an end in themselves. God always has to be at the centre, guiding our thoughts, words and deeds and all our dealings with each other.

Three central questions

Obviously, to love God in the wholehearted, all-encompassing way that Jesus talks about, we need to know him, and know him well. We can understand this easily by comparing our relationship with God with the pattern of our ordinary human relationships.

We need to know who God is, what he’s like, and what, if anything, he asks of us. In fact I would suggest that it would be a valuable exercise for each of us to put some time aside to meditate on those three questions as they apply to ourselves personally: for me who is God? What is he like in my experience? What, if anything, is he asking of me?

It’s instructive to think of the answers we might give if someone put us on the spot and asked us those three questions.

In its consideration of these questions the Catholic religion has always maintained that we human beings can begin to know God through the exercise of our minds, or by the use of our human reason, even without an attitude of religious faith, without the gift of faith. And we can do that in two ways.

Knowing God from the world around us

One is that we can look at the natural world that we live in, or the physical universe, and we can come to the certain conclusion that there must be a creator as the origin and source of everything that exists.

The First Vatican Council (1869-70) spoke with great conviction about the created world as a pointer to the God who created it, and the Second Vatican Council repeated this conviction: God has given us ‘an enduring witness to Himself,’ says Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum ‘in created realities’ (art 2).

Nowadays perhaps this is far from an easy or an automatic step for many people to take, because they look around at the natural world and they conclude that it all came into existence by some set of processes intrinsic to itself, and they would say that it’s the job of science to explain those processes. The widespread attitude today is that of the scientist Pierre-Simon Laplace, who designed a model of the solar system, and, when Napoleon asked him where God was to be found, replied haughtily: ‘I have no need of that hypothesis’.

Today, to see God in nature it seems that people already need to be looking at reality with the eyes of faith, free from the ideology of exaggerated scientism.* 

Encountering God in our conscience

The second path that the Catholic faith has always maintained we can follow in order to gain some indication of who God is and what he’s like is to look inwards, into our own human nature. When we reflect on the way we’re constituted as human beings we’re able to get an inkling of the God who has made us in his own image and likeness.

Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, takes this conviction as its point of departure, and it issues what I think is a very beautiful and profound declaration about the way that every individual man and woman can encounter God’s moral law, and so come to a personal knowledge of God himself, by reflecting especially on our human conscience.    

I’ll quote the relevant paragraph (art 16) of Gaudium et Spes because it presents our Catholic belief on this subject in language that I don’t think can be bettered:

‘Deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey. Its voice, ever calling him to love and to do what is good and to avoid evil, tells him inwardly at the right moment: do this, shun that. For man has in his heart a law inscribed by God. His dignity lies in observing this law, and by it he will be judged. His conscience is man’s most secret core, his sanctuary. There he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths. By conscience, in a wonderful way, that law is made known which is fulfilled in the love of God and of one’s neighbour… Hence, the more a correct conscience prevails, the more do persons and groups turn aside from blind choice and try to be guided by an objective standard of moral conduct.’

‘Yet,’ the Constitution adds, ‘it often happens that conscience goes astray through ignorance which it is unable to avoid, without thereby losing its dignity. This cannot be said of the man who takes little trouble to find out what is true and good, or when conscience is by degrees almost blinded through the habit of committing sin’.

Those last two sentences are crucial. Today, in the same way that so many people are able to look at the natural world and believe straightaway that science can explain it completely, it’s also true that simply being aware of good and evil, right and wrong, and having an active conscience, doesn’t automatically lead men and women to an understanding of God’s moral law and to an encounter with God himself.

We’re all familiar with an expression which has become something of a favourite among politicians, the expression ‘moral compass’. This seems to mean the basic sense of right and wrong which supposedly guides every individual’s attitudes, decisions and actions. It’s become a cliché that politicians and their aides and advisors are fond of using to gather moral support for particular policies. It’s also a tactic, I suspect, to reassure the voting public that they themselves (the politicians) are good, trustworthy, morally conscientious individuals.

Whatever purposes the expression serves I think we can recognise that in no sense do modern politicians and commentators link the idea of our ‘moral compass’ with the content of traditional Christian morality, or with the idea that conscience is the ‘core and sanctuary’ of each man and women where God’s voice echoes in our depths. In fact, as we know, in many contemporary political movements people are frequently led by their ‘moral compass’ to campaign energetically for causes that are completely opposed to Christian convictions about what serves the moral welfare of individuals and society.

A ‘natural’ knowledge of God not enough

So these two pointers to God which we can discover by the use of our human reason alone aren’t nearly enough to give us a complete idea of what God is like. They’re only a starting point. 

Left to our own thoughts and imaginings, we would never come to the knowledge that God is one divine being but three persons, for example, or that he became human in the person of Jesus, that Jesus’ death on the cross made the salvation of the human race possible, that God summons us to eternal life in a resurrected body. We would never arrive at the ethical teaching of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.

For that degree of knowledge about God, his principles and purposes, it was necessary for God to choose to reveal himself, to communicate to us the various aspects of his personality and character, his will for us, his involvement in the stream of human history for our salvation. It’s also necessary for us to be endowed with an ability or a capacity to receive God’s communication, to recognise and indeed respond to God’s revelation of himself.     

In this post, then, and in the posts that follow it, I’d like to say something about both these aspects of our Christian faith: the fact that God has revealed himself, and the fact that he created us with the capacity to receive his revelation.

We don’t need to get caught up in a painstaking theological exploration, fascinating as that might be. We only need to touch on these realities insofar as they have a significant part to play in our personal spiritual life, our relationship with God in Christ and our answering the call to holiness.

With that purpose in mind, then, I’d like to try to cover four subjects:

A. The fact that God has revealed himself, given us detailed knowledge about himself. God has provided us with the answer to the three questions I suggested we put to ourselves: who is God? What is he like? What, if anything, does he ask of us?

B. The reliable sources of God’s revelation of himself, which are therefore reliable and indispensable sources for us to draw on in our individual spiritual life. The two great sources of Divine Revelation are Sacred Scripture and the Sacred Tradition of the Church. We also need to consider the Church’s teaching authority, or Magisterium, which has the role of interpreting these sources accurately and reliably.

C. Some mistaken ideas about who God is and what he’s like, which are fairly common today, but which can lead us badly astray in our spiritual life.

D. A brief description of some of God’s true personality traits and facets of character which we know from Divine Revelation. It’s important for us to have clear and authentic ideas about God in order to be able to know him, love him and enter into communion of life with him.

__________

*The word ‘scientism’ means different things to different people. What I’m thinking of primarily is the widespread tendency to assume that the natural world is the only realm that exists and that therefore the natural sciences can explain the whole of reality and provide ultimate truth.

The scientistic mentality tends to assign the highest intellectual value to methods of empirical observation, measurement and analysis, and to the resulting ‘objective’, ‘factual’ knowledge. It disparages and dismisses forms of mental activity which open us to the realm beyond the empirically observable and measurable - contemplation, prayer, the ‘sense of the supernatural’ - and the knowledge they produce: knowledge of God.

Science enjoys enormous prestige and authority in contemporary society and generally favourable, even reverential, treatment by the mass media.

For popularisers of evolutionary theory like Richard Dawkins scientific knowledge matters precisely because it disproves God’s existence to all intents and purposes and discredits religious morality. Linking science with atheism and secular humanism he and other advocates of the New Atheism have helped to form a widespread trust in science as the principal means of making social and moral progress.

Perhaps the recent leap forward in the field of technology has revived an attitude that was common at the beginning of the scientific revolution: a belief in the almost unlimited possibilities of human ingenuity to shape our environment and way of life, leaving ignorance and superstition behind in the ‘Dark Ages’ where they belong.

All these tendencies contribute to a general outlook on life which can accurately be labelled ‘scientistic’.

(Part 2 to follow shortly)