Knowledge of God as Assimilation and Participation: An Essay on Theological Pedagogy in the Light of Biblical Epistemology (original) (raw)
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A STUDY OF THE ROLE THEOLOGY AND EDUCATION ARE INTEGRATED.
Faith and knowledge may appear to be two distinctly different disciplines but an the contrary they are not. This research is base on the integration of faith and learning, basing its ideas in the fact that education is usually devoid of a Christian morality. Hence the research will make use of literature that will show the “how” and the “why” Christ should be included in the classroom. This being highlighted by a symbiosis of faith and knowledge.
The Knowledge of God Essays on God, Christ, and Christ, by Michael Allen
Evangelical Quarterly, 2022
Michael Allen's The Knowledge of God is a collection of essays presenting material topics on 'God, Christ, and the character of human communion found with God and one another'. The order of his project overlaps historical theology (dogmatics) and exegetical commentary orienting the reader to a theocentric religion, with the goal of a contemplative Christian theology of the Triune God fixed as the center of our worship, faith, wisdom, and practice. Allen's discursive work considers the nature of the Triune God, the mystery of Christ, and a doctrine of the church, an enterprise taking in the rich insights from the Great Tradition, culminating in a thoroughly classical Reformed doctrine of God. This review will order the material according to the three divisions in which Allen frames his work: God, Christ, and the church.
Christian Privilege in U.S. Education: Legacies and Current Issues, 2017
Chapter 6 explores two main issues: first, we look into the God of the Old Testament as a teacher, that is, into the methods and means God uses as well as how those combine to teach the particular lessons and knowledge he wishes to teach his students, looking specifically at his encounters with Adam and Eve in the two stories of creation, with Abraham (particular attention is paid to Abraham’s journey from his homeland to the land God shows him and to the sacrificing of Isaac), Moses, and others. In all, we examine what godly teaching entails, and how it is enacted, and compare those to the pedagogies currently enacted in education, emphasizing the role of the Bible in helping provide a teacherly imagination as to what constitutes good (and in some cases, not-so-good) teaching. To use the example of Adam and Eve, we look into the ways in which God, much like teachers today, asks Adam questions for which he (God) already has the answers (and most of which tend to have short, “correct” answers); how he poses particular questions to Adam and engages the student (Adam) when the latter responds incorrectly, or simply refuses to respond; and how he proceeds to admonish his students (Adam, Eve, and the snake) following their failure—of conduct, of complying with established rules as to what can and cannot be eaten, and finally, of failing the “test” questions administered by God. Not surprisingly, as noted, such teacherly maneuvers are not uncommon in today’s classroom, even if their ramifications, luckily, do not impact all generations to follow with such harsh results. The chapter also attempts to mirror the ways in which God initially teaches directly (in person), as is in the case of him speaking directly to Adam and Eve, Abraham, or Moses, yet distancing himself later on by creating proxies—in the form of judges and prophets—to do his speaking for him. In that regard, we connect God’s disillusionment with the Israelites with similar notions exhibited by teachers who are initially enthusiastic with direct teaching, and, following several years in the profession, often either take on student teachers to “assist” in their teaching and/or move on to administrative positions that remove them from direct contact with students in classrooms while still ensuring their pedagogical and curricular messages are conveyed to students by others.
Theology and the Knowledge of Persons
Roczniki Filozoficzne
The aim of the paper is to discern between philosophy and theology. A philosopher is looking after impersonal wisdom, a theologian searches for a personal God. This differentiation is fundamental because knowledge of persons differs from knowledge that. The author shows how taking into account the fact that theology is based on the second-person knowledge changes the way one should approach the hiddenness argument. * The paper was originally published in: Fiona Ellis (ed.), New Models of Religious Understanding (Oxford: OUP, 2017), 172–90. Reprinted by the permission of the Author.
Chapter Four. The Knowability of God: A Preliminary OT Survey
Gorgias Press eBooks, 2022
The destiny of the soul is to see as God sees, to know as God knows, to feel as God feels, to be as God is"-Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) INTRODUCTION A popular statement in the past about the purpose of Evangelical Christianity was "to know God and make Him known." One of the major apologetic arguments against so-called dead orthodoxy is that it lacks a personal relationship with God. One of the most influential Evangelical and theological but practical books has been J. I. Packer's Knowing God. 1 Yet in practice, the experience of knowing God remains subjective, not uniform, and somewhat elusive for many Evangelicals. We know about God, based on the Bible, but knowing Him personally, like we know our spouses or best friends, remains an individualistic, diverse, and curious matter. This presentation is not concerned, however, with investigating current experience and related existential issues. Rather it will look back at selected OT passages exegetically to examine their meaning for an OT theology about the nature of knowing God. 1 J. I. Packer, Knowing God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1973; paperback). Although pastoral in tone, Packer's work is much more academically informed than the typical layperson's publications such as Knowing and Understanding God by Godsword Godswill Onu (yes that is a real name). Unfortunately, the chapter titles but not the content are directly relevant to the subject of God's knowability (e.g. "Jesus' Knowledge of God," "Moses' Knowledge of God," and "Paul's Knowledge of God" on p. 3). A desideratum of this present study is a call for more academic treatments of knowing God and how He can be known. Another example is Knowing God: Using the Scriptures to Know God by Maureen Schaffer, a purely devotional approach. The OT presents people having subjective experiential knowledge of God and expressing objective ideas about God's nature and needs and intentions. "Knowability of God," therefore, suggests the former more than the latter. Yet it does not explain how the reader is supposed to gain intimacy with God other than imply that He is reachable through prayer. Most of the ways (supernatural) we see OT people interacting with God begs the question of why such close encounters stopped historically (or only continue in rare instances). The norm now is God's relative distance from believers (by comparison), apparently, but even in the OT we find only certain chosen ones to merit such intimacy (e.g. only Moses met with God "face to face"). The present irony is that the few who claim such unique contact with and communication from God are usually and generally considered not to be credible. And what we think we learn about God objectively in the pages of the Bible is open to the question of whether a given statement is God's truth or human belief about God. Both are accurate in terms of reflecting reliable information, but the latter is not necessarily a basis for doctrine.
An Alternative Form of Theological Knowing
Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical, 1993
How did human beings come to feel that some of the movements they make with their bodies could comment upon others, forgetting that the movements 'commented upon' ('meant,' 'referred to,' 'represented,' 'stood for,' 'designated,' and so on) are just that, movements themselves? David Sudnow Talk's Body, 56 Polanyi's conception of knowledge as personal-that the knower participates in all acts of knowing, and that the knower passionately contributes to what is being known-has radical implications both for the content of knowledge (what is known) and, more importantly, for the forms of knowledge (how the knower is dwelling in the world). What and how we know are deeply intertwined. One's personal dwelling place, where one is in the world, such as an apprentice in the presence of a master, shapes and forms what one comes explicitly to know. My essay relates Polanyi's approach directly to theology. An alternative form of theological knowing implies that the primary forms of knowing often weighted in theology have failed to absorb Polanyi's post-critical philosophy. While Polanyi's philosophy has apparently been absorbed, its implications are only superficially acknowledged. Few theologians today would want to defend objectivism. Certainly the recent emphasis on knowledge as "social construction"-whether the focus is race, gender, or culture-assumes that objectivism is no longer viable. And yet, the current rush toward social, racial, gender, etc. analysis indicates a disturbing academic desperation. I mean by this that theology (and religious studies) is losing, if not already has lost, a sense of place. While objectivism as a form of theological knowing is decried, an alternative that accounts for how we come to know, how we personally participate in theological knowing, has yet to be offered. If anything,
William J. Abraham and Frederick D. Aquino. The Oxford Handbook of the Epistemology of Theology
Journal of Analytic Theology
Analytic theology has, since its inception, been a metaphysics-heavy enterprise. Indeed, a brief perusal of the contents of The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology (i.e. a predecessor to the present volume under review) reveals as much. My noting this emphasis on metaphysics is not a criticism, for the fruits of Christian analytic metaphysics have been widespread indeed. Nevertheless, developments in epistemology have been at least as significant in many respects as those in metaphysics, and thus, the comparative rarity with which they emerge in discussion in contemporary theology is unfortunate. Such a lament, however, has in recent times become less apt, for with the release of The Oxford Handbook of the Epistemology of Theology, we now have a text which ably introduces its audience of theologians, scriptural scholars, and philosophers to a broad class of epistemological concerns for theology. No one writing in analytic theology should remain wholly ignorant of its contents, which hail from many of the best epistemological and theological minds today. Due to constraints of space, in this review I provide a sampling of one of the best articles from each of the four sections included in the handbook. I begin with Sandra Menssen and Thomas D. Sullivan's "Revelation and Scripture", followed by Jason Baehr's "Virtue", Scott M. Williams's "John Duns Scotus", and close with Harriet A. Harris's "The Epistemology of Feminist Theology". In "Revelation and Scripture" Sandra Menssen and Thomas D. Sullivan develop a framework from which a non-believer might assess the Christian revelatory claim. That claim, as construed by Menssen and Sullivan, includes the proposition that Jesus is God's revelation, as are the propositions of the various creeds. Along the way, Menssen and Sullivan provide much helpful advice to the non-believer interested in understanding Christian faith. For instance, they point out that many facts, which they call CUE-facts (i.e. Conditional Upon Explanation), are the sorts of propositions that one would accept only if a reasonable explanation for their truth might be advanced. And plausibly the Christian revelatory claim consists of many such facts. Moreover, Menssen and Sullivan emphasize that a framework for evaluating evidence might additionally reveal other places to look for further evidence of Christianity in the way that Mendeleev's development of the periodic table of elements pointed him to the discovery of further elements. Keeping such features in mind while assessing evidence for the truth of Christian claims is indeed wise counsel.
With the Incarnation of the Son of God, a new period in the divine economy of salvation begins. The second Person of the Holy Trinity assumes our human nature, and the Word becomes flesh. That unity of natures takes place in the Person of the divine Word, so that the creature is united to God in unity of person. Jesus is both, then, true God and true man, and that unity of natures (divine and human), takes place in His divine Person. There are two perfect natures in Christ, one divine and one human, and therefore two operations, one divine and one human. By implication we are saying that there are in Christ two modes of knowledge, one divine (common to the three persons of the Trinity), and the other human, in Christ’s human intellect. There is also in Jesus a divine will and a human will, but these will not be the object of my present study. Christ’s human knowledge is the basis of his capacity for his free human decisions and consequently of his capacity to merit salvation for us. That is the reason why the Church has always attached maximum importance to the problem of the human and divine knowledge of Jesus. Regarding Christ’s human knowledge, we can identify in Christ, during his life on earth, three modes of knowledge for which the mind has at least an obediential potency : acquired or experimental knowledge, infused knowledge, and science of vision. We shall therefore look at these three modes in this presentation, and what they involve, to conclude with the qualities of Christ’s knowledge, such as infallibility, and Jesus’ consciousness of himself, of his divine filiation, and of his mission.
The use of the Bible in theology: Theology as a ‘lived experience’ of God
HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies, 2020
The use of Bible in this article refers to the 66-books (39 OT and 27 NT) as they occur in the Protestant Bible. This is because of my reformed church tradition as the space where memory is cultivated in a way that generates meaning and provides norms, a space into which the members of a group may (Schnelle 2009:48) repeatedly enter to receive assurance, answers and orientation (Schnelle 2009:49). 2.The Bible is not congruent with itself on this point. Jacob claimed, for example, in Genesis 32:30 that he saw God face to face. According to the wholistic picture of God from the Bible, we can say that a finite being will never see or even comprehend an infinite being. Contribution: This article pleads that biblical analyses should play a more comprehensive and determinative role in the composition and formulation of theology, pointing more explicitly to the transcendence and immanence of God. The reading of such theologies then must create different lived experiences of the immanence and transcendence of God.