“He lowered the heavens and descended, with clouds under his feet” (Psalm 17:9)
There is no doubt that the idea of God in man seems “innate” and attached to his life, and there is no dispute about that. But the difference throughout the ages has been about how we recognize God and how He appears to us. God is by nature invisible and outside this created world, so how can this world know Him? And how do we discover Him?
There are two ways to discover God. The first way is what we call “natural discovery,” meaning the natural human inference of God’s existence and attributes. This is because man effortlessly and by mere logic infers God from His works and the nature created around man and placed at his service. Therefore, denying the existence of God is an illogical inference! Within the framework of this discovery, philosophies and religions have established their teachings about God.
But there is a method of “supernatural revelation,” which means God’s intervention in history. Here we know God as He comes, not from His creatures. The Bible relied on this method of revelation, meaning the appearance of God more than human exploration. This supernatural revelation occurred in the Bible in stages, beginning with the prophecies of the Old Testament and its prophets. For prophecy often constituted news that exceeded or contradicted the logical human knowledge of its time, since knowledge comes from divine revelation, that is, from God’s manifestation of Himself, which culminated in the incarnation of the Word, the Lord Jesus.
Our Orthodox Church speaks of God in a realistic and historical way. The Lord Jesus divided history into two parts, before and after Him. The Renaissance and Enlightenment in Europe in the eighteenth century tried in vain to challenge this supernatural revelation and to turn Christianity into a mere religious system like any other, removing it from its historical context as an event. However, for our Orthodox Church, faith remains based on events and not on research. We have seen “that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and our hands have touched… for life was made manifest, and we have seen it and bear witness and declare it to you” (1 John 1:1-2). When religion is limited to knowing God on the basis of natural revelation, it is reduced to a religious system created by humans. But when Christianity builds its faith on historical events, it becomes a realistic science. Our God is a person who entered history for our sake and shares our history.
Some Christian intellectual currents in the Protestant and Catholic worlds were influenced by the ages of Western scholasticism and enlightenment. Therefore, Protestants, especially the liberal ones, tended to return to natural discovery and to rely on the role of human reason in discovering God through his works. Thus we understand how they use the art of the icon but replace the divine person with creation. They use art but to express the natural discovery about God, not to express God directly as he came. There are many examples in worship and theology resulting from this.
As for the “existential Protestant” movements, they have benefited from the divine-historical events in a way that benefits the inner life of man. Thus, they dealt with these events as if they were a useful mythology-legend that affects the spiritual life of man and gives him lessons and strength to continue his life in accordance with Christian teachings. Thus, they have accepted history as a myth and not as an event. In this way, they are no different from religions and philosophies that are based on natural revelation, ignoring God’s intervention in human history, i.e. His entry into our history.
We believe that God is a person. Therefore, no one can know Him unless He defines Himself. Moreover, God is of a nature other than ours and a world other than ours. Therefore, if He did not come to us, we cannot draw a correct picture of Him. How can a person know something outside his world? Unless he defines God with the attributes and limitations of his world, then he knows about Him what is in his knowledge and does not know Him as He is and as He came and defined Himself to us with what is beyond our knowledge.
Catholic Christian thought accepted the existence of two degrees of revelation: the natural and the supernatural, but viewed them as two different degrees.
Our Orthodox Church sees divine revelation as one, beginning with the manifestation of God’s works in His creation (natural revelation) and developing into supernatural divine revelation. Thus, the natural ways of knowing God represent the foundation and first degrees of God’s final revelation, with His eventual entry into the world.
The incarnation of Jesus overturned the methodologies of religions in knowing God. God is the one who appears to us, not the one who is discovered by us. The God of the Bible is a God we have received, not a God we have invented. This fact has very important consequences. The first is that we accept God as He is, not as we are. God is not an image of human ideals, ideals that evolve, conflict, and change. The second important consequence is that knowledge of God is by nature “reception,” and therefore it is linked to a very important matter, which is “acceptance.” Here, human freedom plays the same importance as divine desire. Human acceptance is equivalent to the manifestation of God. God’s love alone is not sufficient without positive human freedom. This bridge that will connect the created with the uncreated, the perceived with the unperceived, the limited with the unlimited, cannot be based on a single foundation, which is divine love for humans. Rather, it needs a foundation from the other side, which is the free acceptance of this divine-human dialogue in which God takes the initiative and to which humans respond.
Thus, divine revelation begins as an epiphany, that is, with God revealing Himself to man. This revelation is a gift of divine love and not the fruit of human effort. But this revelation is only achieved when it becomes a “participation,” that is, a shared life between God and man. Therefore, God revealed Himself to man not as knowledge but as a partnership. This is what is assumed by acquaintance between persons. For man, like God (and in His image), is a person. God offers Himself and man receives Him through a free relationship. This is why the psalmist exclaims, “Christ has come from heaven; receive Him.” Therefore, divine love is ineffective when human freedom rejects it. Thus, we do not know God from religion but from fellowship and partnership in His life. God, in the methodologies of religions, almost becomes a mere “theory” that we can believe in without changing our lives except for the little that commitment to its principles requires. But the “God of history” who bowed the heavens and came down is a God whom, when we know Him, we know ourselves in a new way. We know Him as our God and we know ourselves as His companion.
Amen