Knowledge of God

One of the reasons I fell in love with my husband is that he requires intellectual stimulation. And in that drive he inspires me to read more and challenges me to be critical of what I hear/believe and helps me to grow in my thinking/learning. He reads a lot. I struggle to keep up, but recently he and I have decided to read together the two-volume set of John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. This will keep us busy a long time. (admittedly, I have to read his chapters twice before I really absorb what he’s saying.)

John Calvin is the man! I can’t help but share his brilliance with you…

Calvin claims that our knowledge of God and our knowledge of self are so closely related that it is difficult (if possible) to separate them…each seems to preface the other. It is sort of a “chicken or the egg” puzzle.

Here is the exchange: 1.) “Without knowledge of self there is no knowledge of God.” and 2.) “Without knowledge of God there is no knowledge of self.”

We fail to acknowledge the holiness and sovereignty of God unless we first begin to understand our own depravity. Calvin reminds us that it is our falleness that better reveals the fortune of God’s grace and mercy. (If we had remained upright and never disobeyed God from the beginning, would we know His mercy? ) Recognizing our deficiency, we are motivated to find what we are missing in order to remedy our need. That search takes us beyond ourselves. “…knowledge of ourselves not only arouses us to seek God, but also, as it were, leads us by the hand to find him (37).”

Conversly, we cannot understand our miserable state unless we first behold and contemplate him who is perfect and holy. Unless we first acknowledge an all-sufficient and transcendent entity, how do we begin to understand our own deficiency? By what measure do we esteem ourselves? By what measure do we make any judgment?

For we always seem to ourselves righteous and upright and wise and holy–this pride is innate in all of us–unless by clear proofs we stand convinced of our own unrighteousness, foulness, folly, and impurity. Moreover, we are not thus convinced if we look merely to ourselves and not also to the Lord, who is the sole standard by which this judgment must be measured. For, because all of us are inclined by nature to hypocrisy, a kind of empty image of righteousness in place of righteousness itself abundantly satisfies us (37).

As long as we do not look beyond the earth, being quite content with our righteousness, wisdom, and virtue, we flatter ourselves most sweetly, and fancy ourselves all but demigods (38).

Looking beyond our physical world we may begin to comprehend a greater truth. Somewhat like the sphere that enters Flatland. In a two-dimensional plane, the inhabitants of Flatland perceive a visiting sphere as a mere circle. Failing to recognize a superior dimension, circle is the logical (though false) assumption.