Revelation contrasted with human knowledge (Ephesians 3:14-21) How does one know by means of revelation? This is not how we usually use the words “know” and “knowledge.” When I say that I know something, I usually mean I am the subject of this activity, the one who knows, and what I know is the object apprehended by me. Revelation stands all this on its head. In revelation I am not the one who knows, but the one who is known, and what I know is the experience of being known by someone other than myself. This is a peculiar form of knowledge, a form of knowledge the writer describes by means of the term “revelation,” which, among other things, suggests this knowledge is a gift and not a discovery, and that the Spirit and not the individual is the primary agent in this disclosure. As H. Richard Niebuhr put it, “Revelation means the moment in our history through which we know ourselves to be known from beginning to end, in which we are apprehended by the knower; it means the self-disclosing of that eternal knower.” In Ephesians what Christians know is “the boundless riches of Christ” (3:8)—boundless in that the breadth and length and height and depth (i.e., the limits) of God’s grace in Jesus Christ are nothing less than the fullness of God, a boundlessness that is beyond the human imagination, but a boundlessness that includes and reconciles all things. Hence, the writer prays that his readers “may have the power to comprehend” and “to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” (3:19). How can one know that which surpasses knowledge? If knowledge is limited to what reason can affirm, how can reason know that which is beyond the limits of reason? That would appear to be impossible. As Immanuel Kant has taught us, if there are limits to what reason can know, then whatever is beyond those limits cannot be known by reason. Reason is not, however, the only human faculty that “knows.” The heart has its reasons and its own knowledge as well. What is known in revelation, according to Ephesians, is “the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” (3:19). It surpasses knowledge in that it dwells not only in the intellect but also (and perhaps primarily) in the heart. The boundless riches of Christ are made known by the Spirit, and when that happens, Christ “dwell[s] in your heart through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love” (v. 17). It is in this sense that Christian knowledge is always something more than belief, something more than what the intellect can affirm. The heart has its reasons the mind does not fathom, or as Ephesians puts it, for those in whom Christ dwells there is a “power at work within us … able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine” (v. 20). It is in response to this One who is not only at work within us, but also at work in the breadth and length and height and depth of creation, that Christians are driven to their knees in worship. ~NIB George Stroup
Posted on: Thu, 16 Jan 2014 03:13:30 +0000
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