Text for the Month
“Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
John 20:29
One of the things I try and do over the summer is read! It’s something clergy are encouraged to do as part of their normal duties: after all, we can never stop learning about our faith. The trouble is that I still find a lot of theology quite impenetrable!
When I was at Oxford, I had to attend lectures on moral philosophy. I would come away knowing I had heard something important, but for the life of me I could not have told you what it was!
So I was very pleased with myself that I managed to read – from cover to cover – a book called ‘Why There Almost Certainly Is A God’, by Keith Ward.
Once again, I found myself having to read, then re-read, and often re-reread passages that were very dense philosophical concepts. But they are important ideas. After all, we live in a world where many regard the existence of God as, at best, problematic and, at worst, ludicrous and risible.
Is there a God? How can we know?
What arguments can we use to give an account of the faith that is in us?
It felt good to rehearse some of the arguments for and against but at the end of the book I was left feeling that, ultimately, I cannot prove God’s existence and an atheist cannot disprove it either. So we are left with that thing called faith. Or not. A faith that believes in the God who isn’t just another thing among all the other things in the world.
God is the One who just IS: the reason there is any-thing rather than no-thing. He is Existence: all existence comes from Him and is held in existence by Him. The One who named Himself to Moses as I AM: the ONE-WHO-JUST-IS.
Ipsum esse subsistens, as St Thomas Aquinas put: the sheer act of to be itself.
Now I hate to mention it, but Autumn also means we begin to look towards – dare I say it? – Christmas! And that’s important because Christians don’t believe simply in the God who just is. Who kicks off creation then sits back to enjoy, or not, the show.
We believe that that God became visible - became en-fleshed – in a person: Jesus of Nazareth, the icon of the invisible God, for to have seen Him is to have seen God.
We call it the Incarnation and it is one of the crazy yet fundamental truths that Christianity proclaims. That Christian faith is not some impenetrable philosophy, or a series of moral laws, but a person.
Do you want to know the nature of God?
Look at Jesus.
Do you want to know what it means to be truly human?
Look at Jesus.
Get to know Him and Him alone for to know Him is to know God.
Father Tim Handley, Vicar St. James’s Church, Sussex Gardens