Knowing About God
Sometimes the people who are supposed to know the most about God know Him the least. Perhaps this sounds counterintuitive, but this has consistently been the case throughout history. The past is littered with examples of men and women who have been raised to believe in God, who have been trained in theology, and who spent their whole lives studying Him but did not truly know Him. Martin Luther is a perfect example of this. Prior to his rediscovery of the gospel during the Reformation, Martin Luther claimed to hate God.[1] Yet, as a monk he studied Scripture, fasted regularly, and did all sorts of devotional duties. Luther knew many things about God, but he did not know God.
This phenomenon—knowing lots about God yet hating Him—is present in the Bible as well. The Pharisees constantly challenged by Jesus because of this. Just like Martin Luther, these men were required to know the Bible and studied the things of God to a degree beyond many of us. Yet, they too were guilty of not truly knowing God. Jesus makes this abundantly clear when He exclaims, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others” (Matt. 23:23). They failed—just like Luther once did—to grasp the purpose behind all their diligent study.
Believing in God
Both of these examples demonstrate something that is extremely important when dealing with the topic of belief in God. There is a big difference between saying, “I believe in God” and “I believe in God.” The first highlights that someone can have a lot of knowledge about God, can read all the right things about God, can do all the prayers and rituals without ever truly believing in God. For them, belief is merely intellectual assent to an idea. Saying “I believe in God,” under this rubric, is no different than saying “I believe that the earth revolves around the sun.” It is a mere fact.
This is why not everyone who claims to believe in God will enjoy eternal life, because they do not truly know God. They believe in the wrong way—a way that failed to produce life. As the late J.I. Packer says in Knowing God, “A little knowledge of God is worth more than a great deal of knowledge about him.”[2]
However, when a Christian says, “I believe in God,” they are not using this phrase to show their intellectual assent to an idea, but to reflect their trust in the God of the Bible. Belief, faith, and knowledge of God are primarily relational categories. “Christians don’t just believe—we believe in someone.”[3] Obviously, this means knowing things about God. A person cannot claim to be in a healthy relationship with someone if they know nothing about that person. But it also means much more than simple intellectual assent.
Abraham’s Faith
So why do Christians think of belief in this way? Why is it that they focus on the relational instead of only focusing on the intellectual? The answer to this can be found in the book of Genesis and the life of Abraham. Abraham was called by God to leave his family and travel to a new land. God was going to take him and make him into a great nation. But there was just one problem, Abraham did not have an heir. So God appears to Abraham and tells him, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them . . . So shall your offspring be” (Gen. 15:5). Abraham responds to this in a rather unique way; “And he believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness” (Gen. 15:6; cf. Rom 4:3).
Abraham believes God, takes Him at His word, and trusts that He will do what He says He will do. This faith is credited to him as righteousness. He is not commended by God for his great theological skills. He is not exalted because he can list the attributes of God without needing to reference a theology textbook. No! He is considered righteous because he believes in God. He puts his hope in the word of the Lord that is addressed to him. He has faith, and as Herman Bavinck beautifully says, “only by faith does a promise become our possession.”[4] It is trust in the Lord that is highlighted when the Christian exclaims, “I believe in God!” It is relationship, not mere knowledge, that is proclaimed by the Christian.
Belief That Leads to Life
Martin Luther, the Augustinian monk who once declared his hatred for God, eventually came to understand this for himself. He did not have any grand vision or a cathartic experience, but he came to believe in God through “study in the tower of the Augustinian monastery.”[5] There, Luther would have a similar experience to Abraham’s. Rather than looking to his own merits, he would learn to take God at His word and trust Christ. This so changed his life that he could write, “What man is there whose heart, upon hearing these things, will not rejoice to its depth, and when receiving such comfort will not grow tender so that he will love Christ as he never could by any means of any laws or works?”[6] Martin Luther’s recognition of these things not only allowed him to say “I believe in God,” but sparked a movement against the cold, dead intellectualism of his day and has since allowed millions of people to proclaim “I believe in God” with him.
None of this is meant to sound anti-intellectual. Learning about God, studying theology, and knowing the Bible are all really good things. Yet, Christian faith cannot end with the intellect. To say “I believe in God” is to proclaim that you have entered into a relationship with Him by taking God at His word. It is, as Herman Bavinck says, “not a matter of knowing a number of doctrinal truths” but consists “in the soul’s union with the person of Christ according to the Scriptures and with Scripture as the word of Christ.”[7] It is a relationship, not knowledge of facts.
[1] Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: The Life of Martin Luther (New York: Meridian, 1955), 44.
[2] J.I. Packer, Knowing God (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1975), 26.
[3] Alister McGrath, I Believe: Exploring the Apostles’ Creed (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1997), 20.
[4] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Prolegomena, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 565.
[5] Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand, 47.
[6] Martin Luther, “The Freedom of a Christian,” 66.
[7] Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Prolegomena, 573.