The Unknown God

For a long time now I’ve used the Revised Common Lectionary Online as a basis for daily reflection on the Bible. The four weekly passages ensure that there is a reading from the Hebrew Bible, Psalms, Epistle and Gospel on which to think and pray each week. One or two of the passages I usually explore much more thoroughly – an exercise in exegesis intended to keep me exegetically fit, the equivalent of the three or four times a week run to sustain aerobic fitness.

Alongside this particular trek through the Bible in company with the many Christian traditions which use the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL), I use the New Interpreter’s Bible (NIB) on each passage as a mid-range commentary. There are contributions to the NIB which are very high quality biblical comment – Fretheim on Genesis, Brueggemann on Exodus, Birch on Samuel, Newsom on Job, McCann on Psalms, Miller on Jeremiah, O’Day on John, Wall on Acts, NT Wright on Romans, Craddock on Hebrews I’ve found are highlights in a set that does have some less impressive efforts.

One passage this week is Acts 17.22.31, Paul’s speech at the Areopagus. I’ve always found this a passage that shows Paul at work as a skilled, innovative mission tactician – on this occasion outmaneouvering the cultural intellectuals on his way to making his witness to Christ the saving revealer of God. Maybe the church today has to respond ‘to a similar "culture war" in which the gospel is challenged by cities "full of idols" and where the church is asked to respond to the important questions  of secular intellectuals. In which case Paul’s proclamation of resurrection faith as a thoughtfully presented  challenge to those other ultimate loyalties (modern idols) to which people now give their lives. The knowability of God, the grace of the One who is no ‘unknown God’ but comes near in love and judgement, not the God of the Philosophers but certainly the God the philosopher is groping after; but the God who is not found by argument, not contained by reasoned logic, not domesticated by abstract concepts at a sufficient remove to leave the deep places of the soul undisturbed. The living personal God who is known in encounter, who speaks and calls, who comes and invites, – but also the God who to use a phrase used by Flannery O’Connor of Karl Barth – throws the furniture around.

The living room of the mind is given a radical makeover by affirming faith in the resurrection of Jesus. Faith in Jesus’ resurrection isn’t a correction of mental perceptions; it isn’t a surprising change of opinion; it is a reordering of the mind, a new worldview, a radical break with that most comforting of securities, that we inhabit a controllable predictable world. The resurrection of Jesus is a miracle of theology, not a miracle of technology. In Jesus, incarnate, crucified and risen, the unknown God (comfortingly vague and safely distant), becomes known.