Or Rather, Known by God

What this page is asking

The author of this site heard a sermon and wrote down how it went. As he reports it, the sermon kept returning to one question: “Do you know God?” Its answers were to “get to know God,” to pursue an “intimate relationship with God,” to spend time alone with God, to hear God, and to discover God’s individual “project” for one’s life.

That is all this page has of the sermon: a question, three quoted phrases, and a listener’s summary. The preacher is not named here, and nothing on this page depends on who he was. A summary is not a transcript, and a preacher may put things more carefully on another day. The page tests the account of knowing God that the summary describes. It does not judge the man, and most people who preach this way mean nothing but good by it.

The author set down a thesis to be tested: “Knowing God is something God gives through objective means, not an individualized quest for a deeper private experience.” Scripture, he wrote, does speak of knowing God. “But in Scripture and in historic Christianity, God gives this knowledge by revealing himself in Christ. He delivers it through external means: the Word, Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, absolution, and the life of the Church. When knowing God becomes a private pursuit measured by intimacy and time spent, the direction is reversed. God coming down to us becomes us climbing up to God, and believers are left unsure whether they know God ‘enough.’”

He also put the question in a form that can be checked: “How does this compare with historic Christianity’s emphasis on knowing Christ through Word, Baptism, Eucharist, prayer, the Church, and vocation rather than continually seeking a deeper private experience?”

That is the question this page works through. It reads what the Bible means by the verb “know,” follows the passages the brief names through their own chapters, sets out what six Christian traditions say in their own documents, and traces where the language of “intimacy with God” came from. It also checks the author’s brief, and in six places it corrects or qualifies it.

Two positions, labelled so they can be told apart

Two accounts of knowing God are compared all the way through. They are given letters so that the page can refer to them without repeating a paragraph each time.

Position Q is stated here in its plain pulpit form. Part VIII quotes it in the words of two of its ablest twentieth-century writers, and Part XI gives its best texts their full weight. Its last clause is not something every preacher of the Quest says aloud. It is what the question “Do you know God?” implies when it is put to a room of baptised, communicant Christians, and Part IX shows why it cannot be kept out.

What both positions agree on

So the disagreement is narrower than it sounds. It is about direction, and about what counts as the measure. Does a person come to know God by going inward and upward after him, or by receiving him where he has come down? And is the test of knowing God the depth of one’s experience, or the word of the shepherd who says of his sheep, “I know them”?

What the page concludes, stated up front

The prompt behind this page

Everything below was produced by giving the following brief to a frontier language model with web search, which assembled and checked the sources. It is published so you can run it yourself, change it, sharpen it, or reverse it and see what comes back. Three experiments are worth more than reading this page. First, reverse it: ask for the strongest case that the New Testament expects every believer to pursue a deepening, conscious, private communion with God as the heart of the Christian life, with the texts and the writers who have said so, and see how far it gets. Second, narrow it: ask only for every conversion in the book of Acts, with what the person saw or heard and what he was told to do next, and draw your own conclusion. Third, make it a test: paste in the notes of a sermon on knowing God, with the names removed, and ask who is the subject of its verbs.

Write a detailed, source-first, interactive article, in British
English, for a general reader who is willing to work. Quote Scripture
from the Authorised Version. Date and attribute every other quotation:
give the work, the edition or translation, and the section. Verify
every quotation against a reliable published source; where a
quotation cannot be verified, cut it, or say that it is given at
second hand. Do not invent quotes. Do not take verses out of context:
where a text is being applied beyond what it first addressed, say so.

  TITLE. Or Rather, Known by God

  THESIS TO TEST. Knowing God is something God gives through
  objective means, not an individualized quest for a deeper private
  experience.

  OCCASION. A recent sermon kept returning to the question "Do you
  know God?" Its answers were to "get to know God," pursue an
  "intimate relationship with God," spend time alone with God, hear
  God, and discover God's individual "project" for one's life.
  Report this as a listener's summary. Do not name or identify
  anyone, and do not put words in the preacher's mouth beyond the
  quoted phrases.

  CORE CLAIM. Scripture does speak of knowing God (Jeremiah 31:34;
  John 17:3; Philippians 3:10). But in Scripture and in historic
  Christianity, God gives this knowledge by revealing himself in
  Christ. He delivers it through external means: the Word, Baptism,
  the Lord's Supper, absolution, and the life of the Church. When
  knowing God becomes a private pursuit measured by intimacy and
  time spent, the direction is reversed. God coming down to us
  becomes us climbing up to God, and believers are left unsure
  whether they know God "enough."

  QUESTION. How does this compare with historic Christianity's
  emphasis on knowing Christ through Word, Baptism, Eucharist,
  prayer, the Church, and vocation rather than continually seeking
  a deeper private experience?

  TWO POSITIONS, labelled and used consistently.
   K, THE KNOWN (held): God makes himself known in Christ and hands
      Christ over through outward means; faith receives; the
      decisive fact is that God knows us.
   Q, THE QUEST (under test): knowing God is a relationship each
      believer must pursue and deepen inwardly, measured by
      intimacy, time alone, what one hears, and finding God's
      particular plan.

  POINTS TO TEST.
   1. In Scripture, knowing God comes as a gift tied to forgiveness.
      "They shall all know me, from the least of them to the
      greatest... for I will forgive their iniquity" (Jeremiah
      31:34). The least know God as truly as the greatest, because
      the knowledge rests on God's act of forgiving, not on the
      believer's spiritual intensity.
   2. God is known in Christ. "Whoever has seen me has seen the
      Father" (John 14:9). "No one has ever seen God; the only God,
      who is at the Father's side, he has made him known" (John
      1:18). "In these last days he has spoken to us by his Son"
      (Hebrews 1:2). Knowing God means knowing Christ crucified and
      risen, not reaching some further private depth.
   3. Christ is given through means. Faith comes by hearing the word
      of Christ (Romans 10:17). Baptism unites us to his death and
      resurrection (Romans 6:3-5). The cup and bread are a
      participation in his blood and body (1 Corinthians 10:16). The
      first Christians "devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching
      and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers"
      (Acts 2:42). All of these are shared and public.
   4. Historic confessions resisted the move inward. Augsburg
      Confession Article V teaches that the Holy Spirit is given
      through the Word and Sacraments "as through instruments." It
      rejects the idea that the Spirit comes without the external
      Word through our own preparations. The Smalcald Articles
      (III.8) call the opposite tendency "enthusiasm." Catholic,
      Orthodox, and Anglican traditions likewise place knowing God
      within the Church's Word and sacraments. Explore where these
      traditions agree and differ.
   5. Paul corrects himself. "Now that you have come to know God, or
      rather to be known by God..." (Galatians 4:9; compare
      1 Corinthians 8:3). The decisive fact is that God knows us,
      not how well we know him. Link this to "I never knew you"
      (Matthew 7:23).
   6. "Intimacy" language is modern and has side effects. "Intimate
      relationship with God" is not biblical wording. Explore where
      the phrase comes from and what it brings with it. It tends to
      make feelings the measure. A quest has no finish line, so
      assurance moves from God's promise to the believer's
      experience. Baptism, by contrast, is an objective place where
      God has said "you are mine."

  ADDITIONS.
   7. What the Bible means by the verb "know" when God is its object
      or its subject, in both Testaments.
   8. The conversions in Acts: what each person saw or heard, and
      where he was sent next.
   9. The individual "project": where the idea of a personal plan to
      be discovered comes from, what the New Testament calls "the
      will of God," and what the doctrine of vocation says instead.
      Give this its own Part. Keep "hearing God" brief and link it.
  10. The Quest's best texts (Matthew 6:6; James 4:8; Psalms 42 and
      63; Philippians 3:10; John 17:3), given their full weight, with
      the place of prayer and of the affections.
  11. A closing diagnostic for a sermon on knowing God.

OBJECTIONS. Answer them inside the argument. Do not caricature the
position under test: quote it from its best writers, grant what it
gets right, and say what it was reacting against. Where the evidence
corrects the brief, say so in a marked box.

NAMING. No living individual named as an example of anything.
Deceased writers quoted only from dated published works. Living
scholars named only as authors of published research. A modern
organisation named only when quoted verbatim from its own published
statement. Every remark attributed to a pastor or a churchgoer is
composed for illustration and labelled as composed.

EXCLUDED. Whether God still speaks to individuals today (linked).
Deciding between the traditions on what Baptism and the Supper are.
Assessment of any actual church or preacher. Ground covered by
earlier dossiers (union with Christ, the quiet time, assurance,
vocation, "I never knew you") is kept brief and linked.

INTERACTIVES. A priors quiz. A sort of sayings by which position is
speaking. A finish-the-verse quiz on what "know" means. A sort of
the clauses of Jeremiah 31 by who acts. A finish-the-sentence quiz
on being known. A sort of texts by direction, up or down. A
what-happened-next quiz on Acts. A chooser comparing six traditions
and a quiz on which said what. A figure to guess from published
word-frequency data, and a who-said-it-and-when quiz. A sort of
statements by whether they have a finish line. A sort of claims
about "the will of God." An objection drill the reader answers in
his own words first. A diagnostic for a sermon.

OUTPUT: a single self-contained interactive HTML page, professional
and readable, light theme by default with a dark switch, stating the
question at the top, publishing this prompt in full, repeating the
key points in prominent boxes for readers who skim, explaining every
technical term in a box where it is used, and giving the reader
something to do in every major section. Also produce a plain-English
quick version of about fifteen minutes with three short exercises,
and a Simple English version with no exercises.

The page you are reading is the output of that brief after the sources were checked. Where a quotation could not be verified against a published source it was cut, and three that were verified only at second hand are marked as such in Part XIV. The brief quoted Scripture from a modern version; the page gives the same verses from the Authorised Version, as it does everywhere on this site. Six things qualified the brief. The language of intimacy is not modern. The exact phrase “intimate relationship with God” is recent, but Augustine, the medieval monks and the Catholic Catechism all speak of intimacy with God. What is recent is its detachment from the means and its use as a measure. “The least know God as truly as the greatest” is right, and it does not mean equally. Calvin says so on the verse, and the New Testament tells Christians to grow in knowledge. Scripture does supply tests of knowing God. They are obedience and love of the brother, which can be seen. They are not depth of feeling. The other traditions agree about where God is known and differ about assurance. The Council of Trent denied the kind of certainty the Reformers taught, and the Westminster Confession adds inward evidences to the promises. The means are not a mechanism. The Augsburg Confession’s own words are “where and when it pleases God,” and every tradition quoted here says that God is not bound to the means, though we are. And “you are mine” is a sentence God spoke to Israel (Isaiah 43:1). Applying it to Baptism is the Church’s application, and the page says on what grounds.

What do you currently think?

Ten questions. Each has a determinate answer, and you can check every one yourself in Part XIV. Answer them before reading and lock them in. They come back in Part XIII with the sources beside them.

What follows

One question and five answers

Start with the sermon as it was reported and take it apart. It asks one question, “Do you know God?”, and the answers it gives contain five separate moves.

The first is sound. Everything turns on the other four.

What the sermon gets right

It should be said before the testing begins that the preacher has strong texts behind his question. Hosea says, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge” (4:6), and makes God say, “I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings” (6:6). Jeremiah says that the one thing worth boasting of is “that he understandeth and knoweth me” (9:24). Paul counted everything he had as loss “for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord” (Philippians 3:8). And Paul warned Titus about people who “profess that they know God; but in works they deny him” (Titus 1:16).

So a person can be surrounded by religion and not know God, and the Bible says so more than once. Part II begins with two priests of whom it is said. A preacher who looks at a comfortable congregation and asks whether they know the God they are singing about is doing what the prophets did.

The page grants all of this. Its question is what the hearer is then told to do, and what he is told to look at in order to find out the answer.

The step that is easy to miss

“Do you know God?” sounds like one question. It is really two, and they have different answers.

The first is a question of fact: is this person God’s, or not? It has a yes or a no. The second is a question of degree: how well does this person know God? That one has no yes or no. It has only “more” and “less.” The sermon, as reported, slides from the first to the second. It asks the question of fact, and it answers in the language of degree: get to know him, grow more intimate, spend more time.

The slide matters because of what it does to the hearer. A question of fact can be settled. A question of degree cannot be settled by anyone, because however much there is, there could be more. A man who is asked whether he is married can answer. A man who is asked whether he is close enough to his wife will, if he is honest, never be quite sure. If the first question is answered with the second, nobody in the room can leave knowing where he stands. That is why the author’s brief ends where it does: believers “are left unsure whether they know God ‘enough.’”

The same woman, answered twice

Here is how the two positions sound when a woman of fifty stays behind after a service. She was baptised as a child, has come to church all her life, and receives the Lord’s Supper. Both pastors care about her, and both want her to pray.

Both pastors take her seriously. The first accepts her report of her inner life as the evidence, and prescribes more effort in the place where she has already found nothing. The second points away from her inner life to things that were done to her and said to her. That difference runs through the rest of the page.

Try it: which position is speaking?

Eight things that might be said in a church. All are composed by this page. Sort each by which account of knowing God it assumes. Two could be said by either.

0 of 8 sorted

What the Bible means by “know”

Before asking how a person comes to know God, it is worth asking what the Bible means by the word. In modern English “I know him” usually means one of two things. Either I am acquainted with him, or I know him well, as a close friend does. The second meaning comes in degrees, and it is the one the sermon’s language leans on: get to know, more intimate, deeper.

The Bible’s usage is different, and the difference decides a good deal.

Two priests who did not know the LORD

The verse at the head of this Part is about Hophni and Phinehas. They were priests. They served at the sanctuary and handled the sacrifices, and few people in Israel can have known more about the LORD than they did. The text says they did not know him, and then says what it means: they took the best of the offerings for themselves by force, and “lay with the women that assembled at the door of the tabernacle” (1 Samuel 2:16, 22). In this passage, not knowing the LORD is a way of living. The priests behaved as if he were not their God.

A chapter later the same phrase is used of a child, with a very different sense:

Now Samuel did not yet know the LORD, neither was the word of the LORD yet revealed unto him.

1 Samuel 3:7. Samuel is already serving in the sanctuary, and is about to be called by name.

Samuel was a faithful boy, “in favour both with the LORD, and also with men” (2:26). The verse explains itself. He did not yet know the LORD because the word of the LORD had not yet been revealed to him. When he does come to know him, it is not by searching. He is asleep, and he is spoken to. And the chapter ends by saying how it went on: “the LORD revealed himself to Samuel in Shiloh by the word of the LORD” (3:21).

How the word is used

The Hebrew verb is yada‘, and the Greek of the New Testament has ginōskō. Both can mean to know a fact. But when the object is a person they regularly mean something closer to “acknowledge,” “own,” or “be bound to.” A few cases show the range.

In 1966 the Old Testament scholar Herbert Huffmon showed that in the treaties of the ancient Near East a great king was said to “know” a lesser king when he recognised him as his own vassal, and the lesser king to “know” the great king when he gave him his loyalty. He argued that the prophets use the word in the same way. Whether or not that is the whole background, it fits the texts in the table. To know the LORD is to have him as one’s God and to live accordingly. To be known by him is to be owned by him.

One book makes this almost a refrain. In the Authorised Version the phrase “know that I am the LORD” comes in seventy-two verses, by this page’s count, and fifty-eight of them are in Ezekiel. In nearly every case the knowing follows something God has done: a judgement or a rescue. People come to know him by his acts and by his word about them.

Three things the word does not mean

The objection: “this makes it cold”

Someone will say that all this turns knowing God into a legal status, and that the Bible is warmer than that. It is warmer. The word that describes Adam and Eve is not a cold word. Hosea’s whole book is a marriage: “I will even betroth thee unto me in faithfulness: and thou shalt know the LORD” (2:20). Jesus calls his disciples friends (John 15:15).

But notice what kind of warmth it is. A marriage is not made by the feelings of the couple on a given morning. It exists from the wedding, it is lived in good days and bad, and a wife does not stop being a wife when she feels nothing. In Hosea the betrothal is something God does: “I will betroth thee.” The knowing is its result. The Bible’s word has more in it than the modern one, because it includes the bond as well as the feeling. And it puts the bond first.

Try it: finish the verse

Seven verses about knowing God, each with a piece missing. Choose the words the text actually has.

“For I will forgive”

The author’s first point rests on this verse. It is the great Old Testament promise about knowing God, and the New Testament quotes it at greater length than any other passage of the Old. So it is worth reading slowly.

Who does what

The promise runs from verse 31 to verse 34. Here are its clauses in order, with the one who acts in each.

In these four verses of the Authorised Version God says “I will” five times. Under the new covenant the people are said to do one thing, which is to know him, and it is not given as a command. It is a prediction, and it has a reason attached. Two small words carry the weight. They shall know me, for I will forgive.

That is the brief’s first point, and the text supports it. The knowledge of God promised here is the fruit of a forgiveness that God gives. It does not arise from a search, and nothing is said about its intensity.

Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist, puts the two things in the same order when he says what his son has been born to do: “To give knowledge of salvation unto his people by the remission of their sins” (Luke 1:77). The knowledge comes by the remission.

“From the least of them unto the greatest”

The promise is for all of them. It does not single out the prophets, or the priests, or the people with time for long devotions. The least are named first.

This is what the Quest finds hardest to say. If knowing God is measured by intimacy achieved, then there will be people who have achieved a great deal of it and people who have achieved little, and the first group will know God in a way the second does not. Jeremiah’s promise does not describe a people sorted that way. It rests the knowledge on forgiveness, and forgiveness does not come in sizes. A man whose sins are forgiven is not more forgiven than his neighbour.

The objection: “they shall teach no more”

The same verse might seem to help the other side. If nobody will need to say to his neighbour, “Know the LORD,” then perhaps the new covenant does away with teachers and outward means, and each believer knows God directly and inwardly.

Some in the sixteenth century read it that way, and Calvin answers them in the same place. “The Prophet here does not mean inspiration, nor does he exclude the practice of teaching.” He points to the words themselves: the verse does not say that nobody will teach, but that nobody will have to teach the first lesson, “Know the LORD.” The people of the new covenant are not strangers who must be introduced. They already belong.

The New Testament settles it by what it does. The letter to the Hebrews quotes this passage in full (8:8–12), and the letter is itself a long piece of teaching, which calls itself a “word of exhortation” (13:22) and tells its readers not to forsake “the assembling of ourselves together” (10:25). The writer saw no conflict between Jeremiah’s promise and a preacher in a congregation. In Ephesians, Christ himself “gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers” (4:11). The new covenant has teachers. What they teach to the people of God is a God who is already theirs.

Where the new covenant is handed over

Jeremiah says God will make a new covenant. He does not say how a person will come to be in it. The New Testament does, and it is very particular.

Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.

Luke 22:20. “Testament” and “covenant” translate the same Greek word. Matthew’s account adds: “which is shed for many for the remission of sins” (26:28).

The phrase “new covenant” comes once in the Old Testament, in Jeremiah 31. When Jesus uses it he is holding a cup, and he ties it to the forgiveness of sins, which is the very thing Jeremiah gave as the ground of knowing God. Paul hands the same words on to Corinth as something he “received of the Lord” (1 Corinthians 11:23–25).

Hebrews draws the conclusion. Having quoted Jeremiah a second time, it says:

Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus … Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water.

Hebrews 10:19, 22. The quotation from Jeremiah is in verses 16–17.

Here is the nearness the sermon was reaching for, and the passage even has the words “draw near.” But look at what it rests on. The verbs are plural: let us draw near. The boldness is “by the blood of Jesus.” And the people drawing near are described by something that was done to their bodies: “washed with pure water.” Many interpreters, ancient and modern, hear a reference to Baptism in those words. The full assurance is the assurance of people who have been forgiven and washed. Nothing in the passage is about what they have achieved in private.

Try it: who is acting?

Eight clauses, most of them from the promise and from the New Testament’s use of it. Sort each by who is doing the thing described.

0 of 8 sorted

Or rather

The fifth point in the author’s brief is three words long in the Authorised Version: “or rather are.” Paul is rebuking the Galatians for drifting back to a religion of rules and calendars. He reminds them what they were, and then what they have become:

Howbeit then, when ye knew not God, ye did service unto them which by nature are no gods. But now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage?

Galatians 4:8–9. In the Greek the two verbs stand side by side, the same word in the active and then the passive: gnontes theon, mallon de gnōsthentes hypo theou.

He writes “ye have known God,” which is true. Then he changes it. “Or rather” is the phrase a person uses when he has said something that is correct as far as it goes and wants to say the thing underneath it. Paul lets the first version stand, and puts a deeper one beside it. The fact about the Galatians that he wants them to hold on to is that God knows them.

How it has been read

Commentators of very different centuries and churches have read the correction in the same way.

An Eastern bishop of the fourth century, the German reformer and the French one say the same thing. They did not agree about much else. Notice also how Luther fills in the phrase. To be known by God, he says, is to have been “visited by the Word.” He does not take Paul to mean a hidden decree that nobody can see. He takes him to mean that God came to these people in the preaching they heard and made them his. Part VI returns to that.

It is not only Galatians

If this were one verse it might be a turn of phrase. It is Paul’s settled habit, and the rest of Scripture has the same pattern.

The last of these matters for the sermon, because Philippians 3:10 is one of its texts: “That I may know him.” Paul does press on to know Christ. He says so, and Part IX takes it seriously. But read his next sentences. “Not as though I had already attained.” And then the reason he keeps going: he has been apprehended. The pursuit is real, and it is the pursuit of a man who has already been caught.

“I never knew you”

The brief links this to a text an earlier dossier examined at length. At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus describes people who will come to him on the last day with an impressive record:

Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.

Matthew 7:22–23

These people would have answered “Do you know God?” with complete confidence. They had experiences to point to, and powerful ones. What they hear in reply is a sentence about his knowledge of them. It does not correct their account of how well they knew him. The final verdict on a human being, as Jesus puts it here, is spoken in the first person by the judge.

That should make any preacher careful with the question. If the thing that counts at the end is whether Christ knows a person, then the useful thing to tell a congregation is where Christ has said, in so many words, “you are mine.” Sending them to inspect the quality of their own knowing does not answer that, and the people in this passage are a warning about how such an inspection can come out.

The objection: “God knows everybody”

It may be said that being known by God cannot be a comfort, because God knows everything. “Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight” (Hebrews 4:13). He knew the people of Matthew 7 perfectly well.

That is true, and it shows that the word has two senses. God is aware of all things. But when he says to Israel, “You only have I known of all the families of the earth” (Amos 3:2), he is not confessing ignorance of Egypt. And when Jesus says “I never knew you,” he does not mean that these people had escaped his notice. “Know,” in these sentences, is the word of Part II: to own, to acknowledge as one’s own. The comfort lies in being acknowledged by God, which is more than being observed by him. Part VI asks where that acknowledgement is spoken.

The objection: “if any man love God”

1 Corinthians 8:3 has a condition in it: “if any man love God, the same is known of him.” Does that put the weight back on us?

It puts something on us, and it is worth seeing what. Paul’s contrast in that chapter is between knowledge that “puffeth up” and charity that “edifieth.” Some Corinthians were proud of how much they knew, and were using it to trample weaker Christians. Paul says that the mark of a person God has made his own is love. It is not the amount he knows. That is the same test as 1 John’s, and Part IX collects those tests. It is a long way from “the person who has gone deepest knows God best.” In Corinth it was the people who thought they had gone deepest who were the trouble.

An evangelical voice

One of the most widely read evangelical books of the twentieth century is called Knowing God. Its author, the Anglican theologian J. I. Packer, was as keen as any preacher that Christians should know God and not merely know about him. In the chapter called “Knowing and Being Known” he writes:

What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it—the fact that He knows me.

J. I. Packer, Knowing God (Hodder & Stoughton, 1973), chapter 3. Given here as widely quoted; check it against the printed page.

That is Paul’s “or rather,” written out in modern English by a writer who is honoured in the very churches where the question “Do you know God?” is most often asked.

Try it: how does the sentence end?

Seven sentences from Scripture, each stopped before its end. Choose how the text finishes it.

“Shew us the Father”

If God makes himself known, the next question is where. The author’s second point answers it in three words: in Christ. This Part tests that, and it begins with a disciple who wanted more.

Philip’s request

Philip was one of the first disciples Jesus called (John 1:43). He had heard the teaching and seen the signs from the beginning. On the last evening he asks for one thing further, and says it will be enough: “shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us.” It is a devout request. Philip is not asking for money or a place of honour. He wants to see God. He takes it that there is something beyond Jesus still to be had, a direct sight of the Father, and that until he has it he does not have enough.

Jesus’ reply is one of the sadder questions in the Gospels: “Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip?” Then comes the sentence the brief quotes: “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” No further sight is being held back. Philip has been looking at what he asks for.

The rest of the New Testament says the same thing in several ways.

“All the treasures.” “All the fulness.” “Complete in him.” Paul wrote those words to Christians at Colossae who were being told there was more: further wisdom, visions, stricter disciplines. His answer is that nothing of God has been kept outside Christ for the advanced to go and find. He describes the teacher of the further depth as one “intruding into those things which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind, and not holding the Head” (2:18–19).

It is worth noticing what follows the verse in Matthew. Jesus says that nobody knows the Father except those to whom the Son reveals him. The next words are an invitation: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (11:28). The knowledge of the Father comes by revelation, and what he offers with it is rest. The Quest offers a pursuit.

Which way the ladder runs

The brief says that the Quest reverses the direction: “God coming down to us becomes us climbing up to God.” Scripture has a good deal to say about direction, and it is consistent.

At Babel men say, “let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name.” The next verse reads: “And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower” (Genesis 11:4–5). Seventeen chapters later a man asleep on the ground sees “a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven,” and the LORD speaks to him from it and makes him a promise. Jacob had built nothing and had not been seeking. He wakes and says, “Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not” (28:12–16). Jesus later takes that ladder and says what it is: “ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man” (John 1:51).

Moses is the hardest case, because he asks for exactly what the sermon holds out. “Shew me now thy way, that I may know thee,” he says, and then, “I beseech thee, shew me thy glory” (Exodus 33:13, 18). The answer comes in two parts. “Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.” And then what God will do in place of that:

And the LORD descended in the cloud, and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the LORD. And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin …

Exodus 34:5–7. The request was in 33:18.

Moses asked to see. He was given something to hear. “The LORD descended,” and what Moses received was a name and a sermon on it, the heart of which is forgiveness. That is how God chose to be known by the man who knew him best in the Old Testament.

Paul states the rule in Romans, using words Moses had spoken:

Say not in thine heart, Who shall ascend into heaven? (that is, to bring Christ down from above:) Or, Who shall descend into the deep? (that is, to bring up Christ again from the dead.) But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy heart: that is, the word of faith, which we preach.

Romans 10:6–8, drawing on Deuteronomy 30:11–14.

Nobody needs to go up, because Christ has come down. Nobody needs to go into the depths, because he has been raised. Paul says what is near instead: “the word of faith, which we preach.” The thing God has put within reach is a message that is spoken aloud by one person to another.

Where he let himself be found

When the angel tells the shepherds that the Saviour has been born, he gives them a way to recognise him: “And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger” (Luke 2:12). They are told where to look, and it is low down.

Paul says the same about the end of the story. “For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe … we preach Christ crucified” (1 Corinthians 1:21, 23). And he says what he made of it in his own ministry: “I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (2:2).

Luther built a way of doing theology on those verses. In 1518 he set two kinds of theologian side by side:

19. That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things which have actually happened.

20. He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross.

Martin Luther, Heidelberg Disputation (1518), theses 19–20; trans. Harold J. Grimm, Luther’s Works vol. 31 (1957).

In his explanation of the twentieth thesis he reaches for the very exchange at the head of this Part. Philip, he says, “spoke according to the theology of glory: ‘Show us the Father.’ Christ forthwith set aside his flighty thought about seeing God elsewhere and led him to himself.” And he concludes: “For this reason true theology and recognition of God are in the crucified Christ.”

Years later, lecturing on Galatians, he gave the same advice to anyone troubled in conscience:

Begin with Christ. He came down to earth, lived among men, suffered, was crucified, and then He died, standing clearly before us, so that our hearts and eyes may fasten upon Him. Thus we shall be kept from climbing into heaven in a curious and futile search after the nature of God.

Martin Luther, Lectures on Galatians (1535), on 1:3; abridged translation by Theodore Graebner (1939), at Project Gutenberg.

Not only a Reformation idea

It would be a mistake to think this is Luther’s private emphasis. Around the year 180 Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, was writing against teachers who offered a higher knowledge of an unknown God to those able to receive it. He replied:

For the Lord taught us that no man is capable of knowing God, unless he be taught of God; that is, that God cannot be known without God: but that this is the express will of the Father, that God should be known.

Irenaeus, Against Heresies IV.6.4 (c. 180); trans. A. Roberts and W. Rambaut, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 1 (1885).

A few chapters on he says how. God, “as regards His greatness, is indeed unknown to all who have been made by Him … but as regards His love, He is always known through Him by whose means He ordained all things. Now this is His Word, our Lord Jesus Christ” (IV.20.4).

Two centuries later Augustine told the story from the inside. Before his conversion he read the Platonist philosophers, and found in them much that was true about God: an eternal Word, the light of men. He tried to rise to that God by thought, and for a moment believed he had glimpsed him. “But I was not able to fix my gaze thereon; and my infirmity being beaten back, I was thrown again on my accustomed habits.” What the philosophers did not have, he says, was the sentence “the Word was made flesh.”

And I sought a way of acquiring strength sufficient to enjoy You; but I found it not until I embraced that Mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus … For I did not grasp my Lord Jesus, — I, though humbled, grasped not the humble One.

Augustine, Confessions VII.18.24 (c. 397); trans. J. G. Pilkington (1887), as edited for New Advent.

He sums up the difference between the two roads in a picture: “it is one thing, from the mountain’s wooded summit to see the land of peace, and not to find the way there … and another to keep to the way that leads there” (VII.21.27). The climber gets a view. Reaching the country takes a road, and the road is Christ in his humility.

The Catholic Church’s modern Catechism makes the same point with the help of a sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, a man who knew more about inward experience than most. It quotes John of the Cross on Hebrews 1: God, in giving us his Son, “spoke everything to us at once in this sole Word — and he has no more to say.” Anyone now “desiring some vision or revelation would be guilty not only of foolish behavior but also of offending him, by not fixing his eyes entirely upon Christ” (Catechism of the Catholic Church §65, quoting The Ascent of Mount Carmel II.22).

The objection: “the deep things of God”

The Quest has a text here. Paul writes that “the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God” (1 Corinthians 2:10). Does that not promise a depth beyond the plain gospel, opened by the Spirit to those who go further?

Read the paragraph it stands in. Paul has just said he resolved to know nothing among them but “Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (2:2). The hidden wisdom he speaks of is something “which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (2:8). So the deep thing is the cross. And he says what the Spirit is given for: “that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God” (2:12). The Spirit’s work is to open up what has been given in Christ. It is not to take anyone past him. Jesus had said as much: “He shall glorify me: for he shall receive of mine, and shall shew it unto you” (John 16:14).

The same holds for the prayer in Ephesians that Christians may “comprehend … what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height.” Two phrases frame it. They are to comprehend it “with all saints,” and what they are to know is “the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge” (3:18–19). The depth here is the depth of Christ’s love, and it is taken in together with the rest of the Church.

The objection: “people can know God from nature and conscience”

They can know something. Paul says that God’s “eternal power and Godhead” are “clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made” (Romans 1:20), and he tells the Athenians that men “should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him” (Acts 17:27). Luther drew the line carefully:

There is a twofold knowledge of God, general and particular. All men have the general and instinctive recognition that there is a God who created heaven and earth, who is just and holy, and who punishes the wicked. How God feels about us, what His intentions are, what He will do for us, or how He will save us, that men cannot know instinctively. It must be revealed to them.

Martin Luther, Lectures on Galatians (1535), on 4:8–9; abridged translation by Theodore Graebner (1939).

A person can know that God exists and still not know whether God is for him. That second knowledge is what Jeremiah promised and what John 17:3 calls eternal life. Nobody reaches it by looking at the stars or into his own heart. He has to be told, and Paul goes straight on in Athens to tell them: God “hath appointed a day … by that man whom he hath ordained” (Acts 17:31).

Try it: up or down?

Eight texts. In each, someone moves between heaven and earth, or is told not to. Sort them by the direction of travel.

0 of 8 sorted

Known in the breaking of bread

Part V ended with Paul’s phrase “the word of faith, which we preach.” If God is known in Christ, the practical question is how Christ reaches a person who was not in Galilee. The author’s third point is that he is given through means: things outside us that are shared and public. An earlier dossier went through the texts on Baptism, the Supper and the Word at length. This Part does something narrower. It watches what happens, in the New Testament’s own stories, to people who come to know God.

Emmaus: the test case

If anyone ever had the chance of a direct, unmediated knowledge of Christ, it was the two disciples walking to Emmaus on the first Easter afternoon. The risen Lord walked beside them for miles. “But their eyes were holden that they should not know him” (Luke 24:16).

Luke then tells us how they came to know him, and there are two stages. First: “beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (24:27). Then, at table: “he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew him” (24:30–31). When they report it to the others they name the moment: “he was known of them in breaking of bread.”

They did have an experience. “Did not our heart burn within us,” they say. But look at when: “while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures” (24:32). The burning heart came from the Scriptures being opened. And the knowing came at the bread. Christ was physically present the whole time, and he chose to be recognised through an exposition and a meal. Luke’s first readers had those same two things when they met on the Lord’s Day, long after the risen Christ had ceased to walk the roads.

Five conversions in Acts

The book of Acts records how the first people after Easter came to know God. It is worth setting the accounts side by side and asking of each: what did the person see or hear, and what happened next?

Two of these five had experiences as direct as any Christian has ever claimed. Saul saw Christ. Cornelius saw an angel. In both cases the experience does not deliver the knowledge of God. It sends the man to another human being who will speak words to him, and then to water. Christ, speaking from heaven, tells Saul that he will be told what to do in the city. The angel, who could presumably have explained the gospel himself, gives Cornelius an address.

Lydia’s case shows the two sides together. “The Lord opened” her heart: the inward work is God’s, and Luke says so. And what her opened heart did was attend “unto the things which were spoken of Paul.” The inward opening and the outward word are not rivals. One is how the other is received.

The Ethiopian is perhaps the closest to the sermon’s ideal. He is alone, with a Bible, wanting to understand. And his own answer to the question whether he understands is, “How can I, except some man should guide me?” God’s response to a solitary seeker is to send him a preacher.

The apostles’ own account

What the stories show, the letters state.

Each of these happens between people, out loud or with the hands, and somebody else can witness it. That is the brief’s phrase: “shared and public.” And Christ attached his own presence to them. “Lo, I am with you alway” is the end of the sentence that begins “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them” (Matthew 28:19–20). “He that heareth you heareth me” (Luke 10:16). “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20).

The early Church’s vocabulary reflects this. About the year 155 Justin Martyr described Christian Baptism for the Roman emperor, and gave it a name that has to do with knowing: “And this washing is called illumination, because they who learn these things are illuminated in their understandings” (First Apology 61; trans. M. Dods and G. Reith, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 1). For those Christians, a person’s enlightenment had a date and a place, and it involved water.

Augustine later explained why an outward thing can carry so much. Commenting on “Now ye are clean through the word,” he wrote: “Take away the word, and the water is neither more nor less than water. The word is added to the element, and there results the Sacrament, as if itself also a kind of visible word” (Tractates on the Gospel of John 80.3; trans. J. Gibb and J. Innes, 1888, as edited for New Advent). A sacrament, on this account, is the gospel in a form that can be seen and touched. It is not a rival to the Word, and not a ritual added to it.

The apostle who heard the voice

One text speaks to the sermon’s hope of hearing God more directly than any other. Peter had stood on the mountain of the Transfiguration and heard God speak from heaven. Near the end of his life he tells his readers about it, and then says something unexpected:

And this voice which came from heaven we heard, when we were with him in the holy mount. We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place.

2 Peter 1:18–19

The man who heard the voice does not tell his readers to seek a voice. He points them to the written word of the prophets, which they have and can read, and calls it “more sure.” An earlier dossier works through the question of hearing God in detail. Here it is enough to notice where an eyewitness of glory sends the people who were not there.

The objection: “in spirit and in truth”

Jesus told the Samaritan woman that the hour was coming “when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father … the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth” (John 4:21, 23). Does that not free the knowledge of God from places and outward things, and make it inward?

It frees it from Gerizim and from the Jerusalem temple. It does not make it placeless. In the same breath Jesus says, “Ye worship ye know not what: we know what we worship: for salvation is of the Jews” (4:22). Sincerity without the God who has revealed himself is, on his own account, ignorance. And the conversation ends with the woman saying that when Messiah comes he will tell them all things, and Jesus answering: “I that speak unto thee am he” (4:26). The place has become a person, and he is known because he is speaking to her.

The objection: “ye need not that any man teach you”

John writes: “the anointing which ye have received of him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man teach you” (1 John 2:27). This is the New Testament echo of Jeremiah 31:34, and the answer is the same as in Part III. John says it in a letter in which he is teaching them. Three verses earlier he has told them what to hold on to: “Let that therefore abide in you, which ye have heard from the beginning” (2:24). He is warning them against new teachers who claim a higher knowledge. His point is that they do not need those men, because they already have what was preached to them from the start. The verse sends them back to the message they first heard. It does not send them to an inner voice.

The objection: “God is not tied to rituals”

This is true, and every tradition quoted on this page says so. So far as we are told, the thief on the cross was never baptised. Calvin puts the matter exactly: “although the power of God is not confined to external means, he has, however, confined us to his ordinary method of teaching” (Institutes IV.1.5; trans. Henry Beveridge, 1845). And Wesley, who defended the means of grace against people who wanted to lay them aside, wrote that one who truly trusts in God “cannot fall short of the grace of God, even though he were cut off from every outward ordinance, though he were shut up in the centre of the earth” (Sermon 16, “The Means of Grace,” 1746).

The claim was never that God cannot work without means. The claim is about where he has told us to look. A man who is ill may recover without the medicine. That would be a poor reason for his doctor to tell him to leave it in the cupboard and wait.

Try it: what happened next?

Six people in the New Testament, each at the moment something has just happened to them. Choose what the text says came next.

“As through instruments”

The author’s fourth point is that the historic confessions “resisted the move inward,” and that Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican traditions “likewise place knowing God within the Church’s Word and sacraments.” He asks where they agree and where they differ. This Part lets each speak from its own documents.

The Lutheran statement, and the word “enthusiasm”

The sentence at the head of this Part was read out before the Emperor Charles V at Augsburg in June 1530. It goes on: “They condemn the Anabaptists and others who think that the Holy Ghost comes to men without the external Word, through their own preparations and works.” Two things are being said. The Spirit, who gives faith, comes through outward means. And the opposite view is described as a kind of self-preparation: getting oneself ready, by one’s own exertions, to receive what God gives.

Seven years later Luther wrote the point into the Smalcald Articles in the sharpest form he ever gave it:

And in those things which concern the spoken, outward Word, we must firmly hold that God grants His Spirit or grace to no one, except through or with the preceding outward Word, in order that we may be protected against the enthusiasts, i.e., spirits who boast that they have the Spirit without and before the Word …

In a word, enthusiasm inheres in Adam and his children from the beginning to the end of the world … Therefore we ought and must constantly maintain this point, that God does not wish to deal with us otherwise than through the spoken Word and the Sacraments. It is the devil himself whatsoever is extolled as Spirit without the Word and Sacraments.

Martin Luther, Smalcald Articles (1537), Part III, Article VIII, ¶¶3, 9–11; Triglot Concordia (1921), with the translators’ bracketed glosses omitted.

It is strong language, and it needs two notes. First, Luther does not use “enthusiasm” only for the radical preachers of his day. In the same article he says that “the Papacy also is nothing but sheer enthusiasm,” because the Pope claims that right is lodged “in the shrine of his heart.” And he says it began in Eden, when the serpent “led them from the outward Word of God to spiritualizing and self-conceit.” He means a temptation every human being has, himself included: to trust what arises within over what is said from without.

Second, he supports it from the cases in Part VI. Cornelius “had heard long before among the Jews of the coming Messiah,” and still “St. Peter had to reveal to him” that the Messiah had come. Even John the Baptist did not leap in the womb “without the voice of Mary.”

The Large Catechism, written for parish clergy and households, says the same thing in the language of knowing:

For neither you nor I could ever know anything of Christ, or believe on Him, and obtain Him for our Lord, unless it were offered to us and granted to our hearts by the Holy Ghost through the preaching of the Gospel.

… we could never attain to the knowledge of the grace and favor of the Father except through the Lord Christ, who is a mirror of the paternal heart, outside of whom we see nothing but an angry and terrible Judge. But of Christ we could know nothing either, unless it had been revealed by the Holy Ghost.

Martin Luther, Large Catechism (1529), the Creed, Article III, ¶¶38 and 65; Triglot Concordia (1921).

That is a chain with three links, and each one hangs on the one before. The Father is known through Christ, “a mirror of the paternal heart.” Christ is known through the Holy Ghost. And the Holy Ghost works “through the preaching of the Gospel,” in a congregation which the Catechism calls “the mother that begets and bears every Christian through the Word of God” (¶42).

Try it: ask six traditions the same question

Choose a tradition. Each panel gives, in that tradition’s own published words, how God is known, and then says where it stands apart from the others.

What all six say

Nor does any of the six make private devotional experience the channel through which God is known or the test of whether he is. All six teach daily private prayer. Part XI comes to that.

Where they divide

The agreement should not be overstated. These churches divided over real things, and some of them bear on this page.

Try it: which tradition said it?

Eight sentences about how God is known, each from a confession, a catechism, a liturgy or a sermon. Match each to its source.

Where “intimacy” came from

The author’s sixth point is that “‘intimacy’ language is modern,” and that “intimate relationship with God” is “not biblical wording.” He asks where the phrase comes from and what it brings with it. This Part checks both claims. The second holds. The first needs correcting, and the correction turns out to strengthen the argument.

What the brief gets right

The words are not in the English Bible. This page searched the text of the Authorised Version: “intimate” and “intimacy” do not occur in it, in either Testament. Nor does “relationship,” as an earlier dossier found. That proves little by itself, since “Trinity” is not there either. But it does mean that the sermon’s central phrase has to be brought to the text from somewhere else.

The exact phrase is recent in print as well. Google’s scanned library of English books allows any phrase to be counted by decade. “Intimate relationship with God” appears less than once in every billion words printed before 1900. It is still under two per billion in the 1960s. In the 2010s it stands at forty-one.

Where the brief needs correcting

The vocabulary of intimacy with God is a different matter. It is very old.

The English word comes from the Latin intimus, “inmost,” and the most famous sentence in which a Christian applied it to God was written about the year 397. Augustine, looking back on the years when he searched for God in the wrong places, says: “You were more inward to me than my most inward part; and higher than my highest” (Confessions III.6.11). The Latin is interior intimo meo.

A thousand years later one of the most widely read devotional books ever written used the word freely. The sentence at the head of this Part is from it. One of its chapters has the heading, in the standard modern English version, “The Intimate Friendship of Jesus” (II.8). Its Latin is De familiari amicitia Jesu.

And the Catholic Church’s present Catechism says: “Spiritual progress tends toward ever more intimate union with Christ … God calls us all to this intimate union with him” (§2014).

The Authorised Version, for its part, has the thing without the word. Abraham “was called the Friend of God” (James 2:23). “The secret of the LORD is with them that fear him” (Psalm 25:14). “I have called you friends” (John 15:15). “Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you” (James 4:8).

The other line: knowing God without the means

There has also, from early on, been a second line of teaching. It holds that God is truly known only when he is known directly, without any outward thing coming between. The historic churches met it repeatedly, and it is the real ancestor of Position Q.

Fox’s sentence is the clearest statement of the position anywhere: the knowledge of God “without the help of any man, book, or writing.” It should be read with sympathy. He was a young man in real distress, he had gone to clergyman after clergyman, and by his own account he “saw there was none among them all that could speak to my condition.” The churches of his day had failed him. Nearly every movement in this line began the same way, among people who had been given the outward things by ministers who seemed to have nothing inward at all.

What the count shows

Words can be counted, and the count tells a story. Before the figure is shown, guess it.

Here are the fuller figures. Each is the number of times the phrase occurs per billion words printed in that decade.

Three things stand out. The older Protestant phrase for closeness to God was “communion with God.” John Owen published a whole treatise under that title in 1657, and it was a hundred and forty times as common as “intimacy with God” in the books of the 1830s. Second, “intimacy with God” was in print all along, at a low and steady level, for a hundred and twenty years. Then, between the 1970s and the 2010s, it multiplied about twelvefold. Third, the phrase “means of grace,” which every tradition in Part VII used for where God is to be sought, had fallen by the 1980s to a fortieth of what it had been in the 1830s.

Three cautions. Google’s library is not a sample of what was preached, and the mix of books in it changes from decade to decade. Religious books were a much larger share of all printing in 1830 than in 1970, which accounts for part of the fall in both older phrases. And a phrase can be printed in order to be criticised. The figures are offered as an indication of which words Christians have reached for. They do not measure what anyone believed.

The twentieth-century writers

Position Q should be heard from people who held it well.

A. W. Tozer, a pastor in Chicago, published The Pursuit of God in 1948. He was dismayed by churches with correct doctrine and no evident life, and an earlier dossier quoted him at length and with respect. He is careful to say that the pursuit follows the new birth and does not replace it. But he also writes this, of the knowledge of God:

It is personal: that is, it does not come through the body of believers, as such, but is known to the individual, and to the body through the individuals which compose it. And it is conscious: that is, it does not stay below the threshold of consciousness and work there unknown to the soul (as, for instance, infant baptism is thought by some to do), but comes within the field of awareness …

A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God (Harrisburg, Pa.: Christian Publications, 1948), chapter 1.

Two things are said there that none of the documents in Part VII says. The knowledge of God “does not come through the body of believers.” And it must be “conscious,” which is set against what is given in a sacrament. Those two sentences mark the place where the road divides.

In 1990 a Southern Baptist study course, Experiencing God, by Henry Blackaby with a co-author, began to be used in churches of many denominations. Its publisher still summarises it in seven statements. The second is that “God pursues a continuing love relationship with you that is real and personal.” The fourth is that “God speaks by the Holy Spirit through the Bible, prayer, circumstances, and the church to reveal Himself, His purposes, and His ways,” with this comment: “If people don’t know when God is speaking, they are in trouble at the heart of their Christian lives.”

That course says plainly that God takes the initiative, and it names the Bible and the church among the ways he speaks. On those points it is closer to Position K than a hostile summary would allow. But notice what has become the heart of the matter. It is the believer’s skill in recognising when God is speaking to him, through his prayers and his circumstances as well as through Scripture. A person who lacks that skill is “in trouble at the heart” of his Christian life. Compare the woman in Part I, who said she prays and hears nothing.

The anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann spent several years in congregations of this kind for her study When God Talks Back (2012). She describes hearing God as something their members learn to do through practice, and she dates the style: “This style of Christianity really emerged with the hippie Christians in the shadows of the 1960s and has just exploded since then.” That date agrees with the count above.

So what is new?

The warmth and the vocabulary are both old. Three shifts are recent.

The third shift does the damage. A medieval monk who wrote about the sweetness of Christ’s friendship was describing something he was grateful for. He did not turn to the ploughman at the back of the church and tell him that without the same experience he did not know God. The ploughman knew God because he was baptised and came to Mass. The modern sermon has taken the monk’s word and made it the ploughman’s examination.

Try it: who said it, and when?

Eight sentences about knowing God, from sixteen centuries. Match each to its author and date.

Enough?

The author’s brief ends with a word in inverted commas. Under the Quest, he writes, believers “are left unsure whether they know God ‘enough.’” And he gives the reason: “A quest has no finish line, so assurance moves from God’s promise to the believer’s experience.” This Part tests that. It asks what kind of measure intimacy is, what measures Scripture itself supplies, and what the historic churches gave people to hold in its place.

Three properties of the Quest’s measure

Two men at prayer

Jesus told a story about measuring oneself before God, and Luke says whom it was for: “certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others.”

The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are … I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess. And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner. I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other.

Luke 18:11–14

Apply the Quest’s gauges to the two of them. One has a regular discipline of fasting and of prayer, speaks to God with confidence, and can give an account of his spiritual life. The other stands “afar off,” cannot lift his eyes, and has seven words to say. Asked “do you have an intimate relationship with God?”, the first would say yes and the second would not know where to look. Jesus says which of them went home right with God. The publican’s whole prayer is a request for the thing Jeremiah named as the ground of knowing God: mercy on his sin.

The tests Scripture does give

None of this means that the claim to know God cannot be tested. The New Testament tests it, and its tests are worth setting out, because they are of a different kind from the Quest’s.

Every one of these looks outward. They ask what a person does with God’s commandments and with the brother he can see. None asks how much time he spends alone, how vividly he feels God’s presence, or whether he hears a voice. And all of them can be checked by someone else. A man’s wife, his employees and the poor of his town are able to say whether he passes.

John is not asking for sinless perfection. The same letter says, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves” (1:8), and, “if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father” (2:1). His tests are aimed at a particular person: the one who makes a large claim to know God and whose life contradicts it. They expose false claims. He does not offer them as a ladder for anxious people to climb.

Growth is real

The Quest is right about one thing that Position K must not lose. The New Testament does expect Christians to grow in the knowledge of God.

“But grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 3:18). Paul prays that the Colossians may be “increasing in the knowledge of God” (1:10). He says of himself, “That I may know him … Not as though I had already attained” (Philippians 3:10, 12). There is more to know, and a Christian of fifty years’ standing should know God better than a new convert does.

Two things keep this from becoming the Quest. The first is that growth is not the test of belonging. A girl of five knows her father less well than she will at thirty, and she is every bit as much his daughter. Paul, who is still pressing on, has already been “apprehended of Christ Jesus.”

The second is that the New Testament says how the growth comes, and it does not leave it to private effort:

And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ: Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man.

Ephesians 4:11–13

Growth in “the knowledge of the Son of God” is something “we all” come to, and the means Christ gives for it are people who preach and teach. Calvin’s comment on this passage is pointed: “We see that God, who might perfect his people in a moment, chooses not to bring them to manhood in any other way than by the education of the Church.” He goes on to describe the alternative in terms that might have been written about the sermon:

Pride, or fastidiousness, or emulation, induces many to persuade themselves that they can profit sufficiently by reading and meditating in private, and thus to despise public meetings, and deem preaching superfluous.

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), IV.1.5; trans. Henry Beveridge (1845).

Calvin was not against private reading and meditation. He was against the idea that they are where a Christian mainly grows.

What the historic churches put in a person’s hand

If the measure is not the believer’s experience, what is a doubting person to look at? The brief’s answer is Baptism, “an objective place where God has said ‘you are mine.’” The older churches gave several such places, and they have something in common.

Luther explains why these things have to be outward. The whole point is that they are not the believer’s own state of mind:

Yea, it shall and must be something external, that it may be apprehended by the senses, and understood and thereby be brought into the heart, as indeed the entire Gospel is an external, verbal preaching. … Wherever, therefore, He speaks, yea, in whichever direction or by whatever means He speaks, thither faith must look, and to that it must hold.

Martin Luther, Large Catechism (1529), IV.30; Triglot Concordia (1921).

Look at the grammar of “I am baptized.” It is in the passive: something was done to me. It is in the past, on a date that is written in a register. Other people saw it. And it does not rise and fall with my mood. In each of those respects it is the opposite of “I have an intimate relationship with God.”

What four listeners heard

A sermon is heard by particular people. Here are four of them, as this page imagines them, on the way home from a sermon that asked “Do you know God?” and answered in the language of the Quest.

Position K has something different to say to each. To the widow: you have been given Christ’s body and blood every week for fifty years, and that is what knowing him looks like. To the father: the God who knows you gave you those children, and changing a nappy at five in the morning is a service to him. To the student: thank God, and read 1 John 4:20. To the depressed man: what you feel today is not the evidence. You were baptised, and he has not forgotten your name.

An earlier dossier asked who gains when the person in the pew loses assurance. It is enough here to note the structure. If knowing God is a matter of depth, and depth can only be judged by those who have it, then somebody in the room has to be the judge.

Try it: has it a finish line?

Eight sentences a Christian might say about himself. All are composed. Sort each by the kind of statement it is.

0 of 8 sorted

A project for your life

The last of the sermon’s answers, as the author reports it, was that a person should discover God’s individual “project” for his life. It is the fourth move under test from Part I: that knowing God includes finding out a particular plan he has for you. The idea is so familiar that it can be hard to see it as an idea at all. This Part asks where it comes from, what the New Testament says in the places where it would be expected, and what the historic churches taught in its stead.

What is right about it

God does govern the course of each life. “A man’s heart deviseth his way: but the LORD directeth his steps” (Proverbs 16:9). Paul can say that Christians are “created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10). And Scripture records people who were given a specific task: Jeremiah, known “before I formed thee in the belly” (1:5), and Barnabas and Saul, of whom the Holy Ghost said, “Separate me … for the work whereunto I have called them” (Acts 13:2).

So no Christian thinks his life is an accident, and the wish to spend it on what God wants is a good wish. The page grants that. Its question is narrower. Does Scripture tell each believer that there is a personal plan which he is responsible for discovering, and that discovering it is part of knowing God?

Where the phrase came from

In the 1950s Bill Bright, the founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, wrote a short evangelistic booklet in four statements. The first, as the organisation still publishes it, reads: “God loves you and offers a wonderful plan for your life.” When Bright died in 2003 a Baptist news agency called it “the most widely disseminated religious booklet in history” and said it had been printed in some two hundred languages.

It is fair to Bright to say what he meant. The tract explains the “plan” by quoting John 10:10, “that they might have life, and might have it abundantly.” He meant salvation and a full life in Christ. He was not offering a career blueprint. But the phrase travelled further than its explanation, and by the end of the century “God’s plan for your life” had come to mean something more particular: a set of right choices about work, marriage and place which God has made in advance and which the believer must find. The study course quoted in Part VIII speaks in its fifth statement of God having “a God-sized assignment for you.”

The count shows the timing. The phrase “plan for your life” occurs about once in a billion words of English print in every decade from the 1900s to the 1960s. In the 1970s it is at three. In the 1990s it is at thirteen, and in the 2010s at eighty. The phrase is not only a religious one, so the figure is a rough guide, but the rise is steep.

The text most often quoted

When a verse is given for the personal plan it is nearly always this one: “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the LORD, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end” (Jeremiah 29:11). Earlier dossiers have looked at it (05 and 50), so the point can be made briefly.

The verse is a sentence in a letter. Jeremiah wrote it to the Jews who had been deported to Babylon. The “you” is plural: it is addressed to a people. The sentence before it reads, “after seventy years be accomplished at Babylon I will visit you” (29:10), and the letter has just told them what to do meanwhile: “Build ye houses, and dwell in them; and plant gardens” (29:5). Most of the adults who first heard the promise died in Babylon. It promised that the nation had a future, and it was kept. It did not promise each exile a personal destiny, and it gave none of them anything to discover. They were told the plan outright, and it was to settle down.

What the New Testament calls “the will of God”

If each Christian had a personal plan to find, the natural place to look for it would be the passages where the apostles speak of “the will of God” for their readers. There are several, and they are remarkably alike.

In every case the will of God is the same for everyone who reads the letter, it is stated openly, and it concerns how to live. Nothing is hidden for the individual to find out. Micah says God “hath shewed thee.” The Old Testament has a sentence that draws the line: “The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law” (Deuteronomy 29:29). God has purposes he has not disclosed, and they are his affair. What he has disclosed is ours, and it is given to us to be done.

Where the New Testament leaves it open

The other side of this is just as plain. On the kinds of decision for which people most want a personal plan, the apostles show a striking freedom.

Marriage is the obvious one. Paul’s ruling for a widow is: “she is at liberty to be married to whom she will; only in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 7:39). There is one boundary, that the man be a Christian. Inside it the choice is hers. No word here about finding the one man God has selected.

Paul’s own travel is another. “Oftentimes I purposed to come unto you, (but was let hitherto)” (Romans 1:13). He made plans, and they fell through. “It may be that I will abide, yea, and winter with you … I trust to tarry a while with you, if the Lord permit” (1 Corinthians 16:6–7). He does not claim to have been told. He says “it may be,” and makes a sensible plan, and leaves the outcome to God. James gives that as the rule for everyone: “ye know not what shall be on the morrow … ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that” (4:14–15).

The objection: Paul was sent to Macedonia by a vision

He was (Acts 16:9–10), and God spoke to prophets and apostles on other occasions too. Three things are worth noticing about those occasions. They came unsought: nobody in Acts is shown setting out to discover his assignment. They were rare enough to be recorded as events. And they were given to the people through whom God was founding the Church and giving its Scriptures. The New Testament nowhere turns them into a method, or tells the Christians at Thessalonica or Corinth to expect the same. What it tells them is in the table above.

An earlier dossier has examined at length whether every believer should expect to hear God in this way, and this page does not repeat it. One verse may stand for the rest. “My sheep hear my voice” (John 10:27) is sometimes quoted for a private voice. In the sentence before it Jesus tells his opponents, “ye believe not, because ye are not of my sheep.” To hear his voice, in that passage, is to believe what he says. And he tells his preachers, “He that heareth you heareth me” (Luke 10:16).

What the Church taught instead: vocation

The historic churches did have a doctrine about what God wants of each person’s particular life. It is called vocation, and it differs from the “project” at every point. An earlier dossier set it out in full.

The text at the head of this Part is its foundation. Paul is answering Christians at Corinth who wondered whether, now that they belonged to Christ, they should change their situation: leave an unbelieving husband, seek or reverse circumcision, get out of slavery. He does not forbid all change: a slave who can become free should take the chance (7:21). But his answer, given three times in eight verses, is that the place a person is already in is a place where God has called him to serve. “Let every man, wherein he is called, therein abide with God.”

Luther built this into the way ordinary people were to examine their lives. When the Small Catechism teaches someone how to prepare for confession, it does not send him in search of a hidden plan. It says: “Here consider your station according to the Ten Commandments, whether you are a father, mother, son, daughter, master, mistress, a man-servant or maid-servant.” And it ends with a list of Bible passages for each station in life, under a rhyme: “Let each his lesson learn with care, And all the household well shall fare.”

The difference bears on knowing God in a way that is easy to miss. The author’s question lists vocation among the places where Christ is known, and Scripture supports him. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matthew 25:40). Jeremiah said of a king’s justice to the poor, “was not this to know me?” The neighbour whom a person’s station puts in front of him is where his knowledge of God becomes visible. Under the “project,” a person’s present duties are a waiting room. Under vocation they are the place where God is to be served today.

What the project does to a person

It follows the logic of Part IX. A plan that has to be discovered can be missed, and a person can never be sure he has found it. So the young are left unable to choose a job or a spouse for fear of choosing wrongly. The middle-aged wonder whether an early decision put them on “God’s second best” for good. Ordinary events come to be read as coded messages, which is the habit earlier dossiers examined in Job’s friends. And those who are confident that they have found their project can speak of their own plans with God’s authority.

The apostolic pattern is plainer and kinder. Do what God has openly commanded. Serve the people he has put in front of you. Where he has not spoken, decide sensibly and say, “If the Lord will.” And trust that the one who directs a man’s steps can do so without the man’s help.

Try it: is it called the will of God?

Eight matters a Christian might want guidance on. Sort each by what Scripture says about it.

0 of 8 sorted

The secret place

A page that argues for the outward means owes its reader the strongest texts on the other side. The sermon had them. Scripture tells people to seek God, to draw near to him and to pray in secret, and it is full of longing for him. This Part sets those texts out and asks what each one says.

“Enter into thy closet”

Jesus commanded private prayer. “But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret” (Matthew 6:6). He practised it. “And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, he went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed” (Mark 1:35). “And he withdrew himself into the wilderness, and prayed” (Luke 5:16).

Position K accepts all of this without reserve. A Christian who does not pray alone is disobeying a plain command, and every tradition in Part VII teaches daily private prayer. Luther’s Small Catechism has a form of it for morning and evening.

Two things should be noticed in the text. The first is what Matthew 6:6 is about. Jesus is warning against prayer performed “to be seen of men” (6:5). The closet is there to keep prayer from becoming a display, and he does not present it as the place where God is found. The second is the word he uses for the one prayed to: “thy Father.” The person who goes into the closet already has a Father there. And when the disciples ask to be taught, he does not give them a technique for reaching God. He gives them words: “When ye pray, say, Our Father” (Luke 11:2). Even in the secret place the Christian prays with something that was handed to him, and in the plural.

“Draw nigh to God”

“Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you” (James 4:8). This is the verse that seems most clearly to make nearness depend on the believer’s approach.

Read the rest of it. “Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double minded. Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep” (4:8–9). James is writing to people he has just called “adulterers and adulteresses” and friends of the world (4:4). He is not describing a method by which a faithful Christian reaches a deeper intimacy. He is calling the unfaithful to repent, and promising that God will receive them. The verse is the prodigal’s road home.

Hebrews also says “draw near,” and Part III quoted it: “Let us draw near … having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water” (10:22). Three verses on comes the practical instruction: “Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together” (10:25). In Hebrews, drawing near is something the Church does together, on the ground of Christ’s blood.

“My soul thirsteth for thee”

The Psalms give the Quest its warmest language, and it would be a poor theology that had no room for them. “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God” (42:1). “My soul thirsteth for thee” (63:1). “When thou saidst, Seek ye my face; my heart said unto thee, Thy face, LORD, will I seek” (27:8).

These are prayers the Church has always sung, and nothing on this page argues against meaning them. But each of them says where the Psalmist’s longing is directed, and it is worth reading on.

The man who thirsts for God in Psalm 42 is an exile who cannot get to the temple, and what he remembers with tears is going there “with the multitude.” The man of Psalm 63 is in the wilderness, and what he wants is to see God as he has seen him “in the sanctuary.” Their longing is intensely personal, and it is aimed at the place where God had promised to meet his people. God himself had told Israel where he was to be sought: “unto the place which the LORD your God shall choose out of all your tribes to put his name there, even unto his habitation shall ye seek” (Deuteronomy 12:5). When some preferred other shrines, Amos gave them God’s answer: “Seek ye me, and ye shall live: But seek not Beth-el” (5:4–5).

So “seek the LORD” is a real command, and it comes with an address. Isaiah’s great invitation, “Seek ye the LORD while he may be found” (55:6), is followed four verses later by the account of how he is found: “For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven … So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth” (55:10–11). The seeker looks up, and what he is given is a word that comes down.

Friends, and the secret of the LORD

Part VIII granted that the Bible has the language of closeness. “The secret of the LORD is with them that fear him” (Psalm 25:14). The second half of the verse says what the secret is: “and he will shew them his covenant.” Jesus calls his disciples friends, and gives the reason: “for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you” (John 15:15). The friendship consists in his having told them. It rests on what he has revealed, and no inner circle is given anything further.

What about feeling?

It may still seem that Position K has no place for the heart. That would be a misreading. The disciples at Emmaus said, “Did not our heart burn within us.” Peter writes to people who love a Christ they have never seen and “rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory” (1 Peter 1:8). Calvin, who is nobody’s idea of a sentimentalist, insists that the knowledge of God “is not that which, resting satisfied with empty speculation, only flutters in the brain, but a knowledge which will prove substantial and fruitful wherever it is duly perceived, and rooted in the heart” (Institutes I.5.9).

So the affections belong. What Position K says about them is that they follow the gift, and that they are no measure of it. The hearts at Emmaus burned “while he opened to us the scriptures.” Peter’s readers rejoice “believing.” Joy comes to people who are hearing and trusting what God says. It also goes. The same Psalter that pants for God contains a psalm that ends in darkness: “LORD, why castest thou off my soul? why hidest thou thy face from me?” (88:14). The man who prayed that was no stranger to God. He was praying.

Nothing the sermon told people to do is lost. A person should pray alone and read the Scriptures. He does it as someone who has already been met.

What a week looks like

The author’s question asks about “Word, Baptism, Eucharist, prayer, the Church, and vocation.” Put together, they make a pattern of life that the historic churches have recognised for a very long time. It is first described in a single verse about the earliest converts: “And they continued stedfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers” (Acts 2:42).

There is nothing in that list a tired, busy or unintellectual person cannot do, and nothing in it that tells one Christian he knows God better than another.

Who is the subject?

The page has argued that God makes himself known in Christ through outward means, and that a sermon which turns this into a quest does harm the preacher does not intend. The same slip can be made by any preacher on any Sunday, including those who hold Position K. This Part offers a way to notice it.

What a sermon on knowing God can safely say

Ten statements about a sermon

Think of the last sermon you heard on knowing God, on a relationship with God, or on going deeper. Answer for that sermon. Nothing is stored or sent anywhere, and the result is a prompt for thought and nothing more.

One sentence, turned round

This page began with a question, “Do you know God?”, and with a sentence of Paul’s in which he starts to affirm that the Galatians do and then stops himself. It is worth seeing why he stops. The Galatians were being drawn towards a religion of things to do: days to keep, rules to observe, a standard to reach. Paul calls it bondage. And the first thing he says to people in that danger is to remind them which way the knowing runs.

The Quest is a gentler religion than the one the Galatians were tempted by. It asks for devotion, and makes no demand for circumcision. But it has the same shape. It gives the believer something to attain and a standard to measure himself by, and it leaves him unable to say that he has arrived. Paul’s three words of correction apply to it as they applied in Galatia.

Your answers, revisited

Here are the ten questions you answered before reading, with what the sources say. If you skipped them, go back to the quiz, lock in your answers, and return.

Check it yourself

Twenty-four items. Nearly everything here is free and online. If you read only three, read the first three. If you do only one thing, do the last.

1. 1. Jeremiah 31:31–34; Hebrews 8:6–13 and 10:11–25; Luke 22:14–20; Luke 1:67–79. Read this first. Fifteen minutes. The promise, the New Testament’s two quotations of it, and the cup. Underline every verb and write beside it who is acting.
2. 2. Galatians 4:1–11; 1 Corinthians 8:1–3 and 13:8–13; Philippians 3:3–14; 2 Timothy 2:15–19; John 10:1–30; Matthew 7:15–23. Read this first. Twenty minutes. Every text in Part IV, each with its surroundings.
3. 3. John 14:1–11 and 1:1–18; Hebrews 1:1–4; Colossians 2; Romans 10:1–17; Exodus 33:7–34:9. Read this first. Twenty-five minutes. Philip’s request, where God has put himself, and which way the movement runs.
4. 4. The verb “know”: Genesis 4:1; 18:17–19; 1 Samuel 2:12–36 and 3:1–21; Hosea 2:14–23; 4:1–6; 6:1–6; 13:4–5; Jeremiah 9:23–24; 22:13–17; Amos 3:1–2; the whole of 1 John. Forty minutes. In each place, ask what knowing or not knowing the LORD looks like.
5. 5. Luke 24:13–35; Acts 2:36–47; 8:26–39; 9:1–19; 10:1–48; 11:1–18; 16:11–15 and 25–34; 22:6–16; 2 Peter 1:16–21. Forty minutes. For each person, write down what he saw or heard and where he was sent.
6. 6. Genesis 11:1–9; 28:10–22; John 1:43–51; 3:9–15; Luke 2:8–16; 1 Corinthians 1:18–2:16; Philippians 2:5–11; Isaiah 55. Twenty-five minutes. Up and down.
7. 7. The Quest’s best texts: Matthew 6:5–15; Mark 1:35; Luke 11:1–4; James 4:1–10; Psalms 13, 27, 42, 63, 73 and 88; Deuteronomy 12:5–14; Amos 5:4–6; Luke 18:9–14. Thirty minutes. Read each psalm to the end.
8. 8. The will of God and vocation: Jeremiah 29:1–14; Deuteronomy 29:29; Micah 6:6–8; 1 Thessalonians 4:1–8 and 5:16–18; 1 Peter 2:13–17; 1 Corinthians 7:17–24 and 39; 16:5–9; Romans 1:8–13; James 4:13–17; Matthew 25:31–40. Twenty-five minutes.
9. 9. The Lutheran confessions: Augsburg Confession (1530), Articles V and XIII; Smalcald Articles (1537), Part III, Article VIII; Large Catechism (1529), the Creed, Article III, ¶¶34–66, and Part IV, ¶¶26–46; Small Catechism (1529), the Creed, Confession, the Sacrament of the Altar, and the Table of Duties. Trans. F. Bente and W. H. T. Dau, Triglot Concordia (1921); free at bookofconcord.org. Forty minutes. The translators’ bracketed glosses have been omitted from the quotations here.
10. 10. Martin Luther, Heidelberg Disputation (1518), theses 19–24 with their proofs; trans. Harold J. Grimm, Luther’s Works vol. 31 (Muhlenberg Press, 1957); the text is reproduced at bookofconcord.org. Fifteen minutes. Lectures on Galatians (1535), on 1:3 and 4:8–9: the quotations in Parts IV and V are from Theodore Graebner’s abridged translation (Zondervan, 1939), free at Project Gutenberg, which is a free paraphrase in places. The full translation is Luther’s Works vol. 26 (Concordia, 1963), pp. 399–402.
11. 11. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), I.5.9; III.2.7; IV.1.4–5; IV.15.3; trans. Henry Beveridge (1845). Commentary on Galatians (1548), on 4:9; trans. William Pringle (1854). Commentary on Jeremiah, on 31:34; trans. John Owen (1854). All free at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Thirty minutes.
12. 12. The Fathers. John Chrysostom, Homily 4 on Galatians. Irenaeus, Against Heresies IV.6 and IV.20. Justin Martyr, First Apology 61. Augustine, Confessions III.6, VII.9–21 and X.1; Tractates on the Gospel of John 80. All in the Ante-Nicene Fathers and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (1885–89); free at New Advent, whose editors have modernised “thee” and “thou.” The epigraph to Part IV gives Pilkington’s wording of 1887. Forty minutes.
13. 13. The Reformed and Baptist catechisms. Heidelberg Catechism (1563), Question 65. Westminster Shorter Catechism (1647), Question 88; Westminster Confession, chapter XVIII. The Baptist Catechism (London, 1695), on the outward means. Free online. Ten minutes.
14. 14. The Book of Common Prayer (1662): Morning Prayer, the Second Collect, for Peace; A General Thanksgiving; the Articles of Religion, XIX and XXV. Free at churchofengland.org. Ten minutes.
15. 15. Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992; second edition 1997), §§50–53, 65–67, 1127–29, 1213–16, 2014 and 2558; free at vatican.va. The Council of Trent, Session VI (1547), chapter IX; trans. J. Waterworth (1848). Twenty minutes.
16. 16. The Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, the hymn sung after communion, “We have seen the True Light”; quoted as published by the Orthodox Church in America in The Orthodox Faith, vol. II, “Worship.” Free at oca.org. Five minutes.
17. 17. John Wesley, Sermon 16, “The Means of Grace” (1746). Free at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Thirty minutes. Read the whole: it is the best single statement in English of how to use outward means without trusting in them.
18. 18. Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ (c. 1420), Book II, chapters 1 and 8, and Book IV; trans. Aloysius Croft and Harold Bolton (Bruce, 1940). Free at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Thirty minutes. Authorship has occasionally been disputed and is generally accepted.
19. 19. George Fox, Journal, the entries for 1647; in Rufus M. Jones, ed., George Fox: An Autobiography (1903), chapter 1. Free at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Fifteen minutes. Read it with sympathy.
20. 20. The twentieth-century writers. A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God (Christian Publications, 1948), chapter 1; out of copyright in some countries and widely available. J. I. Packer, Knowing God (Hodder & Stoughton, 1973), chapter 3. Henry T. Blackaby and Claude V. King, Experiencing God (1990); the seven statements are quoted from the publisher’s own summary, “7 Realities of Experiencing God,” at lifeway.com. The four statements of Bill Bright’s booklet are quoted from cru.org. The obituary is Baptist Press, 21 July 2003.
21. 21. Three things given at second hand. The sentence from Luther’s Works 26:401 in Part IV is quoted as given, with volume and page, in a Bible study published by the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (2016). The sentence from Packer is quoted as it is widely reproduced. Herbert B. Huffmon, “The Treaty Background of Hebrew Yāda‘,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 181 (1966), pp. 31–37, is summarised from standard accounts of it; this page did not consult the article itself. Check all three against the printed page before relying on the exact wording.
22. 22. On the research. T. M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (Knopf, 2012). The sentence quoted in Part VIII is from her public lecture on the book at the Carnegie Council, New York, 16 May 2013, whose transcript is online. The dating of the phrase “personal relationship with Jesus” is discussed in Dossier 52, Part X.
23. 23. On the counts. The word counts for the Authorised Version were made for this page from its text, and any reader with a concordance can repeat them. The phrase frequencies are from the Google Books Ngram Viewer (English corpus of 2019, case-sensitive, no smoothing), averaged by decade for this page: search for “means of grace,” “communion with God,” “intimacy with God,” “intimate relationship with God” and “plan for your life,” and see where each line turns. Ten minutes.
24. 24. One sermon, and one date. Do this one. Take the notes of the next sermon you hear, or the words of the next three songs you sing in church, and underline every verb. Count how many have God as their subject and how many have “I” or “we.” Then find out the date of your baptism, if you were baptised, and write it somewhere you will see it.

No living individual is named on this page as an example of anything; the sermon that prompted it is described as a listener reported it, without identifying its preacher or his church, and no judgement of any person is intended. Living scholars are named only as the authors of published research, and modern organisations only as the publishers of statements quoted word for word. Apart from those, every individual quoted is deceased, or biblical, and is quoted from a dated, published source. Every remark attributed to a pastor or a churchgoer, and every person described, is composed by this page for illustration and does not describe any real person. This page gives no pastoral or medical advice.