Encountering the Divine Through God’s Self-disclosure

I sometimes have a hard time balancing the two sides of my experience of God. On the one hand, I primarily consider myself a mystic, meaning I believe I have a real and personal experience of Christ. On the other hand, I write this blog where several thousand readers throughout the year have come to expect some left-brained theological abstractions. Heart and head. I owe a lot of my ideas about divine revelation to Karl Barth who despite crafting some tough abstractions to crack himself, provides a compelling vision of divine intimacy. Barth offers a theology based around God’s self-disclosure that continues to invite us into transformative encounters with God.

Jerimiah 23: 23-24

Am I a God near by, says the Lord, and not a God far off? Who can hide in secret places so that I cannot see them? says the Lord. Do I not fill heaven and earth? says the Lord. 

We seem to be trapped in an information cycle in most of the areas of our lives. Despite living in a post-modern age where we’re taught that knowledge and truth are socially constructed, most of us still behave in a post-Enlightenment mindset where we think there is some kind of objective truth to discover. We read Amazon reviews to try to find that one perfect coffee grinder. We try to maximize our workouts by weight, reps, distance, heartrate and more, all tracked on little wrist-worn computers. And it carries over into our experience of revelation where many of us seek the one right answer to life’s problems through scripture and prayer. Unfortunately, there is not one right answer to be found. There is more disagreement about what the Bible means in our lives today than there is about which toothpaste we should choose, and our toothpaste choices are out of control.

Barth shows us that theology is not a video game where we’re seeking out new loot crates filled with facts about God. It’s about meeting God. It’s about encounter. God’s self-disclosure in revelation isn’t a passive unveiling that stopped 2,000 years ago, it is a dynamic and active engagement with God. It’s true that God is only revealed where God chooses to reveal themselves. Yet, they go about this self-disclosure in a personal and relational manner that continues today.

But what about, “God said it, so I believe it and that settles it for me?” (That’s a special callout to my fellow ex-Seventh-Day-Adventists who still have a fond memory of the Heritage Singers). This personal revelation of God means that revelation is not some static deposit of truths, but is a living action. God steps into human history, not to be understood like the speed of light or cellular division or planetary movement, but be known as a loving person. This should resonate deeply with my fellow progressives because your faith is not a checklist of beliefs but an interaction with the divine.

For Christians, the primary self-disclosure of God is Jesus Christ. Jesus is the incarnate Word of God. This disclosure is not about words, although the Bible does record some from and about Jesus as best as humans and their instable memories could over several decades. The disclosure is God’s presence Itself. Jesus, fully divine and fully human, forms this bridge to connect us to God. God takes a body, dignifies humanity and become radically accessible all the way to death. Through resurrection, Jesus is available to us today, present in communion, present wherever two followers meets, present in our very hands and feet and hearts. God is not revealed only to the scholarly or the clerical, God is revealed to all of broken and beautiful humanity.

Of course, Barth is famous for also upholding scripture as revelation. If a divine encounter of God thrills progressives, upholding the Bible as revelation will seem idolatrous. But beware of reducing Barth’s reverence for scripture as an indication he thinks it is the final word of God. Again, Jesus is the Word. Our encounter of God through scripture is only as revealing as the Holy Spirit chooses to reveal themselves through it. In that way, the Bible is neither just a library of old ideas about God, nor is it a perfectly inerrant divine dictation. It’s a living means through which God continues to speak. I want to call you toward a more mystical engagement with scripture. The Bible is not here as a rulebook or prooftext. It doesn’t tell us once and for all much of anything, because language and culture and knowledge change over time. It does continue to function as a relational dialog where God’s voice can break through in new ways. We are invited into conversation, transformation and communion.

It’s important that Barth believes you cannot know God through human effort alone. As humans, we cannot help but exercise our reason, experience and religious traditions in our contemplation of God; however, God’s revelation is on God’s terms, not ours. Some progressives find this challenging because many of us find God everywhere, in nature, in science and in our own hearts. I don’t believe Barth is counseling us not to trust those disclosures, but to accept that we receive them solely through God’s grace. In fact, I think that God’s self-disclosure challenges many of the more conservative religious denominations who seem to build their faith on certainty, dogma and control. A theology of God’s self-disclosure affirms that our faith is relational. It’s not about mastering the right ideas about God but allowing our lives to be mastered by God’s grace.

By anchoring God’s self-disclosure in Christ’s life, death and resurrection, we can measure all of what we find in revelation through love of God and neighbor. Saying that God’s revelation belongs to God alone is not about escaping the natural world, but it is about seeking God within it. Where there is a sacredness to nature, history, human transformation and growth, knowledge and hop in the resurrection, it is because God’s spirit has entered those places incarnationally.