How can anything be known about God? I have been sitting with this question for quite a while now. Indeed, how can anything be known about anything? At the most basic level, the knower explores, experiences, and discovers. Information is gathered through the senses and interpreted through various processes, both internal and external to the knower. By this definition, knowledge in general, and knowledge of God in specific, is entirely experiential. To modern materialistic understanding, knowledge depends on observable and measurable facts.
Theology presents some interesting challenges to these basic assumptions. Faced with a lack of observable and measurable facts, the very existence of God is rightly questioned and challenged. Some will find within their experience enough evidence to convince them that there truly is a God, but not all will have such experience. There will even be those whose negative experiences will tell them that there is no God and there will be those who are quite sure that God does not care. All of these outcomes are inevitable if theology is a purely experiential pursuit.
The best that can be done under this assumption is to invite people to give this God thing a try in order to see if it works for them. Enter into the experience, come and worship! Taste and see! This is all well and good and there are many faithful communities that do this well enough. Yet, what is the message that is given for those who for whatever reason fail to share the God experience at a particular occasion? Try again next week? Find another community that works for you?
Maybe there needs to be an acceptance of inevitability, that not everyone will be able to experience God. If this is the case though, I think those of us who find God knowledge through experience are not using our imaginations enough. It is not that we need to abandon experience and find some other way to know God. Experience is always a part of the equation. What I hope to get across is that God is greater than our experience. How can this be embodied in a way that honors experience, but also honors those who have not experienced?
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