How Do We Know God?

C.S. Lewis is well known as a Christian apologist, but it is worth remembering that he was a literature professor who had many insights into the ways ancient people used language vs. the way modern people use language.  This has implications for how we treat the Bible.  

Peter Macky summarizes Lewis' approach to the value of metaphors:

"Both poetic-type speech and scientific-type speech are valid language-games, neither of them to be judged by the standards of the other.  Metaphor is most at home in the poetic-type (including religious speech), for that is the way to speak of supersensible human experiences.  It is best done by appealing to the imagination, using metaphors that enable us to taste reality rather than just talk about it.  But even when we move toward theology and talk about God as if he were an object we could analyze, our abstractions are still metaphors, often unrecognized metaphors.  Thus our choice in speaking of God is not between metaphor and literal speech.  Rather it is a choice between the authorized, concrete metaphors of the Bible that enable us to participate in a relationship with God and the humanly-developed abstract metaphors of theology that keep us as spectators and are mainly valuable for marking out the limits of the more concrete metaphors." ("The Role of Metaphor in Christian Thought and Experience", 246)

If we expected the Bible to read like an owners' manual, or like a guide to how to put a jogging stroller together, we might be very disappointed when we found that the Bible was filled with visions, prophecies, parables, and stories.  How unhelpful!  The Bible does not use scientific speech as much as it uses poetic speech.  It uses metaphors.

So in our disappointment we think now we have to work harder to get beneath the artistic exterior to find the inner practical part that tells us what to do.  But, as Macky points out, metaphors and poetic speech are great language to use to get us to participate in what God is doing.  If God wanted us only as spectators, he could have used scientific speech.  Metaphors enable us to "taste reality rather than just talk about it."

Maybe its not that the Bible is hard or that its easy to lose the narrative thread in, say, Isaiah (although that is true enough).  Maybe as modern people we are too eager for the Bible to speak to us in the voice of an owners manual which we can stand outside of and handle as a casual spectator.  And as we do this, it is so easy to miss that the Bible presents a series of metaphors - God as Father, rock, ancient of days, Jesus as a 'Son', a 'Lamb' who 'loves, forgives, judges, saves' (all metaphorical language), the Holy Spirit as 'wind', and many, many, many more - that appeal to us in participants language.  "Come, he replied, and you will see." (John 1:35)   If we cling to the metaphors, rather than expecting to outgrow them, we would not merely observe God scientifically as though he were in a petrie dish, but would 'taste' him.  "Taste and see that the Lord is good." (Psalm 34:8)

Do we know the Lord like we know a geometric equation, a scientific-type knowledge which keeps us at arms length as a spectator?  Or do we know him more like we know the face of a friend or spouse, which involves us more as a participant?  If the latter, we might expect that a biblical metaphor couldn't be used up and discarded in one reading or five.  We might have to treat it like a life-long lozenge, that we meditate upon, that we memorize, that we carry with us, that we think about when we lay down at night and when we rise up.  We would treat it, not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself.  To enjoy.  "The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever." (Westminster Shorter Catechism, question 1).