Theology

At the Chosen Demos, we wish to know what can be known about God.  The word theology is derived from two Greek word roots, theos meaning God, and logia meaning study or discourse. So the fundamental meaning of the word theology is the act studying God and thereby trying to know God.

Since Christianity understands that we (people) are God’s creations it is somewhat (or perhaps very) impertinent of us to think that we wish to study Him or can study Him.  It is even more impertinent of us to think that having studied Him that we can know Him in any real or deep sense.

Nonetheless it would be even more foolish of us if we thought of ourselves as Christians and did not try to understand at least some of the most important things about God. Not being blatantly foolhardy, overly presumptuous or wanting to be blasphemous we will stick to those aspects of God which are revealed to us in his Word.

Of course that also raises some prickly issues. The original text documents of His Word have all been lost over course of time. The best text documents we have are (hopefully) high quality copies of those originals.

To make it even harder, those ancient original text documents were not written in 21st century English. They were written in vowel-less Ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and Koine Greek to audiences and cultures that lived more than 3000 years ago, and in the case of the more recent texts at the least 2000 years ago.

Because of the importance of the matter, we will nonetheless endeavor to know Him, and to learn to obey His will.

None of the information to be presented in the thread of this web page and its associated posts will be the opinion of the author.  Nobody desiring to know God, should have any interest in an authors opinion.  This series of posts will be restrained to facts, consisting only of eye witness accounts and observations, recorded for posterity in the surviving texts of scripture and of the ancient fathers of the Christian church universal and the three ancient Christian Creeds they published as summaries of their faith in God.

All language about God must, as Thomas Aquinas pointed out, necessarily be analogical.  In particular, when we speak about something of which we have no direct experience, we must think by analogy or refrain from thinking altogether.  It may be perilous, as it must be inadequate, to interpret God by analogy with ourselves, but we are compelled to do so; we have no other means of interpreting anything.

As Dorothy L. Sayers stated in her adroit and insightful book The Mind of The Maker:

“Skeptics frequently complain that man has made God in his own image; they should in reason go further (as many of them do) and acknowledge the man has made all existence in his own image.”

and:

“To complain the man measure God by his own experience is a waste of time; man measures everything by his own experience; he has not other yardstick.”

Therefor our examination of the nature of God in this series of posts will involve the “picture-thinking” of many metaphors and analogies.  When we use these expressions, we know perfectly well that they are metaphors and analogies; what is more, we know perfectly well where the metaphor begins and ends.

In the beginning God created the cosmos^{(Genesis 1:1)}.

God is spirit^{(John 4:24)}, and He is pure being:  “I AM That I AM^{(Exodus 4:14)}.”

These not metaphors.  They are simple statements of fact.