Q: What do we mean by calling God “Creator?”

Hey Friends,

I just want to say thank you to all the many folks who reached out to encourage me into revisiting, revising, and completing this project.

And thanks to all of you for subscribing and supporting my platform here. No one wants to get more email so I hope you can get some value out of this one. In either case, I appreciate the privilege of inviting me into your inbox and, I hope, your headspace.

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If you missed the Kick-Off Catechism Post last week, here’s the intro:

I recently decided to revisit and finally finish a catechism I began writing a decade ago, which, thanks to a long vacation called cancer, I never completed. My plan is to rework what I had written, as God has made otherwise than who I was back then, and to write new entries for the questions that I left unaddressed.

Originally, I began writing it because I became convinced it is important for the Church to inoculate our young people with a healthy dose of catechesis before we ship them off to college, just enough so that when they first hear about Nietzsche or really study Darwin they won't freak out and presume that what the Church taught them in six grade confirmation is the only wisdom the Church has to offer. What I’ve realized since then is that adults— more specifically, Christians—also need this kind of catechesis. There is a long tradition in the historic church, especially in the Reformation, of distilling the faith down into concise questions and answers with brief supporting scriptures.

As Luther intended his own Small Catechism, the Q/A's of a catechism are, really, the pretense for a longer dialogue, in Luther’s case a conversation between parents and their children. Given the post-Christian world in which we will live, I think it's important to outline the faith such that people can see— and learn— the philosophical foundation beneath it. Ours is a faith that has ancient answers for modern questions, a faith that will always rely upon God's self-revelation but it is not irrational for all truth is God's truth. In other words, ours is a faith with the resources to tame the cynicism of a post-Christian culture.

I’ll post one every Wednesday so if you’ve not yet subscribed to the Substack…WTF?!

3. Is God knowable?

In a certain sense.

As Being that supplies existence to all created things in the universe, God is knowable for God is literally closer to us than we are to ourselves.

However, as Creator, God is necessarily greater than his creatures’s apprehension of him. Our knowledge of God is never full or perfect. We can know that God is but never know what God is.

Therefore we know God only analogically; that is, we can know what God is “like” but we do not know God in his essence.

"I beseech thee, my son, look upon the heaven and the earth, and all that is therein, and consider that God made them of things that were not; and so was mankind made likewise."

- 2 Maccabees 7.28

“Such knowledge is too wonderful for me.”

- Psalm 139.6

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