Dying to Know

Abstract

The previous chapters introduced some topics unfamiliar to ordinary philosophical discourse: for instance, God's authoritative call , God's intervening Spirit , and human transformation by noncoercive divine power . We need to fill out these topics in connection with both the proposed cognitive shift in knowledge of divine reality and the dire human predicament of destructive selfishness and impending death. This chapter undertakes that task. We shall see that the ways of a perfectly loving God are unsettling indeed, and call for the killing of certain wayward human attitudes and deeds, for the sake of needed human transformation by divine power. Firsthand knowledge of divine reality follows suit, as this chapter shows in its moving further from abstraction to specific features of knowing the reality of the perfectly loving Jewish and Christian God. Hence, we may talk of “dying to know” God's reality. SPIRIT Given the evidence and argument of the previous chapters, we may say that a perfectly loving God goes beyond revelation as the imparting of information and nonpersonal experience to revelation as purposively available divine self-revelation. This God, being perfectly loving, offers a distinctive kind of purposively available evidence widely overlooked in philosophical and theological discussions of divine reality. Given our root problem of selfishness, the evidence includes divine self-revelation in the intended imparting of God's Spirit to humans as the irreducibly personal power behind volitional transformation of humans toward God's moral character.