Matt Kennedy on knowledge of God vs. saving knowledge of Christ

This comes from a Facebook status update of Fr. Matthew Kennedy, an Anglican priest in New York, from about a week ago.  I found it worth deserving more attention and thought, and have thus taken the liberty of posting it here.  I think it's likely that you will find it stimulating further reflection, and that it's worth coming back to from time to time.

The NT logic is: saving knowledge of Christ alone leads to a true knowledge of God.  Problems come in contemporary universalist/inclusivist thinking when that logic is reversed so that it becomes: any kind of knowledge of God = saving knowledge of Christ.  Scripture never goes there. People are to be drawn to God through the proclamation of Christ because without Christ there can be no saving knowledge of God.

Hell as congitively and imaginatively resistant and repulsive: consequences for us

Interactions elsewhere on the net with regard to my comments on N.T. Wright's response to Rob Bell have led me to realize I'm being largely misunderstood.  Matt Kennedy of StandFirm seems to take my stance as being that we should not be particularly attentive of the things Christ told us about hell; this is far from the case.

When we begin to imagine and understand hell, we are so violently repulsed by the horror of the spectre of the lack of God's presence, that we quickly come to the realization that we do not belong there, and that we are in great need of God's presence. This should have the effect of us immediately calling out to God, and fleeing from the imagining of hell, with our realization that we weren't "really there," and that this imagination was but a futile, human attempt at imagining something which we couldn't possibly imagine in any realistic, vivid sense.

If we do not experience this, we are merely fooling ourselves in thinking that we have somehow imagined or conceptually grasped hell.

There are topics where our knowledge of A and B can lead us by inference to truths C and D. My point here is: that which we know - in no clear, and distinct manner from scripture about hell - should never lead us on to C and D unless we do so with great care and prayer, and when we discuss these things with others, this should also be characterized by prayer and care.

At times, our engaging in this debate about Rob Bell and hell was not adequately characterized by prayer and care, nor proper respect of our own finitude, and how these matters of such great importance utterly dwarf our imagination and reason - how they condition us, our thinking, and our thoughts - instead of us being able to produce cogent, rational descriptions of such things.

So I'd say, for hell especially, when we teach about this topic, and think about it, let us be especially solicitous in using Christ's own words and those of the apostles - without engaging in too much "embroidering" upon them.   These words should be enough.  The Holy Spirit will convict as necessary, without our having to rub people's noses in the awful fate of what awaits them in the unredeemed state.

When Jesus was on earth, and demons proclaimed His name ... He told them to shut up.  It is interesting to note how Jesus seems to not have wanted people to learn about Him from demons, even if what they said was true.  If Jesus did not want people to learn truth about Him from demons ... how much more dangerous is it for us to pretend to learn about God from hell, when our very imaginations of hell are more likely to be conditioned by our own dark fantasies and nightmares, as we are really totally unable to imagine hell, since hell is so tied up with ultimate judgment, which is one of “God’s things” and not ours?

It's possible that further reflecting about the place of hell in cognition, imagination, and theology could help bring peace to the still-divided "pro-Bell" and "anti-Bell" camps.  Perhaps hell is something where we more profitably reflect about the reflection, than try to reflect directly (except, of course, in reflecting upon Christ's own words and those of the apostles).

A few notes on things which make it impossible for us to conceptually or imaginatively grasp hell:

1) Agency (what we do, what we are responsible for) is never a “simple” question - it is a complicated issue.  I hit your car, your car rams into the car in front of it.  Did “you” ram into that car, where is the agency, who is responsible?  When God created man - God gave man freedom and agency.  This alone is a thing which is in many ways beyond our imaginitive and conceptual grasp - God's creation of moral agents, and the awesome (and terrifying) responsibility which belongs to such agents - which God could not withdraw from these agents, without their ceasing to be agents (and, perhaps - in doing so - corrupting justice - though I would add, even trying to imagine such is so far removed from human comprehensibility, that this notion also resists cognition and imagination).

2) Our abilities to think and imagine, and everything about the world in which we do so, are suffused with God’s natural grace, ordered according to His will.  This is why we can think, talk, etc. etc..  We have no knowledge of what God’s natural grace will be like in hell.  Or what “is left over” if we are in absence of such grace.  What a person who is “in hell” is, for us, a rather meaningless thing other than what we are told in Scripture. 

(Note: some philosophically-inclined readers might read in this something of Kant's notion of the sublime in aesthetics.  This is a posting for more of a popular audience so I won't comment on that here, but comments on this are welcome)

American Hell

Carson Clark has posted a video of N.T. Wright commenting on the American spectacle of Rob Bell's book on hell and the Christian response to it.

Wright on Hell & Bell from The Work Of The People on Vimeo.
My remarks:

There is something both fascinating and gruesome about how we have dealt with all this Rob Bell stuff. It says a great deal more about us, I think, than it does about God, or hell.

John Dyer has an excellent analysis of the situation from before the book was released: Love Wins and Truth Prevails but speed kills ‘em both. He also wrote a version of this for Christianity Today entitled “Not Many of You Should Presume to Be Bloggers: How Social Media Changed Theological Debate” – and points out, lusciously: “The commenters seemed to agree with the post by attempting to enact its main point.”

I was terribly taken aback by this whole “perfect storm” Dyer describes, realizing that the way the video was released, its content, the book blurb preview, a few chapters released to reviewers but not the whole book … was about to set the Christian community into Jerry Springer mode. We would have a lot of yelling, and very little substance.

Reviews of the book seemed to indicate that it was rather fast and loose in hermeneutics and other areas. I haven’t had a chance to read it.
I was tremendously impressed with Rob Bell’s fielding of questions at his interview with Lisa Miller. He is an incredibly talented man, when he’s working a field where he’s adept. But getting into the larger issues of Christian faith is not his thing; he is much better at imaginitively beckoning us to consider the awesome expansiveness of God’s love, and its implication for ourselves and those with whom we interact.

In this interview, Bell set out one of the founding premises of his book, and I think also, the presupposition behind much of the American argument:
That hell tells us a lot about God’s character; and that a person’s view of hell says a lot about what they think of God.

I would agree here in a qualified sense, but primarily disagree.



Hell would tell us a lot about God’s character if we knew quite a bit about hell, and were able to understandingly discuss it. What we think about hell does tell us something important about our our belief in God, if we allow this belief to be important in conditioning our view of God – e.g., if we dwell on it.
I would argue, very simply:

We can not imagine hell, or that which rightly belongs to God, in matters of judgment which are “ultimate” from our perspective as embodied humans in our present state here on earth. It seems to me that Christ’s words on judgment, His few words on hell, and the general literary qualities of His words, and those of the apostles, should indicate to us: “This is way beyond our grasp … the categories which we use to try to understand these things are simply not cut out for such things … we will end up in contradictions and probably many false classifications if we try to move too far in this territory.”

Thus: we should not dwell on hell, nor should we hold detailed beliefs regarding hell, nor should whatever beliefs we have in hell, be particularly important in conditioning our ideas about God, or “telling” us what we believe about God – simply since we must acknowledge, this is beyond our capacity of thinking, imagining, and perceiving.

A correlary: does what we think about the physical nature of the cosmos, tell us a lot about who we are, who God is, or what justice is?

I would say: “No. It doesn’t matter if we think that over billions of years it is expanding or contracting; whether it has edges, or somehow folds upon itself in a single, circle-like continuum; this breaks the very boundaries of our imaginations. Whatever our beliefs about this, we still tend to agree on how to treat our neighbours, what we need to do in life, etc. etc.. Changing from one viewpoint to the other is not likely to have serious consequences for the important aspects of one’s world view.”

So I am in profound agreement here with N.T. Wright. I think that dispensationalism and “literal” readings of prophesies somehow found their ways into American consciousness in a way that is rather unique – not only amongst those who consciously believe in such things, but even amongst atheists. It’s a part of Americans’ shared imagination, as it were – effecting the imagination at a deep level. All Trinitarian churches have believed in hell; most have abided by Scripture’s implicit warnings in the language regarding hell, and the explicit warnings regarding arrogance, preventing detailed speculation regarding hell itself from becoming an important part of the collective imagination or the way in which we tend to view things.
Americans tend to be pioneers – thinking no territory can’t be mapped out and fruitfully occupied. There is something very admirable in some of the ventures of the imagination where Americans have dared to go, where others have not. But not all exercises of the imagination are profitable; some most certainly blight the soul, or numb the mind. And I would suggest that hell is somewhere our minds and imaginations don’t need to go.
People of other cultures tend to respect boundaries more; and are more aware of “proprieties” – that our very finitude demands of us that we respect certain limits. Americans with their pioneering mentality seem to think that all limits are equally surmountable.

With hell, this is simply not the case.