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5 God-Talk The chapter has five main sections, organized under five different fundamental assertions Christian theology makes about God. As a part of each section, relevant doctrines from different religious traditions are introduced, inviting the reader to raise questions and make connections. At the conclusion of the chapter, there is a series of interreligious questions for further discussion and reflection. 1. GOD MAKES GOD-TALK POSSIBLE The most basic claim that grounds a Christian understanding of God is that it is God first and foremost who makes knowledge of God possible. Certainly, human questioning of God’s nature and action is possible, and human reason is capable of reflecting upon and describing God’s being and work. In fact, once God has revealed Godself to humanity, it is incumbent upon humans to respond to that revelation with faithful consideration. Saint Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109, is famous for categorizing the Christian theological enterprise as fides quaerens intellectum—“faith seeking understanding.” This phrase was the original title of a text that he ultimately named Proslogion, in which he seeks to prove the existence of God through what has come to be known as the “ontological argument.”1 The point Anselm wants to make is based on Isa. 7:9, which he quotes in On the Incarnation of the Word: “Unless you have believed, you will not understand.”2 Anselm argues that all the knowledge in the world will not lead to faith; instead, it is for 1. The gist of the argument is that God is “something-than-which-nothing-greater-can-bethought ”—and, obviously, one of the attributes of this superlative greatness is existence: something “real” is greater than something that exists only in the mind. The developed argument can be found in Proslogion; see, for example, Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, ed. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 82–104. 2. On the Incarnation of the Word, found in Anselm of Canterbury, ed. Davies and Evans, 235. 133 those who believe in God’s self-revelation to seek after greater knowledge and understanding of God. The main point here, then, is that human activity is a second act, a response to God’s prior self-communication to us. The simple reason for this is that because of human finitude and sin, knowledge of God is impossible without God’s prior self-revelation. As Karl Barth forcefully insisted, when left to our own devices, human beings construct idols that serve our own needs, and religions that tell us what we want to hear. Thus he writes, “From the standpoint of revelation religion is clearly seen to be a human attempt to anticipate what God in [God's] revelation wills to do and does do. It is the attempted replacement of the divine work by a human manufacture. The divine reality offered and manifested to us in revelation is replaced by a concept of God arbitrarily and willfully evolved by [people].”3 Thus Barth offers a stark conclusion: “Religion is never true in itself and as such. . . . No religion is true.”4 In Barth’s view, therefore, the only thing that saves Christianity from this falsehood is the presence of Jesus Christ, the definitive self-revelation of God that allows humanity to speak an authentic word about God, and sets Christianity apart as the one true religion. While I appreciate Barth’s clarity here, and also his reminder that all Christian God-talk must be grounded in God’s antecedent action toward us—God’s coming to and dwelling with humanity in grace and truth, I would challenge the notion that God cannot also be present in other religions, even where the name “Jesus Christ” is unknown and unacknowledged. This seems not only to presume too much knowledge about the working of God in the world, but also to set limits upon God that Christians have no right to establish. Barth’s exclusivism is particularly difficult to defend when looking at the other two monotheistic world religions, Judaism and Islam. Like Christianity, both of these Abrahamic faiths also believe that God willingly and freely reveals God’s will and God’s nature to humanity, establishing a relationship with humanity—and, through them, the whole creation. What, exactly, God reveals, and to what extent God reveals, varies from tradition to tradition; but all three cousins share the same core conviction that it is the God of Adam, Abraham, Isaac, and Ishmael who...

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