It seems important to Christians (particularly Christians) that we can know God.
If God is a person, then we can know God.
Even a young child can know a person; so anyone capable of knowing, should be able to know a personal God.
But if God is not a person, then God cannot be known -- such a God can only be known about.
The problem is that too many self-identified Christians say that their God is personal; while actually defining (as dogma) that God abstract, impersonal, alien from Men; a God of attributes (such as omniscience, omnipotence, etc).
But such a God is infinitely distinct from, different from, Men in His nature.
Such a God is not in practice knowable.
The problem therefore is that too-many Christians have (over the centuries) posited a de facto impersonal deity-of-attributes, instead of a knowable God - while simultaneously asserting the incompatible doctrine that God is personal.
Therefore, they block any possibility of really knowing God - for us as individual persons.
Such Christians will not even try to know God experientially. For them, any God that is knowable (as a young child might know his parents) is not what they mean by God.
What is knowable by experience is (for such Christians, and by definition) not really the real-God; but instead some-thing or some-one else...
Some lesser (or opposed) spiritual being; or some delusion or projection of Man's subjectivity.
We therefore need to become clear and explicit about what we regard as primary about God: is God primarily and essentially a real person of the same kind as human beings? Or not?
If God is a real person, then this is a knowable God, a God we can experience as a person - a God knowable (in principle) by anyone - to the extent that another person is knowable.
Or else God is some unknowable entity.
This ought to be an easy discernment, because we have Jesus Christ who was divine and also a knowable human person; and because of the way Jesus spoke of and to God in a personal and knowing way, in the Gospels; and because of the way that Jesus recommended we personally relate to this personal God.
Yet, of course, it all depends on how we read the Bible, how we regard church dogmas, doctrines, traditions and teachings, the nature of our theology.
There are plenty of these sources in the Christian tradition that point to God as ultimately, truly, genuinely an impersonal deity - and which regard God as a knowable person as a naïve, ignorant, or arrogant approximation or error.
So, as usual, in the end, we are thrown back on our own personal resources, our own capacity for discernment.
But this is what we should be aware of: that it all comes down to each of us.
And then we should take personal responsibility for our choice.
What then is it to be?
The knowable personal God? Or the unknowable abstract deity?
Because it makes a big difference; and ultimately it cannot be both.
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