We shift gears this morning away from Means of Grace in order to examine how we know what we know about God, the universe and everything. This is important because it is the central question for every community of faith (regardless of the faith tradition). Every faith has to make some sense of the world around it as well as judgments about how persons are supposed to comport themselves in that world. I want us then to look at the two basic ways in which persons gain a foundation for their faiths; observation and revelation.
The first way in which we know about God, the universe and everything is through observation. Human beings always observed the world around them. They watched animals, seasons, stars and planets. These various entities were often assigned magical powers, cult status or human characteristics. By so doing, thousands of civilizations made sense of the world in which they lived. If we continue the theme of observation into the modern era we come to the rise of the scientific age. Through observation and experimentation science has defined and is continually redefining the parameters of what we know and how we know it.
The second way in which we know about God, the universe and everything is through revelation. Revelation describes the encountering of God in a way we could not do through observation. This is the heart of the three great Abrahamic faiths; Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Each of these faiths believes that God has revealed God's self to humanity in a variety of ways; Judaism to individuals such as Moses and the Prophets; Christianity in Jesus and through the Apostle's; and Islam through Muhammad. In addition each of these faiths has also compiled these revelations in a holy book (The Bible, both halves, and the Quran).
Both of these ways of knowing about God, the universe and everything are then filtered through tradition. Regardless of what you hear from those who claim to be interpreting their holy book in some tradition-less manner, they are not (this is not really a problem with science which appreciates the practice of building upon the work of those who have come before). All faith claims are filtered through generations of tradition which shape how we interact with and organize what we observe and what has been revealed to us.
Christianity then is a faith of both observation and revelation moderated through tradition. What makes Presbyterians and many other Christians different however is that we believe that the ultimate revelation of God and what God wants of us is not to be found in a book or in a tradition but in a person, Jesus of Nazareth. Our tradition holds that in Jesus, God became enfleshed in our midst. Therefore if we want to make sense of God and what God desires of humanity we look not to words directly dictated by God to a prophet (such as in Islam and Mormonism) but to the life and teachings of Jesus. While God has revealed God's self in a burning bush, through the Torah and through the proclamation of prophets, the only perfect revelation of God is Jesus the Christ.
Scripture becomes important then because it is our source for knowing about Jesus, who he was, what he did, and what he asked us to do. It is also the source of our knowing how God has revealed God's self before and after Jesus. It is also the source of God's story which tells us who we are (creatures), what happened to us (sin), how God has worked with us (calling Israel), how God is going to fix us (through Christ) and what our future holds (a new heaven and earth). Finally scripture is the lens through which we are able to continually evaluate and adjust our tradition. Though scripture cannot tell us about the mechanics of the universe and everything in it, it can and does tell us about God and ourselves. Thus scripture is the foundation upon which the church has built its faith and life.
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