IMO those verses are the essence of Christianity, but in no way particular except that they feel like a big step away from the Old Testament.
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I agree. The greatest instructions according to Jesus, in Jesus day and from the Hebrew Bible (Jesus quoted the OT for both of these) is to love the Lord your God and love your neighbor. I love those verses. At times I’ve even tried to build the habit of saying the Shema, plus “Love your neighbor as yourself” when I wake up in the mornings.
You asked a good question. It made me think about why I included only examples of seeking God on an individual level. One thing is that the verses I quoted (or approximated) for my list lent themselves to the “seek God and you’ll find him” pattern that I had in mind. But also, I’m no stranger to my own selfishness. I need some growth in prioritizing others.
Here are some verses that don’t lend themselves to the A → B pattern.
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Let us do good to everyone
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Be of the same mind as Jesus…let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.
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Visit orphans and widows in their affliction and keep oneself unstained from the world. This is pure religion before God.
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See someone overtaken in a fault, restore them in gentleness
Here are some that follow my original pattern.
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Pray for the sick person → they will be healed
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Pray for someone sinning → God will give them life
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See someone overtaken in a fault, restore them in gentleness
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If you’ve fed the hungry, given drink to the thirsty, clothed the naked, visited the sick, visited those in prison → You’ve done those things to Jesus, and will inherit the kingdom prepared by God
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Or how about more simply, “seek to serve others and you’ll find God”?
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So what you call “truth” is not truth at all, just opinion.
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To say that is the essence of Christianity is like saying the essence of a Black Forest Torte is flour. Sure, it wouldn’t exist without the flour. But there are so many other things that contain flour as well that it is meaningless to define this particular cake in terms of that.
The essence of Christianity, as it seems to me, is the incarnation of the Abrahamic god in the person of Jesus Christ, and the idea that salvation is possible only thru his sacrifice and resurrection.
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@John_Harshman and @Faizal_Ali
Thanks for interacting with me on my post. After sleepng on what I presented I want to say that the Bible doesn’t speak of these things as experiments. So that’s a bit of a fatal flaw in my logic. The Bible presents promises, makes invitations and says that God is faithful to perform his part.
But as a thought experiment, I don’t think what I presented is completely without value. So I’ll keep it going to to answer the questions you guys posed.
But I also want to keep the original goal in mind. @John_Harshman has questions about how Christians know things. I’m still interested in those questions. And I still stand by my assertian that knowing God in the scriptures comes from experience with Him. So let’s continue with the thought experiment so that I can answer your last questions, but I do want to circle back to John’s original question at some point.
I’ll start another post or posts to answer the pending questions.
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I can accept that. And, for my part, my position is that the only way we know things about the world (as as opposed to the knowledge we can obtain regarding abstractions such as those used in math and logic) is thru what could be described as experiment. So, from my perspective, nothing about your god can be known.
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Yes, exactly. And this is why I say there are good epistemologies, bad ones, and Dada ones.
Good epistemology: I evaluate observable evidence and apply reason to it, so far as possible, in order to derive conclusions about what is and is not real.
Bad epistemology (for example): I attempt to reason from first principles what the truth of any factual question may be.
Dada epistemology: I implore unknown things to answer me; I make them a sandwich, paint three dogs blue, and run in a circle around my house five times while chanting the names of various citrus fruits. At the end, though I have investigated nothing in any meaningful sense, I am filled with inner conviction.
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I know that I’ve been vague and that’s for two reasons. Stories take lots of space to tell, and answers to prayer for burdens to be lifted, for peace and forgiveness are real to me but I’m not sure how to make them more real in the telling.
So to add specificity, here are a couple of stories.
I have often asked him for financial provision to do what I thought he was leading me to do. Often the fun God stories happen when I think I’m at an impasse. I had a degree to finish, had a wife and baby, didn’t think taking years to complete the degree via part time coursework made sense. A friend and mentor suggested that I take year off work to knock out my coursework. I had no savings and it took all I made to support my young family. My wife and I went for a walk that night and I shared with her that I didn’t think part time school would work for our family and that I would love to take a year to finish school, but that it wasn’t financially possible. We prayed and asked God to show us what to do. The next day a family member called, had been thinking about my degree, and offered a loan that would allow us to take a year off of work to finish school.
I have asked God to allow me to participate in his work of caring for people. I prayed for a man that I didn’t know, who was sitting next to me and asked God to show me how I could encourage this man. Immediately after making my request, I saw a picture of a trailer being pulled by a truck. I asked God what that meant and thought of a verse. I told the man that I had seen a trailer after praying for him, and thought of the scripture that he “loads us with benefits”, and that I thought God wanted to load him with benefits so that he could be a blessing to others. The man looked surprised and told me that he was considering buying a trailer and had been praying about it. My interpretation of the situation was that God wanted to show the man that he saw him and wanted to bless him in order to make him a blessing to people.
I have tons of other stories that all contribute to this adventure I’m having with God. The way I met my wife was miraculous. I can tell more stories, including that one, if the stories answer your questions.
But the point is that I’ve experienced an adventure with God by asking and receiving, seeking and finding, tasting and seeing. I’ve done the “A” part of the “if A then B” equation and I’ve seen God do his part countless times.
I don’t know if I’m better off than anyone else. No doubt that you, or anyone else that’s not a Christian, could be a better person, more squared away internally, peaceful, joyfull, more loving than I am. What I have is an adventure with God that includes interaction with him and comes with those internal things like love, joy, peace, a clean conscience, etc.
For the second question, I’m convinced I’m not experiencing an allusion. But I don’t know that I could convince anyone else of that.
I’ll also add this. I’ve talked about my experiences as a way to attempt to answer the question about how Christians know things. We know by experiencing God. But I do not tell my story to say that my story is the Good News!
The good news (and story of the OT and NT) is that God is redeeming his good world, that Jesus rose from the dead, conquered sin and death and is King and Lord. He initiated his kingdom during his ministry, death and resurrection, sat down on his thrown at his ascension and will be returning to bring his kingdom in fullness on a renewed heavens and earth, at which time redeemed humanity can fully take up their original vocation from Gen. 1 to co-work with God to steward his creation.
Do the more specific stories above speak to this at all, Faizal?
In one story I was at an impasse about school, my wife and I prayed and told God that we would like to finish school by taking a year off of work, but don’t see how it’s possible. The next morning someone called, concerened about my schooling, and offered a loan.
My life is full of stories like this.
I don’t expect that my stories will convince you of anything necessarily. But stories are the specifics of my claim that I’ve taken God at his word and the results are that he has revealed himself. And my claim is that the Bible invites people to do exactly that.
LOL. This is fun, but it doesn’t actually describe how I’ve lived my life. My claim is that God actually is knowable and that he is active in this world. If you’re right, and God isn’t knowable, then your definition works.
I haven’t tried making God a sandwich. 
So that is easily testable by experiment.
Collect a random group of people who are facing similar financial challenges.
Have one group pray to the Christian god, other groups to different gods or not pray at all…
See if there is any statistical difference between the two groups in terms of whether solutions to their financial problems arise.
It’s not an air tight experiment, as the participants would not be blind to whether or not they have prayed to a given deity. But if there is no difference, it would be difficult to conclude that prayer worked.
Do you agree?
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I agree in theory, but it would be a difficult experiment to pull off. It is possible, though, to interview people that pray and collect their stories.
That would be useless in terms of gathering knowledge about a god that might exist. It would be interesting knowledge regarding why some people believe in gods. I heard many stories like yours from Muslims when I was growing up. That seems quite at odds with the claim that there is one god only who answers prayers from those who believe in him. If Christianity is true, why would God encourage people to remain as Muslims by answering their prayers?
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Thanks. That did answer my questions. However, as I think you realize, nobody who isn’t already a believer will find those stories to be credibly explained by encounters with God. A skeptic might claim that you are a victim of confirmation bias, remembering the hits and forgetting the misses, and that your life experience, taken as a whole, is no more miraculous than anyone else’s. Everything you have mentioned is explicable by coincidence. As has been said many times before, the miracles at Lourdes are fine, but don’t call me until somebody regrows a missing leg.
My claim, then, would be that you don’t actually know any of these things, and that your experience of God can as easily be your imagination combined with selective memory. There seems nowhere to go from here, no way for anyone to show that personal revelation corresponds to anything real; then again, there may be no way to show that it doesn’t. The advantage of science as a way of knowing is that it can be externally validated.
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I think that’s a question that would be impossible for me to answer
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And that’s a problem. If with God all things are possible, nothing can be evidence of what God didn’t do. Still, I have encountered a number of unexpected, favorable events in my life, but without having prayed for them, even to Allah. How can we explain that? If this were an experiment, I would be a negative control. And the lesson from that negative control — a placebo, in medical terms — would be that we can’t detect an experimental effect.
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Thanks for the interaction. I do realize that many, or most people would not believe my stories. But I know by experience that “nobody who isn’t already a believer” is an overstatement.
I know people with those kinds of stories, but many or most still don’t believe those stories.
I used stories to try to answer your question, but I’ll say again, I don’t think people’s personal experiences should replace the gospel. I point folks that are interested to the scriptures, not to my stories.
Wait, you have a story about a regrown leg?
The problem with that is that only your personal experiences are what validate the gospel for you. Why should anyone believe that the scriptures are true?
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I’ve never seen someone healed of something that drastic. But I’ve heard stories like that from people I’ve known.
I said that the Bible invites us to taste and see, seek and find. I offered that as a way of knowing. But I wouldn’t say that only my personal experiences validate the gospel. I think the Bible can stand on it’s own without my stories. I think that investigation of the Bible itself can lead to belief that the scriptures are true.
edit: Sharing my own stories in relationship to what the Bible says about seeking and finding are more of a way to say “seek God and see what he does” rather than offering my stories as proof. I have a friend whose adventure with God started with, “God, I don’t believe that you’re real, but if you are, show me.”