On God’s First Help
Q. What help is there for us?
A. Our help is in God.
Q. How did God first help us?
A. God first helped us by revealing himself and his will, through nature and history, through many seers and saints, and especially the prophets of Israel.
Having talked about how and why humans turn away from God in the last two questions on human nature, the Catechism turns then to talking about how we may begin to get out of this predicament. As this section opens up into all those that follow, we also get a clearer sense in retrospect of what it is and isn’t meant to do. The next section will offer much more detailed insight into God as creator and the nature of the creation; Sin and redemption are covered in an entire section that further describes the state of our separation from God and how that relationship is restored; the section on the Old Covenant offers much greater insight into how God reveals Godself to humanity through Israel.
The section on Human Nature thus comes into sharpest focus: This section offers first and foremost the place where the Catechism will discuss the image of God, which appears is explained in no other place, and to take the position that this is the core of what constitutes our distinctly human nature, not only existing as creatures, but creatures made in the image of God. This section, specifically the last question, also offers what we call in theology the prolegomena (pro-leh-GAH-min-uh). In this word, you may see something like “prologue”; it is a fancy way of saying “procedural things that must be taken care of before talking about content.” As I’ll talk about in this post, this final question and answer can helpfully be read as an attempt to ask and explain how we arrive at any of the knowledge of God, or of the world in relationship to God, that follows.
In my post on this section’s first question, I posited that the layout of the Catechism seeks to follow the content of the Bible, namely beginning where the scriptural narrative does with creation. One could rightly ask, given that the section that follows is about God as creator the creation (under the heading God the Father), why these two sections aren’t reversed. Why not talk about creation in general and then zoom in to talk about humans as part of that creation? Such an alternative ordering of content makes a lot of sense—perhaps even more sense than how the Catechism was in fact ordered—but two things commend the present ordering to us. First, the discussion of humans as part of creation can assume the Image of God without having to digress to explain that concept—it allows for a neat flow from humanity in general to God’s specific relationship with Israel. Second, as presented, this first section gives space for that ground-clearing material, the discussion of how it is that we know what is talked about in all the following sections.
Before a discussion of the possibility of our knowledge of God, it’s important first to acknowledge the preceding question. In the last post, I affirmed that given the nature of Sin, human beings are unable to save themselves of their own power; this position, which is simply the traditional position of nearly all Christianity, is affirmed here from the outset in the Catechism. What precisely this means will be discussed at much greater length when we arrive at the section on Sin and Redemption.
However, some discussion of both our condition under the effects of Sin as well as how God begins to rectify that situation are unavoidable in digging deeper into the final question and answer about human nature. By saying that God first needed to reveal God’s self and will to us, this answer implies that humans had knowledge of God and God’s will that was lost through Sin. It does not indicate one way or another whether that knowledge prior to the effects of Sin was through some natural capacity that humans had and lost, or whether knowledge of God was always a kind of super-added grace over and above our “natural state.” What the answer does indicate, though, is that humans lose any natural capacity to know God unaided by God revealing Godself. The Catechism thus rules out so-called “natural theology,” or the idea that human beings can come to know true things about God through our unaided mental capacities. All knowledge that humans have of God comes through God’s gracious initiative, the result of an active act of assistance on God’s part. God is not an object that our minds can reach out and “grab” to gain knowledge.
At the same time, the Catechism offers an expansive view of how God reveals Godself to us. There are some theological traditions that hold that the only real knowledge of God that we can have comes about through activity that is explicitly from God, knowledge that cannot be arrived at through reflection on the natural world or human history. These traditions may say that only Christians have true knowledge about God, or that only what is explicitly stated in the Bible, as well perhaps as what is gleaned through reflection on the implications of what is explicitly contained therein, gives real knowledge about God and God’s will. The Catechism likewise rules out these extremely circumscribed positions about sources of human knowledge of God.
The Catechism takes the view that while humans cannot arrive at knowledge of God without God’s activity to make Godself available to us, God offers Godself to human minds through our reflection on the natural world and human history. One may also plausibly hold that “seers and saints,” being a category larger than the “prophets of Israel,” may extend to figures in religious traditions beyond Judaism and Christianity. It is not inappropriate to see this answer as affirming that while God always reveals Godself, God has and does reveal Godself and God’s will well beyond the confines of the Christian tradition.
However, that God can be known outside the Christian tradition, and even that other traditions may have knowledge of God that can inform how Christians understand and relate to God, does not mean that the Catechism indicates the idea that all traditions have equally valid or complete understandings of God or God’s will. In fact, this position, which in technical parlance may be called epistemological pluralism, seems ruled out by the fact that there is a hierarchy of validity for revelation: The Catechism affirms that such knowledge first came especially through Israel’s prophets.
Of course, even if God could be equally and fully known, at least in the sense of having factual, discursive, or propositional knowledge about that God, through many traditions beyond Christianity (even though this question and answer seem to push against such an equal distribution of knowledge), the Catechism affirms that humans need more than merely having knowledge of God and God’s will restored. This is how God first helps us—there is need for subsequent or further help. Our problem is that our relationship with God has been broken. A full relationship with someone seems hardly possible without any knowledge of that person. Deepening knowledge of them certainly can help the relationship grow stronger, but merely having knowledge about another person does not mean you have a relationship, or at least a healthy one. That such knowledge may be necessary but not sufficient for a relationship is easily illustrated by the public lives of celebrities easily accessible to so many people online these days. One can develop an extensive body of knowledge about such a celebrity without actually knowing that celebrity, which is to say, beginning to have an actual relationship with them. The Catechism will go on to affirm that our problem is not simply that through Sin we lose knowledge of God and God’s will, but moreover that we remain unable to follow God’s will as God would have us follow it even if we knew it and we remain entrapped by and subject to the powers of corruption and death.
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