Endnote 9 – Ways of Knowing God

Paul Van Buren’s three-volume theology of the Jewish-Christian reality is the most important Christian work to appear on this subject. See A Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality: Discerning the Way (New York: Seabury, 1980); A Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality, Part II: A Christian Theology of the People Israel (New York: Seabury, 1983); and A Theology of the Jewish Christian Reality, Part III: Christ in Context (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1988).

In what follows, my perspective is significantly formed by one of my mentors, H. Richard Niebuhr. In his book The Meaning of Revelation, he already insisted on the relativity of all religious thought and belief to space and time. Yet, he strongly affirmed the possibility of revelation in Jesus Christ to be the revelation of a universal God, the one beyond the many about which he spoke so eloquently in several of his essays and in Radical Monotheism and Western Culture (New York: Harper, 1960). He also strongly believed revelation to be open-ended because, as he put it, “A static faith is faith in a dead God.”