From the Third to the Second

Bruce Waltke has this thing where he gets a student, who the class does not know, to stand in front of the class without saying anything about himself. The students cannot say anything to him and he cannot say anything to them. They must start talking about him, his background, his likes and dislikes, etc.

The point of the exercise is to show that one cannot know anything about another individual without that individual communicating himself to them. This, in turn, is to show that one can know little to nothing about God without God revealing Himself to man.

Hence, God's communication to us in the Bible is vital in knowing God. Without it, we can know nothing about Him. Nothing is confirmed. We are merely guessing. Guessing cannot even produce an accurate description of another human person, and that is a being for which we have analogous knowledge to make our guesses. We have no familiarity with any being like God, so our speculation does not even have an analogy or shared experience around which it can throw a rope. This means without revelation one cannot know God at all.

However, Waltke also makes the point that the goal of this knowledge is not just to have knowledge about God. It is necessary to speak of God and theology in the third person. God and His revelation is the object of our study in the third person, and of course, this sets us at a distance from God all by itself.

The goal of third person knowledge of God is moving that knowledge to the second person. The goal is to move the "He is like this or that" discourse to "You are like this or that and I respond to you in such and such a way." The goal of studying God via His revelation, then, is not merely to have a knowledge of God, but to have a right relationship with the true God who has revealed Himself.

Many a seminary student has talked about the deadness of what they are learning at seminary, I think, because they do not realize that the third person is a necessary step to get to the second person, but that it is only the step to get there, not the destination of their learning.

One might say that all false religion is either talk about God without talking to God or talking to God without talk about God. We often forget that the former is just as much a form of apostasy as the latter.

Hence, if our discussions of God do not lead to a submissive relationship with God as our Lord, even if our knowledge of Scripture is complete, we will have failed to grasp the purpose of the Bible.