There you have it. The God you (I assume) love is so defined by what you know. Not by what you don’t know.
————————————-
Because I have concluded the definition is God. Someone else may not make that connection. They would still love God, just not know it was God or even a god. The symbols we use for God sometimes get in the way of identifying God.

And so we come full circle, and the disagreement still stands.

You seem to be concerned that a specific definition of God must be agreed upon for us to agree on the principle that one must know God to love Him. This is far too subjective in order to ever allow the principle to hold. So if that is the case, then your original claim must win out.

But this is not so. My position is that for anyone to love someone or something, they must *know* that someone or something. And for this to be possible, God must be knowable. In other words, it matters who and what we think God is. That is the extent of my present claim. This is a conclusion based on the mere meaning of the word “love.” And you have conceded this point by your own understanding of who God is:

“I think the definition of God is that which created existence. Others may disagree. By this definition you can love God by loving existence, and by extension whatever made it even if you don’t call it God.”

There you have it. The God you (I assume) love is so defined by what you know. Not by what you don’t know.

—————–

Ok, now let’s move off of the original point at hand for which I entered this discussion. We either agree or we do not. All that can be said on that topic has been said, more than once.

Re: the Christian understanding of God, you say:

“Now from the point of view of the Bible the definition cannot be “God is who raised Jesus of Nazareth from the grave and validated Jesus’ mission here on earth as the Messiah of Israel.”, sense the Bible presumes that the heroes of the Old Testament loved God, and I don’t think all the Godly Jews were prophets who saw these events. Then what is the definition?”

The Christian speaks from the perspective of the New Testament, not the Old Testament. And the NT’s very starting point is “God is who raised Jesus of Nazareth from the grave,” so suffused is the identification through the books of the New Testament that one might as well read it rather than trying to pull the available proof-texts for inclusion in an exhaustive list.

—————–
We’ve covered the Christian concept of who God is, and I will not debate this with you. It is the consensus of the one holy catholic and apostolic church of the ages, and I contribute nothing but its declaration.

Now, as for the Christian identification of *what* God is, the Christian tradition has generally started where the Jews started for understanding, that is, the exodus event. God is what breaks into our present comfort and established patterns of power, overturning the sinful and oppressive regimes and wrongs of the past and opening the possibilities and renewal of the future to mankind (particularly the poor, weak and oppressed) and, subsequently, to the rest of creation. Of course, God is creator, (to appropriate the words of the Nicene Creed) “maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.” But this further understanding has been built through centuries of God’s revealing Himself to Israel and acting on behalf of Israel and, through Israel, the world. The N.T. is merely a development of this trajectory.

To elaborate on the more generalized identification of God as we mean it when we use the term of “God” in the abstract, i.e., when we are not generally trying to speak of a single conception of *who* God is, I would point you to Lutheran theologian Robert W. Jenson. He explains with much more clarity and eloquence than I ever could on *why* it matters who and what we say “God” is:

What can be said prior to God’s identification must, to be sure, be said. What do people use this word “God” for, that we ask so urgently to whom or what it is truly applied?

The horizon of life and its concern is time, the inescapable already, no-more, still, and not-yet of all we know and will. Every human act moves from what was to what is to be; it is carried and filled by tradition but intends new creation. Just so our acts hang between past and future, to be in fact temporal, to be the self-transcendence, the inherent and inevitable adventure, that is the theme of all religion and philosophy. But also, our acts threaten to fall between past and future, to become boring or fantastic or both, and all life threatens to become an unplotted sequence of merely casually joined events that happen to befall an actually impersonal entity, “me.”

Human life is possible – or, in recent jargon, meaningful – only if past and future are somehow bracketed, only if their disconnection is somehow transcended, only if our lives somehow cohere to make a story. Life in time is possible only if there is such a bracket, that is, if there is eternity. Thus in all we do we seek eternity. If our seeking becomes explicit, we practice “religion.” If our religion perceives the bracket around time as in any way a particular something, as in any way the possible subject of verbs (as in, e.g., “The eternal speaks by the prophets.”), we tend to say “God” instead of “eternity.”

But already we are becoming intolerably indefinite, for manifestly there are many kinds of bracketing that can be posited around past and future, many possible eternities. There is, for example, the eternity of tribal ancestors who have become so old that nothing can surprise them any more and in whose continuing presence all the future’s putative novelties are therefore mastered by traditional maxims. There is the eternity of nirvana, where a difference of past and future is just not permitted. There is the eternity of existentialism, in which decision brings time momentarily to a halt. So multiform is eternity that the mere assertion that it is, that there is some union of past and future, that life has some meaning, is for practice as good as the suspicion that there is none at all. Life is enabled not by a posit that life means but by a posit of what it means. The plot and energy of life are determined by which eternity we rely on, and the truth of any mode of life is determined by the reality of the eternity it posits. If we speak of “God,” our life’s substance is given by which God we worship, and our life’s truth is given by whether this is the God that really is.

Sorry there, it was a response to the line
“Jesus is Lord and is risen from the dead.” That’s it. That’s all one has to “know” and confess.”
Since the blog post I was responding to was on the necessary beliefs for salvation I wanted to bring back my conversation to that point.

Ah, I understand. I am only debating one aspect of your original response, i.e., “I don’t think it is necessary to know what God is to love God.”

Now, this is a narrow point and it easily leads into discussions regarding salvation. I would certainly be happy to expand the discussion to argue your statement that one can “omit Christ bodily resurrection” from essential beliefs about God – but this takes the conversation into an explicitly Christian context, and it seems we are not there yet, given the question at hand, namely, how can we love God when we don’t know what He is.

—-

“I’m hardly arguing that God is unknowable, I don’t know enough to make that statement.”

Perhaps, then, I inferred too much from your previous statement:

“That would seem to be the definition of supernatural, but such a thing would be beyond human definition since our thoughts are limited by reason and nature. Thus nobody would know what God is.”

—-
“So if you have a answer to what God is, feel free to let me know. I have only the barest comprehension of what God might be, and from my time studying the issue have come to believe most folks are in the same boat (but there are no shortage of people who think they know)”

Again, it is hardly possible to go much further without, in my case, exploring specifically Christian answers that center around Jesus Christ. If you would like to take the conversation in that direction, let me know.

But this does take us to the original point, does it not? People do not love some abstraction that they call God. They love the God of whom their beliefs and understanding (as limited as it might be) inform them. People love the God they know. This is my original counter-claim. Surely, we can agree on this principle.

I’m not sure of the relevance of this point to the present discussion, so I’ll pass on debating this question. We are not discussing salvation (which is an activity on God’s part), as the question centers around humanity’s ability to love an unknowable deity.
————
Sorry there, it was a response to the line
“Jesus is Lord and is risen from the dead.” That’s it. That’s all one has to “know” and confess.”
Since the blog post I was responding to was on the necessary beliefs for salvation I wanted to bring back my conversation to that point. I’m not trying to demonstrate what is true about God, only what one has to know about God to be saved. I felt we had got off track.

I’m hardly arguing that God is unknowable, I don’t know enough to make that statement. I only admit the possibility that it may not be possible to rationally comprehend God. We still don’t fully understand gravity. So if you have a answer to what God is, feel free to let me know. I have only the barest comprehension of what God might be, and from my time studying the issue have come to believe most folks are in the same boat (but there are no shortage of people who think they know).
———————
My thought on how people can love God without the full understanding of who and what He is by loving those attributes of God that are most essential to Him. He is existence and truth. God is the source of all that exist, if something exist then it is real, and all that is real is true. So, if you love life and you love truth then you would love God since he is the substance to truth and existence. Beyond His causing to exist and his truthfulness I’m rather unsure of Gods attributes but I’m always happy to hear peoples ideas.

CORRECTION: Obviously, I made a typo at the end of this phrase. Please insert “grave” in place of “grace”. :-/

We have reviewed the Christian definition of *who* God is, and seeded the Christian answer to the question of *what* God is. (We can explore that path if you like because there is a very definitive, positive answer that is more than “intelligent, invisible, spirit”, but somehow, I don’t think that would alter your hold on your premise.) Muslims and Jews, as you allude, *believe* they know what and who God is, and they are surely not going to defer to some syncretistic conception of the Deity. Even the Deists had some idea of who and what they meant when they referenced God.

To say it’s not possible to know which of these conceptions of God is correct is one thing, for this is the realm of faith, but that is not what you have asserted. You have asserted that God is not knowable. Further, you claim that God’s unknowability does not interfere with a human’s ability to love God. But if words have any meaning at all and are not mere empty abstractions, this assertion just does not make any sense and falls meaningless! Webster’s first definition of the word “love” is: “strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties.” The very concept of what we mean by love is based on what the subject knows of the object of the love.

“Of course one can love God and not know God is who raised Jesus of Nazareth from the grave.”

One can love one’s existing conception of God (which, apart from the Jews, will by definition mean a *different* God than the One who raised Jesus of Nazareth from the grace), but this is far different from saying one loves what something does not or can not know.

“Did Paul believe only those “who declare with their mouth, “Jesus is lord”, and believe with their heart God raised Him from the dead will be saved?… So to sum all of this up, I don’t think declaring,”Jesus is lord” is necessary for salvation…”

I’m not sure of the relevance of this point to the present discussion, so I’ll pass on debating this question. We are not discussing salvation (which is an activity on God’s part), as the question centers around humanity’s ability to love an unknowable deity.

As I said in an earlier commend, Christians have had their disagreements, but none of them have been over *who* God is. The description(s) of God you have pulled are more Hellenistic and either describe God by a negative or by comparing God to other known quantities. The Christian tradition (and that of other faiths) has resorted to this sort of language, obviously, but fundamentally, at the start of all talk of God in the Christian context, is that God is manifested in Jesus Christ. God is who raised Jesus of Nazareth from the grave and validated Jesus’ mission here on earth as the Messiah of Israel. Christians have been very clear on *who* they *believe* God to be, starting with the apostles, continuing with Ignatius, the Cappadocian Fathers, the ecumenical creeds and on. All of these are expansions of the gospel message that is at the core of the New Testament: “Jesus is Lord and is risen from the dead.” That’s it. That’s all one has to “know” and confess. Paul affirms as much in Romans. There’s nothing obscure or scholastic about that.

It’s not about knowing *theology*. It’s about knowing, and thereby loving, the person through whom God has revealed Himself. So again – one cannot love God without knowing who He is. This holds even beyond the Christian context – even if one’s only conception is that God is an unknowable, mysterious Watchmaker in the sky.