the epistemic basis

I'm very thankful for the blessings the Lord gives us day by day. Sometimes it's easy to forget even the little things - like coffee - and the ways in which we are so blessed by his graciousness. Even in struggles, and hardship, I'm confident that the Lord is blessing us. Possibly not in any way we can discern this side of heaven, but I believe that he is. I tried to make this point on Wednesday night at Youth Group, but I'm pretty sure I just wandered in convoluted circles trying to communicate.

As Christians, our faith isn't grounded in circumstances, because the true circumstances - the circumstances of God and how he understands, orchestrates and uses them - are often hidden and above us. Rather, we ground our faith in the person of Jesus Christ and his unchanging, faithful character. We come to know his character through the pages of Scripture, and we're more fully confronted with his person, then we enter circumstances first with those truths held high above our head as a torch; we allow those truths to illuminate our circumstances - not the other way around.

I was struck, as I was prepping this week for my Sunday School lesson on the doctrine of the Trinity, by a statement made in some of my old Systematic Theology notes. It was pointed out that because the Trinity is fully specified revelation - that is, indiscernible by a natural theology - it truly has no epistemic basis apart from the revelation of God. Rather, as Christians, we must allow allow the truth of the Trinity to be for us an epistemological basis, rather than arrival point, and allow our inquiries about this world to flow from that truth. Therefore, as Christians, the very nature of Truth is suddenly vastly distanced from a non-Christian's understanding of truth. We take this same concept into dealing with struggle and hardship, because we do not allow of understanding of God to be dictated by the circumstances, but rather allow the circumstances to be understood only in light of those aspects of God's character which have been revealed to us. We have been told God is a blessing God, and so in trouble and hardship, we interpret some of those circumstances as God's righteous character being worked out in ways which are above our head.

Ha. And I say I hate theology...