Formation for Knowing God: Imagining God: At-One-ing, Transforming, for Self-Revealing

God is Self-Revealed we are assured by many Christians today. Yet this conviction stems only from eighteenth-century Enlightenment debates. Early and ongoing Christians, with their Jewish roots, trusted God as a committed and saving but heavily clouded presence (whether by God's choice, or our inadequacy, or both). Continuing Christian tradition has thus insisted that there is much more to this God than we can hope to get our heads round. Yet such Christians have trusted that this loving, saving, triune God's purpose is to transform us Godward. "The divine Word became as we are so we might become as he is" Meanwhile, some of us at least can find ourselves drawn to share with our predecessors and one another in imagining how this may be. And then we may be drawn to realize in practice what we imagine-in active service to God among fellow humans and all God's fragile creation. Then, we may hope, we may have been brought to know God more nearly as God is. Gerald Downing first argued this fifty years ago, and here he restates the issues with fresh insights and renewed hope.

F. Gerald Downing is an Anglican priest, retired from ministry in parishes and among students in their ministerial training. He has written many articles in a range of journals, and books with various publishers, from Has Christianity a Revelation? (1964) and A Man for Us and a God for Us (1968) to God with Everything (2008) and Order and (Dis)order in the First Christian Century (2013).