{"id":155,"date":"2009-11-23T13:07:00","date_gmt":"2009-11-23T13:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/thinplaces\/2009\/11\/what-matters-is-if-god-believes-in-us-life-with-god-part-two.html"},"modified":"2009-11-23T13:07:00","modified_gmt":"2009-11-23T13:07:00","slug":"what-matters-is-if-god-believes-in-us-life-with-god-part-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/2009\/11\/what-matters-is-if-god-believes-in-us-life-with-god-part-two.html","title":{"rendered":"“What matters is if God believes in us…” (Life With God, Part Two)"},"content":{"rendered":"

My theme for my talks last weekend was “Life with God.” And yet before I could talk about life with God, I had to address the question of God’s existence<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
So, some thoughts on that question, taken from the first talk I gave this past weekend:<\/div>\n
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I\u2019m not planning to mount a defense of the existence of God. Honestly, if there is a God, it is up to God whether we know about Him. For all our arguments, at the end of the day, God\u2019s existence and character need to be revealed to us, not discovered by us.<\/i><\/div>\n

<\/i><\/div>\n
I go to seminary up the road at Princeton, which means I take a lot of classes that talk about God, and in seminary classes, my teachers talk about something called the \u201contological divide.\u201d Ontological. It\u2019s a big word, but I like it, because it defines a big concept. \u201cOntological\u201d comes from \u201contology,\u201d which means \u201cthe nature of being.\u201d In other words, the question, \u201cWhat makes us human?\u201d is an ontological question. \u201cWhat makes God God?\u201d is an ontological question. And most people (though not all) would agree that there is a divide, ontologically, between human beings and God. God is God and I am not. What it means is that God is different, in His being, than we are. And if there is a God, then that God is not just ontologically different than us, but ontologically more than us\u2014more powerful, more intelligent, more knowledgeable, more everything.<\/i><\/div>\n

<\/i><\/div>\n
It\u2019s because of this divide that we don\u2019t get to decide whether or not God exists. God exists, or He doesn\u2019t. And if He does, it is up to Him to let us know. God\u2019s existence doesn\u2019t depend on us, so on that level, it doesn\u2019t matter, really, whether we believe in God. If there is a God, then there is a God, no matter what we think. What does matter is whether God believes in us. So this weekend, my job is to explain how it is that God has let us know that He exists and how God has let us know that he believes in us.<\/i><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My theme for my talks last weekend was “Life with God.” And yet before I could talk about life with God, I had to address the question of God’s existence So, some thoughts on that question, taken from the first talk I gave this past weekend: I\u2019m not planning to mount a defense of the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":88,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-down-syndrome"],"yoast_head":"\n"What matters is if God believes in us..." (Life With God, Part Two) - Thin Places<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/2009\/11\/what-matters-is-if-god-believes-in-us-life-with-god-part-two.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\""What matters is if God believes in us..." 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Two major life experiences have shaped her writing and her faith\u00e2\u20ac\u201dcaring for her mother-in-law as she battled cancer and welcoming her daughter Penny into the world after she was diagnosed at birth with Down syndrome. Both experiences expanded and enriched her understanding of what it means to be human and to receive each and every person as a gift.\u00c2\u00a0 A graduate of Princeton University and Princeton Theological Seminary, she is the author of Penelope Ayers: A Memoir, and the forthcoming A Good and Perfect Gift (Bethany House). Her essays have appeared in First Things, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Christian Century, ChristianityToday.com, and Bloom, among other online venues.","sameAs":["http:\/\/amyjuliabecker.com"],"url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/author\/amyjuliabecker"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/88"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thinplaces\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}