This morning I read Paul K. Moster’s essay “Reorienting Religious Epistemology: Cognitive Grace, Filial Knowledge, and Gethsemane Struggle” in For Faith and Clarity (ed. James K. Beilby). While there were some areas of the chapter that I felt assumed certain things that I would need clarified there was a particular paragraph that I found very interesting and worth sharing here.

Moster addresses whether or not God owes us any obvious cognitive evidence if there seems to be no desire on our part to know and love God. He writes,

“God does not owe us any kind of impersonal confirmation of God’s reality whereby we are unchallenged by God’s personal character of merciful, forgiving love. In fact, God owes us nothing beyond faithfulness to his loving character and to God’s promises stemming from such a character. We see, on reflection, that we have no right to make cognitive demands of God beyond such faithfulness. Nothing requires that God allow propositional knowledge that God exist due apart from our filial knowledge of God. An all-loving God would promote the two together. In knowing the that the true God exists (rather than, say, the God of deism or “mere theism”), we have knowledge of God’s character of merciful love toward us and are thereby profoundly challenged for our own good to abide in filial knowledge of God. God need not offer evidence of his reality susceptible to our trivialization God by not being challenged to undergo transformation toward filial knowledge. The true God, being a God of merciful love, does not settle for mere reasonable belief that God exists. God, being all-loving, seeks to have us becoming loving as God is loving. God’s self-giving love seeks to foster love in us, even in our knowing God.” (p. 76, emphasis mine)

In other words, God does not owe the world a revealing of himself for the sake of merely knowing God exists. When God reveals himself it is for more than cognitive purposes. God reveals for the sake of an actual saving relationship.