Knowledge of God through Scripture

Martin Luther wrote:  God does not want to be known except through Christ; nor can he be known in any other way. Christ is the offspring promised to Abraham; on him God has grounded all his promises. Therefore Christ alone is the means, the life, and the mirror through which we see God and know his will. Through Christ God declares his favor and mercy to us. In Christ we see that God is not an angry master and judge but a gracious and kind father, who blesses us, that is, who delivers us from the law, sin, death, and every evil, and gives us righteousness and eternal life through Christ. This is a certain and true knowledge of God and divine persuasion, which does not fail, but depicts God himself in a specific form, apart from which there is no God.

Karl Barth wrote:  When Holy Scripture speaks of God, it does not permit us to let our attention or thoughts wander at random . . . When Holy Scripture speaks of God, it concentrates our attention and thoughts upon one single point and what is to be known at that point . . . if we ask further concerning the one point upon which, according to Scripture, our attention and thoughts should and must be concentrated, then from first to last the Bible directs us to the name of Jesus Christ.

W. Robertson Smith, wrote:  If I am asked why I receive Scripture as the Word of God . . . [I answer] . . . Because the Bible is the only record of the redeeming love of God, because in the Bible alone I find God drawing near to us in Jesus Christ, and declaring to us in him his will for our salvation.  And this record I know to be true by the witness of his Spirit in my heart, whereby I am assured that none other than God himself is able to speak such words to my soul.

The word theology, according to Graeme Goldsworthy, properly refers to the knowledge of God, that is, to what is to be known about God through his self-revelation. . . . Theology means the knowledge of God as God himself reveals it. . . . The most important concern in the study of the Bible is the revelation of God: What is God saying to us in the record of his acts? What did God do in entering in a special way into the history of mankind? . . .  the aspect which above all else creates the Bible’s unity is its theology. It is the one God who acts and speaks throughout the history of the Bible. Furthermore God acts and speaks with a unity of purpose. God’s message to us is one unified discourse, not a series of isolated and disconnected messages.  The task ahead of us is to try to discern what God is saying and how he says it. in doing this we may say we are primarily interested in revelation—in theology.  But we may not separate what God says and does from the context in which he says it and does it (the history) nor from the way he says what he does (the literary record). We shall be looking for the essential unity of the Bible, without ignoring its diversity and its complexity.

Biblical theology [therefore] is dynamic . . . it follows the movement and process of God’s revelation in the Bible. . . . Biblical theology is not concerned to state the final doctrines which go to make up the content of Christian belief, but rather to describe the process by which revelation unfolds and moves toward the goal which is God’s final revelation of his purposes in Jesus Christ. . . . The biblical theologian . . . is concerned . . . with the progressive unfolding of truth. . . . Using the method of biblical theology . . . we can thus discern a development in the biblical revelation [W]e are in a better position to say what relevance the law of Moses, the narrative of the manna in the wilderness or any other event of the Old Testament, may have to us who live on the opposite side of the “Christ event.”