It’s funny to look back in time and see how far humans have come technologically, but how we basically still walk along the same thought footpaths that previous generations have walked when it comes to religion and philosophy.
I was finishing up The Children of Abraham by F.E. Peters and he was describing the debate that occurred in the late 13th century over the Aristotelian approach to describing aspects of God. This approach used reason and careful argumentation to provide thoughts about God. Ibn Rushd, who lived many years before the debate in the 1270s, was a Muslim teacher who was considered an expert on Aristotle’s teachings and based somewhat on his findings many believed that faith and understanding would not fit together. They were described as two chairs that one could attempt to straddle but the chairs could never be stacked.
However, the teachings of Thomas Aquinas were very influential and those who followed his philosophical methods and principles were able to win the debate at that time. Aquinas, to quote www.aquinasonline, “believed that both faith and reason discover truth, a conflict between them being impossible since they both originate in God. Believing that reason can, in principle, lead the mind to God, Aquinas defended reason’s legitimacy, especially in the works of Aristotle.”
To Aristotle, reason extended to every subject from metaphysics to political theory to biology. Following Aquinas’ line of thought that faith and reason both discover truth that originates in God, we can see God in all truth, not just “spiritual” truth. So, though it is argued by others (not me) that there may not be further spiritual revelation since the scriptures were written, those of us who follow along Aquinas’ basic views would say that truth is still being revealed today and thus God is still being revealed today.
This will make God bigger than the God of any scripture ever written. That irritates and offends some people of very fundamental faith groups, but God is bigger than the God of any scripture ever written. He is bigger than anything we will ever discover through faith or reason. Just look at what we’ve learned about the size of the universe and the physics we understand. Look at all we don’t understand about dark energy and dark matter and quantum physics. We see things beyond a scale that we can even wrap our heads around. God is beyond all that we can even imagine.
So why would God stop revealing Himself to us when there is so much to learn? Why would He only have taught the ancients and not us? He does reveal Himself through new discovered truths. It only stands to reason.
Treasure In Heaven 