When Christians don’t have much knowledge of God, how can they develop love of God?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
so if christians don’t know about god then without the knowledge of god how can they love god and how can they attain god see there are different purposes when certain points are spoken and they have particular focus in our tradition also we say that knowledge doesn’t lead to devotion devotion is independent so there are many people we even talk about dry jnanis those scholars who have a lot of knowledge but they don’t have any bhakti so it is not that knowledge is essential for devotion knowledge is helpful for devotion but devotion itself is a matter of the heart’s attraction towards transcendence so when prabhupada says that in the bible there is not much knowledge about god what is he talking about let me be a little careful there is the understanding that god is a person but who that person is that is not understood clearly that is not revealed over there so if we look at the biblical descriptions of god for example i am the alpha and the omega of all things means i am the beginning and the end of all things so there is something similar in the bhagavad gita aksharanam akaro smi i am the first alphabet first letter a in the alphabet aham atma budhah kisaro bhutah shestha aham adhishya madhyam cha bhutanam antaiva i am the beginning middle and end of all things so if we look at the attributes of god which are described, the understanding of god’s greatness his pervasiveness the conception of god which is described is fairly similar in the bible and the bhagavad gita or for that matter in the quran and the bhagavad gita now that means when it comes to understanding the aspect of god as the lord of the world, god as the maintainer of the world that is the parmatma understanding and the parmatma understanding is often non specific it is generic god is sustainer of the world god is the source of the world god is the controller of the world so now in this i may not know who god as a person is that means the knowledge of the bhagwan, god as bhagwan that is not there in the bible but to some extent knowledge of god as parmatma, we may not have the term parmatma, but god as the lord of the world, that knowledge is there parmatma is the form parmatma is the form of Vishnu in the heart that is fine they don’t have that I don’t think see wait a minute again there are specific and generic features of god we should not confuse between the two see we are talking about the generic understanding of god as the maintainer of the world they may not know the form of god they may not even know the form of parmatma but the conception we are talking about the conception like that we may say that if you are going into the specifics the specifics are revealed in the bhakti tradition but the universal features of god they are there also and one can develop devotion to god based on based on even appreciation of god’s greatness and appreciation of god’s benevolence in maintaining this world and if one does that, one can become devoted just like there is a prime minister of the country or if there is a citizen in a country and that is well maintained now the person may not know really who is at the top, who is the prime minister if you have old primitive in the past citizen may not even know who exactly the king is how the king will react but they see the country is well managed and they feel grateful to the king and they happily give tax for the king because they see that other things are being taken care of so that way, even if one doesn’t know specifically about god, if one has generic understanding of god also, that can be helpful for developing devotion to god and especially if you look at the christian saints many of them you see the poetry that they have written in devotion to god or their realizations St. Augustine, his confessions very deep so to say that they don’t have they can’t have devotion to god is actually to misunderstand reality so knowledge of the specific attributes of god can help enormously in developing love for god but there are many people who may know about Krishna and they think this is just a nice mythology like Sahajiya, they know so many esoteric pastimes of Krishna but they continue to do immoral things so it’s not that knowledge alone will lead to devotion or knowledge alone will lead to transformation and the bible does not contain specific attributes of god as Bhagawan it gives generic attributes of god as a maintainer of the world and that’s how they can become elevated and many of them they have the conception that god has made himself accessible through Jesus and thus they see that Jesus, they become devoted to Jesus and there also they have personal conception of Jesus because Jesus lived in this world, he acted in this world and that becomes the kindler of their devotion so they say that the technical thing in the Nicene Creed was a significant watershed in the evolution of Christian theology, they say that the divinity of Christ is manifested in the humanity of Jesus, that’s their understanding so they appear like we have seminal position of the guru like that they have the conception of Jesus is the way to god so they often devote themselves to Jesus quite significantly and that’s how they may also develop love for god so we should not become dismissive of any tradition because of their deficiencies what we should see is that yes there are these additional facilities which are there within our tradition and with these facilities I can if I want to I can develop love for Krishna much faster but ultimately it is for me to develop love for Krishna if I don’t do that then I will not advance so basically Bhaktivinoda Thakura gives example that there is one mountain peak and different people from different angles may see the mountain peak differently but it’s the same one mountain peak there is one absolute truth revealed differently from different traditions some traditions may give a much clearer view some traditions may not give such a clear view and if you want to climb up that mountain there can be different paths for climbing up the mountain now some paths may be easier some paths may be more difficult but still just because I am on the easier path does not mean that I have already reached the top there may be somebody who may be going for a much more difficult path but they may have gone much higher than where I am right now so if I start saying you know in your religion there is not much knowledge about God available but if you look at the lives there are many Christians who are actually quite devoted very seriously devoted to God and we can appreciate their devotion so our understanding is that wherever there is attraction towards God in a way that leads to detachment from the gross pleasures of this world that is a manifestation of transcendence and we respect that so we know that in the path of Bhakti Yoga as revealed by Chaitanya Mahaprabhu there are a lot of additional facilities by which we can move faster but that does not mean already we have risen higher we have to actually endeavor to rise higher