How do you know you are perceiving the same God?
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I'm sure you're familiar of the story of the three blind men and the elephant. One of them finds the tail and concludes the elephant is soft, long and round. One of them finds the tusk and concludes the elephant is hard. One finds the side and concludes the elephant is like a wall.
They are all describing the same elephant, but they have caught on to different aspects of it. There is truth in each description of the elephant, but there is error if they assume their description is complete.
So the trick is not to assume your understanding is complete, and this explains the disagreements over the details. But you are all "pointing to" the same thing.
Upvote:2
My experience when I talk to others who are serious followers of Jesus, is that we both know the same person. Even if we are in different denominations and have disagreements about peripheral things, I can just tell after talking to a person for a while that we have something in common.
Now some Christians may disagree with me on this, but I have even experienced this to a lesser extent when it comes to people in other religions. Some of their beliefs will be very strange to me, but I have had conversations where I suspect that at the core of their experience there is an element of a real encounter with the same God I encounter. Theologically, I believe this is possible because the Holy Spirit draws all men to Christ, no matter what their religious background. Some people may respond to that drawing in a gradual manner, and may have some experience with God in the context of a religion which is flawed in its doctrines. They may convert to Christ in this life, or maybe it won't be until the end of their lives that they realize that the one they were following was really Jesus.
It is only through Jesus that any human can approach God because Jesus is the only one who is God and man, bridging the human and divine in his own person. So when anyone has an encounter with God, I believe it takes place through Jesus, whether the person knows that or not.
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