University, discharged the keynote address. However, to his shame he initiated that one thing kept distracting him from his interesting presentation. No matter how hard I tried to ignore it, he couldn’t help but notice that Moser bore a striking resemblance to the popular portrayals of Jesus Christ. From his shoulder-length brown hair, to his sparkling eyes, long thin nose, and carefully trimmed beard, I would have believed the chef were he to tell me that Moser himself divided just two salmon into two hundred for our banquet that night. Moser’s talk was passionate and he was obviously in command of his material. He argued that to seek propositional belief that God exists was tantamount to idolatry because it seeks the knowledge of God rather than a relationship with God. “For our own good,” Moser said, “we are not in charge of God or of available evidence for God. We must know God as Reconciling Lord of our lives, given God’s redemptive program.”
Thus, a proper epistemology, Moser insisted, is one that hunt for a relationship with the redeeming God of Israel rather than one that seeks justified true belief that God exists. To seek mere existence of God, Moser said, is to trivialize God and to put God into human terms. Only when one is properly oriented toward God can one see that life is a gift. Then one can behave accordingly with “self-giving trust, gratitude, and humility” toward God. The atheist, Moser pronounced, sees the universe as an accidental fluke; therefore, he responds to the universe with “self-protecting control, self-crediting, fear, striving, and pride.” While the atheist experiences “despair, pessimism, anxiety, and worry,” Moser argued, the Christian experiences “hope, optimism, mercy, and forgiveness.” Moser called the