82 Chapter 1 that is also present in Greek mythology. Before reincarnation, the spirits of the dead drink from the River Lethe to forget. What God’s Holy Spirit does is to make people un-forget: aletheia means ‘to un-hide, dis-cover, re-mind, re-member (as opposed to dis-member), re-call, re-veal (from unveil), dis-close, and real-ize (make real), truth’ (Beech & Beech, 2019, p. 40). In the process of un-hiding, a term Beech & Beech (2019) borrowed particularly from Heidegger, believers do not possess the whole amount but learn on an everyday basis from their Lord and Creator through the relations they have with others, nature and Scripture. This is what Beech & Beech (2019) termed a relational epistemology. In this proposal, they showed themselves to be followers of Dooyeweerd’s (1935/1969) reformational philosophy, to which he added the specific intercultural approach that proceeds from his own, missionary biography. Beech’s relational epistemology is ‘an understanding of knowledge that is integrated, holistic and dependent on the network of relationships that exist’ (Beech, 2021, p. 122; Beech & Beech, 2019, p. 133). Christian knowing, in its essence, proceeds from a personal knowledge of Christ who is the truth (John 14:6). It ‘resembles a return to an Augustinian, neo-platonist, triadic structure where there is a recognition that there exists a reality that is distinct from the individual-object physical reality (c.f., Plato’s forms)’ (Beech & Beech, 2019, p. 20). It also resembles Martin Buber’s comment that ‘it is in the between that spans subjectivity and objectivity that truth is found’ (as cited in Beech & Beech, 2019, p. 20), Lewis’ idea of Tao (1943) and Dooyeweerd’s (1969) idea of an absolute origin: The epistemic encounter we might have with an object is seen to involve the full connectedness of that object: with the knower, with other knowers, with the rest of the created order and with an acknowledged Creator. Crossculturally, the ontological source, or perceived Creator, in this sense refers to an individual’s or to a culture’s perceptions of origins of being. (Beech & Beech, 2019, p. 21) Beech’s (2021) relational epistemology is, like its reformational philosophy background, a faith-based epistemology that springs from a fundamental difference between God and man: ‘God does not have theories about anything: He already knows’ (p. 134). It fundamentally accepts that ‘there exists an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, “supernatural” Being who is the source of all truth’; that God created, in His image, perceiving, sentient and reasoning human beings to whom He reveals truth continuously through ‘a. His acts (in the experienced Creation and redemption), b. His person (in the accounts of Jesus and the work of His Holy Spirit), c. His inspired Word (the Bible)’; and that ‘all knowledge is relational and the knowledge of greatest value is personal knowledge
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