REFORMED WITNESS
January 1992
The Knowledge of God
From Reformed Dogmatics pp. 26-41
by Herman Hoeksema
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... From the earliest times the church emphasized the incomprehensibility of God, and the absolute incapability of man to find Him out, to investigate His Being, and of himself to say anything about Him. God is the Invisible. He dwelleth in a light no man can approach unto. Exactly as God, in His infinite majesty, He is not of our world. The world of our experience is the object of our investigation; but who shall search out the living God? The creature is object of our perception; God is beyond the scope of the things that are seen. He is the Transcendent One, to Whom we cannot reach out. He is the Eternal; we are held within the limits of time. He is the Infinite; we are finite, and the finite cannot comprehend the Infinite. He is One; we are many. He is the Incomparable: He cannot be classified or defined. No chain of finite reasoning, be it ever so keen and profound, can hope to attain to Him as its conclusion. Man, mere man, by his own power can neither affirm nor deny His existence. He may conclude to a final Cause, a Causa causarum; but a cause -- even a final cause -- still belongs to our world. And God is not the final Cause: He is God! Man may conceive of a supreme being; but God is not relatively supreme with relation to the world: He is the Lord, the Being of beings, the Absolute, the Self-existent One, and Jehovah is His name. To conceive of Him is to make an idol. To say something about Him of ourselves is to deny His infinite majesty...
...Contemplating the revelation of this glorious majesty, the redeemed child of God can only prostrate himself before Him in humble adoration and cry out: "O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been his counsellor? Or who hath first given to him, and it shall be recompensed unto him again? For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen" (Rom. 11:33-36).
Such is the language in which Scripture speaks of the eternal and infinite God, Who is God indeed. And it is because the church throughout the ages heard this language and believed it, and not through any abstract philosophical contemplation or rationalistic argumentation, that she confessed emphatically that He is the Incomprehensible. By this she did not express a mere negation, although it was by means of a limiting concept that she expressed herself. Can the caused fathom the Uncaused? Can existence find out the pure Being? Can time comprehend eternity? Can the murmuring and meandering brook swallow up the wide and deep ocean? Can the faint light of the candle surpass the glory of the sun? Though this were possible, yet it would be impossible for little man to comprehend God. The eye does not see Him; and the ear does not hear Him; and in the heart of man He does not arise. For, "Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? It is high as heaven; what canst thou do? deeper than hell; what canst thou know? The measure thereof is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea" (Job 11:7-9). Not a cold, philosophical negation, confession of God's immeasurable greatness and man's insignificant smallness, of God's sovereignty and man's utter dependence, a confession that was designed to cast man into the dust in humble worship before the greatness of God's glorious majesty -- such is the meaning and intent of the emphasis by the church of all ages on the incomprehensibility of God. It is not a mere denial or negation, but a positive statement concerning God, itself based on His own revelation!...
...Though it is certainly true that the church confesses that God is incomprehensible and transcendent, it is equally true that she knows Him as immanent, and that she has some very definite statements to make about the living God...
And even as God alone knows Himself, and that too, with an infinitely perfect and eternally self-conscious knowledge, so also it is He alone that is able to impart His knowledge to the creature, that is, to reveal Himself. Not indeed as if there ever could be formed a creature capable of receiving His own infinite and eternal knowledge of Himself: for such a creature would have to be infinite as He is infinite. Revelation must needs consist in this, that God speaks concerning Himself and imparts His knowledge in a form the creature can receive, in a creaturely measure. And behind and beyond the plane of revelation there must always remain infinite depths of divine glories and perfections which we can never fathom. In revelation God comes down to us; He does not lift us up to His infinite majesty. He gives His Word a finite form; He does not communicate to our hearing an infinite capacity. Yet, while on the plane of revelation He reaches out for us, and speaks to us in language adapted to our capacity, He at the same time and through that same medium of revelation deeply impresses upon our minds and hearts that He is always greater than His revelation, that while He is revealed, He is still hid, and while He is known, He is still the Incomprehensible. If it were not so, we would still worship an idol. This does not necessarily imply that revelation gives us no adequate knowledge of God, even in the sense that through revelation He reflects all His fullness. In Christ dwells all the fullness of God bodily! That we know in part must not be so interpreted that we know only a part of God. But it does mean that beyond and above the divine reflection in finite form there is, and we are ever conscious of, the reality of the infinite Essence. And even when in glory we shall see face to face, we shall still forever be conscious that the face we behold is but the Presence of Him Who must remain invisible in His infinite majesty.
You have, in brief, the professed aim
of our philosophy;
and the learning of these branches, when
pursued with
right course of conduct,
leads through Wisdom,
the artificer of all things,
to the Ruler of all?
a Being difficult to grasp
and apprehend,
ever receding and withdrawing
from him who pursue ...
He is in essence remote;
"for how is it that what is begotten
can have approached the Unbegotten?"Clement of Alexandria
The Knowledge of God Naturally Implanted in the
Human Mindby John Calvin, from his Institutes, Vol. 1, pp. 43-45
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That there exists in the human mind. and indeed by natural instinct, some sense of Deity, we hold to be beyond dispute, since God himself, to prevent any man from pretending ignorance, has endued all men with some idea of his Godhead, the memory of which he constantly renews and occasionally enlarges, that all to a man, being aware that there is a God, and that lie is their Maker, may be condemned by their own conscience when they neither worship him nor consecrate their lives to his service...
All men of sound judgment will therefore hold, that a sense of Deity is indelibly engraven on the human heart. And that this belief is naturally engendered in all, and thoroughly fixed as it were in our very bones, is strikingly attested by the contumacy of the wicked, who, though they struggle furiously, are unable to extricate themselves from the fear of God... For the world (as will be shortly seen) labours as much as it can to shake off all knowledge of God, and corrupts his worship in innumerable ways. I only say, that, when the stupid hardness of heart, which the wicked eagerly court as a means of despising God, becomes enfeebled, the sense of Deity, which of all things they wished most to be extinguished, is still in vigour, and now and then breaks forth. Whence we infer, that this is not a doctrine which is first learned at school, but one as to which every man is, from the womb, his own master; one which nature herself allows no individual to forget, though many, with all their might, strive to do so.
We must recognise how much we lack knowledge of God.
We must learn to measure ourselves, not by our knowledge about God, not by our gifts and responsibilities in the church, but by how we pray and what goes on in our hearts.
Many of us, I suspect, have no idea how impoverished we are at this level. Let us ask the Lord to show us.
J.I. Packer
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