Considering the Incomprehensibility of God

Some time ago I had told a commenter that I planned on reading Van Til’s chapter in Introduction to Systematic Theology on the Incomprehensibility of God and blog on it.  I never seemed to find the time.

Since my computer was “resting” on Tuesday, I was flipping through my copy of the book.  Lo and behold, I have already read that chapter.  Silly me.   So here I go!

Van Til starts with the problem of knowing the “living and true God, who is infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions, immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise…” as our Confession summarizes the Scriptures regarding God.  Such a God, according to Kantian epistemology is beyond our experience.  In their view, God is not just incomprehensible, but unknowable.  The theology of Van Til’s day often embraced such views.  God become unknowable, and faith became irrational.  It was no longer a faith seeking understanding since there is nothing we can understand about an absolute God.

Aquinas put forth the “way of negation” by which we know God negatively instead of positively.  We speak about what God is not rather than what He is.  His dependence on Aristotle means he embraces a non-Christian epistemology that descends into a similar irrationalism.

The Arminian also has this trouble since the mind of man is given ultimacy.  According to Van Til, he locks God up in the box of our own minds.  If man is the ultimate reference point, the fact that we cannot know everything creates problems.  This is because knowledge is interrelated.  Since we cannot know all of the connections, we don’t just lack exhaustive knowledge but can’t be sure if our knowledge is not dangerous.  We essentially know nothing.

In Reformed Epistemology, we start with man as made in God’s image.  Van Til stresses the Creator-creature distinction.  But this is not a descent into irrationalism.  First, due to creation man himself is revelational of God.

Secondly, God made our minds in such a way as to receive revelation from Him.  As creatures, we are utterly dependent upon God.  He must reveal.  He must help us understand that which He reveals.  We were created to not just know God, but to obey God.  Adam initially receive all revelation as authoritative.  God’s Word was the basis for his interpretations of all he experienced.  God, not man, was the ultimate reference point for all knowledge.  He has exhaustive knowledge, and what He tells us is true.

The only change that the fact of sin brought into the picture was therefore the fact that it made man unwilling to be thus obedient to God as manifested to him.

There is in us as stubborn refusal to receive revelation from God as authoritative.  We want to stand above it, as judge, instead of under it as a obedient creature.  This is why Frame, in Apologetics to the Glory of God,  says that all atheist and agnosticism is a flight from accountability before God.

So, for Van Til if we cannot presuppose God’s revelation we cannot speak of God at all.  “God would not be incomprehensible, but inapprehensible.”

If we speak therefore of the incomprehensibility of God, what is meant is that God’s revelation to man is never exhaustively understood by man.  … It is as impossible for man to know himself or any of the objects in the universe exhaustively.  For man must know himself or anything else in the created universe in relation to the self-contained God.

Van Til builds upon Calvin’s thesis that God lisps to us.  He speaks in a way we can understand.  Or to put another way, “in accordance with our creaturely limitations.”

Where Van Til and Clark seem to part ways is found in this passage of Van Til’s.

The Reformed faith teaches that the reference point for any proposition is the same for God and for man.  It holds that this identity of reference point can be maintained only on the presupposition that all human predication is analogical re-interpretation of God’s pre-interpretation. … Rejecting this fully Christian approach, Dr. Clark seeks not only for an identity of reference point between the divine and the human mind, but an identity of content between them.

I suppose this is the difference between thinking God’s thought after him and thinking God’s thoughts with him.  Clark seems to minimize the qualitative difference between our knowledge and God’s.  Van Til wants to maintain the Creator-creature distinction.  My mind works like God’s mind, but is not identical.  Though I can understand what He does reveal, there is a distinction between our knowledge and His- a qualitative one.

That two times two are four is a well known fact.  God knows it.  Man knows it.   On Dr. Clark’s principles there must be an identity of content between the divine and human minds on such a proposition.  If not, he argues, there would be skepticism.  Yet, in point three it is asserted that any truth has an infinite number of relationships and implications that man can never exhaustively know.  In point two it is said that God knows what he by an eternal intuition, and that man can know nothing of the nature of such a manner of knowing.  God therefore knows by an unknowable (to man) eternal intuition the infinite relationships and implications (also unknowable to man) of the proposition that two times two are four.

Part of what Van Til is saying is that God eternally knows these things in a way we cannot comprehend because we are not eternal.  We gain new knowledge- God does not.  So while made us to receive revelation from Him, He did not make us infinite, eternal and unchanging like He is.  We have true knowledge, but not exhaustive knowledge that increases over time according to revelation and illumination.  We have analogical knowledge, not identical knowledge.

This is why Scripture is so important to Van Til.  As God’s Word it is His special revelation through which He interprets creation for us.  It is our reference point- the manner in which God reveals truth to us.  We are ultimately unable to think truthfully apart from it.  There is no neutral thought in man.  It is either subject to God’s authority or in rebellion against God’s authority.