The Incomprehensibility of God: Understanding Our Limitations

This is not saying that God is utterly unknowable, but rather it is saying that no one of us can comprehend God exhaustively. None of us has a total comprehensive exhaustive knowledge of who God is. And a sub point under that, and I’m going to use a very important formula that came out of the 16th Century Reformation—the finite cannot contain or grasp the infinite. [00:01:23]

We have a little square here that is a measurable square with a definite area we can say it’s 12 inches across here, it’s not a square; it’s a rectangle, and say 6 inches across here. This is a finite area. Now could we squeeze all of God into this box? You’ve heard the expression so and so’s God is too small; they have God in a box. [00:03:53]

Now unfortunately this concept of the incomprehensibility of God can be abused. People can easily slide off the edge into two very serious errors. One is the one I’ve already alluded to, that if God is incomprehensible then that must mean He’s utterly unknowable, and so that anything we say about God is just gibberish, and that’s been a crucial point of debate in the 20th Century. [00:05:35]

But Christianity at this point, though it affirms the incomprehensibility of God nevertheless affirms the rationality of God. Now here’s where it’s crucial. Our mind can only go so far in understanding God, and certainly to know God we depend upon revelation. Ok? But that revelation is intelligible, understandable. It is not irrational. It is not gibberish. It is not nonsense. [00:09:37]

God is both hidden and revealed. The technical term for hiddenness is Deus absconditus. You don’t have to remember that except that it’s a neat Latin term because we get an English word from it, from the word absconditus. What word do we get? Abscond. And when do we use that? When someone like when he bank teller absconds with the funds. [00:10:24]

Christianity is a revealed religion, where we say that God, who has created us, has revealed Himself manifestly in the glorious theater of nature where one cannot be awake for five seconds without being bombarded with God’s general revelation. But not only that, God has revealed Himself verbally. He has spoken, and we have His word inscripturated in the Bible. [00:11:09]

So that God is a revealed God, but He doesn’t reveal everything there is to know about Him. We see, as it were, in a glass darkly. What’s the Old Testament passage? “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that He has revealed belong to us and to our seed forever.” So it’s not like we have no knowledge, and it’s not like we have consummate knowledge. [00:12:42]

And so what we’re getting at here is that our language about God is built upon analogy. I talked to a professor of philosophy last week, and he made the statement to me, he said can you know anything about God from nature? And I said yes. I said, God reveals Himself in nature and not only does God reveal Himself in nature, but everything in nature reveals something about God. [00:14:37]

Our language at best is language of analogy. What we can say is what God is like, but as soon as we equate whatever it is that we use to describe God with the essence of God Himself, we have committed the error of thinking that the finite has contained the infinite. [00:19:38]

The reason why theologians struggle with this is they recognize that these limitations exist in our knowledge of God. For example, we find in the Bible what we call anthropomorphic language. What is anthropomorphic? What does anthropomorphic? What’s anthropo… What’s anthropology? It’s the science of man. The Greek word for man an anthropos. The Greek word for form is morphe. [00:23:29]

All of our language, whether it’s about God, or about trains, or about flowers, is anthropomorphic language. You know why? Because we’re anthropoi. And we can never get beyond our humanness, because the finite cannot contain the infinite. And the only language we have is finite language. Ok. Then so does that mean we can never get beyond ourselves? No, because there is a point of contact between man and God. [00:25:08]

The Bible tells us that we are created in the image of God, so that there is some sense in which man is like God. That’s what makes it possible for communication to occur, because God has built it into creation. He does not make us little gods. We are not to be identified with God, but we are like God in some way, because we are created in His image and in His likeness. [00:26:39]