Westminster Confessions

“If you have come to WTS to study and learn so that God is more comprehensible to you, then you have come to the wrong place! As we know more about God, we see more of his incomprehensibility.” (Dr. Gaffin)

We can look at things in terms of the relationship between the knowability of God and the incomprehensibility of God. We address a key issue in theology and in how we understand and view God. These two notions, despite our initial impression, are not in conflict. They are not supplementary (i.e. one makes up for what the other does not supply). They are not even mutually compensatory, as if knowablity compensates for incomprehensibility. They are complementary. It is not as if incomprehensibility is a barrier to knowability, nor as if knowability serves to reduce incomprehensibility. The one does not limit the other. The one must not be sacrificed to the other. Rather, we need to recognize that incomprehensibility is a function of knowability so that the two are directly, not inversely, proportional. It is not that I reduce incomprehensibility to the extent that I increase knowability. The creator/ image-bearing-creature relationship is in view here with the inherent mystery. In view of this, the more we know God, the more incomprehensible he becomes, not the less. Isaiah 55:8-9 “my ways are not your ways, nor my thoughts yours. Heaven is high above the earth, so my thoughts are higher than yours.”

When we listen to Job 38, the point we see is that the deeper we plumb the depths of God, the more unfathomable it becomes. Our God is an awesome God. We know that our God is awesome, but as we know that, we don’t know the half or the infinity of it. The more and more God becomes incomprehensible, the better we get to know him. Theology roots in the incomprehensibility of God. This is a basic theological concept. Thornwell, “that knowledge begins with the incomprehensibility and is bounded by the incomprehensibility is a truth which the arrogant disputers of the world are slow to apprehend.”

This entry was posted on Monday, October 11th, 2004 at 11:20 pm and is filed under Academia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.