Dr Greg Bahnsen - Higher Thoughts: The Incomprehensibility of God (Part 3)

Yeah, they're having to do with Isaiah 55, 8 and 9.

We have in our previous sessions looked at the prophet Isaiah in the context.

Of his prophecy and the character of it and some of the importance of it. And we've then looked at the transcendence of God, which is really something of the essence of Isaiah 55, 8, 9. My thoughts are not your thoughts. My thoughts are higher than your thoughts. They go beyond your thoughts.

And last week we looked at the.

Question of theological rationalism and how.

Christians.

Can get very confused about how to make theological decisions when they have an.

Incorrect view of reason, when they fail to see that reason is a tool.

That God has created us to use for his glory and subject to his own word and standards. Rather, sometimes what happens is Christians see reason as a standard in and of itself by which they are to even judge what to believe from the Bible. And so you have people that will exercise what I call theological rationalism when it comes to a question like predestination and say, well, I can't understand how God predestines the free choices and responsible choices of people, and so it can't be true. Or I can't understand how God is three persons in one substance, and so it can't be true. And then at the end of last week's lesson, we even saw how somebody that we ordinarily consider a good theologian in the reformed tradition, say Charles Hodge, could have an incorrect view of the use of reason and theology as well.

Now, tonight we're going to turn to.

Perhaps the most controversial subject in the entire series, and that is the incomprehensibility of God. And in order to get into that, let's turn to Isaiah again, to the 55th chapter of his prophecy. And I'd like to read the entire chapter. I would remind you these are God's own words.

Ho, everyone that thirsts, come ye to the waters. And he that hath no money, come ye buy and eat. Yea, come buy wine and milk without.

Money and without price.

Wherefore do you spend money?

For that which is not bread and your labour, for that which satisfies not.

Hearken diligently unto me, and eat ye.

That which is good.

And let your soul delight itself in fatness. Incline your ear and come unto me.

Hear, and your soul shall live.

And I will make an everlasting covenant with you. Even the sure mercies of David. Behold, I have given him for a witness to the peoples, a leader and commander to the peoples. Behold, thou shalt call a nation that thou knowest not. And a nation that knew not thee shall run unto thee because of Jehovah, thy God, and for the Holy One.

Of Israel, for he hath glorified thee.

Seek ye Jehovah while he may be.

Found, call ye upon him while he is near.

Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts and let him return unto Jehovah, and he will have mercy upon him and to our.

God, for he will abundantly pardon.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts.

Neither are your ways my ways, saith Jehovah.

For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth in bud, and giveth seed to the sower, and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth.

It shall not return unto me void.

But it shall accomplish that which I.

Please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.

For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace. The mountains and the hills shall break.

Forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap.

Their hands, instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree, and it shall be to Jehovah for a name, for an everlasting.

Sign that shall not be cut off. And thus far God's word.

In the very middle of this particular.

Passage, this chapter that we have called chapter 55, Isaiah, speaking for God, calls upon God's people to seek him, because he is now available while he may.

Be found in the acceptable gracious time.

That he has provided, they are to turn to him.

But in order to turn to God according to verse seven, they will have to because they are wicked and unrighteous people, they will have to forsake their own ways and their own thoughts, so that they might return unto Jehovah, experience.

His mercy and his pardoning grace.

Now verse 8 explains why they must.

Turn away from their own thoughts and from their own ways.

He says, for my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith Jehovah. In this verse, Isaiah is using the expression thoughts and ways to talk about man's sinfulness, how man has rebelled against God and deported departed from the ways.

Of God, departed from the thoughts of God.

He says, just because my thoughts are not your thoughts, my ways are not your ways, then you must necessarily repent. You must forsake what you're accustomed to thinking. You must forsake the way you're accustomed to behaving and return to me. So in this verse, the idea is that man and man's thoughts must be brought now into conformity with God's. Where there's been departure, where there's been rebellion, there's now got to be conformity. And then Isaiah does something which is very interesting. He tells us that even when we conform our thoughts to God's thoughts, His thoughts will still be above ours. And so we have another thought in verse nine. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. You see that God calls upon them. God calls upon his people. He calls upon us to have our thoughts conform to His. He says, your thoughts are not my thoughts. That's what's wrong with you. So start thinking the way I think. Start doing what I want you to do. Your ways should become my ways. And yet, even when we return to that standard and have that conformity, God says there's going to be a distance between us. Not now the distance of sin, but the distance of creator and creature. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my thoughts higher than your thoughts.

We have to keep that in mind.

When we turn from our wicked thoughts to conformity with God's own righteous and true thoughts. He still declares his thoughts to be higher than ours. Speaking of the thoughts of God being.

Higher than man's thoughts is to speak of his incomprehensibility. When we get kind of tied up and jumbled up in theological jargon. It's sometimes good to get back to biblical expressions themselves and we start talking about God being incomprehensible.

You might always think because his thoughts.

Are higher than my thoughts. That's what I mean when I say he's incomprehensible. But then, of course, more than that needs to be said. And I want to spend the rest.

Of tonight's lesson trying to unpack what we mean in theological circles by the incomprehensibility of God. There are really two different uses, quite different uses in the English language for the word incomprehensible. Sometimes we say something's incomprehensible because it's unintelligible.

Grandpa gets on the phone to his little three year old grandson, and the grandson goes on and on and on and on, talking to Grandpa. And Grandpa says at the end, that was incomprehensible.

What he means by that, not this was really profound.

He means, what sense can you make of that? There's no intelligibility to it. It can't be known. On the other hand, we use the.

Word incomprehensible for that which is unfathomed, that is its depths cannot be plunged all the way to the bottom. We cannot circumscribe the limits.

It goes beyond our ability to get our thoughts or our understanding, grasping everything.

When we speak of God being incomprehensible, those of us who are evangelical Bible.

Believing Christians mean that God's thoughts are unfathomable, not that they are unintelligible.

I want to draw that distinction because many theologians, in fact, it is the.

Prevailing habit of theologians in our day.

To argue that just because God's thoughts.

Are unfathomable, they are also unintelligible. That is to say, God is really unknowable.

All of our talk about God is somehow limited to our experience and we can't get beyond our finitude, much less our sin.

And so we really don't know God as he is. We don't know God in and of himself.

And so the incomprehensibility of God becomes.

For many theologians a stepping stone to the unintelligibility of God or the unknowability of God.

Now, from previous lessons, you all know what happens whenever in a religious system, be it Hinduism or the Muslim system or professedly Christian system, what happens when a theologian says God cannot be known? You will always find that he turns around and then defines God on his own terms. He will turn around in an idolatrous.

Fashion, as Paul says in Romans 1.

He'll then tell us all sorts of things about this unknowable God, things that reflect of course, the thought of the theologian rather than the self revelation of God.

And so we make a God after our own image rather than learning to be the image of God that He created us to be.

First major point I want to make.

After this introduction, linguistically is that according.

To the Bible, God, or if you.

Will, God's thoughts, I'll use them somewhat interchangeably tonight.

God or God's thoughts are not inapprehensible.

They are not inapprehensible.

To say that something is inapprehensible is to say it's inaccessible. You can't come into contact with it.

You can't apprehend it. When the FBI goes running after a bank robber and they catch him, they have apprehended their suspect.

Now we are not saying that God's thoughts or God himself are inapprehensible, that we can't come into contact with them, that we can have no knowledge of him at all, that he is somehow inaccessible to us. The Bible tells us that God is knowable just because God is know known.

You may want to get that in your notes.

God is knowable because the Bible insists He is actually known. And he is known by all men. Believers and unbelievers alike know God.

You know where I'm going to go. You've heard me enough times. Romans 1.

What does Paul tell us about all.

Men and their relationship to God? Verse 18.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth by means of unrighteousness. Because that which is known of God is manifest in them. For God manifested it unto them. The reason why that which is known of God is manifested is because God's law. One who's doing the work here, he's the one who's manifesting himself. And because it's God who manifests Himself, men cannot avoid knowing Him. It was dependent upon something else. Human agency or human ability or creativity or ingenuity or initiative or anything like that that might not be said, but it's based on God's work. Since God is making Himself known, then all men know him.

Verse 20.

For the invisible things of him, since the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity. That they may be without excuse. Not only is God known by all men, but they have no excuse for their departures from Him. They have no excuse for their theological errors. They have no excuse for their moral errors. They have an excuse for their spiritual mistakes there, without excuse. And then verse 21. Because.

Not all of you are Greek students, but you're going to get used to hearing that.

Nontas knowing tan the Theon.

God.

Because knowing God, they did not do what Glorify him as God or give thanks, but became vain in their reasonings.

And their senseless heart was darkened, professing.

To be wise, they became fools. All men know God. There are no agnostics. There are those who profess agnosticism. But there and no one in his.

Heart of hearts is an agnostic.

God has manifested Himself to all men. It's unavoidable. They are all categorically described as knowing Him. And so when they say that they don't know him, or they think that they know that he doesn't exist. Then there's a real serious spiritual problem here, not simply an intellectual one. It isn't for lack of information that.

They say these things.

It's for lack of a heart that.

Wishes to thank God's thoughts after him.

It's a desire to be an idolater, to make God after their own image that leads them to say, no, we.

Don'T know this God.

All men know God. No man is an agnostic. Okay, so I'm insisting that the Bible uses knowledge, the verb to know of unbelievers and believers alike. All men know God, and yet there's no another sense in which only believers know God. The Bible also uses the terminology in that way.

You say, well, that's very confusing. I don't like that. But, you know, it's not really all that confusing when you think about it.

Even we use the word to know.

In different ways, different degrees of knowledge.

I know my son Jonathan very well.

And I have a great deal of affection for him and commitment to him. I also know George Bush wouldn't put him in the same category. And I think, you know, you all can think of examples like that.

But the word no in English is.

Used in even a more starkly different way when you think of things like Adam knew Eve and she bore him a son there. The Bible is talking about a kind.

Of intimacy that goes way beyond cognition.

At least my understanding of the birds and bees would indicate that it goes.

Way beyond cognition, intimacy of relationship or love.

The Bible can talk about knowing God in a saving way. To know God here communicates the same kind of connotation of intimacy. To know God here is to be loved of God and to express love to God in return. We love him because he first loved us. That is what it is to know him and his High Priestly prayer Before going to the cross, notice what Jesus Prays in John 17:3. And this is life eternal life that they should know Thee, the only true God, and him whom Thou didst send, even Jesus Christ. This is life eternal. To know thee, to know God is here used in the sense of savingly, to know God, to know him in love and intimacy, or more importantly, to be loved of him, to know God because he first loved me, and then I return that love in a limited way. In this sense, only believers know God because only believers love God and are loved of God in a saving fashion. Thus, in 1 Corinthians 1:21, the Bible the same author who tells us that all unbelievers know God will now tell us that the world does not know God. First Corinthians 1:21 Foreseeing that in the wisdom of God, the world, through its wisdom, knew not God. It was God's good pleasure, through the foolishness of preaching to save them, that believe. The world, through its wisdom, through its philosophy, through its way of thinking, did not know God. However, through the created order, through what God manifests about himself, all men do know God. So there's a sense in which God makes Himself known to everyone. And yet when people use their own worldly system of thinking, their own philosophy, they do not come to know God.

In a loving, saving, intimate way.

Now, unbelievers want to go beyond what.

I have told told you.

Unbelievers repeatedly attempt to argue that God is unknowable. Not only will they say, yes, we don't know God in the sense that.

You'Re talking about, that we believe in him and trust in him and love him and have a saving relationship with him. They'll say, yeah, we don't know God in that way.

But they'll go on to say, and no one can know God in the first way either. That is, to know God in damnation, to know God under judgment because he's made Himself known, and yet you're not living in conformity to what you know about Him. Unbelievers attempt to argue that God cannot be known. I think here of Immanuel Kant, the Prussian philosopher who, maybe the most important.

Made the most significant contribution to the.

History of Western thought.

Not that there aren't many important philosophers.

There, but philosophy took a major shift.

And turned around when Immanuel Kant suggested that man's knowledge is restricted to the appearances of things.

Man can never get beyond his own.

Thoughts, as it were, his own experiences.

What we have is the world impinging.

On man, giving us sensations which have to be interpreted by the mind.

And because the mind is doing this work of interpretation, we never get beyond, as it were, the veil of the mind to the world itself, to the things in themselves. We never get to the noumena. We're always restricted to the way things appear on the screen, as it were, that we're looking at internally the phenomena. And so since we can't know anything in itself, and all of our knowledge is restricted to sensation, which is interpreted.

By the mind in certain preconceived ways.

Kant said there's absolutely no way to.

Know things that transcend human experience.

See, we can't even know the things within experience for what they are in themselves. Much less can we know anything outside of human experience, for what is or.

He or she would be in itself, namely God or a spiritual realm.

In the 20th century, a school of.

Thought known as logical Positivism perhaps was.

The most crass, gave the most crass.

Expression to the idea that God cannot be known. The logical positivist said, we can only.

Know things which are known in a particular way.

If we know them in terms of.

Our sensations, then they are knowable. But if we talk about something that.

Cannot be verified in terms of our sensations, then it is unknowable.

So we can't know that there are other minds in the world, because you.

Don'T experience directly another person's mind. You only experience the sensations. You know what you see, hear, touch, whatever.

We can't know about ethics, all ethical.

Talk is gobbledygook, according to the logical positivist, has no meaning whatsoever.

And certainly we can't know anything about.

The supernatural, because that which goes beyond our natural temporal experience can't be verified by the senses.

And so unbelievers do make an attempt to argue that God is unknowable. The transcendence of God, however, which we've.

Studied previously in this course, tends to.

Tells us that God guarantees that he is inescapably known by all men, and he leaves them without excuse. That is to say, just because he is transcendent, just because he goes beyond sensation to speak to the logical positivist.

Just because he goes beyond temporal experience to speak to Immanuel Kant, he is known in time and in space by us.

You see, the logic in the Bible.

Is completely different than the logic of the unbelieving philosopher.

The unbelieving philosopher says God goes beyond, therefore he can't be known. The Christian says God goes beyond, therefore he can make very sure that he's known. Just because he's not limited by time.

And space, just because he is sovereign.

Just because he is the Creator, he has no difficulty in speaking to us and coming right into our experience and communicating in a way which clearly leaves us without excuse when we don't respond correctly to Him. So God is transcendent, and because he's transcendent, he is knowable. And yet we want to say that.

There are always limitations upon our human knowledge.

And I would say there are always limitations upon our human knowledge of anything. But more especially in our knowledge of God, human knowledge is always in some ways limited. No matter what you're thinking about. You may be thinking about subjects that we know within the created Order. We may know how to repair a car, we may know something about the War of 1812, we may know a lot of facts, we may have a lot of know hows this world. But whatever we know, even about our temporal experience is limited. Let's think of ways in which that's true. First of all, the Bible tells us that we are sinners. And as sinners we are rebellious against the truth. We're rebellious against the truth even when we're not looking to say something which is untrue. We're rebellious against the truth and we're just lazy about finding things out. That kind of laziness infects a lot of human relationships. You know, our laziness about finding out whether so and so did say the following or what they meant by that leads us to get very angry with people. The book of Proverbs tells us that it's the fool who gives an answer before he is asked. So there is this sinfulness in us even when we're not promoting a contrary program to the truth. We are rebellious, we are stubborn, we are lazy people. We sometimes avoid the truth. And I know in a pastoral capacity that's one of the hardest things to.

Point out to somebody that they are.

Avoiding a very important truth.

They need to know about themselves, about their situation. And it's even harder when you have to find it in yourself. That's why the doctoral dissertation that I did on self deception continues to challenge me not just as to the philosophical issues, but what kind of people are we? What kind of person am I that.

I have that capacity to deceive myself to avoid the truth and acknowledgement of it? Our thinking is always limited because we are sinners and rebellious. Secondly, our thinking is always limited because we are immature in our thinking and we make mistakes. And I'm going to say something that will probably sound a little out of line at first to you, but upon.

Reflection, I hope you'll agree with it.

Adam was not created knowing everything, even everything that he could know as a human being. Adam was created mature in the sense that he was grown. He wasn't just some kind of amoeba that had to evolve into a human being. So I believe in the mature creation of Adam, but I do not believe that the maturely created Adam was fully mature. Now, if I said that about his physical body, you'd have no problem. I don't know how old Adam was.

When he was created. Probably, oh, 23, 24 is my guess. No, I'm just kidding.

I have no idea. But however Old he was. He certainly got older, right? His body matured. Likewise, his thinking matured.

He had to subdue the creation.

That means he had to go out and learn about the animals and the plants and so forth and how to use them to God's glory.

And so our thinking, even when we are not being lazy or resisting the truth or actually opposing the truth, our thinking is always immature. We're always learning more and more. And in our learning process, we make mistakes. That's one of the limitations of being a human being. You know, we like to say, often rationalizing things we've done. But we say, to err is human. And it is.

We.

We make mistakes. I don't think all mental mistakes are sinful.

I think many of our mental mistakes stem from our sinfulness, our laziness, our irresponsibility, our hastiness, whatever it may be. But I don't think all of them are.

It's conceivable to me that before he fell into sin, Adam would have learned.

Things through a trial and error method where error in the sense would never have meant rebellion against God or harm to somebody else.

He wants to find out, what does.

This plant do and how should you use it?

It doesn't seem to me that he.

Sins because his first hypothesis about it turns out not to be workable.

So not all error is sin. As human beings, we are immature in our thinking, and we do make errors. Thirdly, even if we were completely sanctified in our thinking thinking, even if our knowledge was mature knowledge, obviously we would fall short of knowing all the information that is possible. We couldn't know another person's thoughts.

We don't have that divine ability. We couldn't know the future. I mean, apart from it being revealed.

By God, only God is omniscient. Man will always be less than God in that regard. So then, to make my point again, there are limitations upon all human knowledge, knowledge of anything, but especially in our knowledge of God. Now, if I ended the lecture at this point, you would, if you were good students, you would apply those three points to our knowledge of God. You would say, in what I know about God or what we know about God, we are rebellious, lazy, and sometimes sinful.

We're obstinate.

We oppose the truth. There's that limitation in our knowledge of God. There's always the immaturity that we need to grow to think. We need to even to try out our theological hypotheses and learn more. And we could never know everything about God. We'll never be omniscient. About anything, much less about God himself. But if I ended the lecture here, I would not have given you anything.

About the incomprehensibility of God. It's very important for you to see this.

When we say that our knowledge of God is limited, we are saying something.

Much more than the three points that I just made. And here's where the disputes begin.

God's thoughts are always higher than our thoughts in some sense, not just more than our thoughts, not just more mature, not just a matter of being righteous and pure. God's thoughts are higher than our thoughts, even when our thoughts come into conformity with his own. That's what I was saying at the beginning of tonight's lecture. And so we have to talk about incomprehensibility and the higherness of God's thoughts now. And before I do that, I want to observe that the discussion of this topic, sadly, is often muddled by theologians who have used their terms in a very ambiguous way and talked at cross.

Purposes to each other.

Theologians are not the only ones that.

Do this sort of thing. But I pick on theologians because that's my occupation.

Theologians often start using vocabulary and they do not stop to define their terms, to think about the logic of their.

Discourse and to make themselves clear.

And then what happens is we don't like the way somebody else said something, and then we jump in immediately and.

You start this back and forth.

And then this guy starts going down one road in terms of how he's using his terms. And what usually happens is you have one ambiguous term that becomes the bone of contention, and then another term is brought in that's supposed to elucidate this, and it is equally ambiguous. And now you have these two ambiguous terms being played against each other over. Against this over here. And then you find out the theologians haven't really done their philosophy philosophical homework. They don't understand the logic of sameness and difference. They get tied up in words like essence and substance, and they think it sounds very profound. But anyone who's done history of philosophy.

Study sit there and go, oh, stop it, stop it, stop it. This is really not helpful. And sadly, that happened in our own denomination in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in the late 1940s, when two schools of thought centered around two very strong personalities, Gordon Clark and Cornelius Van Til, did battle over the incomprehensibility of God. One is tempted to say a little tongue in cheek in reading about this.

Debate and what they said back and.

Forth, that the whole debate was incomprehensible. Meaning now in the inapprehensible or unintelligible sense. It's really a shame, and it's hard. And my point tonight is not to.

Rehearse Presbyterian history with you. I'm going to get beyond that in just a second.

But you have to know that when you look at this.

The whole issue was not isolated from a number of other things going on. And very clearly and cleanly and objectively.

Approached by the two different sides.

There were personalities involved.

There was an ecclesiastical institutional struggle going on there. Between one party within the Presbyterian Church, another party.

One that wanted to have its own faculty at Westminster Seminary. And another that was resisting that.

And, I mean, it's very ugly.

And all that gets balled up together with it.

And it's not just Clark's view of.

The incomprehensibility of God that you see that was on the skewer either. It was also Clark's view of the primacy of reason. Clark's view of God as being reason or logic itself. And on and on and on.

So it's hard to read it. And those of you who are going.

To go out tonight and do some homework. And get into that.

I just want to remind you of that. There are a lot of different things working here. But to the degree we can isolate the discussion. That of the incomprehensibility of God. I do think that the Clark controversy.

In the late 4th was extremely muddled.

The side that favored Dr. Van Till. Wished to see more adequate recognition of the Creator creature distinction. In Gordon Clark's discussion of the relation.

Between God's knowledge and man's knowledge. Especially God's knowledge of himself and man's knowledge of God.

The Van Till side was constantly saying, the Creator creature distinction. And in that sense, quote. The qualitative difference between God's thoughts about himself and man's thoughts about God. Needs to be given more adequate expression.

By Clark and his followers.

The Clark side didn't want to be pushed, however, into using language that. That they thought suggested that God is really unknowable. Not just that God is incomprehensible. But now he is unknowable, inapprehensible. So in a sense, you have one side saying, the importance of the Creator creature distinction. Is not being recognized. And the other side saying, if we have to recognize it in that language. We'll end up without an ability to know God at all. Now, the followers of Dr. Van Till certainly believe God is knowable.

The followers of Gordon Clark certainly believe in the Creator creature distinction.

So why were they Fighting?

Well, a good deal of it had to do with inability to read each.

Other in the best possible light and.

To work toward clarification of our own language.

Okay, so on the one hand, we know that Van Til believes God is knowable.

We know that Clark believes in the creator, creature distinction. Yet they're pushing on these things.

Pushing on these things. Was there nothing to the debate?

Now here I'm going to depart from my former seminary professor, John Frame, who.

I have a great deal of respect for, and say I do think there was more to it than just a verbal dispute. I do think that there was a serious defense deficiency in Clark's expression about the incomprehensibility of God. And yet in saying that, and I'm asked this repeatedly, so I'll just answer.

It now so you don't have to get to it later.

If I were in the presbytery or the General Assembly, I would not have tried to block Clark's ordination based on that mistake. I've always thought, at the height of ridiculousness, that somebody as brilliant as Gordon Clark was being opposed in his examination. And any number of dullards coming along in theology or past week by, well, month by month or year by year in presbyteries who couldn't hold a candle to Gordon Clark in a theological discussion.

So, I mean, there's a lot of.

Stuff going on here.

But I do think there's a serious problem that may not have been as clearly identified as the band Hillside wanted to. But I don't think it's a problem that should have created the ecclesiastical mess that it did either.

Enough Presbyterian history.

Let's talk theology.

Now.

The reason the two sides talked.

Past each other to the degree that they did back in the late 40s.

Is because they refused to clarify what they each meant when they talked about things like God's thoughts being identical with man's thoughts. Or the relationship between the thought content.

Of God and the thought content of man.

God's thought content and man's thought content.

Must be different, one side would say.

The other side would insist. There must be some identity between God's.

Thoughts and man's thoughts.

The other side responds, they are never identical. The creator and the creature are never.

The same back and forth.

Now, if we stop and ask, how are we using the word identity? How are we using the expression thought content?

We might have gotten beyond some of this.

Perhaps the most misleading expression in the debate over the incomprehensibility of God has to do with Van Till. Speaking of the analogy between God's thoughts and man's thoughts. That discussion of analogy was, I think.

Thoughtlessly misconstrued by the Clarkians to be.

A thesis about theological language. That we only know analogies about God.

That is our language about God can.

Never be literally true. When in fact all that was meant by Van Till is that there is both continuity and discontinuity between God's thoughts and man's. What Dr. Van Till was insisting upon is, you know, how an analogy has a point of comparison and yet the things are different. So there's difference and yet there's sameness. And Van Till was just saying that when we think God's thoughts after him, we are thinking analogously. There's a difference between and yet there's something that's very same between these two. Man's thoughts must be an image or reflection of God's own thoughts. And the interesting thing is that Dr. Van Til would have said that is true whether we are speaking literally or figuratively about God. The Bible says God is a rock. Is that figurative or literal language? Well, obviously, I hope it's obvious that's figurative language. God is not a rock in the sense that we can go out here.

And touch a boulder and say, this is God.

God is rock, like so it's figurative to say God is a rock. But Van Till would say whether we are talking about God being the creator, literally the creator creator, or God being a rock figuratively, in both cases, we are thinking of God analogously. We're not thinking about analogies. We are thinking God's thoughts after him. There's a sense in which they are God's thoughts and yet they're on a creaturely level. So they are different in that sense.

An analogy.

And I'll share with you.

You all know my affection and my.

Gratitude to Dr. Van Til. I do think that he could have.

Found a better way to say this.

I also think that a little bit of charity on the part of his opponents will help him deceive that he doesn't mean. He's not giving a thesis about theological language at all. He's only talking metaphorically about analogies.

We may know God analogously, but what.

We know is not simply an analogy. You want to get that in your notes? That'll help.

We may know God analogously, but what we know is not simply an analogy. So let's talk about how God's thoughts are higher than our thoughts. Finally, with this now all penned in this context.

What about the incomprehensibility of God?

Are God's thoughts And man's thoughts identical. I'm going to speak about the objects of thought, the standard of thought, the process of thought, the thoughts themselves, the.

Meaning of the sentences expressing the thoughts, and finally, the qualities of the thinking or thoughts. I'm going to talk about six different things and I'm going to talk about them really fast.

Okay, first of all, when we ask whether God's thoughts are the same as man's thoughts, what if we are thinking about the object of thought? Now, to understand that nomenclature, let me.

Just give you a little philosophical background. Throughout the history of philosophy, Western philosophy.

Philosophers have distinguished between the subject and.

The object of knowing.

The subject of knowing, it doesn't mean.

The topic that you're talking about. When I first started reading philosophy, it always threw me.

The subject of knowing.

Are we talking about baseball? Are we talking about oceans?

Or just what the subject of knowledge is the knowing person, the knower, that's the subject.

And the subject is knowing or thinking about an object. Okay, so I might be thinking about.

My car out on the street.

I'm the subject, the car is the object of knowledge.

Okay, now, with that in mind, between God and man, are the objects of thought the same? Well, I think the Clarkians thought the Ventilians were denying this. But of course, I think it's almost a sophomoric mistake for anybody to think that God slots an manslaughts are different in that way.

When I'm thinking about a rose in the garden, God's thinking about the same rose in the garden. When I'm thinking about the world or the globe, what I'm thinking about is what God is thinking about. And when I'm thinking about God himself, I'm thinking about the same God that God himself is thinking about when he thinks of himself. When I think two plus two is four, that truth that I'm thinking about is the same truth that God thinks two plus two is four. So with respect to the objects of thought, God's thoughts and man's thoughts are the same. How about the standard of thought?

What makes a thought veridical? Or to put it in language, layman's terms, truth. The standard of truth.

When I think a thought that is.

True or veridical, is the standard of its truthfulness the same for me as it is for God? The answer is yes, of course it is. Because the standard of truth is God's own thoughts.

So when I think what God thinks.

About two plus two, the rose in the garden, the saltiness of the ocean, or anything else, I'm thinking his thoughts after Him. The standard of truth for God is conformity to his own thought. Of course, that leads to an interesting.

Thing that I'll bring up later.

That means God never makes any mistakes, right? He's always truthful. But when I am truthful, and I'm not always truthful, when I am truthful, I am truthful because what I am saying or thinking what conforms to what.

God says or thinks.

So the standard for thought or the standard for truth is the same for God and man. And that does no despot. That's no insult to the Creator creature distinction. It is just an expression of my. My humble recognition of the Creator creature distinction that I say we have the same standard, God and I.

And that standard is whatever he says.

And does whatever he thinks.

So the object of thought is the same. The standard of thought or truthfulness is the same. How about the process of thought? Thirdly, is my process of thought the.

Same as God's process of thought?

No. By the way, both the Clark and.

The Van Til side seem to have agreed on this. In the late 40s that didn't seem to be a problem.

Although there was kind of some cutesy.

Metaphorical language used that wasn't as helpful as they may have thought.

They like to say God knows everything in an eternal intuition.

Sounds very profound, but I don't know that in intuition is the way that God knows or that's the model. I'm not even sure what intuition is when we, I mean, when you get right down to it, what intuition amounts to for human beings either. So I doubt that's very helpful.

But it is true that God's process of thinking, whatever it is, it's not.

The same as ours.

In fact, there's some truth to the idea that God doesn't think discursively. Now a discursive way of thinking is step by step by step and therefore.

Requires temporal sequence and well, some amount of time. Maybe you can think very quickly through the steps, but you have to go, you know, step one, step two, step three, conclusion, whatever.

Does God think that way?

No, he doesn't have to think discursively.

And of course God. God doesn't know anything in the way.

That we know things through our senses. You know, impinging upon my eyeball or my eardrum or my tongue or whatever it may be because God doesn't have physical eye, ear, tongue, hand, what have you.

So the process of thought is not.

The same between God and man. But that doesn't seem to go far enough to get at the incomprehension, sensibility of God.

We get to the tough one. It's the content of God's thought the same as the content of man's thought. And just because of the ambiguity of.

That expression, I think people argued with.

Each other the thoughts themselves. Sometimes, in English parlance, to speak of the thought is to speak of the object of thought. And in that sense, the thoughts are the same. We've already said God and man are.

Thinking about the same things. Two plus two is four, the rose in the garden, what have you.

But if you mean the thinking itself, now I'm speaking metaphysically, the reality, the very substance of what it is, of course they are not the same. They couldn't be the same because God is a different being than man. And I don't think we're making a real profound.

I mean, it's profound that God and man are different.

But to say that his thoughts are not our thoughts. Because obviously whatever is going on in terms of the gray matter up here or even within my spirit, however you want to look at that, is not what's going on or is not identical to the very thinking of God. Because I'm not God. His being and my being are different. That, it seems to me, is not a real profound remark, but it seems to have been at the heart of.

The debate over incomprehensibility.

How about thought content? Is the thought content the same? What do you mean? Obviously, my mind is not God's mind. But what I'm thinking about is what God's thinking about. And we're thinking about it according to the same standard. Although the way he does it and the way I do it are different. Fifthly, how about the meaning of sentences expressing those thoughts? That is, when God's thought is put into an English sentence or my thought is put into an English sentence. Are the meanings of those two sentences the same? Well, sadly, the whole idea of the.

Meaning of something is obscure in the 20th century. In philosophy, we have to distinguish different senses in which we speak of the meaning of a term. The meaning of a term is not ordinarily thought of as its referent. The meaning of the word car is not the car itself. Right? If the car were destroyed, the meaning of the term car would not be destroyed.

Okay, so obviously, if we. If we talk about the meaning of sentences having to do with the referent, we're back to objects of thought.

In God and man have the same.

Referent, the connotation, is it the same? Does God have the same definition as I do? Well, in a sense, yes. When he speaks of love and I speak of love, we're talking about the same thing. Although he knows a whole lot more.

About love and righteousness and so forth than I do.

But now here's the interesting thing. Sometimes when we talk about knowing the meaning of a sentence, we're also talking.

About knowing the implications of the sentence.

And to the degree that I learn more and more about the implications of some truth, I'm said to know that truth better or deeper or more richly. And in that sense the meaning is going to be different, not in connotation or sense. The difference between God and man's understanding of the meaning is going to be a matter of richness. Because God knows everything and every implication. He knows that sentence much better than I do. And so while we're saying the same thing, when we say God is love.

God is righteous, God is holy, God is true.

Certainly God's knowledge of that has many more insights, implications in it. To use a human analogy, God knows more about how that expression is used than is to be applied than I do. And then sixthly, and for all of the build up to this point, this.

Is really the point of tonight's lecture. How about the qualities of God's thinking or the qualities of God's thoughts and ours?

Is there in any sense a quality qualitative difference between God's thinking and man's thinking?

Well, of course there's a qualitative difference in that he's the Creator and He's eternal. I'm a creature and I'm temporal. We could speak again. That would be, I think, sharing trivial points.

But I think there are some qualities, some things that show a categorical difference.

Between God's thinking and my thinking. I want to share a few of those in closing tonight. First of all, God's thinking is always self attesting.

To attest to something is to give evidence for it, to give testimony to.

It, to support it, to verify it.

Right? And what I'm saying is that God's.

Thoughts always attest to themselves.

They do not look to anything outside themselves to be more certain, to be.

Verified, to receive their authority. God's thoughts are self authorized thoughts.

And in that sense there's a categorical.

Difference between God and man. Because none of my thoughts are like that. Now this is going to seem strange, but hear this out.

Even when I am preaching from God's.

Word and preaching truly, my thoughts are not self attesting. But if what I'm saying is true about God, what I told you is self attesting because of who God is. What I'm saying is when the preacher is right in the pulpit, he's never right because of who he is. He's only right because of the one for whom he speaks. And so my thoughts are never self attesting thoughts.

Let me put it another way.

My thoughts can never be the criterion of truth, but God's thoughts are always the criterion of truth. That's quite a qualitative, big qualitative difference. I think God stands in a sovereign, authoritative, unchallengeable position. He has a status which I never have.

It's not like, well, every once in.

A while I'm like that, but just not enough.

I'm never like that as the creature. Even if I were not a sinner, as the creature, my thoughts would never have the quality of God's thought of being self attesting, being the criterion of truth being beyond challenge.

Secondly, there's another qualitative difference that I think needs to be emphasized and that's.

That God's thoughts.

God's knowledge is never revelational. Mine is always revelational. God doesn't know anything by revelation. Amazing, isn't it?

Who would reveal anything to God?

But everything I know is revelational either.

Through the special revelation of Scripture or through the natural revelation of the world round about me and also myself. So that there is a real difference between God and man, even when what we know is the same.

Dr. Van Til always had fun talking about this. When we would share ginger ale in his front room and we'd talk about the incomprehensibility of God, he'd say if I want to know how many pairs of socks I have in my dresser upstairs, I have to go look. God doesn't. And not because God has X ray vision. It's not just that God in heaven can see through my dresser drawers into there and count the socks.

The point is God never needs to go and look and count. Think about that. God never approaches knowledge in that sense. He never goes out to find out that. The Bible does speak metaphorically of God.

Coming down to check things out, but.

We know that's a metaphor. The point is God doesn't need to go search out things. And yet what I know is always based upon what God has revealed. Mine is always a searching out kind of knowledge.

His never is.

Thirdly, and this is tied to the.

Second point, God's knowledge is creative, Mine isn't. And by creative I mean here. When God thinks something that makes it the case, it brings it about. His thought created this world. His thought governs this world. So everything that God thinks is what takes place when he thinks is the case. Is that ever true for me? Can I ever think things into being.

Now?

My thought is not creative thought. My thought is always receptive thought. I must think God's thoughts after him. And that makes his thought the original and my thought the derivative. There's another major qualitative difference that has to be taken into account.

And then I'd like to talk more.

About this, but I do see our time is getting away.

But I want to give you one.

More that I think is very important.

And that is there is always about.

God's thought a quality of awe and wonder and worship that does not ever attach to mind. And if you've been listening to tonight's lecture, this may be the most juicy insight of all. I mean, I really. This does something for me emotionally to think about this.

To the degree that I know more information about God, to the degree that the facts that I have about God.

Grow and grow and grow to that degree, his incomprehensibility is not diminished, but accentuated. That is the paradox of theological knowledge.

The more we know about God, the.

More we stand in awe of his knowledge.

You see, if it were only a quantitative thing. Think about the difference between. Well, let me give.

Pardon me for using a personal example.

But there was a time when I started studying philosophy. I stood in awe of a lot.

Of people around me. Professors who had read more than me, who knew more than me, were more adept at talking about these things to me who wrote books and I hadn't.

I mean, I was just this little.

Twinkie of a student starting out, looking at these wonderful minds and all they knew. And I'm not saying that I'm at.

That level, but what I'm saying, you.

Do know, because you've had it in.

Your own experience, to the degree you know a field, more and more, your sense of awe of those people is somewhat diminished. Now.

I guess some people get arrogant enough to think, well, there's no awe at all. I. I don't have that kind of relationship to these people.

But it is true that I don't stand in fear and trembling of these.

People the way I would have when I was, say, a freshman in college. I can hold my own talking to these people.

I'm willing to publicly debate them.

I'm willing to write articles back and forth. They don't intimidate me, that sort of thing.

Which isn't to say I don't respect Them I don't have awe. But you see the awe as the awe has shrunk to the degree that my knowledge has grown. Now, this is. Maybe somebody can find a nice way.

Of putting this that I haven't found yet.

But that's not true when it comes to God, to the degree that I know more about him, my awe doesn't shrink, it grows. I'd like to leave you with this thought. You might consider Paul In Romans, the 11th chapter. At the end of the chapter, Paul says, at verse 33, oh, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God. How unsearchable are his judgments and his.

Ways past, tracing out how incomprehensible is He.

For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor, or who has first given to him that it should be recompensed unto him again? For of him and through him, and unto him are all things, to him be the glory forever and ever.

Amen.

It's a beautiful expression of Paul standing before God in utter awe. He says, who can plumb this? Who can understand all? Who can, you know, put Christmas corral all this in his thinking? You can't comprehend this. And now I want to ask you, where does Paul say that? He says that at the end of the most systematic presentation of Christian theology.

That you'll find in the New Testament.

He begins in chapter one, thought about the righteousness of God being revealed in the. The wrath of God and then the judgment of God and then the justice of God being met in justification as Christ. And he goes on and on and on through this, you know, chapter by chapter, verse by verse, intricate detail. I mean, you learn so much theology. And the interesting thing is at the end of it, what you have Paul doing is saying the more you know, the more you stand in awe. Even those things which we read righteously and truly and maturely know about God.

Lead us to say all the more he's incomprehensible.

The closer you get, you see, to getting around everything or knowing more about.

God, the further he gets away from you.

Does that make sense? The closer you get and, and apprehending the facts and the truths about God, the more incomprehensible he gets, the more you stand in awe and wonder of him.

So there are truly qualitative differences between.

God's thinking about himself and our thinking about Him.

Next week, when we come back together.

To finish, not finish, but to continue our discussion of Isaiah 55 and the nature of God, I'm Going to talk to you about the subject of mystery and mysticism and how these things fit into or stand opposed to our Christian understanding of theology. I'm falling into my bad habits of going over time. I'll give a few moments for questions.

And then maybe next week we can.

Have a longer time for discussion.

Tim.

How do you clarify that type of knowing which we have as subject and which God cannot have as a subject, but which being the subject is necessary to know it? Now, for instance, when I put a salt kernel on my tongue, I know saltiness. God knows that I know saltiness, but he doesn't taste salt. How do you clarify that? It almost seems that there's a sense in which there are experiences, that it is necessary to be the finite subject in order to know them.

Isn't that clear in and of itself?

Your experiences are not my experiences, and God's experiences are not your experiences either.

That is to say, when you put the.

The salt on your tongue and see, you're saying no saltiness, I would say experience saltiness.

However, as you know saltiness, I'm not.

Experiencing saltiness, at least as you do. And theoretically, I could go through my whole life and never experience saltiness as you do. Maybe that's a bad illustration because there's so much salt everywhere.

But in theory, you will probably have.

Had a sensation or sensations that I never will have.

But that isn't.

I mean, that doesn't make us stand back and say, boy, what a paradox, or what an intellectual conundrum. We're different subjects, that's all.

To that extent. That means in my knowledge, if all of our other experiences were equal, then my total experience indeed is yours or greater than yours. That's the very variance.

Now, of course, I suppose when you incorporate the doctrine of the Incarnation into.

This discussion, we might say that you can't even claim to exceed God's experience in that way, because the Bible tells us Jesus had every experience that we.

Do.

In the category sense.

Obviously, he's not experiencing a Toyota the way I'm experiencing a Toyota when I drive it, but every kind of human experience he had because he took on a physical body.

Marty, I just need a point of clarification. You mentioned Professor Frank and the discussion of controversy between Manil and Clark, and I'm just not clear. You said you believe that there were problems in Clark system. What is this, Professor Frate?

It would be good to have him here, you know, to be very sure of this. But in my reading of his discussion, and of course I had him in class many years ago as well. I felt that he would be much closer to saying, if not actually saying, it was completely a verbal dispute. It was something that there really wasn't any substance or problem there, except that they didn't talk clearly to each other. And I can't go that far. He may be right, I may be wrong. I'm not trying to be adamant on that, but when I look at it, I do think that there was something being overlooked here. And it was a significant overlooking, things that should have been said. And there shouldn't have been that stubbornness in a Christian theologian to say, oh, yes, there are these qualitative differences. Now, see, Frame finds qualitative difference more problematic than I do as well. But even at that, there should have been things which you have to squeeze.

Out of a theologian who is being, you know, examined as to his theological competence. And I think that Clark should have, on his own and certainly in the midst of the debate, offered the sorts of things we were talking about here to say, well, of course there are these differences.

Now, one of the things that kept him from doing that, I would suspect would lead us into some of the.

Other complicating features, like Clark thinking that God is the Logos, the Logos in my mind. And so there's this logic connection and the primacy of the intellect.

I do think, because he was protecting some of those peculiar theses of his own, that he was hesitant to say.

Some things about the incomprehensibility of God.

Which need to be said if you.

Want to cover the ground.

I don't think it was completely a verbal dispute there.

I think there was something deficient in Clark, but not so deficient that I would not have fasted for ordination. So I'm adding that as well.

It may be that John Frame would.

Say what I've just said, but that's not the impression I have from reading.

Him in discussions on thinking in Revelation, a discussion that you had with Dan Fuller, he was intrigued with how men in general outside of the Christian realm experience these intellectual flashes. So that there's a. There's a level of knowledge, and then man tries to formulate, but then there has to be. He's relaxed or he's walking the baby carriage, he's doing something, and all of a sudden, in a flash, there's a new revelation or a new insight. During that discussion, it was almost as though in God's common grace, there are degrees God has to reveal even in his common grace, more and more, even, save to the unsaved man. Is outside of the Christian circle, the only thing they can account for and just call it intellectual flashes. Is there anything else they have for that?

No.

Is there anyone pursuing those lines as. Or what's the source of that?

To give a universal negative would always be dangerous. I can't say for sure that no one is, but there's no one that's doing it in any notable or remarkable way that I'm aware of. I think that's an anomaly that unbelievers are going to struggle, always struggle with. Another one is self consciousness. I don't think evolutionary thought will be able to account for self consciousness even if they could account for perception, which I think is hard enough on evolutionary premises.

Self perception.

And I don't mean by that looking in a mirror, but thinking about the subject of knowing and experience is something that is unique to human beings. I can't account for it.

And another one is what you are talking about here. Unbelievers don't know what to do do.

With this experience of say an Einstein who was, according to him, pushing the baby carriage. And all of a sudden it comes to him. He could not discursively have arrived at that. It just hit him like a flash, you know. Well, of course, in their view of the universe, either that should never happen because the universe is too chaotic or it should be happening all the time. I mean another sense because everything we know is such an amazing accomplishment in a chaotic universe. So yeah, unbelievers I think have a.

Hard time even explaining human thought, which always is makes them out to be hypocritical when they will say very strong.

Things about how we cannot know God and you cannot know the Bible is true and so forth. I have a response to Bertrand Russell's why I'm Not a Christian coming out in a few weeks. And one of the things I say in there is Russell is one of the most brilliant epistemologists of the 20th century. Yet Russell could not get it all.

Together and he admitted as much. And so I'm thinking if you stand back, don't look just at the particular.

Issues that he brings up.

If we just stand back and look.

At the whole of Bertrand Russell's life.

And say, well that's strange, he couldn't even figure out human epistemology.

He had all these paradoxes and problems that couldn't be worked out.

And yet he could say that we.

Don'T know God and that Christians are wrong.

You would think he would be humble and say since we haven't figured out what knowledge is who knows whether we.

Know God or not? I mean, that would have been the more consistent conclusion. But it isn't what he did.

All right, if there aren't any other.

Questions, let's have a word of prayer before we go home.

We do thank you, our Heavenly Father, that you have revealed yourself to us. We know that without that gracious self revelation we would be completely in the dark. Not simply about you, but about everything. And we do ask that you would forgive us for the way in which our thoughts are so often not your thoughts and we depart from your ways. We do pray that you would bring us more into conformity to your revelation. That we might know you, that we might walk in the truth. We might profess the truth and be faithful. We do also ask that as we leave tonight that you would fill each and every one of us with a sense of your incomprehensibility. That we would know so very clearly that you are always the creator and we are always the creature, even when it comes to knowing and knowing about you. Indeed, Lord, we would even confess that the doctrine of your incomprehensibility is too deep for us. There's a sense in which even it is incomprehensible. It is unfathomable. And the more we come to know about you, we know the more in which we recognize the awe and reverence that is due in your presence. We do thank you for speaking to us as little children. We do thank you for speaking words which are exactly right and appropriate to communicate the truth to us. We do thank you through all of this that you have let us know you, to know you in a loving way. Indeed to love you because you first loved us. And we pray in Jesus name, amen.