What can we know about God? This is the most fundamental question in theology, because what we can know about God and whether we can know anything about Him really determines the scope and content of our study. Here we must consider teaching the greatest theologians in history, affirming the “understandability of God. “When using the term incomprehensible, they do not refer to something we cannot truly understand or know. Speaking in theological terms, saying that God is incomprehensible does not mean that God is totally unknown; means that none of us can fully understand God.
Misunderstanding is linked to a fundamental principle of the Protestant Reformation, the finite cannot contain (or understand) the infinite. Human beings are finite creatures, so our minds always work from a finite perspective. We live, move and exist on a finite plane, but God lives, moves and exists in infinity. Our finite understanding cannot contain an infinite subject; Therefore, God is incomprehensible. This concept represents a kind of brake to warn us not to think that we have grasped and mastered every detail of the things of God. Our finiteness always limits our understanding of God.
- If we do not understand the doctrine of God’s incomprehensibility.
- We can easily fall into two serious mistakes: the first error says that because God is incomprehensible.
- It must be totally incognishable.
- And everything we say about God makes no sense.
- Rationality with God’s incomprehensibility.
- Our mind can only go to a certain extent in understanding God.
- And to know Him.
- We need His revelation.
- But this revelation is intelligible and not irrational.
- It’s not a talk.
- It’s not pointless.
- Himself.
Here we refer to the principle of reform that God is hidden and revealed; there is a mysterious dimension of God that we do not know; However, we do not remain in darkness, groping the hidden God; God has also revealed himself, which is fundamental to the Christian faith. Christianity is a revealed religion. God, the creator, has clearly revealed himself in the glorious theater of nature. This is what we call “natural revelation. ” God was also revealed verbally. He spoke and we have his Word written in the Bible. We are talking here about a special revelation, information that God gives us and that we could never discover for ourselves.
God remains incomprehensible because he reveals himself without revealing all that needs to be known about him. “The things covered belong to the Lord our God, but the revealed ones belong to us and our children forever?(Deut 29. 29). It is not as if we have no knowledge of God, or as if we have full knowledge of God; Instead, we have a practical knowledge of God that is useful and essential to our lives.
This raises the question of how we can speak meaningfully of the incomprehensible God. Theologians have an unfortunate tendency to oscillate between two poles. The pole of skepticism, which was previously considered, assumes that our language about God is meaningless and has no reference point The other pole is a form of pantheism that mistakenly assumes that we capture or embrace God. From these mistakes we turn away when we understand that our language about God is built by analogy. We can say what God is like, but as soon as we associate what we use to describe God with his essence, we make the mistake of thinking that finite can contain infinity.
Historically, there has been an oscillation between the two mistakes already mentioned in Protestant liberalism and neo-orthodoxy. The liberal theology of the nineteenth century identified God with the flow of history and with nature, promoted a pantheism in which everything was God and God. In this context, neo-orthodoxy opposed God’s identification with creation and sought to restore God’s transcendence. In their zeal, neo-Orthodox theologians referred to God as “any other. “This idea is problematic. If God is totally different, how do we know anything about him?Could it be revealed through a sunset?Could it be revealed through Jesus of Nazareth?If it were totally different from human beings, what common basis of communication between God and humanity could there be?If God is totally different from us, He has no way of speaking to us.
Our understanding of the Lord by analogy solves the problem. There is a point of contact between man and God. The Bible tells us that we were created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-28). In a sense, human beings, we are like God, This makes communication possible. God has put this capacity for communication into creation. We are not God, but we look like him because we carry his image and are made to his likeness. Therefore, God can reveal Himself to us, not in his language, but in ours. He can talk to us. You can communicate in a way that we can understand; not completely, but in a meaningful way. If he gets rid of the analogy, he’ll end up skeptical.
This article is part of the August 2014 issue of Tabletalk magazine
Translation: Joel Paulo Aragono da Guia Oliveira. Critic: Yago Martins. © 2016 Faithful Ministérium. All rights reserved. Website: MinistryFiel. com. br. Original: What can we know about God?
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