C. Michael Patton and Rhome Dyke · The Theology Program · 71 minutes
Lecture by C. Michael Patton, Th.M., and Rhome Dyke, Th.M., from The Theology Program, published on their public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
Before a single attribute of God can be studied, an unavoidable question stands in the way: can creatures below the arch say anything true about the One above it? Some traditions answer no, warning that every definition puts God in a box. Patton and Dyke take the objection seriously, then answer it from Scripture and from the nature of language itself. Listen for the difference between knowing God truly and knowing him fully; the whole session turns on it.
The session opens with an honest admission: no one in the room is infallible. The teachers describe themselves as fallible teachers teaching infallible truth only to the degree they teach it faithfully. The Bible is inspired, inerrant, and infallible, but every interpreter of it is fallible, and every student of God is finite, reaching toward One who is infinite. Some traditions conclude from this that theology itself is presumption: since God is incomparable, all we can do is fall down and worship in awe of his transcendence without trying to understand him. Their fear is a real one, that defining God will humanize him, confine him to man-sized terms, and put him in a box, and the teachers say the concern is duly noted. But the question that decides the matter runs the other way: does God want to be known?
The case against the knowability of God comes in two claims. First, the finite cannot comprehend the infinite and therefore should not even attempt to define him. Second, human language itself will always be inadequate and therefore misleading. The session takes each in turn, but not before letting Scripture speak to how far above us God really is: Psalm 145 says his greatness is unsearchable, beyond fathoming; Psalm 147 says his understanding is infinite; Romans 11 says his judgments are unsearchable and his paths beyond tracing out; and 1 Corinthians 2 says that just as only a man’s own spirit knows the man, so only the Spirit of God knows the depths of God, and without the Spirit we could not receive what God reveals. The biblical warrant for God’s incomprehensibility is real. He is way beyond us.
Turn the question around: what is it like for God to describe himself to creatures like us? He must come down to our level. His self-description in Scripture is an act of condescension, even a kind of humility, the infinite One reaching down below the arch in his immanence to speak of himself in finite words to finite hearers. The course’s theme verse from 1 Timothy 6 keeps the tension honest: he dwells in unapproachable light, and no one has ever seen or can see him. There is an aspect of God’s existence we cannot possibly reach. He is above the arch, and the best we can do is receive what he hands down. But he has handed something down, and that changes everything about the first objection.
The claim that the finite cannot comprehend the infinite turns out to be a self-defeating statement, like saying my wife has never been married, or answering yes when your mother asks if you are asleep. To declare that nothing can be known about God, you must already know quite a lot about God, at minimum, that he is the kind of being who cannot be known. The statement requires the very knowledge it forbids. So the objection cannot stand as stated. What survives of it is a needed humility, which the course gathers into one sentence from John Hannah: God reveals himself to us truly, but not fully.
The teachers illustrate from friendship: after years of teaching side by side, one of them knows the other truly, yet still hears new stories every month; what he knows is true without being everything. So it is with God, and permanently so. Wayne Grudem presses the point into eternity: even in the age to come, freed from sin, we will never fully understand God or any one thing about him; we have true knowledge from Scripture, not exhaustive knowledge. Heaven does not lift a creature above the arch, so the saints will grow in the knowledge of God forever, world without end. Even with Christ, who could be seen and touched, the four Gospels record only a handful of his days, and John ends his account by saying the world itself could not contain the books if everything Jesus did were written down. What is written is true; it was never meant to be exhaustive.
The second objection gets its own demonstration. Close your eyes and think of a person: hands, feet, a body, the neighbor in the next chair. Now think of God as a person, and feel how the word smuggles in its limits. The church of the fourth century fought at length over which Greek and Latin terms could carry the doctrine, and settled, amid huge conflict, on language of one God in three persons. But the meaning of the word person has shifted with the culture since, and it keeps shifting: the modern debate over when life begins is, among other things, a fight to redefine the word, and a secular redefinition read back into the creed changes the theology. The teachers even suggest that a theologian who proposed saying three centers of consciousness rather than three persons would be denounced as a heretic while possibly representing what Nicaea meant more accurately than our drifted word does. Terms change, and terms are difficult.
This is not a new anxiety. From the early centuries to the present, the eastern churches have thought differently from the west, warning that western definitions confine God, mislead worshipers, and breed heresy. Their instinct produced apophatic theology, the way of negation: since we cannot say what God is, say what he is not. God is not mutable. God is not bounded. At least, they reasoned, that keeps us safe. The east never went to the extreme of pure silence about God, but its emphasis stands as a permanent caution against overconfident definition, and the disputes between east and west over trinitarian terms, where the concepts often agreed while the vocabularies collided, will return later in this course.
The resolution the church reached is this: while human language has its limits, God chose to express himself within those limits in his word. The Creator knows exactly what language can bear, and we cannot stand above him and tell him his chosen medium fails. Our duty is the balance: never force his revelation to do more than he intended, and never refuse what he actually said. The early church named the principle the analogy of language: language is capable of communicating what exists in reality, not fully, but analogously, pointing in the exact right direction. When we say God is great, the word does not exhaust him, but it truly distinguishes him from bad; the arrow points the right way.
The analogy of language guards believers from a private fear: that God’s idea of love or righteousness might turn out to be the opposite of ours, so that heaven begins with unlearning everything. It will not. Paul writes in the opening chapters of Romans that God will prevail when he is judged: every complaint we have filed against his righteousness will collapse, not because the meaning of righteousness flips, but because we will see more fully what was always pointing the right way. We know love now, a husband’s, a mother’s, a friend’s, and above all the sacrificial love of Christ, and God’s love is that, in greater perfection and magnitude than we have yet seen. Jeremiah 9 gives the session its charter: let no one boast in wisdom, might, or riches, but let the one who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows the Lord, who exercises lovingkindness, justice, and righteousness on the earth and delights in them. God says we can know him. That settles the question.
The session pivots to the next subject and meets its objectors first. Why argue for God’s existence when the Bible never does? No ontological, cosmological, or teleological argument appears anywhere in Scripture. Others object that proof is the enemy of faith, or that a God you could prove would be believed rationally rather than supernaturally, or that proving a god is not the same as proving the God of the Bible, or, with the presuppositionalists, that everyone already believes God exists and some simply deny it, as Psalm 14 says of the fool. Each objection gets an answer, and the first requires a tool the course will use constantly: a taxonomy of proof itself.
Ask someone demanding proof of God which kind they mean. Mathematical proof covers analytical truths, things true by definition, two plus two, a triangle’s three sides, the law that A equals A, and it proves nothing in the real world, not even who your mother is; demanding it for God is demanding a kind of proof no one uses for anything that matters. Logical proof works by syllogism, and is infallible only to the degree its premises are certain: all creation demands a creator holds only if the skeptic grants the first premise. Empirical proof appeals to observable data, the order and beauty of creation, and is strong but never absolute. Moral proof is what is demanded by the compelling weight of the evidence, and it is how every human being actually lives. To refuse moral certainty, to stay indoors over the outside chance of a germ, to refuse the highway over the outside chance of brake failure, is the working definition of insanity, and the class laughs its way through a film character who lives exactly that way. The one who demands absolute certainty before believing in God demands of religion a standard he applies to nothing else in his life.
The teachers gather the threads with several witnesses: an apologist’s observation that no argument from real-world facts yields mathematically certain conclusions, yet all factual decisions in life rest on probability; a philosopher’s point that if proof means probable conclusion from produced evidence under reasonable judgment, then the classical arguments do prove God’s existence; and R. C. Sproul’s distinction that one can prove many things to many people and persuade them of nothing. Proof lands differently on different people, and persuasion belongs finally to the Holy Spirit, who convicts the heart and makes the unwilling able to believe. The claim of next week’s session is measured: God’s existence can be proven by the same criteria by which anyone proves anything, no less, and no differently.
The objection that God must be accepted by faith, not evidences, rests on a false dichotomy the program has fought before: faith against reason, spirit against mind, as if God did not use the mind he gave us to reach the spirit he made. If religion were evidence-free leaping, every religion would be equally valid, and Christianity would have nothing more to say than anyone else. Against the contentless faith of the age, the era of advertisements in which everyone simply believes, in nothing in particular, the Reformers defined the faith that justifies as three things together: notitia, the knowledge, the actual content believed; assensus, the assent of the mind that the content is true, reached through study and critical evaluation; and fiducia, the trust that rests one’s whole weight on it. Knowledge and assent without trust qualifies a person to be a demon, for the demons believe and shudder. And the theology program aims its whole labor at the neglected middle term, assensus, so that when cancer or death shakes a believer, the faith that surfaces knows what it believes and why. Faith grows with knowledge; it does not shrink. It is faith seeking understanding.
To the presuppositionalist who says everyone already believes, the teachers answer: true enough, and the degree varies. Is your awareness of God’s existence perfect, equally alive at all times and in all places? Would you be tempted the same way if you could see God sitting beside you? He is beside you; the difference is the vividness of your belief. So the arguments for God’s existence serve discipleship as much as evangelism: the more assured a person is that God exists, the more likely they are to live like it. And the Bible’s silence on the arguments is itself the answer to the last objection: Scripture assumes God’s existence because, as Romans 1 declares, his invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived in what has been made, so that men are without excuse. The evidence was already everywhere. God did not need to write it twice.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all seventeen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. Why do some traditions object to studying the doctrine of God at all?
2. What do passages like Psalm 145, Psalm 147, and Romans 11 contribute to the discussion?
3. According to 1 Corinthians 2, why is the Spirit of God essential to knowing God?
4. What must God do in order to describe himself to us?
5. Why is the claim that the finite cannot comprehend the infinite self-defeating?
6. What does Wayne Grudem say about our knowledge of God in the age to come?
7. How does the end of John’s Gospel illustrate true but not exhaustive knowledge?
8. What does the shifting meaning of the word person show about theological language?
9. What is apophatic theology?
10. What is the church’s resolution to the objection that human language is inadequate?
11. When we say God is great, what does the analogy of language claim the word accomplishes?
12. Why is the analogy of language a comfort to believers?
13. Why is demanding mathematical proof for God’s existence unreasonable?
14. What is moral proof, and what does refusing it amount to?
15. What are the three elements of faith as the Reformers defined it?
16. Why do the teachers say knowledge and assent without trust qualify a person to be a demon?
17. Why are the arguments for God’s existence valuable for discipleship and not only evangelism?
All seventeen correct. Lecture 2 is complete.
The session distinguishes knowing God truly from knowing him fully, and promises that the saints will grow in the knowledge of God forever. How does that change the way you think about heaven, and about the pace of your learning now?
The teachers say the program aims at assensus, the neglected middle of faith, so that doubt met in a crisis finds a faith that knows why it believes. Where is your own faith weakest, in content, in assent, or in trust, and what would strengthen it?
Would you be tempted the same way if you could see God sitting beside you? Since he is beside you, what practice this week would make your belief in his presence more vivid?
The charter of the session, from Jeremiah 9: let not the wise boast in wisdom, nor the mighty in might, nor the rich in riches, but let the one who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows the Lord, who exercises lovingkindness, justice, and righteousness on the earth, for in these things he delights.
The lecture’s own directions for the week: meet with others over the group discussion questions, since theology is done in community and not alone; the teachers also commend the assigned course reading on the doctrine of God and remind honors students of the approved reading list, including a study on the existence of God. The course turns next to the classical arguments themselves: the ontological, cosmological, and teleological cases for the existence of God.