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II. The Knowability of God
A. God Incomprehensible but yet Knowable.
The Christian Church confesses on the one hand that God is the Incomprehensible One, but also
on the other hand, that He can be known and that knowledge of Him is an absolute requisite
unto salvation. It recognizes the force of Zophar’s question, “Canst thou by searching find out
God? Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection?” Job 11:7. And it feels that it has no
answer to the question of Isaiah, “To whom then will ye liken God? or what likeness will ye
compare unto Him?” Isa. 40:18. But at the same time it is also mindful of Jesus’ statement,
“And this is life eternal, that they should know Thee, the only true God, and Him whom thou
didst send, even Jesus Christ,” John 17:3. It rejoices in the fact that “the Son of God is come,
and hath given us an understanding, that we know Him that is true, and we are in Him that is
true, even in His Son Jesus Christ.” I John 5:20. The two ideas reflected in these passages were
always held side by side in the Christian Church. The early Church Fathers spoke of the invisible
God as an unbegotten, nameless, eternal, incomprehensible, unchangeable Being. They had
advanced very little beyond the old Greek idea that the Divine Being is absolute attributeless
existence. At the same time they also confessed that God revealed Himself in the Logos, and
can therefore be known unto salvation. In the fourth century Eunomius, an Arian, argued from
the simplicity of God, that there is nothing in God that is not perfectly known and
comprehended by the human intellect, but his view was rejected by all the recognized leaders
of the Church. The Scholastics distinguished between the quid and the qualis of God, and
maintained that we do not know what God is in His essential Being, but can know something of
His nature, of what He is to us, as He reveals Himself in His divine attributes. The same general
ideas were expressed by the Reformers, though they did not agree with the Scholastics as to
the possibility of acquiring real knowledge of God, by unaided human reason, from general
revelation. Luther speaks repeatedly of God as the Deus Absconditus (hidden God), in
distinction from Him as the Deus Revelatus (revealed God). In some passages he even speaks of
the revealed God as still a hidden God in view of the fact that we cannot fully know Him even
through His special revelation. To Calvin, God in the depths of His being is past finding out. “His
essence,” he says, “is incomprehensible; so that His divinity wholly escapes all human senses.”
The Reformers do not deny that man can learn something of the nature of God from His
creation, but maintain that he can acquire true knowledge of Him only from special revelation,
under the illuminating influence of the Holy Spirit. Under the influence of the pantheizing
theology of immanence, inspired by Hegel and Schleiermacher, a change came about. The
transcendence of God is soft-pedaled, ignored, or explicitly denied. God is brought down to the
level of the world, is made continuous with it, and is therefore regarded as less
incomprehensible, though still shrouded in mystery. Special revelation in the sense of a direct