With respect to the first of our present concerns, the issue more pointedly put is this: are the content of God’s knowledge and the content of man’s knowledge that is derived from Scripture ever the same? One can find many reputable and otherwise good theologians and ministers today who would insist that God’s knowledge of a truth and man’s knowledge of the same truth, acquired even from God’s revelation to him, will never coincide at any single point. The relationship between these ‘two contents’ is said to be ‘analogical’ and not ‘univocal’.
Definitions of these two terms are, of course, in order. By these terms is normally intended the precise meaning of a given predicate when applied to separate subjects. A given predicate applied to separate subjects univocally would intend that the subjects possess the predicate in a precisely identical sense. The opposite of univocism is equivocism which attaches a given predicate to separate subjects in a completely different or unrelated sense. Now between univocism and equivocism is analogy. A predicate employed analogically intends a relationship between separate subjects based upon a comparison or proportion, a relationship which is neither completely similar (univocism) nor completely dissimilar (equivocism) but partly the same, partly not the same. With these definitions before us, we are able to sharpen our earlier question this way: Are the content of God’s knowledge and the content of man’s knowledge that is gained from God’s verbal revelation univocal (the same), equivocal (different), or analogical (partly alike, partly not alike)?
Thomas Aquinas (1224–74) was one of the first Christian theologians formally to deal with this issue in any significant way (see his Summa Contra Gentiles, XXXII–XXXIV). He was not the first, of course, to address the issue of the nature of knowledge and the functions and limits of language. Augustine (354–430), for example, had grappled with these issues in his treatise, De Magistro, and incidentally had come to radically different conclusions from those of Thomas. But in the latter’s treatment Thomas declared that nothing can properly be predicated of God and man in a univocal sense. To do so and to say, for example, that God and man are both ‘good’ and to intend by ‘good’ the same meaning, was, for Thomas, to ignore the difference between the essences respectively of God the Creator (his existence is identical with his essence) and of man the creature (his existence and his essence are two different matters). But Thomas saw too that to intend an equivocal meaning for ‘good’ would lead to complete ambiguity and epistemological scepticism. Therefore, Thomas urged the way of proportionality or analogy as the via media between the Scylla and Charybdis of univocism and equivocism. In other words, the assertion, ‘God and man are both good,’ means analogically that man’s goodness is proportional to man as God’s goodness is proportional to God, but it also means that the goodness intended cannot be the same goodness in both cases. In sum, of this Thomas was certain: nothing can be predicated of God and man in the univocal sense. Rather, only analogical predication is properly possible when speaking of the relationship between them.
But now a problem arises, for what is it about any analogy which saves it from becoming a complete equivocism? Is it not the univocal element implicit within it? For example, if I assert that an analogy may be drawn between an apple and an orange, do I not intend to suggest that the apple and the orange, obviously different in some respects, are the same in at least one respect? Why, otherwise, would I be drawing attention to the relationship between them? While it is true that the one respect in which I perceive that they are similar will not be immediately apparent to anyone else without further explanation on my part, it should be clear nonetheless to everyone, if I assert that they are analogous one to the other, that I believe that in some sense a univocal feature exists between them—in this case, it may be that I have in mind that they are both fruit, or that they are both spherical, or that they both have extension in space or have mass. But whatever I intend, I at least intend to suggest that, for all their differences, they have at least something in common. The predicate indicates something that is equally true of both. What I am urging here is that the success of any analogy turns on the strength of the univocal element in it. Or as E. J. Carnell said in his An Introduction to Christian Apologetics, the basis for any analogy is non-analogical, that is, univocal.1 Thomas’ dilemma is that he wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants to affirm the analogous relationship between God and man on the one hand, but he denies all univocal coincidence in predication respecting them on the other. But if he affirms the relationship between God and man to be truly analogous, he cannot consistently deny that in some sense a univocal element exists between them. Or if he denies all univocal coincidence in predication between God and man, he cannot continue to speak of the predicative relationship between them as one of analogy. As a matter of fact, Gordon H. Clark argued through the years that Thomas’ doctrine of the analogia entis (analogy of being) between God and man is actually not analogical at all but really an equivocism. If Clark is correct, and I am persuaded that he is, Thomas’ natural theology, which was grounded in his understanding of the analogia entis, is also defective, for he was, of necessity, working with two different meanings for the word ‘existence’ as that single predicate applies to God and to sensory data; thus his argument from the existence of sensory data to the existence of God commits the error of equivocating, that is, using a single word with two different meanings in the same argument.
Having sensitized the reader to the particular problem inherent in any analogical predication which would deny a univocal element, I would now like to turn attention to our own time, for after all, we are people of the twenty-first century. How are we to respond to this issue? What should you and I say when asked about the relationship between the content of God’s knowledge and the content of our human knowledge which is based upon (or derived from) God’s verbal revelation to us? I propose that we address this matter by considering the pronouncements of Professor Cornelius Van Til of revered and recent memory. I was privileged to study under him and admire him greatly for his labours of over half a century to work out an apologetic methodology consistent with the Reformed faith.
Throughout his exposition of the Reformed faith and his corresponding explication of an apologetic method consistent with it, Van Til made it always his goal to be true to a single and initial ontological vision—the distinction between the Creator and the creature. Throughout his writings, striving always to remain consistent with his understanding of this single ontological distinction, again and again Van Til insists that man’s knowledge is and can only be analogical to God’s knowledge.2 What this means for Van Til is the express rejection of any and all qualitative coincidence between the content of God’s mind and the content of man’s mind. That is to say, according to Van Til, not only is God’s knowledge prior and necessary to man’s knowledge which is always secondary and derivative knowledge if it is true knowledge (with this I am in total agreement), not only is God’s knowledge self-validating whereas man’s knowledge is dependent upon God’s prior self-validating knowledge for its justification (with this I am also in agreement), but also for Van Til this means that man qualitatively knows nothing as God knows a thing.
In his An Introduction to Systematic Theology, Van Til writes: ‘All human predication is analogical reinterpretation of God’s pre-interpretation. Thus the incomprehensibility of God must be taught with respect to any revelational proposition’.3 In his ‘Introduction’ to Warfield’s The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, Van Til declares:
When the Christian restates the content of Scriptural revelation in the form of a ‘system’ such a system is based upon and therefore analogous to the ‘existential system’ that God himself possesses. Being based upon God’s revelation it is on the one hand, fully true and, on the other hand, at no point identical with the content of the divine mind.4
In a Complaint filed against the presbytery which voted to sustain Gordon Clark’s ordination examination, to which Van Til affixed his name as a signatory, it was declared a ‘tragic fact’ that Clark’s epistemology ‘has led him to obliterate the qualitative distinction between the contents of the divine mind and the knowledge which is possible to the creature’.5 The Complaint also affirmed: ‘We dare not maintain that [God’s] knowledge and our knowledge coincide at any single point.’6 It is important to note here that it is not the way that God and man know a thing that the Complaint declares is different. Both the complainants and Clark agreed that God knows everything by eternal intuition whereas men learn what they know (excluding certain innate ideas) discursively. Rather, insists Van Til and certain of his students, it is the content of man’s knowledge that is qualitatively distinct from God’s knowledge.
Because of his particular ontological vision Van Til insists that all verbal revelation coming from God to man (and this, of course, includes the Bible) will of necessity be ‘anthropomorphic’, that is, it must assume ‘human form’ in order to be understood at the level of creaturely finite comprehension. But Van Til is equally insistent that this divine self-revelation, by the Spirit’s enabling illumination, can produce in men a ‘true’ knowledge of God, although their knowledge of him will be only ‘analogical’ to God’s knowledge of himself. That is to say, their knowledge of God, although true, will never correspond to God’s knowledge of himself at any single point! How Van Til can regard this ‘never corresponds’ knowledge as ‘true’ knowledge is, to say the least, a serious problem. Perhaps he means that the Creator is willing to regard as ‘true’ the knowledge that men derive from his self-revelation to them even though it is not univocal knowledge at any single point, because due to man’s finiteness he had to pitch his revelation to men at the level of their creaturely finite comprehension. God’s verbal revelation to men, in other words, since it is ‘creature-oriented’ (that is, ‘analogical’), is not a univocal statement of his understanding of himself or of anything else and thus can never produce anything higher than a creaturely (‘analogical’) comprehension of God or of anything else. If this is what Van Til means, and I cannot think of another alternative, I fail to see how Van Til with his explicit rejection of the univocal element (see his ‘corresponds at no ‘single point’) in man’s so-called ‘analogical’ knowledge of God can rescue such knowledge from being in actuality a total equivocism and no true knowledge at all. Nor do I see how he can rescue God from the irrationality in regarding as true what in fact (if Van Til is correct) he knows all the while coincides at no single point with his own knowledge which is both true and the standard of truth.
Against all this, Clark contended more than once that Van Til’s position leads to total human ignorance. Listen to Clark’s own words:
If God knows all truths and knows the correct meaning of every proposition, and if no proposition means to man what it means to God, so that God’s knowledge and man’s knowledge do not coincide at any single point, it follows by rigorous necessity that man can have no truth at all.7
He further argues:
If God and man know, there must with the differences be at least one point of similarity; for if there were no point of similarity it would be inappropriate to use the one term knowledge in both cases.… If God has the truth and if man has only an analogy [this ‘analogy’ containing no univocal element], it follows that he (man) does not have the truth.8
Clark illustrates his point this way:
If … we think that David was King of Israel, and God’s thoughts are not ours, then it follows that God does not think David was King of Israel. David in God’s mind was perchance prime minister of Babylon. To avoid this irrationality … we must insist that truth is the same for God and man. Naturally, we may not know the truth about some matters. But if we know anything at all, what we know must be identical with what God knows. God knows the truth, and unless we know something God knows, our ideas are untrue. It is absolutely essential therefore to insist that there is an area of coincidence between God’s mind and our mind. One example, as good as any, is the one already used, viz., David was King of Israel.9
Clark concludes:
If God is omnipotent, he can tell men the plain, unvarnished, literal truth. He can tell them David was King of Israel, he can tell them he is omnipotent, he can tell them he created the world, and … he can tell them all this in positive, literal, non-analogical, non-symbolic terms.10
Of course, as far as the extent or quantity of their respective knowledge data is concerned, Clark readily acknowledged that God knows more and always will know more than man. This hardly even needs saying. But if we are to preserve for man any knowledge at all, Clark urged, we must insist that if God and man both truly know anything, then what they know must have some point of correspondence as far as the content of their knowledge is concerned. I wholeheartedly concur, and believe that Francis Schaeffer’s dictum is right on target: men, Schaeffer says, may indeed have ‘true though not exhaustive knowledge’.
At this point the reader may believe it appropriate to enlist the aid of a catena of biblical references that seems to support Van Til’s contention that God’s knowledge and man’s knowledge are always and at every point qualitatively distinct. Van Til himself suggested that Deuteronomy 29:29, Job 11:7–8, Psalm 145:3, Isaiah 40:28, 55:8–9, Matthew 11:27, Luke 10:22, John 1:18, 6:46, Romans 11:33, and 1 Timothy 6:16 support his contention that with respect to any revelational proposition God still remains, even after the revelatory act, the incomprehensible God.11 Of course, if these verses do teach this, then what is being asserted is that these verses are primarily concerned with an epistemological issue, specifically, that they affirm the analogical nature and limits of human knowledge of the incomprehensible God. I suggest, however, that a close examination of these verses will disclose that, while they do not deny the immeasurable wisdom and knowledge of God, they are primarily concerned with the soteriological issue, that is, they are underscoring man’s need of propositional revelation if he is savingly to know God, a saving knowledge which can be gained by men, but only in the redemptive/revelatory complex made possible by God for sinful, needy man. Job 11:7–8, Psalm 145:3, Isaiah 40:28, Romans 11:33, and 1 Timothy 6:16, while certainly affirming the infinity of God, need simply mean that men, beginning with themselves and refusing the benefit of divine revelation, cannot, as Paul so forcefully declares in 1 Corinthians 1:21, come to God through their own wisdom, or said somewhat differently, that men will always be dependent upon divine informational revelation for a true and saving knowledge of God. Franz Delitzsch captures the essence of the intention of these verses when he comments on Psalm 145:3:
… of [Yahweh’s] ‘greatness’ … there is no searching out, i.e. it is so abysmally deep that no searching can reach its bottom (as in Isa. 40:28, Job 11:7 sq.). It has, however, been revealed, and is being revealed continually, and is for this very reason thus celebrated in ver. 4.12
As for Deuteronomy 29:29, Matthew 11:27, Luke 10:22, and John 1:18, 6:46 (see verse 45), these verses actually teach that men can know God and his thoughts truly to the degree that he reveals himself in his spoken word. Finally, Isaiah 55:8–9, far from depicting ‘the gulf which separates the divine knowledge from human knowledge’,13 actually holds out the real possibility that men may know God’s thoughts and urges them to turn away from their own thoughts and to learn God’s thoughts from him. Consider carefully the context: in verse 7 God calls upon the wicked man to forsake his way and thoughts. Where is he to turn? To the Lord, of course (vv. 6–7). Why should he forsake his way and thoughts? ‘Because,’ says the Lord, ‘my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways’ (v. 8). The entire context, far from affirming that God’s ways and thoughts are beyond the capacity of men to know, to the contrary, expressly calls upon the wicked man to turn away from his ways and thoughts and instead to seek God’s ways and thoughts. In doing so, the wicked man gains ways and thoughts which, just as the heavens transcend the earth, transcend his own. These verses in Isaiah 55 teach then the very opposite of what they are often thought to teach. Far from teaching that an unbridgeable gulf exists between God’s thoughts and our thoughts, they actually call upon the wicked man, in repentance and humility, to seek and to think God’s thoughts after him. Again, Franz Delitzsch, in my opinion, rightly interprets these verses:
The appeal, to leave their own way and their own thoughts, and yield themselves to God the Redeemer, and to his word, is … urged on the ground of the heaven-wide difference between the ways and thoughts of this God and the despairing thoughts of men (Ch. 40:27, 49:24), and their aimless labyrinthine ways.… On what side the heaven-wide elevation is to be seen, is shown by what follows. [God’s thoughts] are not so fickle, so unreliable, or so powerless.14
My analysis of these verses of necessity has been brief, but the reader may be assured that none of these verses teaches that man’s knowledge of God can be only at best ‘analogical’, in the Van Tilian sense, to God’s knowledge. To the contrary, some of them expressly declare that in dependence upon God’s propositional self-revelation in Scripture, men can know some of God’s thoughts truly, that is, univocally (though of course not exhaustively), that is, that they can know a revealed proposition in the same sense that God knows it and has revealed it.
None of this is intended to suggest that there are no non-literal figures of speech in Scripture. Of course there are. The Bible is filled, for example, with metaphorical terms. But metaphors have literal meanings, and once the appropriate canons of grammatical/historical hermeneutics have determined the precise literal meaning of a metaphor, I would insist that its meaning is precisely the same for God and for man.
The preacher of God’s Word should, as should all Christians, be overwhelmed by the magnitude of this simple truth that we take so much for granted: The eternal God has deigned to share with us some of the truths that are on his mind. Poor undeserving men such as we he condescends to elevate by actually sharing with us a portion of what he knows. What an exalted calling then is God’s call to chosen men to serve him as his earthly flock’s pastor/teachers. It is their privilege to communicate, not their own, but God’s divine thoughts which alone can deliver men from their fickle, labyrinthine, powerless thoughts and ways. Men can know God’s mind to the degree that he has revealed it propositionally to them in Scripture. Accordingly, since the Scriptures require that saving faith be grounded in true knowledge (see Rom 10:13–14), the church must vigorously oppose any linguistic or revelational theory, however well-intended, which would take from men the only ground of their knowledge of God and, accordingly, their only hope of salvation. Against the theory of human knowledge that would deny to it the possibility of univocal correspondence at any point with God’s mind as to content, I would urge that we come down on the side of Christian reason and work with a theory of knowledge that insists upon the possibility of at least some identity between the content of God’s knowledge and the content of man’s knowledge.
Reymond, Robert L. 2003. The God-Centered Preacher: Developing a Pulpit Ministry Approved by God. Fearn, UK: Christian Focus Publications.
E. J. Carnell, An Introduction to Christian Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1948), 147.
See, for example, his The Defense of the Faith (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1955), 56, 65, and his Common Grace (same publisher, 1954), 28.
Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology (unpublished syllabus), 17, emphasis his.
B.B. Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1948), 33.
Minutes of the Twelfth General Assembly of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 1945, 15.
Minutes, 14, emphasis original.
Gordon H. Clark, ‘Apologetics,’ Contemporary Evangelical Thought, edited by Carl F. H. Henry (New York: Harper-Channel, 1957), 159.
Gordon H. Clark, ‘The Bible as Truth,’ Bibliotheca Sacra (April 1957), 163ff.
The Philosophy of Gordon H. Clark, edited by Ronald H. Nash (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1968), 76–77.
The Philosophy of Gordon H. Clark, 78.
Minutes of the Twelfth General Assembly of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 1945, 12.
Franz Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Psalms, III, 389, emphasis supplied.
Minutes of the Twelfth General Assembly of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 1945, 12.
Franz Delitzsch, Commentary on Isaiah, II, 358.