23 “Am I only a God nearby,”
declares the Lord,
“and not a God far away? –Jeremiah 23:23
Here at the Evangelical Calvinist, personally, I’m inclined to follow what is known as a 
cataphatic mode of theological endeavor rather than an apophatic one. Be that as it may my cataphaticism is present precisely because of a kind of very thick apophaticism; so thick in fact that I maintain that we can have no knowledge of God without his personal, objective, and particular Self-revelation in his Son, Jesus Christ. In other words, the idea of there being a natural theology of the sort that there is present within nature (including human beings) a capacity for knowledge of God—even a latently graced humanity—this I maintain is absent. As a Reformed Christian I take the noetic effects of the lapse to be absolute; viz. all of humanity, at the fall, in Adam and Eve, suffered such a traumatic de-conciliation between themselves and God, between the Mediator between God and humanity, the Eternal Logos, that any capacity they had, contingent as it was upon their relationship with God was lost. As such, and if so, if this relationship was so polluted, which I think it was, by the rupture that took place in Genesis 3, knowledge of God as their Father mediated through the Son was lost; in other words, I maintain that nature never had latent within it any sort of ‘hooks’ for discursively reasoning oneself back to a God concept—let alone God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The aforementioned noted, realizing that Henri de Lubac, who we will be hearing from shortly, isn’t in line with my own position (although closer in some ways than others), nevertheless offers some good words on how mystery and paradox function in our knowledge of God. I think, even with my medium-well cataphaticism in place, what he notes, at least here, can be resourced or at least imbibed by me in such a way that it turns fruitful towards thinking about how dialogical or dialectical theology vis-à-vis knowledge of God looks. De Lubac writes:
This idea of mystery is perfectly acceptable to reason once one has admitted the idea of a personal and transcendent God. The truth we receive from him about himself must exceed our grasp, simply because of its superior intelligibility: intellecta, it can never be comprehensa. The distinction is elementary, and accepted by Descartes as well as St Augustine and the scholastics. How could one possibly agree with Malebranche that ‘the Word unreservedly communicates all that he possesses as Word and eternal Wisdom whenever we question him with serious attention’? Or at least, how could one believe that a finite intellect could be capable of receiving such a communication in its entirety? Revealed truth, then, is a mystery for us; in other words it presents that character of lofty synthesis whose final link must remain impenetrably obscure to us. It will for ever resist all our efforts to unify it fully. This is baffling to a philosophy of pure rationality but not to a philosophy which recognizes in the human mind both that potential absolute that makes it declare the truth, and that abyss of darkness in which it remains by the fact of being both created and bodily. ‘Either . . . or’, says rationality, believing that it can get to the bottom of everything, because it makes itself the yardstick, and thinks that its own limits are the limits of being itself. It accuses Christian thinking of ‘a kind of hunger for what is absurd and contradictory’; thinking that what is incomprehensible must therefore be unintelligible, it considers the doctrine of mystery to be a ‘sophism’, an unwarranted overstepping of the bounds of common sense and reason. The idea of the Trinity, for instance, or even the idea of an infinite personal God is, from its point of view, a square circle. Throughout it finds ‘wilful contradiction, systematic absurdity, logical errors’, and so on. Or, because of St Thomas along with all Catholic tradition professes that God is present everywhere in his creation, it accuses him of ‘implicit pantheism’. Limited and enclosed, this philosophy of rationality is a philosophy of the dilemma and the univocal statement. ‘Contradiction is not distasteful enough to you’, wrote Renouvier to Secrétan, of problems concerned not with revelation itself, but with the very being of God. His correspondent, he thought, was leaving behind the honest thinking of the philosopher to enter upon the arbitrary ways of theologians who ‘try to lift thought above its proper conditions and look for truth outside the laws of understanding, outside consciousness altogether’. The objection is reminiscent of certain theologians of our own day, who hasten to speak of contradiction as soon as they hear phrases that seem even slightly paradoxical; in so doing they reject any truth that surprises them, without perceiving that to be really logical they should be rejecting numerous other incontestable truths, both of faith and reason, which only fail to surprise them because they are so used to them.[1]
What we get in de Lubac isn’t anything we’d find as lacuna in someone like T.F. Torrance who recognizes that even in the revealed God in Jesus Christ we are up against an Ultimate ineffable God. Some cataphatic theologians, certain types of Barthians et al are so absolute about God’s Self-revelation pressing so hard on theological actualism that there can be absolutely nothing left about who God is beyond what he has revealed of himself in Jesus Christ; i.e. that there is an ontological not just an epistemological givenness to God’s Self-revelation such that God’s very who is constituted by what he has freely chosen to do in the incarnation (and all its entailments). But this gets us further afield than I want to really chop into at the moment (like this would get us into the so called Barth Wars).
I’ve actually broached things in a somewhat fragmented way. I gave you a kind of sketch about my own approach to knowledge of God, and then quoted Henri de Lubac who seems to be talking about things a bit differently. But what I really wanted to highlight is that even for Christian theologians who hold to either apophaticism or cataphaticism the role of mystery must never be lost. Even as we are brought into participation in God’s life through Christ who God is in his inner-life, while not inconsistent whatsoever with who he has revealed himself to be in Christ, is always deeper and always more inexhaustible than the human mind could ever fathom. This is not to say that there is a ‘God behind the back of Jesus Christ,’ it’s just to say that the antecedent life which Jesus exemplifies enfleshed is deeper than our puny minds could ever imagine; which calls for worship. ‘And this is eternal life that they may know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.’ What this implies, though, is that even the ‘mystery’ or ineffability of God must always be circumscribed for us in and by Jesus Christ; we must never look outside the parameters of God’s life to think God, but from within as we participate in his triune life revealed and mediated in Jesus Christ. I think this is where apophaticism as a mode has a tendency to stray.
[1] Henri de Luback, The Mystery of the Supernatural (New York: Herder and Herder New York, 1967), 222-24.
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Bobby, thanks again for the thoughtful post. I definitely appreciate your emphasis on a cataphatic approach to theology. However, I wonder if it might be beneficial to look at the apophatic/cataphatic approach to be most useful in a dialogical framework where both mutually inform each other. When we speak of divine eternality, infinitude, immutability, impassibility, et. al. I think we are affirming clear biblical truths that do in fact reinforce divine incopmrehensibility. But, I also think that cataphatic statements that speak of divine love, mercy, grace as revealed in Christ we are also upholding a fundamental scriptural truths that God can be known in Christ even if he cannot be fully comprehended.
As an aside, I do see interesting parallels in your thought to the philosophical positions of Henri Bergson. He speaks of the limitation of analysis in attaining true knowledge, where logical analysis can only lead us to knowing-about, where logical analysis can only yield a knowledge about an object. He proposes that knowledge-of, where an object is truly known through sympathetic intuition. I do see limitations in his approach but he does provide a via media in philosophy between broadly Kantian and Aristotelian approaches. My own appropriations of his train of thought are mostly aesthetic. I suppose this is owing to my own creative enterprise as a writer of fiction, and he was profoundly influential on TS Eliot, who is for me one of the most important poets that lay behind my own creative approach (He is also vital for Proust’s fictional work as well). All this to say, I think that the biblical ontology is fundamentally relational, where God is known through Christ by the believers participation in the divine life. If you are ever interested in chasing down Bergson, his essay “An Introduction to Metaphysics” is worth taking a look at. Bergson isn’t without his limitations. But, my sense is that philosophical constructs are useful, if limited tools in the theological enterprise.
Just some thoughts, as always I enjoy your work here; it is thought-provoking and I find myself increasingly sympathetic to much of what you propose.
Thanks for the post Bobby. Your post and EC in general has some implications for sharing Christ with people who do not yet know him which I’ve been thinking through. Trying to reach a kind of working approach.
In terms of its relevance to your blog I think it may be necessary to start with the “apophatic” and move toward a “cataphatic”. I’d like to have your thoughts so i outline it here…
As a general starting point it seems to me that we need to get agreement on the limits of human knowledge (which starts with people in their state without God). This foundaiton is predicated by a tension between knowing-about Christ only according to the flesh (κατά σάρξ) if you like rather than knowing Christ (κατὰ πνεῦμα) although i would not introduce these things initially.
Where i think we can start, however, is with an agreement that human knowledge in and of itself is such that it is can not reach absolute certainty on any matter let alone God. Absolutes lie outside us – we are limited, flawed actually, and subjective. True objectivity and certainty are illusive. The very system of investigation is also limited and flawed when it comes to knowing God who, in a sense, is beyond knowledge (Eph 3:19).
When dealing with knowing the unknown God then, this step hopefully leads to an acknowledgement of the need for a new epistemology which is necessarily beyond the categories and grammar of the person’s current (indeed all uncertain “human”) knowledge (apart from Christ) and into one which is also necessarily dictated by the ontology of the object which is to be known (namely God). (This is what I think TFT would say to be truly objective or scientific – an approach to knowing shaped by the object’s own self-revelation).
Once someone can at least acknowledge both the inherent limits, and the need for new knowledge / Truth, then we can bear witness to God’s own actions in revealing Himself in Jesus so that he may be known, This kind of knowledge is apprehended truly but never exhaustively and is by its very nature only given by God from outside the circle of our resident human capacities.
Thanks for your blog/ posts. I normally find them hard work given my own limitations, but i still find them helpful. I only wish that the ideas could be made more accessible to a less educated audience. (Not a criticism by the way),
R
Jedidiah,
Thanks. I think the type of apophaticism I can endorse is almost a kind of negation of negation. In other words, if apophaticism’s mode is to speak of God from the negative—i.e. in the darkness of the abyss of God’s life there is light—then I simply want to press the idea that the negating should be done all the way through such that God remains in the abyss, for the human mind, a part from illumination that can only come as that darkness is broke open through the light of the world in Jesus Christ. So the positive (revelation) of God, for me, affirms that without God penetrating the abyss that stands between he and us (because he alone is immortal indwelling unapproachable light) there is no access to him; this illustrates to me that there is no way to speak of him from the negative only the positive via positiva.
I will have to look into Bergson at some point; thank you!
Richard,
Thank you. If you read my response to Jedidiah I think what you sketched is similar (I hadn’t read your comment prior to writing my comment to Jedidiah). I’m pretty strict, personally, on there being no natural theology, so I solely reliant on a revelational theology; and yes, in step with TFT’s kata physin according to the nature of it in regard to studying and knowing God and allowing him to determine his own categories of emphases of inquiry and self-disclosure (so also what TFT calls an epistemological inversion). So this is the way I’d prefer discussing God even with an unbeliever; letting them know that I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to think up the true and the living God precisely because we are so ensnared by our own self-possessed limited position as fallen creatures. And then yes, point people to Jesus just as Jesus himself did (and does through us by the Spirit now).
I think we’re in much agreement.
Thanks for your response. Yes much agreement.
If you will permit me an observation. It seems to me you are often at great pains to argue robustly and scholastically, (even with the academy in mind) all the while knowing that the truth you are presenting must itself come as a revelation. That is, not an approach shared by those who dont hold your views. I guess you just figure and pray that God will use your work to open the eyes of others. I do pray the same and that you will find much fruitfulness in your labour.
Richard,
I don’t understand your point about coming as a revelation. Argument is part of the human endeavor to engage with reality; that’s whether or not someone follows the scholastic methodology, the analogy of faith, analogy of being, natural theology, analytical modes, affective theology etc etc. In other words, argument will always be part and parcel of any human theological endeavor even if such endeavor follows a self-confessed revelational theology. The Revelation, in other words, requires unpacking and engagement with. But yes, there are obviously competing ways of doing theology, and so of course because I’m convinced that the way I follow is the better way I will make arguments for it and against other accounts in an attempt to offer persuasion towards the way that I think best engages with God’s Self-Revelation in Christ.
I.e. So truth that comes as a “revelation” is not a subjective thing, but should be in reference to the objective reality of God’s subjective Self-revelation of Himself in Jesus Christ. In other words, my theology is not premised upon a ‘mystical experience’ or a purely subjectivist moment, but instead upon the reality of the gracious Self-giveness of God in Christ. There is a required acknowledgement, in other words, that Jesus is Lord prior to thinking the type of theology I engage with moment by moment.