Knowledge of God for the Christian can only be arrived at by the Christian premise, the one given in revelation, that Jesus is Lord. Christian knowledge of God is one that is arrived at by obedience to the fact that Jesus is Lord; He is Lord of existence itself. If we are not submitted to this fact, then how can we arrive at a genuine knowledge of God that at a primal level, grounds the very being of being for us? The author of Hebrews writes:

God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, ² has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds; ³ who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, ⁴ having become so much better than the angels, as He has by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they. –Hebrews 1.1-4

Torrance ties knowledge of God into this exist[entail] reality by referring us to the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing). If the whole world-reality is contingent upon God’s unique Word of spoken Grace, then it follows that any knowledge that can obtain of God in this theater must be given specifically and even scandalously by Godself. As we read the New Testament witness we quickly recognize that it is Jesus Christ who actualizes this knowledge of Godself for us. That He is the antecedent, other-worldly, God-sourced, God-gifted reality wherein all the hiddeness of God becomes un-hidden or revealed. The creation itself isn’t the condition wherein knowledge of God obtains, or finds consummation; no, it is Godself that is the condition wherein knowledge of Godself obtains, and does so for us in His free choice and election to be for us in the Son of Man, Jesus Christ. Barth writes:

To summarise, where God stands before man as the One who awakens, creates and upholds his faith, and where God offers Himself to man as the object and content of the knowledge of his faith. He does it in this being and action— as the One who remains mystery to us because He Himself has made Himself so clear and certain to us. It is just in this way that He awakens, creates and upholds our knowledge of Himself as a work of obedience, which cannot as such be attacked either by others or by ourselves if only we do not fall out of obedience, out of this relationship between the given clarity and certainty and the guarded mystery. Within obedience the knowledge of God cannot be destroyed, because its object cannot cease to be this object and God cannot cease to be the One who is and acts in this way. If our obedience springs from God, necessarily we are always in the same obedience towards God. In this obedience we are set on the circular course in which we can go only from faith to faith and similarly from knowledge to knowledge. Because we do not in any sense begin with ourselves, with our own capacity for faith and knowledge, we are secured against having to end with ourselves, i.e., with our own incapacity.[1]

So let it be written, so let it be so.

[1] Barth, CD II/1 §25, 41-2.