If not for God’s revealedness (Deus revelatus) in Christ, the glory of His hiddenness (Deus absconditus) would smite us where we stand. Even as adopted children of God now, even as we are co-heirs with Christ now, it is such by the faith of Christ that we are able to stand within the presence (parousia) of the triune God now. It is only as we are robed with the righteousness of Christ’s vicarious humanity now, that we are able to commune with the triune God and not be killed by the weight of His glory. Christ is the Rock of Israel, indeed, as in Moses’ case, the cleft of the Rock wherein he was hidden from the direct Light of God’s presence, by which he could endure the intensity of the holiness of God; even if only God’s backside. Whilst we remain in these bodies of death, it is God’s mercy, wrapped in the Son’s Gracious humanity, whereby we can approach God, even in His throne room boldly; but of course, by the faith of Christ as the vision of inexpressible things—without which, if we were to see God “physically,” in our current status, we would surely die.

Karl Barth opines on such things, in regard to an ‘adequacy of a knowledge of God.’

Here and now, i.e., on this side of the coming final revelation of the kingdom, we cannot take any other path in the knowledge of God, but theology can only be a theologia viatorum [theology on the way]. God knows Himself and all things adequately: not after and alongside one another, but in and with one another at a single stroke. And in the lumen gloriae [light of glory] of eternal life we, too, shall certainly know Him in this sense adequately, “face to face.” Here and now, however, our knowledge has to be inadequate—a knowledge of things after and alongside one another—if it is to be real knowledge. There is no sense in regretting its inadequacy. For adequate knowledge of God here and now would not be real knowledge any more than a direct look into the sun would be real seeing. In both cases we could only be dazzled and therefore blinded. If we were to see God here and now as He is, and as He sees Himself, we should die. To His Word that becomes flesh, to the shining of the lumen gratiae given us here and now, there corresponds the humility of the inadequate knowledge of things after and alongside one another, which precisely as such, as theologia viatorum, is true knowledge, the fully satisfactory form, here and now, of the true knowledge which corresponds to its object and is thus the saving power.[1]

In the theological history this combine of knowledge of God was signified by the language: archetypal (God’s Self-knowledge) and ectypal (our ‘inadequate’ knowledge of God). God is more merciful than we will ever know; at least this side of the inadequacy of our knowledge of God. Graciously, though, we have a true and adequate knowledge of God mediated for us, as we are in union with Christ by the Holy Spirit. This is the ‘correspondence’ and ‘saving power’ Barth is referring to. For the ‘Gospel is the power of God.’

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/4 §52 [034] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 30–1.