You want to turn this evening to page 50 in your outline, essence and attributes, and we want to pick up our discussion at that point. We noted last week that God's transcendence, his ontological otherness, does not entail on nobility. Simply because God transcends our world, it doesn't follow that we must therefore be agnostics. But God's transcendence does require that if we are to know anything about him, he must reveal himself. He must reveal his will and his character in our world, and he must do so in such a way that we human beings can apprehend that disclosure. The Christian confession is that God has done exactly that. As the sovereign lord over his creation, he enters into his world, he acts within it, he personally relates to other persons, and he reveals his word. And all of that without being relativized by it, without losing his deity. God has never shut off from his creation. He's never rendered incapable of revealing himself, simply because of that ontological difference. On the contrary, even apart from his historical acts, God has created the universe in such a way that all of creation screams his presence, screams the fact that he is the creator. In the first chapter of Romans, Paul tells us that all men, following as we are, are still able to know that we stand under the covenantal obligation of God. Yet certain limitations do attend the idea of revelation here where it be in your outline. You see, our knowledge of God is never perfect, it's never exhaustive. Fact is, the more we know about God, the more aware we become of how little we know about God. For we begin to get some glimpse, however vague and finite, of just how much more of Him transcends our knowledge and our experience. But this should not, an unduly concern us in perfect or incomplete knowledge, is not automatically a bad thing. You see, there are many things that limit our knowledge of God. Certainly sin is a limiter. It motivates us to distort reality. It motivates us to flee from truth and to misuse it. And therefore we can speak of sin as producing culpable errors, moral errors. But our immaturity is also a limiter. You see, Adam didn't come into the world just knowing stuff. He had to learn. Learning about God and God's world was part of his calling to exercise a delegated lordship within creation. And there we can sometimes speak of honest mistakes. We do make honest mistakes. You know, we measure the two by four wrong. We forget so-and-so's name, instead of calling them Floyd, we call them Boyd. Those kinds of things. But that's just the beginning. Our finitude is also a limiter. You see, our heads are only so big and our brains have to fit inside of that. And all of our thoughts have to fit inside of those brains. Perhaps I can put it this way. Even a perfect, creaturely knowledge. That is a knowledge that's held by a sinless, mature creature. One who possesses as much information as a creature can possess would still be a finite, limited knowledge. To be a creature is to be limited in knowledge. And it's to know, as we've already made the point, it's to know in creaturely ways. Thus our knowledge of things and our knowledge of God is never equivalent to God's knowledge. We never know precisely as God knows. And thus the Christian tradition has spoken of God as the incomprehensible one. Psalm 145 verse 3 says this, Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised, and His greatness is unsearchable. God's greatness is so beyond our experience that it can never be fully known by man. Two sounds later in Psalm 147 verse 5, we read this, Great is our Lord and abundant power. His understanding is beyond measure. Both God and His understanding transcend all our abilities to reason, to think, to experience, to hold those thoughts in our head. Right at this point, David concluded in Psalm 139 verse 6, Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain. Yahweh Himself in chapter 55 of Isaiah says this, For my thoughts are not your thoughts. Neither are your ways my ways, as the highest heavens are higher than the earth. So are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts. And in Romans chapter 11 verse 33, Paul says this, How deep are the wealth and wisdom of the knowledge of God? How inscrutable His judgments, how unsearchable His ways? The witness of all scripture is that God, His thoughts, and His ways, far outstrip our creaturely reality and our creaturely ability. In other words, we can only know what is revealed to us, a theme we've come back to evening after evening. And this brings us to Romans 2 in our discussion. Can we know the essence of God? The Dutch tradition of reform theology, that tradition that I originally come from, is sometimes called neo-Calvinism. And it's represented by such thinkers as Herman Boving in the Netherlands and Cornelius Vantil here in the United States. And that Dutch tradition has taken God's incomprehensibility to mean that God's knowing and our knowing are so different, that a real knowledge of God is always somewhat problematic. One of the leading questions relative to God in reformed theology, at least since the 1940s, has been the issue of the nature of man's knowledge of God. And much of the discussion has revolved around this question, can we know God's essence? It's been common within the neo-Calvinist tradition to say that we cannot know God's essence. The notion of a divine essence, the idea that we can know God as He is in and of Himself, unrelated to His covenant, unrelated to His creation, is thought to be presumptuous. It was presumptuous, first of all, on the part of Greek metaphysics, second on the part of the early church apologists, who synchrotistically brought together Christianity and Greek metaphysics, thirdly on the part of medieval scholastic theology, and it was also presumptuous even when 17th century reformed theology tried to do it. As a matter of fact, Herman Boving said this, and this quote is provided for you there and you're outlined. Calvin deemed it vain speculation to attempt an examination of God's essence. It is sufficient for us to become acquainted with this character and to know what is conformable to His nature and quote. According to the neo-Calvinist tradition, essences are static philosophical abstractions. They're the ideas of our minds, and Scripture doesn't speak the language of Greek metaphysics. It doesn't speak of essences or beings, rather the Bible speaks of character and relationships. Scripture is concerned with God's redemptive work and relationship with His human covenant vessel. While God may have an essence, that essence is largely irrelevant to man and to His need. God, as He is in and of Himself, is not what revelations about. Rather, Revelation communicates God as He comes out to us in His Word. Thus, this tradition concludes that we don't study God per se. What we actually study is His Word, His Revelation, and that Word is always as much a boundary between God and us as it is a bridge between. Again, we study His Revelation, and Revelation belongs to God's outgoing work, not His inner essence. It involves Him as He comes out to us, not as He is by Himself. Now, I think there are some positive elements about this tradition, and I want to draw your attention to them. First of all, I think the Neo-Calvinist tradition here, with its denial of a knowable divine essence, rightly seeks to get away from the speculations that attend scholastic metaphysics. It doesn't want to speak beyond the Bible, and the Bible does not use the abstract language of essence or being at all. In fact, such language may not be as serviceable as the Western philosophical tradition has led us to believe that the divine essence may not communicate anything substantial to us at all. We use that kind of language sometimes, God's essence, God's being, but do we really know what we're saying? Second, the Neo-Calvinist tradition seeks to emphasize the covenantal reality with which Calvin began his insatives. Calvin said that God is known only in relationship. We never have a theoretical, dispassionate, or abstract knowledge of God. Remember, we made the point formally that one does not know God the way that one knows a hammer or a rock. But we need to be careful here. Sometimes people have taken Calvin and used him as an historical precedent for what we might call a neo-orthodox denial of propositional revelation. According to neo-orthodox theologians, God is known personally and only personally, and only in the moment of passionate personal encounter. And this knowledge is thoroughly ineffable in such a way that it's not open to propositional articulation. In other words, we have an experience of God, but we can't put that experience into words because God always transcends our language. As Bitcoin Stein once put it, if man cannot describe the aroma of coffee, what makes him think that he can describe the nature of God. Another way of saying this is that there's nothing that we might call an objective reference for our biblical statements about God. William Plocker, we talked about him last week, he belonged right to this school. We have an experience of God, but we cannot capture that experience in words. That's not what Calvin's talking about. Calvin affirms an objective reference for our language about God, and he affirms that God can be known. But Calvin does caution that God cannot be studied as we study a lab specimen. Our knowledge of God is always bonded by the fact that he is the sovereign Lord. What Calvin's after, I think, is a proper reverence, a reverence for the God of Scripture. He wanted to be careful to think in biblical ways, and not to run ahead of the biblical revelation. A third positive aspect of the neo-Calvinist tradition is that it seeks to safeguard God's majesty from human presumption and to safeguard the creator creation distinction. And it did that by rejecting the medieval notion of the analogy of being. Remember we talked about the analogy last week. The idea that all being that is not God is derived from his being, and that there's a continuum of being, so that you have a similarity. Well, the neo-Calvinist tradition would say that as creature, man can only know and creaturely ways, never divine ways. The human mind, in other words, is not a reflex of the divine mind. We're not simply God made on the small, and God's not us made on the large. There are creatures who are subject to the bounds of time and space and the covenantal law of God. Fourth, the neo-Calvinist tradition seeks to appreciate the mediated nature of human knowledge of God. The object of theology is not God himself, but revelation. Now there's something about that that seems properly humble to me, but I think we're going to see at the last moment that there's something also insufficient here. God is not simply speaking words to us. He is also disclosing himself. Fifth, while it's not immediately apparent, we should also notice that this tradition inherently denies the possibility of natural theology. In other words, God must come to us in revelation. If I can put it this way, we can't reason our way to God. Our knowledge of God is always the result of divine initiative and grace. Well, we've said something positive about this tradition. Let me say something that's also a danger of the neo-Calvinist tradition. This is point C in your outline. The danger here is that the neo-Calvinist humility could be taken to suggest that nothing essential about God is noble at all. Ronald Nash goes so far as to dismiss the neo-Calvinist tradition as being agnostic. While I think that's far too strong, I appreciate his concern. The neo-Calvinist tradition can suggest a kind of hidden God behind the revealed God. All we have is God's word. And remember that word is as much a boundary as it is bridge. And there's no necessary connection between that revelation, that word, and God as he actually is. We'll have more to say about that a bit later. What we want to affirm, and here we move to D, is that God is noble. But we're still left with the question, what's an essence? Well, that's difficult. But in general terms, an essence is the quality or qualities by which something is defined. It's the quality or qualities that make something what it is. That tells us that a thing is X rather than Z. These qualities, sometimes called attributes, speak to the entire issue of definition. But the neo-Calvinist tradition says that defining God's a bad idea, and it's a bad idea right from the very beginning. And quite frankly, I think they're onto something here. And I say this for two reasons. First of all, you define things, not persons. Maybe you can define the concept of mother, but you can't define your mother. Persons transcend definition. At least till they die, maybe that you can define them as corpses, but persons cannot be defined. Secondly, beings, essences, and definitions are our mental constructions. Neither the natural world nor the biblical text invites us to speak of God in the language of Aristotelian metaphysics. I think that we should let our thoughts be controlled by the biblical revelation of God rather than seek to control the biblical revelation by our philosophical thoughts.
In fact, it's quite possible that the language of essences and being and all that other stuff really obscures God's actual revelation of Himself. And when it comes right down to it, when we use the language of essences and being, we may be talking a kind of communal gibberish. When we hear that kind of stuff, we all nod our head as if we know what's going on, but if we were asked what it means, we'd be left speechless. Now what we're going to see maybe next week, if we can get to it, start getting to it by then, is that in the early church's discussions about the Trinity, the category of being became important. And at some points, it's essential that a distinction between being and person as in God is one being in three persons. There, it's helpful, but in many other places, a philosophical language has been less than helpful. Well, point two here under D. Our knowledge of God is real, and we can state that knowledge in propositional statements. And this really comes from this. Can't we have, or can't we know certain qualities that are essential to God? Yes. We can't know them exhaustively, and certainly we can't know things as God knows them. We can't know all of God's essential properties, but it seems necessary to say that we can know certain things about God. Know them truly, know them sufficiently, but we want to affirm that God is always more than the qualities or attributes that we ascribe to Him. We may in fact know things about Him. John 17 verse 3 tells us this, and this is eternal life, that they might know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you sent. So while we may not know God as He is in and of Himself, while we may not know God abstractly, we know God. But let me comfort you here a little bit, go back to that whole thing about mother. You know your mother in exact the same way. You don't know her abstractly. You don't define her by abstract language. What we're going to suggest is that knowing God is a lot like knowing another, knowing any other person, knowing a loved one. You see the mere act of attributing characteristics to God is not absurd in and of itself. We can have real knowledge of God, and that knowledge speaks to very important realities about Him. Realities that we can articulate in meaningful and true propositional statements. God is the mighty one of Israel. God is the holy one of Israel. God is the father of our Lord Jesus Christ. While we want to respect the distance between God and ourselves, and we want to respect Calvin's warning against unhealthy speculation, we also need to affirm that our knowledge of God is real. As Calvin himself affirms, our talk about God is human talk, but it can be true talk, nevertheless. This brings us to point three here, the integration of cognitive or propositional knowledge in modern theology. We typically draw distinctions between different kinds of knowledge. We talk about the knowledge of facts, knowing that, the knowledge of skills, knowing how, and the knowledge of persons knowing whom. That kind of distinction, I think, is appropriate, but we need to be careful. It's been common both within the existentialist tradition of neo-orthodoxy, the Dutch tradition of neo-Calvinism, and certain kinds of piotism to denigrate cognitive, factual knowledge, and to affirm our only affirm personal knowledge. And I have to reason here, is that there's a certain fear of doctrinalism. I think there's that kind of fear within the Dutch tradition, there's certainly that fear within existentialism, and there's that fear of piotism. After all, we can know all the facts about God and not know Him personally. It's often said that cognitive knowledge is speculative, distance, cold, but the reality is that this fracture between different kinds of knowledge is really false. It's a false problematic. To know God, I must have personal knowledge of Him in exactly the same way that I have personal knowledge of my wife and my children. I must also have a skill knowledge to know Him. I must know how to obey Him, and I must have a cognitive knowledge. I must be able to distinguish between the true God and a false God. Outside of this cognitive knowledge, the other two are undifferentiated and non-referential. Well, does our knowledge of God extend beyond the revelation of His acts and Scripture? No. Does our knowledge of God extends the intricacies of the divine mind to God's private life? No. Do we know anything about God away from the stage of human history? No. But what we do have in Scripture is what we can know. God as He acts. God as He enters into covenant relationship. God has declared and revealed Himself in Scripture. And I think what we need to affirm is that that revelation is a piece. Let me restate that. I think what we need to affirm is that that revelation is one piece with who He truly is. See, right here I think that that Nash is right with His complaint about neo-Calvinism. neo-Calvinism will sometimes want to suggest that all we have is this revelation, and we have no assurance that God as He stands behind it conforms to that revelation. I think we need to affirm that that revelation reflects Him as He truly is, that He is consistent with it. After all, He invites us to attend to that revelation, to accept it as true, to study it, and to pattern our thoughts and ways upon it. Well, Romans 2, I went through that as quickly as I could as not to drag it out. Romans 2 attributes. As you read Gerald Bray on this question, you may find him a little bit confusing. It seems to me on pages 81 and following where he takes up this discussion, Bray puts the best possible face, and in some ways the worst possible face on the discussion of divine attributes. The worst face is that He almost appears to reject the entire notion of divine attributes before He's done. Does anyone else get that sense from Him? The best face is that He uses the discussion of John of Damascus when He enters into this. And I said that's the best face because John of Damascus was Greek Orthodox theologian, and He was always careful to balance His understanding of attributes with the Eastern notion of apophatic theology. And apophatic means the way of denial. And John of Damascus wanted to say that even as we speak of these attributes, God is always more than, always greater than what these attributes say. Well, I'm going to take a similar tack, I guess, to Bray in that I want to give you a worst case understanding. And then I want to come back later on and take up the question of attributes within a covenantal framework and see if we can rehabilitate the entire discussion of divine attributes. Well, let's get to A here. Classical Theism, as it has come down to us from Thomas Aquinas, remember we talked both about classical Theism and Aquinas last week, but classical Theism identified a number of logically connected divine attributes as the central core of God's being. The idea was this, if one knows the attributes, one knows God, at least at a cognitive analytic level, because this collection of attributes define the divine essence. Does that make sense, folks? So if you know the divine attributes, you know God's being, because the attributes taken together define His being. We have for you there on your outline, Thomas Aquinas' list of attributes. God is, first of all, pure actuality. This was following the Aristotelian tradition of actuality and potentiality. Second, God is immutable. Third, God is impassable. Fourth, He's infinite and invisible. Fifth, He's eternal. That means beyond temporality. Sixth, omniscient. Seventh, omnipotent. Eight, simple. That doesn't mean, like, simple-minded. It means having no parts. Simple rather than complex. Nine, necessary and ten, undrived. Another way of saying independent. The word assayity is sometimes used here. Yes. We go back and look at it again. Unipotent. I have to check to my list. Well, we actually should have 11, because he would have said both. So you have omnipresent there put omnipotent next to it. I'm sorry. That's a typo here. My outline didn't match my note. Now, as Bray points out, although using John Damascus' list, many of these attributes have come under question, both during medieval times, and in modernity. Now, some of the terms that we just read here on omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscience, those kinds of things, have so entered popular Christian vocabulary that the questioning of them is tantamount to being held suspect. If you say, well, God is not eternal, or I don't know about that, omniscient stuff. People are going to start wondering if you're orthodox. So this language has become part and parcel of the Christian tradition. We will later. Actually, at this point, we don't need to. At this point, we're just dealing with this list in total. We want to come back. If you look ahead in the outline, we're going to take up the issue of attributes. And we'll be looking at each one separately. Does that make sense? Okay. I want to start right off by saying that I think each item on this list, with the possible exception of number one. So let me kind of answer number one that way. Each item on this list is saying something true and real, something genuine about God. But I have to admit that this language leads me cold. And this list leads me cold to it or to even to each of these, I kind of say, so what? You see the God of natural theology. And that's where this list comes from for all that God's immensity of power and knowledge for all of its lack of creature limitation is a thoroughly unapproachable thing. You notice the one thing that's missing on this list? Person. Outside of person who cares about this list? And persons, the thing is the key word here as classical attributes were worked out in natural theology and classical theism. You see, and here I'm moving number two under B, the affirmations that scripture most repeatedly puts forward that the affirmations that scripture things are important about God, the affirmations that scripture includes within its credal statements and its confessional statements are according to the tradition of classical theism. Accidental, non-essential, we might even say beside the point, a divine attribute according to the Aristilian tradition is an essential property of God and essential property. A property can said to be essential if and only if the loss of that property entails that that being ceases to exist. I'll do it again. Good evening, nice to see you. An essential property. A property can be said to be essential if and only if its loss will entail a loss of being. Let me give you an example here that maybe that'll do it here. Well, a divine attribute is a property which God could not lose and continue to be God. That's one way of getting at it. But before I give an example, I need to throw another piece of language at you. Aristotle distinguished between an essential property and an accidental property. You see, many properties of a thing are non-essential in the sense that they can be they can be changed without affecting the essence of the thing. Let's take a table, for example. You can paint a table white or black, a little table, right? Well, agree. You can vanish it or leave it unfinished. Still table. You can cut its legs shorter. You can move it to another point in the room. Still table. You could eat your lunch on it or perform open-heart surgery on it. Still table? Now you take a sledgehammer to it and you turn it into a gazillion little pieces about that big. Still table? No. Now it's not table. You see, there are changes we can make and not affect the essence of the thing. Some other property we might take away will make this thing cease to be. And that's the distinction that Aristotle's making between essential property and accidental property. Essential properties belong to the nature of a thing and can't be changed or lost without altering the kind of thing it is. On the other hand, any change of a thing's non-essential properties would not change the kind of thing it is. Let me just pause there and let you get your breath, and I'll get a drink. Now, many of the predicates applied to God in Scripture denote not attributes or essential properties of God, but non-essential properties. These non-essential properties, according to Aquinas, relate God to his creatures. Relational predicates like personhood, emotional states, character traits, and actions do not denote divine attributes. Let me give you an example here from that tradition, to say that God is a creator or to say that God is the covenant lord or to make non-essential statements. It's logically possible, after all, that God might never have chosen to create and he would still be God. It's logically possible to suppose that God might never have entered into covenant relationship and he would still be God. Well, that all might make good logic. It makes bad Bible. I hope you know it makes bad Bible. It fails to conform to the biblical pattern of God's self-disclosure and right here we're starting to turn the corner. Here, I think we see the problem of thinking of attributes as essential properties of being. You see, Scripture puts its eggs in a completely different basket. It doesn't try to define God. It doesn't try to argue his existence. It doesn't give us an enumerated list of essential properties anywhere. I think it's all together interesting today that it's very common for theologians just before they entered that point in their book where they're going to talk about divine attributes, they have this little sticker that says warning, contents of this chapter may lead to fruitless speculation. And they often do. Neither a philosophical construct like an essence, nor an abstraction like an essential attribute are capable of bringing one person one step closer to another. Because of that, I think it's worth our time to reconsider whether this method of studying God is the way we ought to be going. Well, turn the page to page 53. Oh, you're already there. And we want to turn our attention to names, roles, and historical acts. And actually the discussion here picks up right where the other left. So instead of starting a whole new topic or heading as I have it there, I could have just done the next Roman numeral, I guess. I want to suggest that the biblical question concerning God begins with a completely different inerogative than the definitional question of essence, being, and attributes. When we read scripture, noting the ways that God is actually spoken of, we won't find words like infinite, omniscient, or omnipotent, nor will you find a discussion of beings or essences. Instead you'll find stories, statements, clauses, which identify God in terms of His relationship to His world and His relationship to His people. It seems to me that the proper question is not what is God. It is rather who is God. Or as Calvin put it, who is the God with whom we have to do? Calvin claimed that questions of definition of essence is a toying with idle speculations when it comes to the God of scripture. Once we understand that the proper question is who is God, we find that the Bible is abounding with answers, and it gives a great diversity in the ways that answers that question. Now we will find along the way that there are many things we're going to predicate of God. There are things we're going to attribute to Him. But what we want to do is we want to see that those attributes, biblically, are not abstract, but they are given in covenantal, relational, and existential relevant context. Well, from what I've just said, I should say something about the Westminster standards in the way they address this issue. The Westminster Confession and the shorter Catechism do ask the question, what is God? Does that mean that I'm dumping on the Westminster tradition? I better be careful here with some on tape. Well, yes I am, but tenderly I hope. Westminster was a child of its time. It seems to me that Calvin's approach is superior to that of Westminster. Now by saying that the who question, the descriptive question, is superior to the what question, the definitional question, I'm not completely saying that Westminster is wrong. Westminster is right in a definitional sense. But it is somewhat cool and somewhat abstract in its presentation. The Westminster standards were meant to be short to the point easily memorizable, if that's even a word, memorizable, of statements about God and different theological issues. The Westminster standards were never meant to stand alone. They were not meant to say everything there is to say. The Westminster materials are meant to drive you to Scripture. Well, having said that. Before we look at the ways that Scripture actually talks about God, how it describes Him, I think it's worth our time to think about how we talk about persons, how we talk about people. And I'm going to not pick on somebody, but I would like to, I need some help here. Amanda, would you be so kind as to tell us for those of us who haven't met your husband? Can you tell us a few things about Him? Anything? Keep going. Soccer? Does He have a name? I don't even know how to get spills, George. Don't tell them. George, go on. Half Italian, half Hawaiian? MDF student? Any brother, sister, parents, sister? Where's He from? I know Italy. What's the manager's done? She has given us a name. She's told us some characteristics. We could put social roles. He's MDF student. He's a soccer player that says something about his deeds. These are the ways that we naturally introduce people, right? We don't talk about people, abstract. She didn't say my husband is a human being. She didn't do that. There was no need. None whatsoever. We had to coax the name out. That should have been kind of upfront. But apart from that, she described a person in personal terms. Well, Scripture does not begin with or even entertain the kind of impersonal descriptors that we find in philosophical theology. We're not going to find a prime mover in the Bible. We're not going to find an uncaused cause. We're not going to find a supreme being. From first to last, God is thoroughly personal. What we find, and this is how we know Him, and these are the ways we are to describe Him. The one who speaks, acts, walks, commands, loves, makes, judges, fights, battles, loves, hates, all that stuff. And all the language I just use is more meaningful for the God of Scripture than all that talk we did for the first 40 minutes. And a lot of the stuff we did last week. So we're finally past the philosophy stuff. I may have to sneak a little bit of it in here and there, just above Rhonda. Right off the bat, however, we've already attributed something to God, haven't we? We have said that God is a person. For our purposes, we don't need to define a person to carefully. But there are qualities that seem to adhere to personhood. Just a second. First of all, life, God is alive. And these things are real, just common sense stuff. We don't even have to think about it. Second, He possesses self-consciousness. God knows Himself. And third, intelligence. He knows others and other things. Now maybe we want to get fancier with the idea of personhood than that, but we really don't need to. But we've already attributed personhood. And if you think about it, we've attributed other things to God. Last week, we began attributing transcendence to God, didn't we? We said that God is a transcendent person. Now, I don't want to take this too far at this point, except to point out that we're not negating the idea of attributes, even what we might call metaphysical attributes. To say that someone is someone and not a something is to make a statement about nature, not merely function. We simply want to put attribute into biblical, covenantal context. Some of some philosophers object right here. And this might be the issue for you too. To say that God is a person is to use an anthropomorphism. Is that word in your outline? I can't say that three times fast. I can't say it one time fast. That's a word I have to say very slowly. Anthropomorphism. An anthropomorphism is applying human characteristics to God. The objection says that we are speaking of God as if he were a human being. And that's not only in precise, it's wrong because God is not a human being. The biblical language referring to God, so the argument goes, is equivocal in nature. That is to say the biblical language that speaks about God, may refer to him as a person, but that's merely the language of appearance. It's a state of that way for our sakes that we can relate to something, but God is not really a person. We simply speak this way. To predicate personhood to God is to reduce or limit the divine being. That's the objection. My response goes like this. If God truly has the characteristics of personhood, light, self-conscious, what was the other one? Intelligence. Then to speak of God as a person is not to employ an anthropomorphic descriptor. If he has the characteristics of person, he is a person. And there's no reason from the biblical materials to assume that it uses language equivically when it speaks of God. You see, many of the so-called anthropomorphisms that we're told about are not anthropomorphisms at all. They are rather theomorphisms. You see, since God is the creator, his personhood has a priority over our personhood. Rather than think of God anthropomorphically, we might better think of man, theomorphically. Our personhood is part of our calling to image God. God is the truly personal one. We mimic something of his personhood. And to do that well, we must know him personally. Yes, God is more than supremely more than our creaturely notions of personhood. But that is no reason whatsoever to deny personhood to God. While the realities of God's own person far outstrip our conceptions, he is never blessed. And that's important, I think, construct in thinking about God. While he transcends our conceptions, he is never less than our conception. That was part and parcel, I think, the C.S. Lewis is understanding of God. He is always more than, more than, never less. But before we look at the different ways that Scripture identifies God, perhaps we should spend at least a couple of minutes talking about anthropomorphisms, equivocal language, and that sort of thing. And it will take a break. See, the real anthropomorphisms of Scripture. There are true anthropomorphisms. The Bible often speaks of God metaphorically. As if he possessed bodily parts. Scripture speaks of God's eyes, ears, mouth, nose, hands, and so forth. We know that God does not literally possess these bodily parts. Scripture insists that he does not possess a bodily form. See, Deuteronomy chapter 4 verses 15 through 18 there. And thus God is incapable of being seen by human eyes. John 118, 1 Timothy 1, 17, and 1 Timothy 6, 15 through 16. There is an important qualification there. God is incapable of being seen by human eyes except in Jesus. That's also said in John 118. No man has ever seen God, but God, the one and only, has made him known. Well, we must say here that God is not composed of matter. Indeed, the second commandment forbids the confusion of God with anything or any shape within the material world. Not being fleshly, God does not possess the bodily limitations of creaturely existence. Well, then here is another thing that we have to attribute to God. He is a spirit. And that is stated exactly that way in John chapter 4 verse 24. God is a spirit. But right here we need to be careful. What's a spirit? Spirits transcend our phenomenal reality. Scripture does not give us anything like a substantial description of spirits. All we really know about spirits is that they don't have bodies. While Scripture affirms the existence of spirits, it does not give us the material so that we could go out and build one or do the physics of spirit or anything like that. But that's the issue of anthropomorphisms and bodily parts. While God transcends the bodily, the functions communicated in these anthropomorphisms are real. And again, this goes back to the idea of that Lewis's idea more than not less. God does not have hands. But does he make things? Uh-huh. He fashions, he scopes. He doesn't possess eyes like you or I have. But nothing escapes his gaze. So while the anthropomorphism is not literally true, the function is true. These anthropomorphisms even tell us something important about God's character. The nose of God is a good example here. Interestingly, the Hebrew word off is used both for nose and for wrath. And not accidentally so. You see, look down your nose at something. Is to take a stance of displeasure toward it, right? To turn up your nose is to act in a superior condescending fashion. And Scripture speaks of God's awe in exactly these ways. Oh yes, the Bible also speaks of God smelling smells smelling aromas. Does God smell? Yeah. While we should be careful not to think of God to materialistically, we should also be careful not to commit the opposite error. That is thinking of God so spiritually that we subtract him from any meaningful contact from his world that we define things or him in such a way that we deny him the joy of his creation. This brings us to D then the nature of language relevant to God. And after D will take our break. Theology is in many ways a talking about God. But what status and weight can we attach to our talking about God? You know, what currency does human language have in reference to God? Remember, our language is creaturely. But God is transcendent. He is infinitely different from us, infinitely greater than us. He is the incomprehensible one. He is the incomparable one. How does the language we use relate to who God really is? Well, historically there have been three main schools of thought here. The first school of thought has held that our language is equivocal. God and man stand at such a distance that human language is incapable of speaking about him with any certainty. And we've talked about these folks. William Plocker last week would fit into this category. Existentials them would fit into this category. The emphasis here is upon discontinuity. Our language at best is vague and approximate. There's no direct explicit statements that are possible for God. And we have nothing in common. There's no link. There's no bond. Another school of thought has said that our language, our theological language is univocal, which simply means same voice. This view presupposes a substantial commonality between God and man. Where the first position, you know, if you think of it, this way it pushes God as far off as possible up into heaven and man is created as much distance as possible. This second position crashes them together so that there's overlap so that there's overlap between the drawings so close together that it makes possible a number of shared qualities, being rationality and language. And the creator creation distinction tends toward overlap. And our God talk therefore corresponds to who God really is in a roughly one to one relationship. A third view holds that our language about God is analogical. Classical theists like Thomas Aquinas made much use of the category of analogy. As a matter of fact, Aquinas is often credited with developing the language of analogy for theological language. But what Thomas and the classical theist had in mind was an ontological correspondence. Man is like God. He's made up of the same stuff as God. What we have in mind here when we speak of analogical language is not an ontological correspondence but a moral, rational, or functional analogy. An example here might help. When scripture speaks of God's eyes, he's in fact seeing. Therefore it's not equivocal. But the language is obviously not univocal either because God does not have eyes. Rather the comparison is functional. So when we talk about the analogy between God and us, it is primarily an analogy of moral relationship, of covenantal relationship, and of function. Well, the point here is simple this. Our talking about God, our God talk. It is not precise. It's never exhaustive. It's never comprehensive. But having said all that, it can be real, true, sufficient, and trustworthy. Let's take a break right here. And when we come back, we'll get into how scripture talks about God.