I am looking at a rock. In this light the rock appears gray with specks of white. The specks seem countless, but I count them and they number 104. The top of the rock is rounded with a slight indentation running from side to side. The light shifts and the rock changes from gray to light blue. I pick it up and put it on the scales; the meter points to two and a half ounces. I look underneath, and it is flat and smooth. The edges are curved and rough. The shape, from this perspective, is round but from another oblong and from another thin and wafery. I drop the rock on the sidewalk, but it doesn’t break. When I smash it with a marble-colored rock, tiny whitish flecks appear. I spit on the blemishes, rub the spittle around, and the flecks disappear. Now that it is wet it looks dark and shiny. It dries intermittently with spots of dark gray, gray, and blue. Now it is all blue.
I consult a geology textbook and learn that it is a piece of granite. It is in the plutonic class of common igneous rocks. Its acid composition is high, and its essential silicate phases are quartz, potash feldspar, sodic plagioclase, biotite, and hornblende.
I never etch it with a diamond or immerse it in acid. I don’t cover it in jello or attack it with a jackhammer. I don’t study it in the light of dawn or early evening. I couldn’t find it in the dark. I don’t know how it differs from most other rocks, how it reacts with most other substances, how it persists unchanged for millennia. I have learned that such things, like most other things, are constructed out of tiny little particles that are traveling at relatively rapid speeds and separated by relatively vast distances. What appears manifestly and archetypically solid and unitary is a multiplicity occupying mostly empty space. I don’t know if it bubbled up from within the earth where I found it or if it was carried on some great glacier. Perhaps it was brought here by a fellow traveler or by a gardener or by a curious child. When I set it down and walk away, I don’t know if it will be carried away again by a glacier or a girl.
I don’t know much about rocks. Yet I have, to the best of my ability, said some true things about this rock. I am reasonably certain that it was a rock, that it was roughly of this shape and not that shape, that it was just about this size not another, and that it would fit neatly and cleanly in my pocket and soothe me if I were to rub my fingers along it. Upon reflection, the rock infinitely overflows my thin description. It spills out of my tiny cup of knowledge and lies in vast pools alongside. Yet puny as it is, that truth seems to me to be genuine truth.
I recently met an old man. We were riding together on the train, and, as often happens with perfect strangers, he shared with me his life. Ray, as I’ll call him here, was old and gray, like the rock. The years had chipped off bits and left traces of powder, which had been smoothed over with sweat and tears. His wife had died young, leaving him to raise his three children alone. He never remarried because he couldn’t quite find the time and energy to seek another partner. He reckoned himself happy, but his eyes tempered his reckoning with sadness. Not regret, he assured me, but sadness nonetheless. Ray was on his way to visit his sick granddaughter. His daughter was divorced and needed to work, so he was going to care for the child. Like the rock, he seemed solid.
He told me that he had once accepted Jesus as his personal Lord and Savior but that it didn’t mean much to him anymore. He occasionally went to church because he liked the choir. His lifelong friends’ names were showing up all too frequently in the obituary column, which he always turned to first when he read the newspaper. His friends were peeling off like layers of an onion, and he feared being the last lonely layer to be torn from life.
I walked away from that train feeling that I had seldom spoken but had been understood; that I had met a genuine human being who was related to me not just as a member of the same species but as a kindred soul. The connection of heart to heart was fast and went deep. I was delighted and saddened with him. I had made a new friend. I ran home and promptly explained this complex and fascinating person to my wife.
Shortly thereafter I learned that Ray was somewhat famous, and that an excellent biography had been written that described his life. I eagerly devoured the biography, and I extracted detail upon detail from its many pages. I learned of his mother and father, of his wife whom he loved dearly, of his brothers and sisters. I learned of the birth of his children but was surprised to discover that his career and not his children dominated his life. Where was the grandfatherly care that was evident on the train? I discovered his work as an artist, the sculptures and paintings explained piece by revealing piece. And I confronted this fact and then that one, each of them masterfully related to the other and psychologically analyzed by the artistic biographer. One whole life packed into 277 fascinating pages.
I never learned whether he liked his coffee black, white, decaffeinated, or not at all. Maybe he preferred tea. I never really determined why he loved his wife so dearly or why his work was more important than his children. And why would he now take the time to care for his grandchild? I could guess, but I don’t know.
I have said what I remember about this man as truly as I can. My knowledge of him is partial and fragmentary. I offer a few grains of sand, but the person is a vast beach. Yet surely I know a few things about Ray–and more than that, I know Ray himself, however inadequately.
I also believe that through experience and reason I have met and known God. He is the omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good creator of the universe. He is Spirit. Everything that is not God depends upon him for its existence. He is the source of truth, justice, and beauty and is the giver of life.
I have also read about him in Scripture and in the creeds of the church. But I don’t know whether or not God is outside time. I am so tenaciously time bound that I don’t have any idea what it might mean for a being to be outside time. I don’t know what God did prior to Creation, nor do I know what it would mean for that question to be nonsensical. I don’t fully grasp the concepts of omnipotence, omniscience, or perfect goodness. I understand the notions of powers, knowledge, and goodness and have some ability imaginatively to expand properties beyond those possessed by mortals. But I cannot envision what the infinite possession of any property might be. I cannot fully conceive of a disembodied person, let alone one that is omnipresent.
So God, too, slides out of my slippery cognitive grasp. He is infinitely grander than my attempts to understand him. But, just as in the case of the rock and the case of Ray, I believe I have expressed real truths about God.
This much is sure: rocks infinitely exceed rock descriptions, people infinitely exceed people descriptions, God infinitely exceeds God descriptions.
Acknowledging this seems right, a sincere expression of piety; who are we humans to claim to comprehend God’s nature? Yet this claim has for a long time been understood by many theologians as implying something very radical and very destructive to traditional Christian faith: that it is impossible to speak meaningfully about God at all.
This radical skepticism about God was probably inspired by the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who drew a sharp distinction between reality as we humans experience it, shaped by our human conceptual framework, and reality as it is in itself. Kant thought that we humans could only know the world of appearances that is structured by our human senses and our human concepts. God, who is beyond such categories, cannot be theoretically grasped by humans, Kant thought, and many theologians have followed in his train.
John Hick, for example, draws a sharp distinction between what he calls “the Real as it is in itself” and “the Real as humanly experienced”; intellectually, according to Hick, we can only know the Real as humanly experienced; the Real as it is in itself is a mystery. The boundaries of meaningful human discourse, according to the Kantian theologian, are determined by empirically available concepts–those that categorize what we can see, hear, touch, taste, or smell. According to Hick, no religion can then claim to provide the objective truth about God; every religion simply describes how “the Real” appears to a particular culture. No such cultural appearance can be regarded as objectively true.
This kind of theological stance holds that since God cannot be captured by empirically available concepts, all talk about God trivializes and tempts one to blasphemy. Gordon Kaufman, for example, holds that since even our ordinary concepts are in some sense “human constructions,” it must be even more true that our picture or conception of the ultimate reality must be “a work of our constructive and synthesizing powers.” Kaufman draws the extraordinary conclusion that the idea of God is “the mind’s supreme imaginative construct.”
The consequences of this Kantian view are far-reaching. We cannot know if God is really loving or hateful, righteous or wicked, concerned or unconcerned about human welfare or salvation, or even a person or thing. Behind the veil of human language is, to use John Locke’s fetching phrase, something-we-know-not-what. Paul Tillich went so far as to claim that it is inappropriate even to think of God as existing, as that would locate him as just another existent being amongst all other beings.
Is God then so Wholly Other that we are invariably reduced to uttering and thinking nonsense concerning his true nature? It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this question. Defenders of Christian orthodoxy often do not realize how crucial is this issue, and so they engage their opponents at the wrong point. For example, someone may argue for the historical reliability of the New Testament, supposing that skepticism about the Bible is the root of theological unorthodoxy and unbelief. However, if someone holds that human language cannot meaningfully refer to God, then orthodox Christianity of the kind summarized by the Apostles’ Creed will not be taken seriously as an option.
It is a fatal error for orthodox Christians complacently to think that the problem is solved because they believe they have a revelation from God. For such a revelation from God, if it occurs in a human language and is to be understood by human beings, presupposes that human language can be used to make meaningful statements about God. The theological doctrine that we cannot speak meaningfully about God therefore undermines the possibility of such a revelation, and the acceptance of this doctrine is a major reason many modern theologians never take seriously the possibility of a true revelation from God.
Of course, not everyone accepts the truth about God. The Bible itself stresses that God’s truth, while accessible, is largely rejected by rebellious human beings. So disagreement is not really surprising. But it does not follow from this disagreement that some are not closer to the truth than others.
What does follow from these roughly Kantian musings is not skepticism about God but rather epistemological humility. We don’t have access to the conditions that ground our beliefs in the world or God; indeed, this may be a cognitive consequence of the Fall. We are in the unenviable position of knowing many things but not always knowing that we know; infallibility is not within our grasp. Yet while we lack absolute certainty, we may nonetheless possess knowledge. This may cause epistemological vertigo, especially for those constitutionally disposed toward certainty and rational consensus.
Although this psychological state is deplorable, it is irreducibly part and parcel of the human condition.
What would our knowledge of God be like if God is what I call modestly transcendent? By this I mean something that is partially but not fully graspable by human concepts (as opposed to Hick’s and Kaufman’s radical transcendence, which posits a deity totally ungraspable by humans).
We first need to ask, then, is our knowledge of God qualitatively different from our knowledge of rocks and persons? Our experienced slice of reality is slim, perhaps slimmer even than Kant realized. Nonetheless, slimness of grasp does not entail skepticism about reality, even the divine reality.
Consider the rock. The rock modestly transcends any mental conception that we have of it. Were we to devote our lives to the study of that one rock we would only grasp a minute bit of it. Were we to stare at it for days, each moment our perspective would be limited to one of the countless perspectives from which to view the rock, and we would be denied access to all past and future presentations of the rock. Its essence, its inner construction, its history, and its future are all absent from our finite experience of the rock. The rock modestly transcends our experiences of it. All of this is unquestionably true. What does not follow is that the rock is a purely imaginative construct.
How about Ray? Ray, like the rock, modestly transcends any of my ideas of him. Ray, of course, is more complicated than a rock, and his complications increase the pressure of transcendence. Besides having physical properties and perspectives that are not accessible to any finite knower, Ray is a person and has a characteristic mental life that is not directly accessible to me: I cannot see Ray’s thoughts, feel his emotions, or sense his desires. The problem of other minds looms large–other minds are in principle beyond what humans can experience. Nonetheless, we categorize Ray as a person, who persists through time, and who has experiences and an inner life beyond that which any person (including Ray) could fully grasp.
So my idea of Ray is a product, to use Kaufman’s phrase, of the elaborate synthesizing powers of the mind. But it doesn’t follow that my idea of Ray is merely an imaginative construct. It certainly does not follow that Ray is simply an imaginative construct. My idea of Ray may be partly an imaginative construct, but Ray is not. And the reality of Ray vastly exceeds my idea of Ray, so I should not identify my idea of Ray with the reality of Ray.
Nonetheless, my limited perspective does allow some limited access to truths about Ray, and to Ray himself.
And finally, what of God? Suppose there is a God. Is it possible for human beings to grasp truths about God, or does divine transcendence make that impossible? If the Kantian theologians are right, even if there is a God who desires to make himself experientially and revelationally available to human beings, no one could know anything about God.
It appears, however, that much of what is said concerning our ignorance of God supports only modest transcendence. Those who want to argue that our ignorance about God implies radical transcendence owe us an account of why the same thing should not be true for rocks and human persons. If it is reasonable to reject skepticism about rocks and persons, it seems reasonable to reject skepticism about God.
There is at least one positive reason to think that God is only modestly transcendent to us humans. If we believe that we have been created in God’s image, then we will believe that we share some divine properties. It has been suggested that we are icons of God in that we are free, rational, moral, creative, social, and knowers; if so, then God has similar properties but modestly transcends any human grasp of them.
For instance, consider God’s causal powers: God is able to directly bring about vastly more states of affairs than human beings. Yet God creates in the sense that God intends for something to be that isn’t and then brings it about that it is–and so do humans. God may do so, however, without using any pre-existing stuff.
Because we are created in the divine image, we share some properties with God and can rightly claim to know some of the divine properties. However, the plurality of beliefs about God and our awareness of our desire to believe what is to our own advantage suggest the likelihood that humans will err in their understanding of God and so caution us not to indulge in triumphalism, dogmatism, or overconfidence. Modest transcendence warns us not to turn our feeble beliefs about God into an idol.
Modest transcendence entails that we know very little about God (or rocks or persons), yet rather than a clarion call to Kantian agnosticism about the divine nature, it summons us to a quiet confidence concerning our tiny beliefs about God. It is an affirmation both of knowledge of God and of human cognitive limitations; after all, although rocks and persons transcend our piddly conceptions of them, we can still know and relate well to rocks and persons.
Affirming modest transcendence places us securely in the tradition of the greatest Christian thinkers. Augustine held that God is like a vast ocean: Even the unlearned can paddle about in the shallows, and the trained theologian can swim out a bit further; but both are of such limited ability that they would be swallowed up in the depths. Aquinas contended that because of the disproportion of our finite intellect and God’s infinitude, our knowledge of God is “dark and mirrored and from afar.” Kierkegaard maintained that there is an “infinite qualitative difference” between humans and God, and that humans, due to their sinful nature, are tempted to domesticate God to make him serve them. All three magisterial thinkers affirmed divine transcendence yet also held that we can know enough about God to relate to him properly.
God is modestly transcendent–we can gain sufficient information for salvation; but God is transcendent–we must beware of the human temptation to turn God into a glorified human being or an omnipresent buddy. Modest transcendence is a threat both to the theological liberal who wallows in utter ignorance of the divine and to the theological conservative who arrogantly asserts that he has the final truth and perhaps wields such knowledge to divide and conquer. We can embrace or be embraced by God, but only as chastened by intellectual humility.
Kelly James Clark is associate professor of philosophy at Calvin College. His When Faith Is Not Enough is forthcoming from Eerdmans.
Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & CultureMagazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mailBCedit@aol.com.
Sep/Oct 1997, Vol. 3, No. 5, Page 29
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