What does the Bible teach us about the
knowledge of God? What are the philosophical, theological, and practical
implications of those teachings? The purpose of this post is to demonstrate
that only a biblically faithful perspective on divine knowledge can be regarded
as logically coherent and philosophically plausible. Moreover, only the
inductive method of biblical exegesis will yield the outcome we hope to achieve,
and that is to arrive at a sound understanding, albeit limited and imperfect,
of the nature of divine knowledge.
The nature of the knowledge of God is such
that God knows all things that have ever come to be, are, and will ever come to
be, at one point all in the same eternal present. God knows all things, not
only things actual but also things possible to Him and to the creature, and
since some of these are future contingent to us, it follows that God knows
future contingent things.[1]
However, the concept of divine knowledge presents us with some complex
philosophical problems.
How God can know future actions of free
creatures is one of the most difficult problems that emerges from the traditional Christian understanding of divine knowledge. If tomorrow, I can choose between A and B, and I am absolutely free to choose between these two, in what
sense can God be said to know that I will choose B?
Putting it another way, if God knows that tomorrow I will choose B when faced with the choice to choose A or B,
in what sense can it be said that I am actually free to choose B?
The implications of this problem touch on such things as human responsibility
and moral culpability. Suffice it to say, the Christian must come to grips with
the problems that their traditional understanding of God seemingly creates.
Another problem that emerges in this
understanding of divine knowledge is the fact that Christians traditionally
have held that God is eternal. This means simply that God exists outside of
time. If God exists outside of time, how can God know anything in advance since
such knowledge is successive and we know that anything that is successive is
temporal as opposed to eternal. In a theology of this sort, God could not be
said to have known that a given natural event was going to occur before some
natural event. This, surely, would violate the idea that God bears no temporal
relations to natural events.[2]
There is no doubting the fact that the traditional Christian understanding of
divine knowledge creates what appears to be, insuperable philosophical and
logical complications.
In his manuscript, Paradox in Christian Theology, James Anderson asks two every
important questions: 1) Are any essential Christian doctrines genuinely paradoxical? 2) Can a person rationally believe a paradoxical doctrine? [3]
As Joel McDurmon said in his book on Biblical
Logic in Theory & Practice, “Like all things that exist before the face
of God, we can only fully understand truth and logic from within God’s
covenantal plan of man.”[4]
The key to all human understanding is found in the covenantal relationship
between God and man. God freely chooses to reveal, to impart knowledge, and to
make human understanding possible. Perhaps part of the bigger problem in our
understanding is that we make basic category mistakes in our attempt to provide
for logical consistency and rational harmony in cases where it does not
necessarily belong. That is to say that we should step back and ask if these
subjects ought to be scrutinized in terms of human logic or perhaps in terms of
a different sort of logic altogether. Yet, if one begins with the
presupposition that formal logical consistency places a negative restraint on
what the Scriptures may teach, then rational non-Trinitarian exegesis must
always be regarded as superior to its orthodox alternative.[5]
One must confess that such a scenario would lead to outrageous perversions of
historic Christian orthodoxy.
When we say that the traditional Christian
understanding of divine knowledge introduces problems, we must ask, by what
standards? Where do these problems reside?
When we say that this apple is filled with problems, we are comparing it to an apple that is not. What then does that apple without problems look like?
Part II will suggest a way forward that I believe is concerned to avoid the right kind of problems. You know, problems like contradicting the divine revelation of Scripture more so than the lofty standards of pagan philosophy and autonomous human reason.
[1] Baruch
A. Brody, ed., Readings in the Philosophy of Religion: An Analytic
Approach, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, ©1992), 422.
[2]
Ibid., 431.
[3] James
Anderson, Paradox in Christian Theology: An Analysis of Its Presence,
Character, and Epistemic Status, Paternoster Theological Monographs
(Eugene, Or.: Wipf & Stock, 2007), 1.
[4] Joel
McDurmon, Biblical Logic: in Theory and Practice (Powder Spring,
GA: American Vision, 2011), Kindle Ed. 140.
5B.A.
Bosserman, The Trinity and the Vindication of Christian Paradox:an
Interpretation and Refinement of the Theological Apologetic of Cornelius van
Til (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2014), 177.
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