Cataphatic theology

No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.

— John 1:18

Cataphatic theology (Greek kataphasis, “affirmation”) is the method of speaking about God by stating positively what he is: that God is holy, wise, or good, rather than only denying that he is limited or changeable. It pairs with, and is disciplined by, its counterpart, negative theology, which speaks of God only by denying of him what belongs to creatures.¹ Reformed theology treats the two as partners, not rivals: since only God knows himself exhaustively, human knowledge of him is analogical, true but never comprehensive, so cataphatic affirmation needs apophatic negation to keep it from shrinking God to a creature’s size.²

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession’s opening description of God matches, almost word for word, the wider Reformed confessional family: the same catalog of positive and negative attributes appears, with only minor wording differences, in the Westminster Confession (1646) and the Savoy Declaration (1658), both of which the 1689 drew on directly.³ None of the three names “cataphatic” or “apophatic” theology, but this shared paragraph performs both moves in a single breath. It calls God “a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions… immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible,” language that denies creaturely limitations of him, and in the same paragraph calls him “most holy, most wise… most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth,” language that affirms positive perfections of him.⁴ It states God’s incomprehensibility and his goodness side by side, without treating them as being in tension: his “essence cannot be comprehended by any but himself,” yet he is nonetheless truly described as loving, just, and merciful.⁴

Biblical Basis

Scripture speaks of God both ways without flagging the shift as a change of method. God names himself positively at the burning bush, “I AM WHO I AM” (Exod. 3:14), and proclaims his own character in cataphatic terms to Moses: “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Exod. 34:6). Elsewhere Scripture denies of God what is true of creatures: “God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind” (Num. 23:19), and Paul calls him “the King of ages, immortal, invisible, the only God” (1 Tim. 1:17), “who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see” (1 Tim. 6:16). Isaiah puts the same apophatic instinct as a question rather than a denial: “To whom then will you liken God, or what likeness compare with him?” (Isa. 40:18). John 1:18 holds both together in a single verse: God is unseen, yet made known in his Son.

Historical Development

The patristic period already worked with both moves, usually leaning apophatic. The Letter of Barnabas asked why the Son had to become incarnate at all if not so that creatures could behold him; Justin Martyr called God “inexpressible, immobile, nameless,” treating even “Father,” “God,” and “Lord” as names drawn from his works rather than words that capture his essence, and Athanasius said God “transcends all being and human comprehension.”² Augustine pressed the same instinct furthest: “It is easier for us to say what he is not than what he is,” and, more sharply still, “God is known better by not knowing.”² Yet Augustine also anchored God’s true, positive name in Exodus: God is “the One who is,” the name YHWH disclosing what he is in himself rather than only what he does toward creatures.²

Pseudo-Dionysius and John Scotus Eriugena pushed negative theology further than Augustine had. For them God transcends even being and knowing itself, so that he can be called “nameless” on the one hand and said to have “many names,” drawn from his effects, on the other. Bavinck summarizes their conclusion: “negative theology is more excellent than positive theology: it makes God known to us as transcending all creatures,” to the point that, in the end, “God surpasses both all negation and all affirmation, all assertion and all denial.”²

Scholastic theology restored a more deliberate balance. Thomas Aquinas (1224/5-1274) distinguished the immediate vision of God reserved for heaven from the mediate knowledge available on earth, holding that God is knowable only “insofar as he is represented in the perfections of his creatures.”² Aquinas worked out the categories still used for how positive, non-univocal speech about God is possible: our knowledge and language about God are neither univocal (meaning exactly what they mean of creatures) nor equivocal (meaning something wholly unrelated), but analogical, resembling without being identical.¹ He distinguished the res significata, the attribute signified (goodness, wisdom), from the modus significandi, the manner in which it is signified: the same attribute belongs to both God and a creature, but the way it belongs to God differs infinitely from the way it belongs to the creature.¹

Nominalism and mysticism reacted in opposite directions. Bavinck judges that later Scholasticism’s dense dialectical treatment of the divine attributes had, by then, crowded out the sense of God’s incomprehensibility.² William of Occam denied that any real, essential knowledge of God could be had by human reason at all. Nicholas of Cusa, in On Learned Ignorance (1440), held that truth about God could not be reached by reason but only by a kind of mystical, unknowing faith.²

The Reformation took cataphatic and apophatic theology in different directions. Martin Luther distinguished God’s “hidden” majesty, which he called “plainly unknowable, incomprehensible, and inaccessible,” from God as revealed in the incarnate Christ, but still held that a dark, hidden background remains in God behind what is revealed.² John Calvin took a more restrained path: rather than speculating about “what God is,” he held it enough to ask “what is his nature and what is consistent with his nature,” confining theology to what God has actually disclosed of himself.² Calvin illustrated this disclosure with the image of a nurse who stoops to speak an infant’s language: God’s positive self-descriptions in Scripture are a kind of “lisping,” accommodated to human capacity rather than a literal report of his inner life.⁵

Opposing Views

Modern philosophical agnosticism collapses the cataphatic/apophatic balance from the negative side, treating denial as total rather than disciplined. Kant held that God could only be postulated as a regulative idea for practical reason, never known; Schleiermacher made God the “whence” of the feeling of absolute dependence rather than an object of knowledge; Feuerbach concluded that talk of God is simply talk of humanity projected outward.² Bavinck judges that this line of thought, carried to its end, empties theology rather than purifying it: “By reducing God to ‘inexpressible depth’ and ‘eternal silence,’ they make the universe godless, in the most absolute sense of the word.”²

A rationalist or univocal view of theological language errs in the opposite direction, collapsing the balance from the positive side. Barrett describes univocal knowledge, in which a word would mean exactly the same of God as of a creature, as “the road to rationalism,” since it treats finite reason as capable of knowing God exactly as he knows himself.¹ Reformed theology rejects both extremes: neither a purely negative theology that ends in an empty abstraction nor a purely positive, univocal theology that reduces God to a magnified creature, but an analogical knowledge that is genuinely positive without being comprehensive.²

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t saying anything positive about God inevitably cut him down to creaturely size, since to know something is to define and limit it? Bavinck poses this objection in its sharpest form: “For us to know is to make distinctions, to abstract, to restrict and limit,” which seems to leave only the choice between a God reduced to a “personal, limited, humanlike being” or an “empty abstract idea devoid of value for religion.”² His answer is that the two are not in competition: “God’s incomprehensibility, so far from canceling out God’s knowability, rather presupposes and affirms it.”² The knowledge cataphatic theology yields is analogical rather than comprehensive, so affirming something true of God, that he is good or wise, does not require affirming everything about him or affirming it in exactly the sense a creature is good or wise.

If “good” doesn’t mean the same thing when said of God and of a creature, hasn’t the word been emptied of content? Barrett answers with Aquinas’s distinction between the res significata and the modus significandi: the attribute signified does not change, but the manner of its signification does.¹ Calling a well-behaved dog good and calling God good both genuinely predicate goodness, but “God’s goodness is infinite in measure, even in ways we will never know,” where the dog’s is not.¹ The word is not evacuated of meaning; scholastic theology said it is applied “supereminently,” in a higher, unlimited manner proper to God alone.¹

Related Doctrines

References

Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2019), chap. 2, “Can We Think God’s Thoughts after Him? How the Creature Should (and Should Not) Talk about the Creator.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 7, “Knowing God.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵
The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1; substantially the same wording appears in The Savoy Declaration (1658), chap. 2, para. 1. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1. ↩ ↩²
Barrett, None Greater, chap. 2. ↩