Theopedia

Incomprehensibility of God

“The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us.”

— Deuteronomy 29:29

The incomprehensibility of God is the teaching that no creature can know God exhaustively, though God can truly be known, because he has revealed himself. Scripture never treats God’s knowability as an open question to be argued for; it simply assumes that those who seek him find him.1 What is at issue is not whether God can be known at all, but how much, and by what means: fully by God alone, and truly but only in part by everyone else.

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession describes God as “a most pure spirit… whose essence cannot be comprehended by any but himself.”2 The confession is not saying God cannot be known, only that he cannot be comprehended, known exhaustively the way one mind can wholly grasp another. Bavinck draws out the implication: “God’s incomprehensibility, so far from canceling out God’s knowability, rather presupposes and affirms it.”1 A being that could be comprehended by a finite mind would itself be finite; it is precisely because God is infinite that no creature can know him completely, and precisely because he has revealed himself that every creature can know him truly.

This distinction was formalized in Reformed theology as the difference between archetypal and ectypal knowledge. Only God’s own self-knowledge is “adequate, underived,” the archetype of all true knowledge of him; what he grants to creatures is ectypal, a derived and accommodated knowledge that remains genuinely “true, pure, and sufficient” even though it is finite.3 The implication is that theology’s task is not to add to what God has revealed of himself but to receive it: the sum of what can be truly known of God is fixed by what he has actually disclosed, not by how far human reasoning can press beyond it.

Reformed scholastics pressed the same point down to the words theology uses of God, holding that they apply to him neither univocally (the same word in exactly the same sense) nor equivocally (the same word in an unrelated sense) but analogically. Van Mastricht states the rule for God’s communicable attributes directly: they belong to God and to creatures “not univocally, because there is no proportion at all between the infinite and the finite; nor also equivocally… but only analogically, such that the thing signified by the attributes belongs principally and originally to God, but to the creatures only participatively, and with a degree of diminution, just as health properly and in itself belongs to an animal, although on account of the animal it belongs to food, air, and medicine.”4 Turretin grounds the same rule in the same premise, that a finite mind cannot contain the infinite (finitum non est capax infiniti): a perfection such as goodness exists “originally, independently, and essentially” in God alone, and only “accidentally and participatively” in creatures who reflect it, so that human knowledge of God is itself analogical to God’s own knowledge of himself, not identical to it and not merely a different thing wearing the same name.5

Biblical Basis

Moses states the principle directly: “the secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us” (Deut. 29:29), granting real, revealed knowledge while reserving what God has not disclosed. The Psalmist marvels that God’s “greatness is unsearchable” (Ps. 145:3), and David confesses that such knowledge “is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain it” (Ps. 139:6). Paul draws the same line: “the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God,” yet “no one comprehends the things of God except the Spirit of God” (1 Cor. 2:10-11), and elsewhere marvels at “the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God” (Rom. 11:33). Paul also describes present knowledge as genuine but partial, growing toward something fuller: “now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Cor. 13:12).

Alongside these limits, Scripture is equally insistent that God can be known, and known personally rather than merely as a set of facts. “Let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me” (Jer. 9:24), and Jesus defines eternal life itself as knowing God: “this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (John 17:3).

Historical Development

Basil of Caesarea captured the paradox in a single line: “the knowledge of God consists in the perception of his incomprehensibility.”1 Calvin opened his Institutes by pairing the knowledge of God with the knowledge of ourselves, treating them as inseparable starting points for all theology, a pairing Bavinck traces back through the Genevan Catechism’s own opening question, “What is the chief end of human life?” answered, “That human beings may know the God by whom they were created.”6 Later Reformed theologians formalized the archetypal/ectypal distinction discussed above to hold together, in one framework, both God’s full self-knowledge and the genuinely limited but genuinely true knowledge he grants his creatures.

Objections and Responses

If God is incomprehensible, isn’t that just a polite way of saying he is unknowable, so that all theology is really agnosticism dressed up in religious language? Bavinck answers that this gets the relationship backward: “Incomprehensibility does not imply agnosticism but an ingredient of the Christian claim to have received by revelation a specific, limited, yet well-defined and true knowledge of God.”1 Agnosticism holds that God, if he exists, cannot be known at all; the doctrine of incomprehensibility holds the opposite, that God is genuinely known through what he has actually revealed, while denying only that this revealed knowledge exhausts the whole of who he is. The two claims sound similar but move in opposite directions: one denies knowledge is possible, the other explains why real knowledge is necessarily partial.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 7, “Knowing God.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1. ↩

  3. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 7, “Knowing God.” ↩

  4. Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 5, “The Attributes of God in General,” 158-159. ↩

  5. Alex Charles Tibbott, “Turretin and Theological Method,” in “De Impassibilitate Et Satisfactione: An Examination of the Methodological Implications of Trinitarian Classical Theism for the Doctrine of the Atonement” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2024), 91-92, citing Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, trans. George Musgrove Giger, ed. James T. Dennison, 3 vols. (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1992), 3.6.4, 3.8.10. ↩

  6. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 7, “Knowing God.” ↩