Truth is what God knows, as all truth is God's truth, since God is the metaphysical foundation of all that is true. Hence, truth should equal, represent, and match the way things really are, that is, reality.
Reality is the way things really are, independent of human subjective experience and man-made conventions. This reality does not rule out the need for subjective application of truth in one's life. In other words, truth is discovered, not invented.
I am not implying that man knows all truth perfectly or does not have to work very hard at comprehending it. Anyone denying the reality of truth has made a self-defeating statement.
What we know is directly connected to God's revelation. We can exercise our God-given rational capacities, through empirical observation, including science, and from understanding and reflecting upon God's unique propositional revelation--Scripture. Whether one is a rationalist (priority to reason) or an empiricist (priority to the five senses), we can trust that properly functioning senses or reasoning minds because God serves as the necessary epistemological ground of both.
At this point we may ask, "What is knowledge?"
Knowledge is properly justified true belief.
Examine the statement in reverse.
belief - No one can know something unless he or she believes it. E.g., we cannot know Jesus is Lord unless we believe it.
true - We can only know things that are true. A person may think he knows something to be true, but, in fact, be wrong. Or a person may know of something false that is indeed false. But this person can only actually and authentically know something if it is indeed true.
justified - We can believe something to be true, that is in fact true, but this would not constitute knowledge if it lacks a proper justification. E.g.,, a wild guess that ends up being correct would not be knowledge, for knowledge involves some sort of confirmation or evidence, that is, proper justification. Here I speak of what philosophers call foundationalism. (A portion of my seven years in seminary were devoted to studying philosophical theology, sometimes callednatural theology). From foundationalism, we may claim that beliefs that stand on their own without appealing to other convictions for justification are called properly basic beliefs. For me, beliefs are properly basic when they are either self-evident (true on the face of it), logically necessary, inescapable, or incorrigible (expressing an immediate state of consciousness).
So we can state that knowledge means believing what is true with proper justification.
Despite the preceding we must recognize that man's knowledge is limited and affected by sin. Our noetic (cognitive and/or belief forming) faculties are to some degree impaired by sin and thus, so is our intelligence and rationality. This is a debated topic among theologians, some arguing that the noetic effects of sin relate moreso to our moral nature than our cognitive. While sin impacts us for the worse, I believe it is still warranted to claim that the laws of logic (principles of correct reasoning) are not impacted. This means to me that these laws remain cognitively necessary, ontologically real, and irrefutable. Again, I caution here that I am not advocating that the laws of logic can bring about a proper relationship with God. Indeed, we require God's grace to soften our hearts, illuminate our minds, and incline our wills to believe.
We are finite creatures, so unlike God, we have limitations in our essence, our being, with regard to knowledge and rational comprehension. This means that pure rationalism (all things can be discovered through human reasoning) is impossible. We may know things, but we cannot know things as God knows things.
Despite the claims of some believers with good intentions of defending the faith, who argue that faith is a "leap", I claim our faith involves knowledge and is compatible with reason. (1) There is an objective source and foundation for knowledge, reason, and rationality--a personal and rational God. (2) Christian truth claims do not violate the basic laws and principles of reason. (3) Scripture teaches us to seek knowledge, wisdom, understanding, and the values of discernment, testing, and reflection are promoted in Scripture. (4) The truths of our faith also correspond to and are supported by evidence, facts, and reason.
A resource, written at a level for all persons, is Kenneth Samples' book, A World of Difference: Putting Christian Truth-Claims to the Worldview Test. Also recommended is Samples' Without A Doubt: Answering the 20 Toughest Faith Questions, both books from which I am indebted to in the discussion given above.
Digging deeper...
God and I know that my house exists, but I certainly do not know of that existence to the same extent that God knows. Our knowledge is derivative. The distinction here is between the archetype and the ectype. God's knowledge is archetypal, the original, ours is ectypal. Our ectypal knowledge is true, but analogical to what God knows. God speaks univocally, and sadly, sinful persons frequently speak equivocally, rather than analogically (thinking God's thoughts after him).
I use analogical in the way of the reformed tradition, which distinguished between God's archetypal (original) and man's ectypal (derivative) knowledge. This was not a matter of much debate until Kant, when some theologians started to buy into epistemological skepticism--that we cannot genuinely know things.
By analogy, I mean our knowledge is parallel to God's knowledge but that knowledge does not intersect God's knowledge, contra Aquinas, and even some modern era theologians. Our derivative knowledge is finite, creaturely, but true knowledge--properly justified true beliefs--as previously stated. In no way is our knowledge univocal, e.g., 1 Cor. 2:11. That not mean our knowledge is equivocal, which would have us believing things contradictorially. We may and do speak equivocally, but we should speak analogically.
Bavinck, in Reformed Dogmatics, volume 1, writes:
For example.
God is a person.
Is God exactly a person as we are? No.
The predicate "person" does not mean the same exact thing to God and man. Not univocal. God is a person here in an analogical sense, just as Scripture describes Him. We need to not misuse the word "univocal" where we end up watering it down or ignoring its import on theological matters.
God has condescended to man in Scripture, and uses human analogies that hold our hands to understand his revelation. This analogical language in all of Scripture uses correct analogies, for God chose them and it is God's speech in human language, but they are not univocal descriptions. Claims to univocity usually end up in rationalism, holding that we possess autonomous knowledge, and even denial of mystery in Scripture. The Reformed tradition does not pull out the "analogy" card when it suits them, but instead declares that all of Scripture is analogical, as a necessary aspect of the Creator-created distinction. God is not greater than man in degree only. God is in a whole separate category and what God knows about himself and anything else is qualitatively (and quantitatively, of course)different from what we know.
I am well aware of the arguments of modern era proponents that argue against analogy, often while misunderstanding the nature of the topic, and even unwittingly (and no doubt to theuir dismay) joining the chorus of open theists in their argumentation. For example, Pinnock, Sanders, Henry, G. Clark, and Nash immediately come to mind, all of whom have argued at one point or another that we can know things univocally from Scripture. This sort of thinking gives rise to the humanistic views we see way too often about God, especially in open theism. Apparently, some are unwilling to accept a plain didactic that God is above, we are below, and God's thoughts are not our thoughts. The Reformers of old understood this ontological divide between the Creator and the created, making a clear distinction in God's and our knowledge, archetypal-ectypal as an epistemological ground.
The Reformed view has always been that since it is God who selects the analogies, they are accurate and appropriate whether or not we know their exact fit. The Reformers argued, why do we need what we cannot possibly have, archetypal knowledge of God? Nash would have it that God has revealed His being in the abstract as knowable, despite no evidence in Scripture. Instead, in Scripture we find analogical descriptions of God's virtues and excellencies, but no access to His nature. God's being is never discussed in Scripture outside of His attributes. Nash and others confuse the literal with the univocal. The Reformed rightly understand the Scriptural predications of various attributes of God are literal but analogical. Scripture exists to reconcile ourselves to God, not to satisfy our curiosities, as Calvin frequently cautioned in line with Scriptures own cautions.
Extract from Dictionary of Theological Terms entry on "Epistemology":
God is the constitutive Creator and interpreter of the facts of the universe. Man can be only a re-interpreter. Man's highest achievement is to think God’s thoughts after Him. That is the true use of analogy—to think of things as God does.
One more, from Van Til in his Survey of Christian Epistemology:
Reality is the way things really are, independent of human subjective experience and man-made conventions. This reality does not rule out the need for subjective application of truth in one's life. In other words, truth is discovered, not invented.
I am not implying that man knows all truth perfectly or does not have to work very hard at comprehending it. Anyone denying the reality of truth has made a self-defeating statement.
What we know is directly connected to God's revelation. We can exercise our God-given rational capacities, through empirical observation, including science, and from understanding and reflecting upon God's unique propositional revelation--Scripture. Whether one is a rationalist (priority to reason) or an empiricist (priority to the five senses), we can trust that properly functioning senses or reasoning minds because God serves as the necessary epistemological ground of both.
At this point we may ask, "What is knowledge?"
Knowledge is properly justified true belief.
Examine the statement in reverse.
belief - No one can know something unless he or she believes it. E.g., we cannot know Jesus is Lord unless we believe it.
true - We can only know things that are true. A person may think he knows something to be true, but, in fact, be wrong. Or a person may know of something false that is indeed false. But this person can only actually and authentically know something if it is indeed true.
justified - We can believe something to be true, that is in fact true, but this would not constitute knowledge if it lacks a proper justification. E.g.,, a wild guess that ends up being correct would not be knowledge, for knowledge involves some sort of confirmation or evidence, that is, proper justification. Here I speak of what philosophers call foundationalism. (A portion of my seven years in seminary were devoted to studying philosophical theology, sometimes callednatural theology). From foundationalism, we may claim that beliefs that stand on their own without appealing to other convictions for justification are called properly basic beliefs. For me, beliefs are properly basic when they are either self-evident (true on the face of it), logically necessary, inescapable, or incorrigible (expressing an immediate state of consciousness).
So we can state that knowledge means believing what is true with proper justification.
Despite the preceding we must recognize that man's knowledge is limited and affected by sin. Our noetic (cognitive and/or belief forming) faculties are to some degree impaired by sin and thus, so is our intelligence and rationality. This is a debated topic among theologians, some arguing that the noetic effects of sin relate moreso to our moral nature than our cognitive. While sin impacts us for the worse, I believe it is still warranted to claim that the laws of logic (principles of correct reasoning) are not impacted. This means to me that these laws remain cognitively necessary, ontologically real, and irrefutable. Again, I caution here that I am not advocating that the laws of logic can bring about a proper relationship with God. Indeed, we require God's grace to soften our hearts, illuminate our minds, and incline our wills to believe.
We are finite creatures, so unlike God, we have limitations in our essence, our being, with regard to knowledge and rational comprehension. This means that pure rationalism (all things can be discovered through human reasoning) is impossible. We may know things, but we cannot know things as God knows things.
Despite the claims of some believers with good intentions of defending the faith, who argue that faith is a "leap", I claim our faith involves knowledge and is compatible with reason. (1) There is an objective source and foundation for knowledge, reason, and rationality--a personal and rational God. (2) Christian truth claims do not violate the basic laws and principles of reason. (3) Scripture teaches us to seek knowledge, wisdom, understanding, and the values of discernment, testing, and reflection are promoted in Scripture. (4) The truths of our faith also correspond to and are supported by evidence, facts, and reason.
A resource, written at a level for all persons, is Kenneth Samples' book, A World of Difference: Putting Christian Truth-Claims to the Worldview Test. Also recommended is Samples' Without A Doubt: Answering the 20 Toughest Faith Questions, both books from which I am indebted to in the discussion given above.
Digging deeper...
God and I know that my house exists, but I certainly do not know of that existence to the same extent that God knows. Our knowledge is derivative. The distinction here is between the archetype and the ectype. God's knowledge is archetypal, the original, ours is ectypal. Our ectypal knowledge is true, but analogical to what God knows. God speaks univocally, and sadly, sinful persons frequently speak equivocally, rather than analogically (thinking God's thoughts after him).
I use analogical in the way of the reformed tradition, which distinguished between God's archetypal (original) and man's ectypal (derivative) knowledge. This was not a matter of much debate until Kant, when some theologians started to buy into epistemological skepticism--that we cannot genuinely know things.
By analogy, I mean our knowledge is parallel to God's knowledge but that knowledge does not intersect God's knowledge, contra Aquinas, and even some modern era theologians. Our derivative knowledge is finite, creaturely, but true knowledge--properly justified true beliefs--as previously stated. In no way is our knowledge univocal, e.g., 1 Cor. 2:11. That not mean our knowledge is equivocal, which would have us believing things contradictorially. We may and do speak equivocally, but we should speak analogically.
Bavinck, in Reformed Dogmatics, volume 1, writes:
- Our knowledge of God is the imprint of the knowledge God has of himself but always on a creaturely level and in a creaturely way. The knowledge of God present in his creatures is only a weak likeness, a finite, limited sketch, of the absolute self-consciousness of God accommodated to the capacities of the human or creaturely consciousness. [Src: Herman Bavinck, John Bolt and John Vriend, Reformed Dogmatics, Volume 1: Prolegomena (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003). 212.]
- In earlier times, therefore, the archetypal knowledge of God was occasionally restricted to the part of the self-knowledge of God that he had decided to communicate to creatures. But this distinction makes the revelation between archetypal and the ectypal knowledge of God into a mechanical one and ignores the fact that absoluteness consists not only in quantity but also in quality. Still, the distinction contains the true idea that the ectypal knowledge of God that is granted to creatures by revelation is not the absolute self-knowledge of God but the knowledge of God as it has been accommodated to and made fit for the finite consciousness—hence anthropomorphized. This ectypal knowledge of God, which lies objectively before us in revelation, is external but intended to be transferred into the consciousness of rational creatures to become ectypal internal knowledge of God, knowledge of God in the subject. [Src: Herman Bavinck, John Bolt and John Vriend, Reformed Dogmatics, Volume 1: Prolegomena (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003). 214.]
For example.
God is a person.
Is God exactly a person as we are? No.
The predicate "person" does not mean the same exact thing to God and man. Not univocal. God is a person here in an analogical sense, just as Scripture describes Him. We need to not misuse the word "univocal" where we end up watering it down or ignoring its import on theological matters.
God has condescended to man in Scripture, and uses human analogies that hold our hands to understand his revelation. This analogical language in all of Scripture uses correct analogies, for God chose them and it is God's speech in human language, but they are not univocal descriptions. Claims to univocity usually end up in rationalism, holding that we possess autonomous knowledge, and even denial of mystery in Scripture. The Reformed tradition does not pull out the "analogy" card when it suits them, but instead declares that all of Scripture is analogical, as a necessary aspect of the Creator-created distinction. God is not greater than man in degree only. God is in a whole separate category and what God knows about himself and anything else is qualitatively (and quantitatively, of course)different from what we know.
I am well aware of the arguments of modern era proponents that argue against analogy, often while misunderstanding the nature of the topic, and even unwittingly (and no doubt to theuir dismay) joining the chorus of open theists in their argumentation. For example, Pinnock, Sanders, Henry, G. Clark, and Nash immediately come to mind, all of whom have argued at one point or another that we can know things univocally from Scripture. This sort of thinking gives rise to the humanistic views we see way too often about God, especially in open theism. Apparently, some are unwilling to accept a plain didactic that God is above, we are below, and God's thoughts are not our thoughts. The Reformers of old understood this ontological divide between the Creator and the created, making a clear distinction in God's and our knowledge, archetypal-ectypal as an epistemological ground.
The Reformed view has always been that since it is God who selects the analogies, they are accurate and appropriate whether or not we know their exact fit. The Reformers argued, why do we need what we cannot possibly have, archetypal knowledge of God? Nash would have it that God has revealed His being in the abstract as knowable, despite no evidence in Scripture. Instead, in Scripture we find analogical descriptions of God's virtues and excellencies, but no access to His nature. God's being is never discussed in Scripture outside of His attributes. Nash and others confuse the literal with the univocal. The Reformed rightly understand the Scriptural predications of various attributes of God are literal but analogical. Scripture exists to reconcile ourselves to God, not to satisfy our curiosities, as Calvin frequently cautioned in line with Scriptures own cautions.
Extract from Dictionary of Theological Terms entry on "Epistemology":
- A consistently Christian epistemology recognizes the ontological Trinity* as the ultimate starting point of all knowledge. It sees all the universe as God’s creation and holds that no fact of creation can be properly described without reference to God the Creator. In other words, every fact must be recognized as a created fact, or it cannot be properly recognized at all.
Thus, man’s thinking cannot be creative, but analogical (see [entry] "Analogy"). If he is to speak truly, man must say what God has already said. The triune God who has given us the Bible as His infallible revelation must be the ultimate starting point of all our knowledge. That is not to say that the Bible must become our source book for the study of, say, biochemistry or physics, but it is to say that all investigation into these and all other subjects must be interpreted in the light of the Bible.
God is the constitutive Creator and interpreter of the facts of the universe. Man can be only a re-interpreter. Man's highest achievement is to think God’s thoughts after Him. That is the true use of analogy—to think of things as God does.
One more, from Van Til in his Survey of Christian Epistemology:
- The necessity of reasoning analogically is always implied in the theistic conception of God. If God is to be thought of at all as necessary for man’s interpretation of the facts or objects of knowledge, he must be thought of as being determinative of the objects of knowledge. In other words, he must then be thought of as the only ultimate interpreter, and man must be thought of as a finite reinterpreter. Since, then, the absolute self-consciousness of God is the final interpreter of all facts, man’s knowledge is analogical of God’s knowledge. Since all finite facts exist by virtue of the interpretation of God, man’s interpretation of the finite facts is ultimately dependent upon God’s interpretation of the facts. Man cannot, except to his own hurt, look at the facts without looking at God’s interpretation of the facts. Man’s knowledge of the facts is then a reinterpretation of God’s interpretation. It is this that is meant by saying that man’s knowledge is analogical of God’s knowledge.
- If we were to draw a large rectangle to represent God’s knowledge of everything and place a tiny point somewhere in it to represent man’s little knowledge, would we not have to say that at least at that small point man’s knowledge coincides with God’s?
At first sight it would appear so, but it is only an initial appearance. On closer examination we find a different answer. Imagine that rectangle again, only this time imagine it to be a million miles deep. Imagine that the point we have placed within it is one millionth part of a millimeter deep.
Then imagine that through all the depth of the rectangle there are countless lines of connection relating God’s knowledge of every point to His knowledge of everything else. Now look at our isolated little point of human knowledge, ignorant of the infinite connections that unite all of God’s purpose in the works of creation and providence.
That point may in some way be like, or related to, the great rectangle in which we have placed it, but it is certainly not identical with it. In fact, what is true in geometry is true in theology, a point can never be identical with a rectangle. What this says is that God does not have any isolated points of knowledge. His knowledge of every point is, to use the language of our illustration, the whole rectangle. His knowledge of everything at every point is omniscience. As a point in a rectangle can never be identical with the rectangle, so our knowledge can never be identical with God’s. And yet it clearly stands related to God’s knowledge and expresses it in some degree.
