#160 – Infinite & Incomprehensible
Knowing Faith
The Incomprehensibility of God
The point of the Bible or any revelation is that we would know who God is. The incomprehensibility of God does not suggest God can't be known. It's just that He cannot be known exhaustively.
Jen Wilkin, JT English, and Kyle Worley discuss what it means that God is infinite and incomprehensible.
Questions Covered in This Episode:
- What do we mean by “the attributes of God?”
- What is the difference between incommunicable and communicable attributes?
- What do we mean by “God is infinite?”
- What does it mean that God is incomprehensible?
- Why is this not a problem? What if there is a hidden part of God that I don’t know about, and it’s not good?
- Why is it good news that God is infinite and incomprehensible?
Helpful Definitions:
- Attribute: Something that is true about God, who he is.
- Incommunicable Attribute: Things that are true about God, that are only true of God and are not true of anyone else.
- Communicable Attribute: Things that are true about God, that can also become true of us.
- Infinite: No limit of any kind.
- Omnipotent: All powerful.
- Omniscient: All things are known effortlessly and instantly.
- Revelation: The self-disclosure of God. God Himself is the sole and proper witness to himself.
- General Revelation: God reveals his divine attributes in the world.
- Special Revelation: God reveals who He is in the Word of God incarnate and the Word of God inscripturated.
- Incomprehensible: Not able to be fully understood.
- Apophatic (Negative) Theology: We cannot in language or in knowledge know or rightly articulate the perfect goodness of the nature and character of God. So a more adequate solution than to use words that fail to describe who and what God is, is to use words that describe what he is not.
- Gnosticism: A heresy that plagued the early church. One of the main teachings of Gnosticism was that all physical matter is evil and all spiritual and immaterial things are good. Therefore, the Gnostic view of life was that death would free of us from the physical evil we can’t escape. Gnostics taught that after death, humans left their earthly bodies behind and enjoyed an immortal, spiritual presence with God.
Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
- Acts 17:24-28, Psalm 139:6, 17-18, Psalm 90:2, 1 Corinthians 2:10, John 17:3
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