God"(27). Do we or do we not know God's essence, then? Sanders cannot seem to
decide. Further withdrawing whatever allowance he has given to these distinctions,
Sanders later adds,
correspondence between God and the creation, and this will preclude any notions of creation or
revelation...If `the finite cannot comprehend the infinite,' then all revelation of God in history, any
incarnation, the possibility of a personal relationship with God and all knowledge of God within our
existence are ruled out. The concept of God becomes Teflon to which no predicates will stick (29).
But once more, such fears assume that analogical knowledge is not true or accurate
knowledge; that the inability of creatures to comprehend (i.e., "fully contain") the
infinite, necessarily entails no apprehension of God on his own terms (i.e.,
revelation).
is "wholly other" nor that he is "wholly like" anything in creation apart from the
incarnate person of Jesus Christ. We do not believe that God is "completely ineffable,"
because he has revealed himself in scripture and supremely in his Son.
Conclusions
Notwithstanding arguments to the contrary, in truth God remains a mysterium
tremendum--truly given in, yet transcending, his own self-revelation. In scripture we are
introduced to a divine drama in which God is tacitly recognized as the playwright but is
focally known as the central, though not sole, actor. Pinnock demands, "Why does it
lacks predicates and what has no predicates has no existence: `The distinction between what God is in
himself, and what he is for me destroys the peace of religion, and is...an untenable distinction. I cannot
know whether God is something else in himself or for himself than he is for me'"(30).
But, I would submit, the very opposite is the case. Kant denied any constitutive knowledge of God--
univocal or analogical. Rationalism, on the other hand, has maintained the possibility of a pure intellectual
vision of eternal forms. The result was that analogies and anthropomorphisms were often ascribed
univocally, which Feuerbach correctly took to be nothing more than a projection of human attributes onto a
non-existent referent. Is this not precisely what open theism tends toward?
testimony, confirmed by the Holy Spirit, that God has given the world his supreme self-revelation in Christ,
whose Godhead remains incomprehensible even in the Incarnation. See the Chalcedonian Creed in John H.
Leith, ed., Creeds of the Churches (Atlanta: John Knox, 1982), 34-6. Also, it seems that Sanders is
requiring nothing less than what Feuerbach demanded: If I cannot have univocal (autonomous) knowledge
of the fit between predicates and reality; if I must rely on the God who is hidden in incomprehensible
majesty to condescend to address me, I cannot have true knowledge. The significant difference between
Sanders and Feuerbach is that the latter surrendered belief in God altogether, while the latter surrenders the
distinction between God's archetypal knowledge (known intuitively) and our ectypal knowledge (mediated
through scripture). Both views rest on the assumption that only if one possesses a God's-eye perspective
himself or herself is one entitled to claim epistemic certitude. This is the tragic legacy of the
Enlightenment.