A Book Review from Books At a Glance
by Ryan M. McGraw
We are made in God’s image, he is not made in ours. Using language that we can understand, God reveals himself to us through analogies. In fact, all language about God is analogical, and Richard St. Victor and the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) have well said, whenever there is likeness between us and God, there is more unlikeness than likeness. Too often, however, we think that God is altogether like we are (Ps. 50:21). If the Bible says that God has feet, eyes, hands, and a mouth, then he must. If he “repents” of his ways (Gen. 6:6; 1 Sam. 15:11), then he must himself change, even though he tells us that he does not (Num. 23:19; 1 Sam. 15:29; Mal. 3:6; Jas. 1:17; Heb. 13:8). The issue is whether mankind is analogous to God, or God is analogous to mankind. If we are analogous to God, then God is the unique original and we are the approximate imperfect copies. Yet if God is analogous to us, then whatever we say about humanity must be equally true about God, only bigger and better. Modern thought makes God like humanity, but biblical thought makes humans like divinity. Remembering that God is in a category of his own, incomprehensible and dwelling in “light unapproachable” (1 Tim. 6:16), humbles and chastens our speech about God, putting us in our places by keeping God in his. God is incomprehensible and our speech about him is approximate only.
In seven chapters, Ronni Kurtz helpfully investigates the biblical and classical foundations of divine incomprehensibility, showing its importance and pastoral use for the church, especially respecting her theological method. One important refrain is that divine incomprehensibility is a revealed doctrine (e.g., 16-17, 55, 136, 186), making our knowledge of God at once limited and true. He also urges readers to avoid both “theological despair and theological idolatry” (19) in searching out the God of Scripture, speaking about him rightly though never exhaustively. Kurtz both aims to retrieve the classic doctrine of divine incompressibility and to offer readers a positive construction of the doctrine (25). After addressing potential tensions in the biblical narrative related to divine incomprehensibility and knowability, Kurtz draws incomprehensibility from the declarations, demonstrations, and demands of biblical texts (39). He reminds readers well that incomprehensibility is “itself not a perfection” of God (49), but rather a qualifier for everything we say about God. After surveying multiple authors in the historical section, most notably John Chrysostom, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Thomas Aquinas, among others, Kurtz appeals to Herman Bavinck as representing the kind of balanced approach to incomprehensibility that he is looking for (109). Bavinck balances well both negations about the divine being (apophatic theology) with affirmations concerning what we know about God (cataphatic theology).
Constituting the book’s core aim, the final three chapters shift towards three constructive uses of incomprehensibility in relation to theological method. Chapter five locates incomprehensibility in the Creator-creature distinction (25-26) to avoid making God relative to creation. This material envelops the important bearing divine incomprehensibility has on the beatific vision (128-134), with special emphasis on Exodus 33-34 as showing God’s knowability and incomprehensibility in Moses’ vision of God (129). In terms of divine “accommodation,” enabling us to apprehend God without comprehending him, chapter six usefully explains classic categories of anthromorophism, anthropopathism, and anthropochronism (140-148). These terms mean that Scripture speaks of God by way of imperfect analogies by way of human forms, passions, and time bound references. He summaries, “Because the creature is corporeal, God accommodates through anthropomorphism; because the creature is passionate, God accommodates through anthropopathism; because the creature is temporal, God accommodates through anthropochronism” (141). To these he adds classic Reformed terms like archetypal and ectypal theology. Chapter seven then drives home the entire book, arguing that theological humility is “not a mere virtue,” but it is an “ontological necessity” (169). Borrowing from Matthew Levering to stress the need for humility and prayer in theology, he notes that we need “the limp of Jacob, the awe of Moses” as we seek God through Scripture (180). Ten theses on incomprehensibility and a collection of the charts scattered throughout the book follow in two appendices, facilitating ease of reference for his main points. Given the book’s title and content, it would have been useful to add material both on Christ’s transfiguration and Protestant (and Jewish) reasoning against images of the Godhead. Yet Kurtz’s material is theologically robust, devotionally satisfying, and clearly and persuasively presented.
We cannot comprehend God, but we can apprehend, or lay hold of him (e.g., 106, 171). We cannot grasp God, though he is not beyond our reach. We never know God exhaustively, though we know him truly, through his Son, and in his Spirit. God is always beyond us, though “he is not far from every one of us” (Acts 17:27). This superb book instills humble prayerful confidence is our present knowledge of God, self-consciously failing to satisfy us fully as we look to seeing God in glory. It usually presses believers into thinking more deeply and devoutly about the kind of God we worship and serve.
Ryan McGraw
Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary