Beeson podcast, Episode 435
Katherine Sonderegger
March 12, 2019

Announcer:          Welcome to the Beeson podcast coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George.

Timothy George:     Welcome to today's Beeson podcast. This is the podcast of the month where we listen to a lecture, and our lecture today is by Doctor Katherine Sonderegge. She is the William Meade Chair in systematic theology at Virginia theological seminary. She's an Episcopalian priest, She has a PHD from Brown University, a DMAN and an STM from Yale University, she's written a number of very important books in theology, that Jesus Christ was born a Jew, Carl Barks, doctrine of Israel and systematic theology, the first volume of which on the doctrine of God has recently been published. She's working on completing that series now.

Timothy George:     This lecture was given at the Carl F.H. Henry Center at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School October the 25th 2018. It's titled Right Reason, Fallen Reason. Listen to Dr. Sonderegger as she takes us into this very important mine stretching topic of Christian faith. Right Reason, Fallen Reason. Dr. Katherine Sonderegger.

K. Sonderegger:     Thank you Tom for that loving and encouraging word in due season. I had a chance to speak with Tom before we opened this session and agreed that a word of prayer would also be a fitting and lovely way to start. The Lord be with you.

Audience:           Also with you.

K. Sonderegger:     Let us pray, Oh God, you are the origin and source of all wisdom and of all truth. You are yourself wisdom and truth. Be with us and our intellect and our heart and mind as we search after you and May this time together in speaking and hearing be always in tribute and honor of you and may you instruct us so that we can learn after you and your son who is the living word and living truth, come down to earth. In his name and following his holy way we pray, Amen.

K. Sonderegger:     This morning I want to reflect with you on this first and the events that stand behind it from the gospel of John. In the supper discourses, our Lord says, “And this is eternal life, to know the one true God and Jesus Christ whom thou has sent.” The night has now descended, Judas has gone out to do that which he must do and that quickly, but he is not alone in this work of the night. Peter too will enter the night and join denial to Judases betrayal in the night. Thomas has confessed that he does not know the way Jesus has traveled these long months towards Jerusalem and Philip will disclose that in this darkness he has still not seen the father, though he be manifested day by day and the person and works of the one he has sent.

K. Sonderegger:     Betrayal, denial, confusion, and ignorance, all these the gospel tells us are the works of the night. As the world's light, Jesus stands in the midst of the night sanctifying himself in the prayer for his disciples that marks him as priest in the act of final self offering. At the heart of this high priestly prayer, Jesus confirms his own vocation as life giver and defines for the disciples, for us, the life eternal which he bestows. This is eternal life, to know the one true God and Jesus Christ whom thou has sent.

K. Sonderegger:     The problem that often goes antiseptically by the title theological epistemology, should properly be anchored in the testimony John, the evangelist records. Knowledge of God leads to life eternal and it is shadowed by ignorance, by denial and betrayal, most especially by those devoted to the Lord. This twin structure of knowledge and denial outlines the task of the Christian theological anthropology. On one hand, in this locus, we aim to set forth how knowledge of God is possible, how that is the human nature we study and bear can truly attain the knowledge that is the creature's blessing and perfection, the knowledge of divine reality that is our highest stand, our richest possession.

K. Sonderegger:     But this task cannot stand alone. It's shadow and it's parody, the deeply human states of ignorance and confusion, the sinful states of denial and betrayal also belong to a proper theological epistemology. For the Holy Gospels tell us that our human condition is made for God and finds its deepest humanity, its fullest freedom there. All our knowledge at base and in the end leads to this one ideal, the super abundant, luminous thought of God. Yet, the same gospels tell us more, that the knowledge, which is our possibility and our perfection enacts another inexplicable possibility, the denial and disowning of the one truth that our intellect was made for. It seems then that the human creature exemplifies two possibilities, knowledge and denial of the one thing needful, the one eternal health of the mortal mind.

K. Sonderegger:     We know and do not know the Lord God who made us. Now, how can such things be? I want here to consider the odd and alien position we are in as creatures of the good God. How is it that our hearts and minds can be fashioned for God? That we can truly know our Lord, that we can think this thought and enter into this joy, this eternal joy, yet at once deny belittle an unthink it, our own best stand. By almost any account of knowledge, this should be impossible, a cognitive impossibility in the same rank as the classical trisectored angle or the squared circle. A deep puzzlement should overspread us when we consider the human person and its actions toward it's God.

K. Sonderegger:     The Creator has made us to know one thought above all and we can know it, yet against our own happiness and liberty we do not know it and scorn and trivialize and passive by on the other side as we stride piously toward the temple. As Kelvin noted so acutely, adultery is the act of drawing near to God in order to inwardly flee him. It is as though we opened our eyes on the loveliest of scenes, saw it, and then look to way, indeed denied we ever knew it. Students of Anselm will recognize the proper source of this analogy, this is a chasm opening up in the very structure and coherence of theological anthropology and knowledge. It is a radical disorder in our intellect that cannot be repaired by an ordinary appeal to the philosophical doctrine known as fallible wisdom.

K. Sonderegger:     This may surprise because it appears at first glance as if fallibilism were designed in its very contours to handle a riddle of the kind I have posed here, a fallabilist and epistemology holes that human knowledge is compatible with error. I can believe I know something, but in fact I am wrong, I can make mistakes even about elements I think I know well, I can misunderstand the grounds on which I know such things, I can be deceived even in my certainties. Fallibilism, that is, can come in varying degrees, affirming the possibility of error from particular facts and theories to widespread explanations of human affairs, our so called master narratives, to the foundations, we have considered certain self evident and undeniable.

K. Sonderegger:     Everyone that is consigned up for fallible at some from the modest student who knows she does not know everything to the relativist or nihilist who knows we know nothing at all. Even the high priest of rationalism, Rene Descartes could subscribe to a certain attenuated form of fallibilism. He knew that we could slumber even after our vigorous application of proper method and our creaturely will could lead us to slovenly forgetfulness, prizing semblances over the crisp security of the clear and distinct idea. All of this might lead us to proclaim our problem solved. We can know and do know the only true God, but we can also be wrong.

K. Sonderegger:     We can misunderstand his nature or commandments, we can forget what we looked like in the mirror of his law, we can think we know God and rest in that certainty, yet in truth, we know nothing but an idol, a thing made by hands. All this sounds human and humane, indeed, it would be hard to find a thoughtful or reasonable person who did not know that she or he could be mistaken. It seems the first mark of a charlatan, that everything is known, everything explained. Fallibilism preserves the proper humility of a human creature of God knowing the world in this temporal and partial way, even in its highest preserves, yet not knowing reality as does our God, perfectly, holy and without shadow of turning or of error.

K. Sonderegger:     Why should we not extend this deeply humane vision of our limited and modest scope to the knowledge of God? Why should we not say that even in our highest thought, perhaps especially there, we could stand in the wrong? Perhaps would I have called a deep riddle is not one at all, but merely the most familiar of any human being, that any human being can enter a knower who makes mistakes. Sadly, I do not believe that this ancient and wise and decent answer can actually unknot the enigma that overspreads our human lot. This because the object of human knowledge, the object who is God, is utterly, surpassingly unique.

K. Sonderegger:     The idea of God is not like any other and his luminous reality does not belong in any class or kind or genus as Saint Thomas said long ago. Students of epistemology will notice that this is an odd reason indeed for me to deny fallibilism as conceptual answer to our riddle for it has been an honorable part of our Christian tradition to say that precisely because God is transcendent, utterly one, utterly unique, human intellects cannot know God fully or infallibly or comprehensively.

K. Sonderegger:     Indeed, the entire apathetic tradition in theology has borrowed a leaf from fallibilism. With this object, if nowhere else it is said, we can know only in part and that in a glass darkly. We are not comprehenders, to borrow a term from the scholastic tradition. God may be known by us, but not comprehended, not fully embraced and analyzed by the power of our minds. God cannot be known by creatures, Thomas says, from first principles as though he were a theorem or deduction. His essence, Thomas says in some texts and at some seasons, cannot be known in this life. All this makes fallibilism sound like the most natural companion to theological epistemology and the most ready explanation for our woeful misunderstanding and defiance of this our truest and highest thought.

K. Sonderegger:     But I believe in fact that God's unshakeable aseity, his utter unicity and transcendence makes fallibilism and unlikely contender as solvent to our stubborn ignorance of God. This is because knowledge of God in virtue of his radical aseity does not enter into our domain of cognition as do the creaturely objects of thought. This is not to say that God cannot become objects, certainly not, it is a central ineluctable element in theological epistemology to affirm that almighty God can become an object to our intellect. The produring and explosives subjectivity of God, they all field expression of God as I am, does not erase or supersede his objectivity. Indeed, it is just his transcendent reality as subject that makes his objectivity possible for our creaturely minds.

K. Sonderegger:     This is to affirm with Bard, that God remains subject even or intensively in his objectivity. So we may say after all the noisy warfare over subject and object and knowledge of God that the reason fallibilism will not resolve our riddle about divine knowledge cannot rest upon problems of objectivity and knowledge, here I part with condecisively, rather it rests upon the tail tailors or goal for which this particular knowledge exists. Before I expound upon this notion of theological knowledge is tallos. Let me turn more deeply to the anthropological foundations for fallibilism that motivate the whole program.

K. Sonderegger:     Consider for example the customary warrants for fallibilism, it is usually argued that human beings are not infallible because that trade is not given to human nature and it's intellect. The human creature is finite, it's cognitive structure limited and mortal. Now, if you are a thinker like me, you'd say fervently just so, I know none better that I have severe limits and my scope, perspicuity, and depth of my very human intellect. It is a knowledge of creaturehood that is, that makes fallible ism persuasive. The object of knowledge is known Thomas says, according to the of the knower.

K. Sonderegger:     We know those things, that it is possible for such creatures as we to know through our senses or through our rationality, through empiricism or rationalism, we need not decide here between them and that some is finite. We cannot know, cannot comprehend, cannot recall everything, and our judgment is fallible in just this sense, our little lives are rounded by asleep. Notice here that fallibilism is a doctrine built up out of recognition of human anthropology. Our minds work in this limited and frail manner and even those things we know with certainty, the principles of logic or of mathematics say, are not limitless, nor do they warrant even for Descartes, a claim that our knowledge is without error.

K. Sonderegger:     The motive the knower, Thomas argues, determines the manner and scope of our knowledge and that is finitude, fallibilism is an anthropological or creaturely claim of this kind. We might extend this reflection about the grounds for the fallibility of human thought by considering the great disturbance of the 19th century, the eruption of historical thinking in the programmatic study of culture in Western Europe. Historical consciousness as this movement was often termed, did not simply refer to a human knowledge of it's past, the history of a nation or people, or the development of a geological pattern on the earth.

K. Sonderegger:     This may have served the brave intellects of the German enlightenment, the off Claire, but it could not meet the demands of the radical historic cysts of the 19th century. In this form of late modernism, historical thinking became the primary form or nature of creaturely cognition itself. History was now seen as the mode of human knowing, not simply its content, and the framework of all historical awareness is change. The becoming and passing away of movements, lives, institutions, laws, are the expression of a mind structured by mutability, by change. We might put it this way, history is no longer simply the term for past cultures, it is not outside us, but rather within. We are history and our minds are history as cognition.

K. Sonderegger:     This we might consider a form of pure rationalism, now under the conditions of historicity. This kind of radical historicity clearly permeates through the borders of our skin, our very creature hood is now historicized. This leads to a particular form of fallibilism in much modern theology. Historical consciousness is limited certainly, we know and can know only so much about the past, and even more so about ourselves, but it is also ambiguous. Historical thinking does not arrive at deductive conclusions, it does not offer demonstrations as do the workings of logical syllogisms, it does not spring from clear and distinct ideas. Indeed, it is not transparent here that there can be foundations in the epistemic sense, in historical thinking at all.

K. Sonderegger:     Rather, the thought of history is the living awareness of the opacity, obscurity, and the riddle of all human becoming. This is not a radical skepticism, historians of the school do not deny the possibility of knowledge, rather the form of historical knowledge assumes ... rather the form historical knowledge assumes is that of the temporal creature itself, the welter of drives and passions and hopes that animate us, the larger than life dynamics of the peoples and institutions that surround us, the profound uncertainty of causes and aims that underlie our great human endeavors from the outbreak of war to the development of the Sonnet or linear perspective. Each generation, each scholar makes history of fresh because we simply cannot penetrate to the very bottom of temporal becoming. We cannot master our own inwardness.

K. Sonderegger:     This form of historical thinking caused a particular soul sickness in Christian reflection upon the life of Jesus of Nazareth, the one who injured our history and became also an earthly creature within it. In the midst of upheavals throughout Europe in the 19th century, theology too was shaken by this radical form of historicism. Jesus Christ became an historical figure, he became the subject of study under the description of the historical Jesus. It is no discovery of today that this development puts special strain on the Christian confidence about its Lord. “What now could be known of him,” this generation asked and what known with joyful reliability.

K. Sonderegger:     I do not need to rehearse for anyone in this room the melancholy struggles, Albert Schweitzer records so fully in his literary Tour de Force, the quest of the historical Jesus, our quest here after all is not history as content, which details of Jesus's earthly life can be known, which cannot or must not or must be denied should such there be, nor how the relation of holy scripture to historical study must be adjudicated or reconciled. Rather, we are considering here how historical thinking as a mode of human knowing will affect the proper knowledge of the one true God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent.

K. Sonderegger:     We have to reckon with the possibility that knowledge of the one who is sent will be governed now by this mode, the ambiguity, the uncertainty, and fallibilism of historical consciousness. An entire generation of dogmaticians fell under the spell. From the young Bard to Tilak in all seasons of his long career, to Boltman and his many disciples, the radical nature of historical thinking impinged directly on the Christians knowledge of the earthly Jesus. What was obstacle to an earlier generation became a strength. 20th century Protestant dogmaticians held that the historical dimension of the incarnate Lord could not be known fully or with certainty.

K. Sonderegger:     Indeed, for some disciples of Boltman or Tilak, he could not be known at all. More radical still was the claim that the earthly flesh of Jesus Christ was a barrier to knowledge of the son of God. Jesus Christ in virtue of his historical existence was the hidden God, history blinded our eyes to the deity in our midst. In the searing second addition to his commentary on Romans, the young Bard can speak powerfully, hauntingly, of a Jesus who slips from view submerged into the flux of historical change, a historical figure unplumbed an unheralded by historical knowing.

K. Sonderegger:     It seems that historical consciousness has given us a form of fallibilism that radicalizes the puzzle we are here exploring. It seems that a human mind that is saturated by movement and change, structured by it, can see in an earthly figure only the shadows and traces of knowledge. He comes to us as Schweitzer plainfully wrote, as one unknown, so historical fallibilism appears to answer to at least one pole of our dilemma. According to its cannons, W=we cannot know the one whom God has sent, just because he was sent just because he became that is an earthly historical being all the while remaining God. This is Bard's formulation in the later volumes to the church dogmatics.

K. Sonderegger:     Fallibilism receives its full due here. Of course, we can be mistaken about Jesus of Nazareth, this school says, indeed we cannot help doing so. For such thinkers the Apostle Paul emerges from the list as their champion. Remember 1 Corinthians 2, we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom which God ordained before the world unto our glory, which none of the princes of this world knew for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory. The betrayal, denial, cruelty, and cool indifference to Jesus can be explained, perhaps even excused by the historical guise the son of God wore. Peter and Thomas, perhaps even Judas himself, can be forgiven their proud alliance with the night, so these critics might say just because historical beings can never know perfectly, but will always enter into the world under the severe constraints of ignorance, uncertainty and ambiguity.

K. Sonderegger:     Christ's existence as flesh and our knowledge Kata Sarka entails that we too will misunderstand, misinterpret, and overlook the truths about this man for others. His historicity has hiddenness in its very form for historical thinking, read as messianic secret is no puzzle waiting explanation. It is simply the outworking of historical intellects attempting to grasp a historical subject and finding instead only ignorance and folly, or so historical fallabilists will argue. But we have not actually reckoned here with the full measure of the dilemma before us. Long ago in famous words, Gatward Lessing gave us a version of this full reckoning, you will recognize they celebrated words from his treatise on the proof of the spirit and of power.

K. Sonderegger:     Contingent trues of history, Lessing wrote, can never be proof of the necessary truths of reason. That then is the ugly, great ditch, which I cannot cross however often and however earnestly I have tried to make that leap. Notice that Lessing, though proceeding his 19th century descendants by a full century, sees more clearly than they the dilemma that has occupied us today. He grasps firmly that both history and conceptual logic concern truths, and even more important for our topic, Lessing knows that such true is go to the heart of human benediction and salvation. Just this, the Fourth Gospel lays before us in stark terms, the knowledge of God and of his son is eternal life.

K. Sonderegger:     We might transpose that proclamation into Lessing's idiom for a moment, the necessary and saving truth of eternal life rests upon the contention historical truth of the one who was sent. We need not adopt Lessing's whole programmatic to see that he has placed his finger on the exact pointed issue for us. We are concerned here with eternal manners, with truth as saving, and we do not know how to relate much less ground that knowledge in the life of the son who went in and out among us. I may say that from my part, I think Lessing commits a version of the genetic fallacy, the claim that an idea's origin determines its validity.

K. Sonderegger:     To endorse such a view as to make scriptural revelation impossible and perhaps this comes closer to the ugly ditch than Lessing cared to say in his analysis of forms of truth. But suffice it to say here we need not bow our heads down before Lessing's essay as if we hear and counter an unanswerable antinomy. Lessing's great strength as a Christian controversialist is to show us just why knowledge is vital to the Christian faith and what is proud claims contain. When we think of this knowledge, we think eternity. We can say that as a philosophical doctrine, fallibilism registers for us the nature of human knowing, its limitation and particularity, its temporal mode and the profound ignorance of the living change before us, but fallibilism cannot register the significance of knowledge for the Christian.

K. Sonderegger:     In the domain of the Christian faith, we are not simply making mistakes about dates or customs are properties of natural objects, we are not merely admitting, we are unable to gather and hold and memory the rich details of the historical and physical universe, and we are not simply recognizing that we are unsure of the grounds and proper warrants for all this finite knowing. In the Christian faith, we are rather to confess that are eternal life rests upon the knowledge of God and his incarnate son. It is urgent and ultimate, it is final. Fallibilism gives us a way of speaking about the region Martin Luther called bear or historical knowledge.

K. Sonderegger:     We can know we can be mistaken about the ordinary facts of Jesus's life or the names, places, particulars of Israel's covenant life with God, but Luther no more than the teachers or the via Moderna who preceded him, did not worry over much about such factual, historical detail. The anxiety, the struggle of the Christian life turned on saving knowledge. Did we know Jesus Christ as the one for us, do we know him as savior, did we confess him as incarnate God, did we acknowledge we have a lord the one who was sent? In this knowledge, Luther said, our salvation lies and we must be urgent in season and out to acquire, confess, and seek after this word. This is the stern matter of theological epistemology that fallibilism as some cannot address or contain for Christ instruction in the gospel of John Raises us up beyond the mode or a structure of human cognition.

K. Sonderegger:     This is no longer a study of how the object of thought resides in the knower, nor how many such objects can be encompassed in the finite intellect, nor the clarity with which we can derive and assess these thoughts. Indeed, we might even say that to follow this verse from John to its radical end, is to question, perhaps even deny Thomas' famous maxim that the object is known in the mode of the knower. For the Fourth Gospel tells us that the knowledge of God is the salvation of the intellect. Just so and here we endorsed the medieval scholastic wholeheartedly, Thomas tells us, we human beings must be able to know God truly.

K. Sonderegger:     In this, he echoes Agustin's moving description of the human creature as core enquiretem, a restless heart that rests only in God, the one for whom we are made. Note the force of this claim, if God has made us for communion with him and if our eternity rests on such knowledge, the benevolence of God is under threat if we cannot attain this knowledge and cannot know it with proper firmness. I do not say with certainty here, I think Decartes' insistence upon unshakable or certain knowledge has not served us well. I say instead, proper firmness. Kelvin held at least in part, that human beings were endowed with a sensus divinitatis, a created longing for God and a rational instinct if we may put it so, that a divine governor orders and upholds this fragile world.

K. Sonderegger:     In the well studied and richly complex opening to the institutes, Kelvin writes there is within the human mind and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity, this we take to be beyond controversy. We may say in passing that nothing marks the distance between kelvin's day and our own more than this last remark on the opening to the institutes. Kelvin continues, to prevent anyone from taking refuge in the pretense of ignorance, God himself has implanted in all people a certain understanding of his divine majesty. From this confident beginning, Kelvin elaborates a doctored knowledge of God that carefully, skillfully, and technically aims to steer between a theological epistemology that affirms creaturely knowledge of God, yet insists upon our sinful confusion and hypocrisy such that revelation is needed to draw our implicit instincts too explicit faith and full confession of the true God.

K. Sonderegger:     Testimony to the rich complexity of chapter three indeed of the entire book one, is the fact that both Schleiermacher and Bard could claim Kelvin for their own. Far beyond the scope of this small essay is the further terrain of revelation as doctrine and text, of common grace and imago Dei, of arguments from design, and the status of human integrity after the fall and the loss of that first Eden. But we can certainly see if from a distance how our more narrow landscape overlooks this terrain and how proper knowledge of God in one sense holds the whole of faith in a brief compass. Here we simply node that Kelvin continues the long Augustinian tradition of affirming that human beings are made for God and made for knowing him. They are Dei form in this strict sense that creature hood is endowed with a passionate and intellectual desire for God and can indeed know him and are blessed in such God word motion.

K. Sonderegger:     So we must return to our original questions, how can creatures made of dust, finite and partial as we are come to this from knowledge, both of the true God and of the mission of the son? What capacities do we possess as children of God to enter into such final saving truths? As is well known, Bard in his early years roared out his answer to Bruner in response to such questions, “Nin, no. There is no human capacity, no point of contact, no natural power to know God as he must be known above and on this earth.” Bard these years had little trouble accounting for the works of the night, the denial, ignorance and betrayal of the earthly son or the rebellion of idolatry and transgression that Israel manifested toward the true God.

K. Sonderegger:     Indeed, it seemed as if such ignorance and rebellion were the second nature of human creatures, we are godless in a very strong sense of the word. It was for this radical redrawing of the main outlines of Kelvin's doctrine of knowledge that Hans Urs von Balthasar early on charge to Bard with the inability to confirm or endorse a full doctrine of creation. Barden those years, insisted that divine grace alone, the impossible possibility could disclose the true God and reveal his son to us, the loss sinners enclosed in the night. This is a strongly apocalyptic view and it possesses the powerful attraction of a dilemma hardened into a virtue.

K. Sonderegger:     We cannot know God, Paul wrote in an early essay, yet we must so we can only admit our inability and give God the glory. This is a kind of contunism or a radical lesson like concentration upon the ugly ditch that is now proclaimed as the very engine of grace, the gift of knowledge that comes down vertically from above, the impossible that God alone makes possible. But Hans's brave insistence upon the knife edge of revealed knowledge properly squared itself with this claim of Augustinians early and late that we are made for God and made to know him.

K. Sonderegger:     I want to spend the last few minutes of this address considering this question in light of our key text from the gospel of John. I believe we must begin this task by affirming that we creatures can and do have the knowledge of the true God. I believe it is vital to affirm that we do have such knowledge, but under the conditions of diverse and sometimes inadequate descriptions, students of epistemology will recognize the distinction I am attempting to draw here. I argue here for knowledge under a description. This is the distinction that belongs in the history of philosophy to the great controversialist and logician Bertrand Russell.

K. Sonderegger:     For Russell, knowledge can be divided into two large halves, those things we know by acquaintance and those who we know by description. I don't want to lean too heavily on Russell here, my point can swing free of the well built construction Russell advances in his epistemology, but I do want to suggest that knowledge has some kind of intimate tie to the way we describe the object known. Let me use a brief example to illustrate the distinction. Say That I tell you I know a certain theologian who has written a book, many books really, under the title Biblical Authority after Babel. I know he teaches in a distinguished seminary in the Midwest and I know that I might describe him as a student of Nicholas Lash, a theologian carrying out some of Lash's intuitions in the great work of theology.

K. Sonderegger:     Many of you here today will say, “I know him that's professor Kevin Vanhoozer." Perhaps you say turning to your neighbor, “I didn't know that he studied with Nicholas Lash. That's interesting, very helpful to know.” Notice what is happening here, I offer you descriptions of this celebrated scholar. You recognize him in these descriptions, but you know him by another avenue. You know him by acquaintance, you take his courses, you sit next to him in chapel and at prayers, you join him for lunch or in a committee room, he is the one you know, and this is critical for our purposes even if you don't know all of the descriptions that I mentioned, or even if you get them wrong.

K. Sonderegger:     Perhaps you thought he wrote after Babel and now learn that George Steiner wrote that book, Kevin Vanhoozer in fact wrote Biblical Authority after Bepal. You still know professor Vanhoozer and you are right to say, even in the midst of this mistake, “I know him truly.” In just this way, fallibilism that could not answer our whole dilemma can enter into our theological epistemology by the back door, so to say. Mutatis mutandis we can say that we know almighty God truly and as frail human creatures under a description. I believe that Kelvin's sense deity that is implanted within each of us is this capacity to know the true God under many varied descriptions, some but not all of them mistaken.

K. Sonderegger:     The one true God may be known as he was to Georg Cantor or Rene Descartes as absolute infinite or he may be known as he was to the young Augustan as truth itself, or he may be known under the description of mystery as perhaps our ancestor Jacob did at Bethel when the cry burst from his lips, “How awesome is this place? God was in this place and I did not know it.” God may be known by those very far distant from the church under descriptions that seem abstract and strange perhaps, yet also oddly familiar. Perhaps the Lord God is known as meaning or recovery from illness or trauma or help in time of need or beauty in touch or sound or sight.

K. Sonderegger:     These we might say are partial descriptions, initial perhaps even confused ideas about the one triune God of the Christian faith and these descriptions might be admixed with air. Perhaps God is known only as power or force as reality, say, but without personality or will. This is a partial and in places erroneous description. God is essentially personal, yet a human being who has described a dynamism beyond all cosmic and creaturely powers has named the true God, or so I say, and I think Kelvin in his remarkable opening book of the institutes would agree at least in part and with some corrections I think too. Indeed, I think I hear his voice even now chiding me for leaving to one side the guilt of our errors and confusions, our superstitions and idolatries, our sins against our creator and judge, and our blindness to the creator's manifold and glorious works.

K. Sonderegger:     And I agree that a full theological accounting of our knowledge of God cannot be forged apart from a doctrine of sin and of salvation. But I believe Kelvin is gracious and generous too and has this to say to my proposal, “Just as old or bleary eyed man and those with weak vision, if you frost before them the most beautiful volume, even if they recognize it to be some sort of writing yet can scarcely construe two words but with the aid of spectacles, will begin to read distinctively. So scripture gathering up the otherwise confused knowledge of God in our minds, having dispersed our dullness, clearly shows us the true God. He has from the beginning and from the beginning maintained this plan for his church so that besides these common proofs, he also puts forth his word, which is a more direct and more certain mark whereby he is to be recognized.”

K. Sonderegger:     Here Kelvin sets out a remarkable distinction between the confused and the general on one side, and the clear and certain and direct on the other. It seems that there are degrees of knowledge, not simply the true and the false, it may well be that the lingering and axial question of salvation can be addressed in this way. Perhaps the saving knowledge of God and his son is the clarified vision of eternal being, eternal life, and perhaps always it is grace beyond measure, grace even to the ignorant, the sinful and the mistaken. Perhaps the seed that is sown even on thin or rocky soil, the soil of denial, betrayal, and ignorance remains truly the word.

K. Sonderegger:     The relation between creaturely knowledge of God and our salvation is the deepest question of theological epistemology and perhaps lies beyond our mortal comprehension. If Kelvin is right about the sensus divinitatis, and I am right even in part about our creaturely knowledge of God, then the riddle and offensive sin only deepens. The night must be impossible, unthinkable, just that. This cognitive contradiction can not be incorporated by fallibilism, it repels it in fact. The final weakness of the Kabbalist tradition we might say, is that it explains too much, reasons and reasons away the profound incoherence and self parody that is the denial and betrayal of God.

K. Sonderegger:     Such sin cannot be, yet it is, an undeniable event waged against the life of our Lord and waged by us, the ones who know. In the midst of this very great enigma and scandal, it remains true and a gift of our good creator that we know the true God under a description. We can say with proper firmness that holy scripture is a sharpening grace for the creatures eyes, the reading glasses for the seekers after God. In holy scripture, we have a full and proper description of God, he is the true one who sent his only begotten into the world.

K. Sonderegger:     We did not err in our original and tentative thoughts about God, they were blurred and surely partial, but they were true words, a true instinct and a true creaturely grasp of the one who is reality itself. But we can be instructed, we can be helped, we can be purified and elevated in our knowledge. The eyes of our mind can be enlightened and in the unspeakable mercy of God, we can know also by acquaintance. We can be moved by the spirit of the son, we can taste that God is good and above all other earthly knowings, we can be given the more excellent way to know and to love the one true God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent. Thank you.

Timothy George:     This lecture by Dr. Katherine Sonderegger is used by permission of the Carl F.H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. You can find more information about the Henry Center by going to their website, that's henrycenter.tiu.edu.

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