Univocal Of The Analogical (part i)

Regarding the Clark / Van Til controversy of the 1940s these points were innocuous.

1. Both sides affirmed a quantitative difference between God’s knowledge and man’s. The disagreement wasn’t so trivial as to pertain to the number of propositions known or how they exhaustively relate to each other. Surely, both sides agreed. God knows more stuff.

2. The mode or manner of how God knows is radically different than that of man. God’s knowledge is original or intuitive. Man’s, receptive or derivative. I know no disciple of CVT or GHC who’d demur.

3. The Westminster team wanted Clark and his gang to affirm a qualitative difference regarding the “content” of what God and man know.

With that as our backdrop, a few words…

All God’s knowledge is eternal and exhaustive. We oppose process theology, open theism, socinianism etc. Yet with respect to God’s ectypal knowledge, that knowledge would be God’s eternal and unchanging knowledge of the analogy he always intended to reveal to us through the things that are made. So, God knows himself originally, but as he lisps his revelation of himself to us he does so in a manner suitable to our creatureliness. The object of our knowledge is God’s revelation of himself, which is a replication or divine interpretation of the original.

Moving beyond the premise, this construct makes room for our having true knowledge that must intersect the mind of God, but not univocal with respect to God’s intuitive knowledge of himself, rather similitude with respect to God’s knowledge of his interpretation of the original. The point of contact or intersection between minds would be the analogy, which is to say God’s communication.

With that in mind, we may consider our knowledge of the ectypal, but not in relation to the archetypal but in relation to God’s own knowledge of the (analogical) objects of our analogical knowledge. In other words, although our knowledge is analogical to God’s original self knowledge (analogical to the archetypal), our knowledge in another sense corresponds not directly to the original of God’s knowledge but rather as it corresponds to God’s own knowledge of the analogical icons that we also know.

In a word, it’s not that we know what God knows (the original), but that God knows what he has allowed us to know (the interpretation of the original).