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Chapter 3
Can God Be Grasped by Our Reason?
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By Eric L. Johnson
"Humans do not know how what is at variance agrees with itself.
It is an attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre." Zeno of Elea
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"It is good that you grasp one thing, and also not let go of the other;
for the one who fears God comes forth with both of them." Ecc. 7:18
A great battle is being waged in our day for the minds of God's people. It is a
momentous intellectual battle, because it concerns the most important of the objects of human
thought: the nature of God. There are two ways to go wrong regarding our understanding of
God's nature. The first is to believe something false about God (like, God is the same as the
universe). The second is to rule out one belief about God simply because it does not comport
easily with some other belief about God (like, since God is love, God cannot send human beings
to hell). False religions are characterized by the former, Christian heresy by the latter. When
examined carefully, many of the objections that constructivists, process theists, and open theists
make to the historic Christian view of God are the result of a resolute favoring of one side of the
truth at the expense of the other. Let's see how this happens.
The first thing to note is that we should not be surprised at controversies regarding God's
nature. The greatest being in the universe is not easy to understand. Believers have always
sensed this and have often expressed limitations in their understanding of God. Reflecting on
God's omnipresence, David exclaimed, "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. It is too high.
I cannot attain to it" (Ps. 139:6). Much later, Zwingli famously suggested, "What God is, we
have just as little knowledge of from ourselves as a beetle has of what man is."
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Such limits in
our understanding have led to profound differences in what people have affirmed about God.