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Pulse
3 February 2025

One of the most profound and instructive statements attributed to the fifth century theologian, Augustine of Hippo, is his dictum ‘Si comprehendis, non est Deus’ (‘if you understand it, it isn’t God!’).

By this dictum, Augustine is not suggesting that God is absolutely unknowable, or that the human mind is incapable of grasping anything true and real about God.

If that were the case, then Augustine would not only be inconsistent but also the most serious transgressor of his own dictum. For this great theologian of Latin Christianity wrote thousands of pages about his understanding of God during his productive life.

Moreover, if Augustine were suggesting that God cannot be understood at all, then he would be at odds with another prominent Western Church theologian, Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109), who famously defined theology as ‘faith seeking understanding’ (fides quaerens intellectum).

Furthermore, it would mean that everything that theologians throughout the centuries have written about God would be nothing but gibberish and nonsense, and must therefore be assigned to the bin. It would also imply that the Church’s liturgical language, which reflects a profound understanding of God, would suffer the same fate.

Most significantly, it would imply that the Christian faith – despite all its eloquent discourse about God – is, in the end, an agnostic faith, speaking of a God it does not understand.

But if this is not what Augustine meant by the dictum, what was he trying to say?

Augustine’s dictum seeks to remind the Church and its theologians of the inexhaustible depths of the mystery of God. Even in his self-revelation, God’s infinite nature transcends the finite capacity of the human mind. Thus, Augustine underscores that while God can be known, worshipped, and loved, he remains incomprehensible.

Throughout the Bible, there is the equal emphasis on God’s incomprehensibility and his knowability, held in a delicate and profound balance.

Isaiah emphasises that God is not an object in this world – a being among other beings – such that we can compare to others: ‘To whom then will you like God, or what likeness compare with him?’ (40:18).

Job makes the same point through the words of Zophar the Na’amathite: ‘Can you find out the deep things of God? Can you find out the limit of the Almighty?’ (Job 11:7).

Yet, this mysterious God who cannot be comprehended by the human mind has revealed himself, making himself knowable through his self-disclosure in Jesus Christ. The apostle John affirms this truth in his epistle, writing:

And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, to know him who is true; and we are in him who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life (1 John 5:20).

 

Throughout the history of theology, theologians have recognized and emphasized this important balance between God’s knowability and incomprehensibility. In the 13th century, the Byzantine monk and theologian Gregory Palamas made the famous distinction between God’s essence, which we cannot know, and his energies, which we can. Similarly, scholastics in the Western tradition distinguished between the quid (essential being) and the qualis (revealed nature) of God.

The Reformers also maintained the tension between God’s knowability and incomprehensibility. Martin Luther, for instance, distinguished between the Deus Absconditus (hidden God) and the Deus Revelatus (revealed God), asserting that even in his revelation, God remains, in some sense, hidden from us.

John Calvin, while insisting that God has revealed himself in Jesus Christ, adds that God’s “essence is incomprehensible; so that his divinity wholly escapes all human senses.” The Reformed tradition later encapsulated this principle in the statement: Finitum non possit capere infinitum (“The finite cannot contain the infinite”).

One of the Cappadocian Fathers, Gregory of Nyssa, beautifully captures this mystery in his Life of Moses: ‘Concepts create idols; only wonder understands anything.’ This reminds us that true understanding of God must be rooted in reverence and awe rather than mere intellectual constructs.

To reiterate, these statements do not deny the knowability of God. Instead, theologians from diverse traditions remind us that while we can know true things about God, we can never fully comprehend him.

It is important that modern Christian theologians and philosophers remind themselves about this. While many of them give intellectual assent to the doctrine of the comprehensibility of God, their practices often suggest otherwise.

This is especially evident in their willingness to discard traditional Church doctrines when these fail to align with the demands of logic or fit neatly within a systematically constructed framework. Their efforts to overly systematise their understanding of God and other theological topics have sometimes distorted the Church’s teachings.

In previous articles, I have discussed how the doctrine of divine simplicity has fallen out of favour among some contemporary Christian philosophers, such as Willian Lane Craig and Alvin Plantinga. Other Christian doctrines have also suffered a similar fate.

For example, the doctrine of immutability – which holds that God does not change in his essence, attributes or will – has been critiqued, abandoned, or modified by theologians such as Jürgen Moltmann and Clark Pinnock. In his controversial book The Openness of God, Pinnock rejects the idea of divine immutability, arguing that a God who cannot change is incapable of truly responding to his creatures.

Another example of a traditional doctrine that has faced fierce criticism is the eternal generation of the Son by the Father. Rooted in the Nicene Creed, this doctrine has been rejected by theologians such a Jürgen Moltmann, John Cobb, and, more recently, Kevin Giles, for allegedly introducing a hierarchy within the Trinity. Giles contends that the doctrine suggests the eternal subordination of the Son to the Father, conflating relational distinctions within the Trinity with human social roles.

Christian philosophers and theologians who fail to fully grasp the significance of the incomprehensibility of God tend to over-systematise theology. In doing so, they try to fit the data of revelation into the Procrustean bed of their own logical framework. The bits that do not fit are readily excised, resulting in the distortion of the great doctrines of the Church.

There is a pressing need today for those practicing the craft of theology to recognise and acknowledge that God, even in his revelation, remains an unfathomable mystery. Additionally, it is essential to reclaim the epistemological balance, calling for a renewed commitment to the traditional doctrines of the Church as faithful articulations of divine truth.

I end this essay with the writings of two theologians from the Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions respectively. Both these passages ably underscores what I have been trying to address in this brief article.

In his important book Orthodox Theology, the eminent theologian of the last century Vladimir Lossky explains that:

Theology as Sophia is connected at once to gnosis and episteme. It reasons, but seeks always to go beyond concepts. Here a necessary moment of the failure of human thought breaks in before the mystery that it wants to make knowable. A theology that constitutes itself into a system is always dangerous. It imprisons in the enclosed sphere of thought the reality to which it must open thought.

 

In a similar vein, the Roman Catholic theologian Thomas Weinandy OFM, warns against theology’s attempt to systematise revealed truths that would in the end result in distortions instead of deeper discernment.

Some Christian systematic theologians today, having embraced the Enlightenment presuppositions and the scientific method that it fostered, approach theological issues as if they were problems to be solved rather than mysteries to be discerned and clarified. However, the true goal of theological inquiry is not the resolution of theological problems, but the discernment of what the mystery of faith is. Because God, who can never be fully comprehended, lies at the heart of all theological inquiry, theology by its nature is not a problem-solving enterprise, but rather a mystery-discerning enterprise.

 


Dr Roland Chia is Chew Hock Hin Professor at Trinity Theological College (Singapore) and Theological and Research Advisor of the Ethos Institute for Public Christianity.