# The Word of God and the Mind of Man (Nash)



## RamistThomist (Jun 20, 2018)

Nash, Ronald. _The Word of God and the Mind of Man_. Zondervan: 1982. Reprint by Presbyterian and Reformed.

The possibility of our having cognitive knowledge about God was denied on three grounds: 1) God is too transcendent; 2) human knowledge is de jure problematic; 3) human language was de jure problematic.

Question of the book: Can the human logos know the Logos of God (Nash 14)?

Hume’s Gap: our pivotal beliefs must rest on something besides knowledge.

Kant’s wall: there is a wall between the world as it is and the sense world.

For the Neo-Orthodox, revelation is always an event. It is never cognitive knowledge about God.

*Defense of Propositional Revelation*

(A) All S is P (E) No S is P

(I) Some S is P (O) Some S is not P.

(A) All revelation is propositional (E) No revelation is propositional

(I) Some revelation is propositional (O) Some rev. Is not propositional

We can rule out O as irrelevant to the discussion. The Neo-Orthodox thinks that all evangelicals hold to A, but that’s false. We hold to I. Further, holding to I doesn’t entail the claim that all revelation is propositional.

In short God reveals knowledge to his creation and some of this knowledge about himself is contained in the form of propositions (45). And even if one wants to claim that revelation is personal, saving faith still presupposes saving faith about something.

*The Christian Logos*

This is the heart of Nash’s project. Key idea: “Jesus Christ, the eternal Logos of god, mediates all divine revelation and grounds the correspondence between the divine and human minds” (59).

*The Christian Rationalism of St Augustine*

Augustine has some sort of interplay between the uncreated Light of God and the mutable light of the human mind (81). How can the human mind understand the eternal Forms within God’s mind? Nash suggests three ways:

(1) The human intellect is both passive and active with respect to the forms (85). It is passive, pace Kant, in that it doesn’t create the conditions for knowledge. It is active in the sense that it judges and receives.

(2) The forms are and are not separate from the divine mind.

(3) The human mind is and is not a light that makes knowledge possible.

While Nash had a fine discussion on how Augustine modified Plato’s essentialism, and I don’t necessarily disagree, the chapter just feels “short.” I know he wrote a book on the topic and it is worth pursuing there.

*In Defense of Logic*

When Nash wrote this book, the Dooyeweerdian school in Toronto was a force to be reckoned with (one sees something similar in John Frame’s works). Nash gives a fine rebuttal to the Dooyeweerdians: if human reason is valid only one one side of the cosmonomic boundary, “then any inference that God is transcendent must be an illegitimate application of human reason” (99). In other words, if God is transcendent, you are in error for saying he is transcendent!

*Conclusion*

The Logos of God has created the logos of the human mind in such a way that that it can receive cognitive, propositional knowledge about a transcendent God.


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