rbcbob
Puritan Board Graduate
Attempting to Mediate between Clark and Van Til ...
While not pretending to be able to bring all of the followers of these two great thinkers to the table allow me to propose something to PBers of both camps something which may be mutually acceptable.
Without encroaching upon God's transcendence may we not say that God has communicated to Man making use of propositional revelation? And how is it that man, lower than the angels, comprehends the propositions of the Almighty?
Several contributing factors:
1 Man is the imago dei and as the image of God he has been designed to think God's thoughts after him.
2 God, to whom nothing is impossible, is able to cause man to understand Him and His gracious revelation.
3 Christ, the Theanthropos mediates between God and man thus correctly exegeting εξηγεομαι Him to us (John 1:18)
Carl Henry wrote:
and
While not pretending to be able to bring all of the followers of these two great thinkers to the table allow me to propose something to PBers of both camps something which may be mutually acceptable.
Without encroaching upon God's transcendence may we not say that God has communicated to Man making use of propositional revelation? And how is it that man, lower than the angels, comprehends the propositions of the Almighty?
Several contributing factors:
1 Man is the imago dei and as the image of God he has been designed to think God's thoughts after him.
2 God, to whom nothing is impossible, is able to cause man to understand Him and His gracious revelation.
3 Christ, the Theanthropos mediates between God and man thus correctly exegeting εξηγεομαι Him to us (John 1:18)
Carl Henry wrote:
“All man needs in order to know God as he truly is, is God’s intelligible disclosure and rational concepts that qualify man__on the basis of the imago Dei__to comprehend the content of God’s logically ordered revelation. Unless mankind has epistemological means adequate for factual truth about God as he truly is, the inevitable outcome of the quest for religious knowledge is equivocation and skepticism.” GRA IV.119
and
“The Word of God is personal and rational, and the truth of God, whether given in general or in special disclosure, including the climactic revelation of the Logos in Jesus of Nazareth, can be propositionally formulated. All divine revelation mediated to man is incarnational, inasmuch as it is given in human history, concepts and language. Even the supreme personal revelation historically manifested by the incarnate Christ shares in this verbal and propositional expressibility.
John the evangelist did not begin his gospel by declaring that Agape (love) became flesh, or that Dunamis (power) became flesh, or that Dikaios (righteousness) became flesh__as indeed they did in the incarnate Christ__but rather that the Logos (word) became flesh.” GRA III.173