Is God Knowable?

Several years ago, I was asked to teach a large Sunday school class for a week while the regular teacher took a sabbatical. About thirty people attended the class, and I hoped to spark some discussion by dividing the class into smaller groups. I don’t remember exactly what we were discussing, but I do remember that I had a theory that the group would divide into two theological camps on a question about a certain passage from the Bible. I wanted to find a way to divide the class into those camps without their knowledge, so they could comfortably engage in discussion among themselves before turning to face the opposite group.

So I posed the question to them, “Is God knowable?” I thought that the group of people who felt that God was knowable would have one response to a further question about a passage from scripture, and the group who felt God was essentially unknowable would have a dramatically different response to the same scriptural passage. I also thought the group would divide fairly evenly over the question.

I was wrong. What I learned is that only two people felt that God is essentially unknowable. Those two people, by the way, are people I know well, people who participated in a small group with me. Nearly the entire group felt that God is basically knowable.

We didn’t explore the implications of the question. I didn’t really want to spend a lot of time on this question, but just hoped to use it as a way to divide the group into two different theological camps. What I learned is that this particular group, which I hoped would fall across the spectrum on the question of the human mind’s ability to know God, was amazingly uniform in its opinion. This surprised me.

Karen Armstrong’s treatment of this same question in The Case for God suggests that those two guys, who would agree with me that God is essentially unknowable, are anachronisms. That mindset was more prevalent among early Christians than it is today. And here I thought I was a modern Christian.

The following passage from The Case for God quotes St. Thomas Aquinas, who went to great lengths to demonstrate the otherness of God, and the inability of the human mind to grasp God.

"Even revelation could not tell us anything about God; indeed, its task was to make us realize that God was unknowable. ‘Man’s utmost knowledge is to know that we do not know him’, Thomas explained. ‘For then alone do we know God truly, when we believe that he is far above all that man can possibly think of God…by the fact that certain things about God are proposed to man, which surpass his reason, he is strengthened in his opinion that God is far above what he is able to think.’" p. 142.

Apparently, even among Christians who don’t identify themselves as fundamentalist, the initial assumption is that God is essentially knowable. It would be interesting to see how conversation would develop on this question if we decided to explore it further, rather than just using it as a litmus test for a different scriptural question.