What do we know? We know what God reveals to us in creation and in Scripture. When do we know it? We know it when God reveals himself to us. We are always and only the recipients of revelation. We are never the originators of revelation. Further, revelation is always accommodated to human finitude the way a sane grown-up accommodates himself to a child.

During the Watergate hearings, Senator Howard Baker asked, “What did the President know, and when did he know it?” However important that question was in the politics of 1973, it remains an important question in theology today.

A friend writes to ask what Reformed theologians mean when they speak of humans having “analogical” knowledge (See Recovering the Reformed Confession, chapters 4-5). The question is whether we can know anything, even for a moment, the way God knows it? This question raises an even more fundamental question: what does it mean to speak of the distinction between the Creator and the creature?

We need to recognize the Creator/creature distinction.

These are fundamental questions because they are among the most basic questions of human existence, and if we get the answers wrong, those errors reverberate throughout our theology.

The short answer to the most basic question of the Creator/creature relation is that humans are nothing more or less than image-bearers (Gen. 1:26). We are analogues of the Creator, but we are not and never become the Creator. That would seem to be a fairly obvious truth from Scripture. After all, Scripture says, “In the beginning God….” and we are nowhere to be found until God says, “let there be…and there was.” We are the product of God’s Word. We did not participate in the act of creation. We did not help to plan the creation. We are creatures. This is what Job 38 is all about. When God asks Job, “Where were you when…?” the answer is, “Nowhere.”

We reflect God.

We are like God in certain ways, but we are not God. This will come as a surprise to the anthropomorphites (an ancient heresy from the period of the early church) such as the Mormons who think God the Father and God the Spirit have bodies. God the Son became incarnate, it’s true, but before the incarnation he had no body and only the Son is incarnate. This will also come to a surprise to certain “evangelical” theologians such as Clark Pinnock who are postulating that perhaps the Mormons have a point! (See his book, The Most Moved Mover, where he cites Mormon theologians approvingly!).

We do not exist on a continuum with God. We exist on an entirely separate plane from God. We are not on our way to becoming God or gods (this view has long been held in segments of the Eastern and Western Churches and gaining in popularity among evangelicals and even among some Reformed folk). Yes, believers will be glorified, but glorification is not deification. Even Adam was not to be deified, but glorified. Deity is not something that can be transferred.

When we say that we are analogues of God we are recognizing the vast differences between God and his creatures. Isaiah recognized these differences when he said,

For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts. (Isa. 55:8-9)

Moses had said essentially the same thing in Deuteronomy 29:29, “The secret things belong to Yahweh our God, but the revealed things belong to us and to our children forever…”

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