Andrew Meredith’s Reviews > The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God > Status Update

"The facts of creation are not raw data or brute facts that are subject to mutually contrary interpretations. They are preinterpreted by God. As Van Til says, "God's interpretation logically precedes all facts."' Therefore human interpretation is never merely the interpretation of facts; it is always also a reinterpretation of God's interpretation. To deny God's interpretation is not merely to adopt an alternative but equally valid interpretation; it is to reject the facts as they truly are; it is to reject reality. There is no such thing as `brute fact' by which fallen man can seek to validate his interpretation over against God's. Fallen man can only reject the facts and seek to live in a world of his own making. Similarly, the believer, in working out a faithful interpretation of the facts, is not merely 'interpreting' data but is affirming creation as it really is; he is accepting creation as the world that God made, and he is accepting the responsibility to live in that world as it really is."

"A presupposition is a belief that takes precedence over another and therefore serves as a criterion for another. An ultimate presupposition is a belief over which no other takes precedence. For a Christian, the content of Scripture must serve as his ultimate presupposition. Our beliefs about Scripture may be corrected by other beliefs about Scripture, but relative to the body of extra-scriptural information that we possess, those beliefs are presuppositional in character. This doctrine is merely the outworking of the lordship of God in the area of human thought. It merely applies the doctrine of scriptural infallibility to the realm of knowing. Seen in this way, I really cannot understand why any evangelical Christian should have a problem in accepting it. We are merely affirming that human knowledge is servant-knowledge, that in seeking to know anything our first concern is to discover what our Lord thinks about it and to agree with His judgment, to think His thoughts after Him. What alternative could there possibly be? Would anyone dare to suggest that though we commit ourselves unreservedly to Christ, there is no place for such commitments in our intellectual work? Thus this doctrine of presuppositions purely and simply asserts the lordship of Christ over human thought. Anything less than this is unacceptable to Him."

Frame stresses that "knowledge" in any sense takes three forms (or perspectives), and if it is to be true "knowledge of God" it must be all three. Knowledge in all three senses grows over time.

The first is propositional facts ("knowing that" or truth). Propositions that must be intellectually assented to. The Lord has tied His Name to specific acts in the history of salvation (The Creator; The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; The Redeemer Who brought Israel out of Egypt; The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ; etc.). We, for instance, must believe the historic reality of the resurrection of Jesus to truly grasp who He is.

The second is applicatory knowledge ("knowing how" or wisdom). How to pray, how to love, how to obey God. This includes skills where Christians will differ by their giftings: teaching, hospitality, evangelizing, etc.

The third, and most prevalent kind, is knowledge of a person ("knowing who"). In the case of the knowledge of God it is a personal knowledge of the Persons of the Godhead. We have a relationship with Them, established by Them in time. In this sense, "knowing" is a close synonym of "loving." In the biblical text, "knowledge" most often has to do with this last category (but remember, it must include the other two perspectives as well).

"Assent, obedience, and friendship—you cannot have one without the others. Since each implies the others, any one of them could be used to define faith." [Assent is faith from the normative perspective, obedience is faith from the situational perspective, and friendship is faith from the existential perspective.]

"Knowledge, as we have seen, is a part of life, and therefore must be achieved and maintained in a way that honors God. That is to say that there is an ethics of knowledge. There are right and wrong ways to think and learn. And if depravity is total, if it extends to all areas of life, then the unbeliever is one who thinks wrongly. And when people think wrongly, they come to wrong conclusions. Their thinking is foolish and stupid, to use biblical language. "'Israel does not know,'' says God in exasperation (Isa. 1:3). Disobedience itself, we must say, is an ignorant, stupid response to God, and stupid even in an "intellectual" sense. If God is who He is and we are who we are, then it makes no sense at all to disobey. Renowned intellectual unbelievers are truly intelligent in the sense that they make extremely sophisticated and ingenious use of their mental powers, but they are stupid in that they reject the obvious."

"Both rationalism and irrationalism are futile and self-defeating, as sin must always be. If irrationalism is true, then it is false. If all thinking is the product of chance, then how can it be trusted even to formulate an irrationalism? Rationalism flounders on the truth that is obvious to everyone: the human mind is not autonomous, not suited to be the final criterion of all truth. We are limited. The rationalist can defend his position, then, only by limiting his rationalism to certain truths of which he thinks there is no question - that we exist, that we think, and so forth. Then he seeks to deduce all other truth from those statements and to deny the truthfulness of anything that cannot be so deduced. But the result of this is that the mind turns out to know only itself or, more precisely, to know only its thinking. Thought is thought of thinking. Only that can be known for certain. Once some more specific content is specified, certainty disappears Thus the consistent rationalist will deny that there is anything, ultimately except "pure thought,'' "pure being,'' and so forth. All else is illusion (but how is that illusion to be explained!?). But what is a "pure thought'' that is not a thought of something? Does that idea have any meaning at all? It is a pure blank. The knowledge of which rationalism boasts turns out to be a knowledge of .. nothing! Thus in the end, rationalism and irrationalism, so contrary to one another in mood and style, turn out to be identical. Rationalism gives us a perfect knowledge—of nothing. Irrationalism leaves us ignorant—of everything. Both are self-refuting for neither can give an intelligible account of itself. The irrationalist cannot consistently affirm his irrationalism. The rationalist, similarly, cannot affirm his rationalism; he can affirm only "pure thought,'' without specifying any content to it."

Great stuff! I like that quote about rational and irrationalism. 🔥

Indeed! I cut my teeth on Frame when I was but a wee theologian. He and Horton were my entry point into Reformed Theology, but Frame especially captured my imagination.

I was turned off from Frame for a while when I inadvertently fell into the Particular Baptist fervor over Thomism almost a decade ago now (thanks Dolezal!), but now that I've come back around, I'm finding a lot to appreciate all over again.

In the quotes above, I especially appreciate his triperspectival definition of faith that includes obedience.