Two Roads Diverged in a Mental Wood, and That Has Made All The Difference

            The fundamental difference between the Christian worldview and all secular worldviews is reducible to this:  God is there and He is not silent.  Because He exists, and because He has spoken meaningfully and understandably to the mind and senses He both designed and then validated by his revelation to them, we now have a well-grounded system in which facts and knowledge are metaphysically warranted, and in which learning can begin.  We can arrive not only at utilitarian technique and personal or cultural preferences, but at the knowledge and wisdom that relates all things to their rightful and transcendent point of reference.  By knowing which direction is north, you know all other directions.

            In this case, north is personal, indeed Tri-Personal, and not the ultimately impersonal, uncaring, and doomed universe of mindless matter to which students taught in a secularist context must adjust.  The difference between these two worldviews could hardly be greater.  One world is the cosmic home made for us by our gracious and self-revealing Father, a world in which history has meaning, purpose, and direction, a world in which Providence oversees all, and leads the universe and its inhabitants to their proper destiny.  The other is a hostile world unaware of, and therefore indifferent to, both its and our very existence -- an existence forfeit to ultimate destruction, a destruction to which nihilism is the only realistic and appropriate response.  One worldview teaches students that they are everlasting souls of inestimable worth; the other that they are soulless lumps of momentarily animate matter, part and parcel of a dying and meaningless world, and that whatever they might do or think, they are destined to share its inevitable doom.  Those are the options.  If the Christian worldview is true, then secular learning is not education but an exercise in nihilistic disorientation.  If, as Christians say, Christ is the Lord of all things, then nothing is properly secular.  Anything pursued in a secular fashion is, therefore, at least partly, if not wholly, mispursued.  Whether we speak of the academy, the marketplace, the public square, the laboratory, or the arena, all human endeavors, to be rightly understood and rightly pursued, must be related back to Him, back the God who, in Christ, walked our roads, breathed our air, and spoke our language, the God in whose light we now see all things.  If the Christian worldview is true, then secular education is a terrible disservice to those in whom we inculcate its impotent methods of intellection and assessment, methods that, from the beginning, banish the Transcendent as either unimportant or unnecessary.  Conversely, if Christ is not the rightful Lord of literally all things, then Christian education is a deep and wide delusion on the grandest scale because, if matter is all there is, then matter is all that matters.  In the canyon between these two possibilities, neutrality is not possible, despite modernist and postmodernist pretenses to the contrary.  One simply cannot escape the fundamental importance of the question Christ asked his disciples:  “Who do you say that I am?” (Mark 8: 29).  The secularist worldview answers, in effect, “Not much,” or “No one worth considering.”  To the Protestant, the answer is “You are the One by Whom, and for Whom all things were made.  You are the glue that holds the universe together” (Col. 1: 16, 17).  Upon their differing answers to that question hinges everything.

Compared to the Protestant view of reality, the secularist vision begins from a very different point, and it yields massively different conclusions.  That assertion, of course, is not new with me.  In the words of renowned atheist Bertrand Russell:

“That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noon-day brightness of human genius are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins -- all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.  Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built . . . Brief and powerless is man’s life; on him and all his race the slow doom falls pitiless and dark.  Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little days . . . proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate for a moment his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.”[1]

            Russell is right:  The secularist worldview is the death not only of optimism, but also of any final distinction between good and evil.  To such a world as they presuppose, only despair can be an appropriate response.  Only death awaits us, the cosmic rendering of what Milton called “ever-during dark” (Paradise Lost 3: 45).  We will, according to Russell, finally be trampled under the heel of the same mindless power from which the world itself arose.  You end where you began.

Whether their secularist teachers intend it or not, the more astute students deduce from all this that life is a cosmic joke without a punch line and that they are part and parcel of a universe on its way to ruin.   They recognize the profound difference between living and learning under the love of a God who would, and did, die for us, on the one hand, and full-orbed, cosmic nihilism, on the other.  They discover that the differences between the Protestant and secularist worldviews are neither incidental nor neutral; they are antithetical.  They notice that ideas have consequences.  They learn that they must adjust to ultimate reality because ultimate reality will not adjust to them.  They learn that Allan Bloom was right about their thoughtless teachers:  Those teachers are the silly purveyors of what he identified as nihilism with a happy ending.  They paint the world with the blackest set of presuppositions and consequences, yet they think that a smiley face sticker on a spelling test can still be appropriate.  By contrast, the Protestant worldview yields an educational philosophy based upon the revelation of God in which – and only in which, things as diverse as humanity and chemistry find their proper place, neither too high nor too low.

            By emphasizing the profound differences between these worldviews, I am not ignoring or belittling what theologians call “common grace,” the enabling grace given to all God’s creatures, the grace by which we all benefit in countless ways, and which links us together in various levels of blessedness.  While real and available to all, common grace neither overlooks nor plays down the ultimate differences between competing worldviews.  Rather, common grace helps us to understand that things that are similar in some ways are not, therefore, ultimately alike.  Simply because the Christian and non-Christian worldviews intersect at various points, or simply because they seem similar in some ways, does not mean that that which divides them is insignificant.  The doctrine of common grace says that similarities between the Christian worldview and others are real but not fundamental.  We must remember that those superficial likenesses appear before the backdrop of the ultimate differences delineated above.  Those who either do not understand or do not believe in common grace are likely to elevate superficial likenesses to ultimate likenesses, with the result that absolute differences are shrunken, even willfully dismissed.

In light of those inescapable ultimate differences, things like the content of the periodic table or the notion that four plus four equals eight, do not have, and cannot have, the same significance for secular thought as for Christian thought, even though their use might be roughly parallel.  Just as epistemological warrant arises only from the God who makes known and who transcendently validates the use of our mind and senses, so also does authentic understanding (or wisdom), which comes from knowing the source, the purpose, the nature, and the end of all things.  That higher, more synthetic, knowledge is not the same as merely efficient manipulation toward a desired end, or as mastery of technique.  Because thinking persons seek to understand the real nature of all things and the relationship that ought to exist between those things, they cannot divorce the reality of, say, atomic weight from the source and proper use of atoms and from our knowledge of it.  The fact that mathematical functions are available to all does not mean that the significance and uses to which those functions are properly put are also equally available, regardless of the context in which we wish to use them or from which they derive.  

You must make a choice:

Either justice and grace are at the root of the world, or else indifference on the grandest possible scale.  We are faced with two very different worldviews as the basis for education and, inescapably, we offer them to our students.  One worldview has the best of all possible outcomes, the other the worst.  An omnipotent and omniscient God is the only sufficient basis for optimism, even in the worst of times; but mindless, indifferent matter at the core of all reality is the death of optimism even in the best of times.  If part of education is to help students know their world and learn how to adjust their responses to it accordingly, then ultimate despair is the only reasonable response to the secular worldview taught in public schools, where the Gospel of John is banished but Heather Has Two Mommies is lauded.  To think things in line with the secularist worldview and yet to inculcate the baseless optimism so characteristic of contemporary education is simply to make Pollyanna the patron saint of secular indoctrination and to sacrifice the minds of our children on her altar, the Moloch of postmodern learning.  Secular educators must either adjust their teaching to their worldview, or else get a different worldview.  Failure to do so is a crime of the intellect and an injury to the next generation.

The road forks; you must go right or left.

---

[1]Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1925), pp 47-48, 56-57

Philosophy, the Great Cheat, and the Great Delusion

         Even though they rightly chastise their students for question begging, philosophers themselves always beg the question.  They always cheat.  If they did not cheat, if they did not beg the question, they could not do philosophy at all.  Philosophers begin with a colossal cheat and cannot proceed without it.  They beg the question, THE question, the question before all questions, right from the start. 

         Here is the question:  “Are mind and senses together a reliable way of understanding the world?

         In order to answer that question properly, in order to answer it without begging it, philosophers must not use the mind and senses in question.  But they do it any way.  They know that not to cheat here is not to begin.  In the choice between beginning with a cheat or not beginning at all, they elect to cheat.  They construct an entire system of reason on the foundation of a begged question, which is the philosopher’s version of the house built on sand.  Theirs is a system of reason based on unreason, even anti-reason.  Theirs is a rationality that is irrational at the root.  They start with a non-starter and march boldly forward nevertheless.  They build, in effect, a metaphysical Potemkin village, something far less profound and substantial than what meets the eye.

         Not to do so brings their entire project to a halt.  To acknowledge that initial cheat, and to refuse to go forward until it is resolved, is to bring the philosophic endeavor to an abrupt end at the very beginning, and that they will not permit.

         They do not permit it because to the great cheat they add the great delusion, which is the pose and pretense that human creatures are careful, precise, and objective seekers after the truth.  They are not.  They are wicked, sinful, self-glorifying sinners whose heart, Calvin rightly observed, is an idol factory.  It displaces and replaces God at every possible turn.  The philosophic impulse, like everything else about us, is fallen.  That’s because the will to power is stronger in us than the will to truth or to validity.

         If the philosophers have such knowledge about their crippled, indeed morally dead, selves, they deny it or suppress it.  If they do not have such knowledge, they are even more woefully ignorant and self-deceived than we yet have said.  They beg the question not only concerning a starting point, but also concerning themselves.  To the question “Even assuming that mind and senses are reliable, am I myself to be trusted in this philosophical pursuit?" they must begin by assuming that they are indeed capable or else not begin at all.  Somehow, that they have cheated at the outset of the philosophical enterprise by begging the question of mind and senses does not does not lead them to conclude that they are cheaters who cannot be trusted.  No; instead they cheat and then cheat again:  If they know they have cheated just to begin, they are deceivers and cannot be trusted.  If they do not know that they have cheated just to begin, they are incompetent and cannot be trusted.  Nevertheless, they trust themselves to begin.

         Do not follow them in their mistake, in their whirling self-delusion.

         Philosophers are like all other human creatures.  They are desperately fallen and deeply wicked.  They are not objective and truth-seeking analysts.  No one is.  Philosophers are subject to the same debilitating noetic effects of sin as are we all.  Ignorant of, or defiant of, the fundamental truth about us, philosophers march boldly and publically forward, spinning out false universes in their minds, hoping to lure you into the vortex of their delusions, mocking those who refuse to follow, but doing so only on the basis of the house of cards they have constructed for themselves and the lies they believe about themselves.  They not only misconstrue the world, they misconstrue themselves and God, which is utterly fatal to wisdom.  They do not know what Calvin knew:  Wisdom is comprised of two things:  knowledge of God and knowledge of ourselves.  Calvin knew that such knowledge is a package deal.  Those two foci of knowledge come tied closely together and are gotten only through Christ, Who is both truly God and authentically human.  He is known only through the historical events narrated and explained in Scripture, which for their work philosophers reject.  Were they to accept Scripture as the basis for their thinking, they would not be philosophers but theologians.

         In a display of unmitigated hubris, some philosophers even think they can reason their way up to God Himself.  They think that they can, simply by means of the mind and senses they cheated to use, construct a system of thought that encompasses and rightly understands the world, themselves, and even things beyond the world.  Regarding the last, they do not know that whatever they reach by such means is not God.  They do not know that God cannot be reached; He reaches.  We cannot get from here to there; He can and does get from there to here.  To know Him requires revelation and regeneration.  It requires raw, undiluted, redeeming and transforming grace, which is no part of philosophy.

         How to avoid begging these questions I have explained elsewhere.  Here is but one:

http://www.reformedandconservative.com/2011/06/revelation-as-event-knowing-god-without.html

         (An aside:  some philosophers think they can justify their use of mind and senses because mind and senses can be shown to work.  But that is simply to mistake pragmatic preference and utility for metaphysical warrant, which it is not and never can be.  It also simply continues to beg the question because both to determine and to measure utility requires mind and senses.) 

       

Paul in Athens (part 3)

The general tone and tenor of Paul’s Areopagus speech was one of condemnation and opposition.  In Corinth, it continued.  Paul was not looking for common ground.  He was not building bridges.  Pagan beliefs and practices were his target, not the object of his affirmation.  The perverse beliefs of the Greeks are what separated Paul from them.   Their beliefs were not a truth they and he both owned, but the foolish and wicked errors he intended to correct.  He did not reach out to them on the basis of their beliefs.  He condemned their beliefs.  They returned the favor.

Paul knew the options that fallen life gives us in this regard:  Either we worship God or we worship things that are not God.  To worship God, requires the mediation of Jesus Christ -- a mediation both of knowledge and of salvation -- of which the Greeks philosophers had neither.  In order to fill that staggering lack, Paul determined to know nothing among them except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.  In this regard, just as it was with Jesus Himself, nothing about the god of Aristotle or Plato crossed Paul’s lips.  At the shocking sight of idolatry surrounding him on all sides, Paul’s spirit convulsed and wretched within him, just as ours ought to do within us.

But rather than wretch and convulse, some Christian theologians and apologists attach themselves to Greek errors both for apologetic purposes and for theological method.  Paul did not.  Rather than attaching his preaching and his apologetic to their idolatries, he pointed out to them their superstition and their ignorance and, in order to heal what ailed them, he directed them to Christ and the resurrection.

Paul’s speech was iconoclastic.  Because the Athenian marketplace reflected the hearts of those who made it and who frequented it, Paul cast down their gods, not from pedestals made of marble, but from pedestals in the human heart.  Paul knew that their invocation of an unknown god was a sham and a pose.  He knew it was a suppression of the truth.  It was an evasion of their obligations before the one God Who is.  It was a substitution of a false god for the real God.  It was not innocent; it was as wicked as it was false.  Suppression, evasion, substitution:  It was what Cornelius Van Til said it was: “culpable ignorance” (Van Til, Paul at Athens, p. 11).  In Paul’s own words:  “Where is the wise:  where is the scribe?  where is the disputer of this world?  hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?  For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God it pleased God through the foolishness of the preaching to save them that believe.” (1 Cor. 1: 20, 21).

Do not miss Paul’s point:  The wisdom of God decreed that, by means of the wisdom of the world, the world could not know God.  Natural theology simply does not lead to knowledge of God.  To say otherwise is to oppose both Paul and God.  Human wisdom, whether Aristotle’s or someone else’s, is more than merely challenged; it is exposed, debunked, and rejected.  The Greeks, known for their supposed wisdom, could not locate even its beginning (Psalm 111: 10).

Rather than endorsing their natural theology, from verses 24 onward, Paul used it as a weapon against them, resisting them and refuting them, sometimes with their own words and ideas.  He directed them to seek God (v. 27), implying quite clearly that by their philosophy and religion they had missed Him.  Paul told his Greek listeners that, despite their excessive religiosity (v. 22), they failed to know God, and that they were ignorant (vv. 23, 30), in response to which he placed before them the resurrected Jesus as Lord.  Concerning Jesus, Paul mentioned that He is fully human and, as such, is subject to death, and that he is Judge of the world (v. 31).  Apart from knowing that, they could not and did not know God.  No one can.  They were estranged from God, and, by rejecting Paul’s message, remained so.  They demonstrated that amusement and novelty (v. 21) are not the same as the pursuit of Truth.  When the Truth Himself appeared in Paul’s speech, they mocked it and turned away (v. 32).  That was where their natural theology led them.  That is where it always leads.  Nevertheless, despite their failing and their rejection of the truth, even when it was proclaimed directly before them, the Greeks thought they offered God authentic worship.  Paul, in order to puncture their bubble of delusion, highlighted their ignorance.  By limiting himself here primarily to highlighting their ignorance, Paul declined to trace out in fuller details the whole litany of their evils and errors the way he did in Romans 1.

According to F. F. Bruce, Paul “does not argue from ‘first principles’ of the kind that formed the basis of various systems of Greek philosophy; his exposition and defense of his message are founded upon the biblical revelation and they echo the thought, and at times the very language, of the Old Testament writings.  Like the biblical revelation itself, his speech begins with God the creator of all, continues with God the sustainer of all, and concludes with God the judge of all” (Bruce, Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free, p. 239).  To be sure, Paul finds his preaching text in an altar dedication.  But that they know they do not know God, and that he knows they do not know God, is hardly an endorsement of their natural theology.  Rather, their ignorance offers him a chance to explain to them the history of salvation, which, in this speech, finds its climax in Christ, just as it does in Paul’s epistles.

Neither Evidentialism nor Presuppositionalism

Willie Mays once made a dazzling over-the-shoulder catch of a fly ball off the bat of Vic Wertz.  That event is not the product of my mind.  I did not invent it.  Wertz would have flown out to Mays even if my mind never existed.  My mind cannot alter that event at all.  While I can know about that event, my mind is powerless to generate that event, to change that event, or to eradicate that event.  That event is independent of me.  It simply is what it is, regardless of what I might think about it.  Its reality as an event is settled.  It happened.  It happened whether I accept it or not, whether I know it or not, whether I like it or not, and whether I think about it or not.  It happened.

Obviously, the fans at the Polo Grounds that day did not invent Mays’s catch.  Rather, they responded to it.  They responded with wild, cheering approval.  It happened; they responded:  event, response.

With regard to that catch, I am in much the same position as the fans that day.  While I did not and cannot mentally produce Mays’s catch, I can respond to it.  I can applaud that event.  I can try to apply it productively.  For example, if I were a ball player, I might work to acquire Mays’ defensive skills, examining carefully how the feat was accomplished and might be repeated.  If I were a father or a coach, I might try to teach those skills to my child or to the Little League team I coach because Mays has shown us the remarkable heights to which defensive skills can be taken and the ways in which they might be memorably and wonderfully applied.

In other words, while I might alter the way that event is applied or not applied in my life, what I do with that event, if anything, has nothing at all to do with the reality of that event.  It is real; it happened.

Although I was not present at the ballpark that day, I know about that event.  I know about that event because a camera operator recorded it; because sports writers wrote about it; and because thousands of the fans who witnessed it talked about it.  The pitch, the swing, the ball’s flight, and Mays’s catch all were witnessed and recorded.   Of course, while someone else’s witnessing that event helps makes my knowing of it possible, the witnesses do not make the event.  They witnessed it; they recorded it; they passed it on.  But the reality of that historical event is independent of them, too.  They did not make it happen.  They witnessed what happened.  Witnesses do not make the event possible; the event makes witnessing possible.   

By contrast, assumptions, deductions, and presuppositions are all very different from the sorts of events I am describing, and they have a very different relationship with my mind than does an event like the Mays/Wertz event mentioned above, which is not a mind-generated event -- and that is the fundamentally important distinction:  One event is generated by my mind and the other is not.

Assumptions, deductions, and presuppositions all are something my mind generates.  They depend wholly upon my mind for their existence.  I can generate them, alter them, apply them, ignore them, or reject them.  Their existence, content, and use all are up to me.  While I might respond to the assumptions, deductions, and presuppositions I generate, they not are not independent of me in the way events outside my mind are.  We might say that while assumptions, deductions, and presuppositions come from me, events of the Mays/Wertz sort come to me.  I make the former; I am confronted by the latter.

By the same token, the ancient Israelites did not simply assume, invent, or project God’s self-disclosure on Mt. Sinai.  They were confronted by it.  They did not create it, devise it, or generate it.  They witnessed it; they responded to it (however foolishly); and they recorded it -- just as they did other events, like the plagues in Egypt and like crossing the Red Sea on dry land.  It happened; they responded:  event, response.

The apostles did not simply presuppose, concoct, or formulate the resurrection.  They were confronted by it -- by the empty tomb and by multiple encounters with the risen Christ, Who once was dead and now was alive.  It happened; they responded:  event, response. 

Here’s another event, an epistemological event:  God made Himself known.  Note carefully that the event in question is not my figuring things out about God.  The event is this:  God made Himself known.  I did not say that God made Himself knowable; I said that God made Himself known.  God has not merely made knowledge about Himself available to us; God has made Himself known by us, specifically by the elect.  That is how those who know God actually know God:  Our knowing God is the consequence of God’s doing.  We know because God did it.   For fallen human beings, knowing God is an externally, not internally, generated event.

When it comes to our knowing God, God is the Subject of our knowing, not merely its Object.  God can be the Object of knowledge by sinful human beings only because He first was its Subject.  When it comes to our knowing God, He did our knowledge.  He made it happen, not we.  That is the event.  God made Himself not simply knowable but known.  We do not generate the event.  It happened.  If we are among the redeemed, it happened to us.  Knowing God is a gift, not an achievement.

In that event, the Holy Spirit regenerates whomever He chooses and drives the Truth home to them with power and effect, just like Vic Wertz drove the ball to deep center field with power and effect.  Both events, the Mays/Wertz event and the God/elect event, are historical.  They happened.  They are not mind-generated.  The mind might respond to them, but the mind does not make them.

Had the Holy Spirit not regenerated the redeemed and made them able to receive this gracious gift of knowing God, and had He not actually put this knowledge of God into them -- had He not actually made God known -- neither they nor anyone else could ever have known God.  On our own, that is quite beyond us.  Such things are spiritually discerned, and we are radically unspiritual.

God made Himself known to some persons.  That is the event, and that is the particularity of the event:  God made Himself known to the elect.  They didn't do it; He did.

When the Holy Spirit regenerates you, He gives you knowledge of God.  He makes it so that you begin finally to relate properly and well to God, which is what knowing God really is.  Knowing God is a relationship based upon things said and done in history, whether by Yahweh for Israel or by Christ for the redeemed, things explained to us by the Holy Spirit in Scripture, and then applied to us by the Spirit through Divine activities such as regeneration and illumination.

In other words, we do not begin with humanly generated notions, or with evidences, or with unaided human reason, or with anything else.  We do not begin at all.  When it comes to knowing God, for us to begin is not to begin.  God begins.

Knowing God was never a matter of “How do I know?”  Knowing God always had to begin with Him or not to begin at all.  To start with us is simply a non-starter.  You can’t get there from here.  But He can get here from there, and He did.  God made Himself known to some persons.

We are talking about an event.  We are not talking about a presupposition, an invention, a fantasy, a wish, a deduction, or even a question.  We are not starting with any human activity whatever.  This event -- knowing God -- does not depend upon the knowers.  It depends upon the Known.  This event is a historical action.  Like other historical actions, it depends upon historical actors.  In this case, the Actor is God.  This event does not depend upon us presupposing it any more than does Mays’s catch.  It happened.  Like Mays’s catch, God’s making Himself known has lots of witnesses; and like Mays’s catch, it does not depend upon those witnesses for its reality.  Quite the opposite:  Their role as witnesses depends upon it happening.   The witnesses do not make the event possible.  The event makes the witnessing possible.  It happened.  It will continue to happen as long as, and as widely as, God wills.

By making Himself actually known, God takes the epistemological initiative.  He assumes upon Himself the epistemological responsibility for our knowledge of Him.  What we do with it, if anything, is a different issue altogether.  In making Himself known by us, God reveals Himself to the mind and senses He created and thereby grants to them the metaphysical validation and warrant we never could have granted them on our own.  We cannot produce metaphysical warrant of this sort from below or by ourselves.  Without His actions, we are reduced simply to metaphysical and epistemological cheating, to begging the question, to using our mind and senses to assert that mind and senses are the proper means to knowledge, even knowledge of God, or else reduced simply to invoking our own mind-generated presuppositions and following them wherever we deduce they lead.

Our knowledge of God is a God-produced event.  God made Himself known.  It happened.  Do with it whatever you will, but you cannot change that fact any more than you can make Mays drop the ball or make Wertz hit it over the fence.  God’s self-disclosure happened.  God made Himself known by the elect.  He did it.  He did it in space and time.  He did it (1) externally through events like the exodus, the incarnation, and the resurrection, and by inspired, explanatory words, like Deuteronomy, the Gospel of Matthew, and the epistle to the Colossians, events and words that were addressed to the mind and senses He gave us, thus granting them the transcendent validation they otherwise always would lack.  He did it (2) internally through events like regenerating us and illuminating us -- all of which leaves Aristotle and his ilk beyond the pale when the issue is not only knowing God, but knowing, period.  Their use of mind and senses is mere question-begging, pure and simple.  They assume that mind and senses are reliable means of knowing and simply proceed to use them, use them even when it comes to knowing What cannot be known by us on our own at all, namely God.

The knowledge of God given to the elect is not something the elect presuppose, deduce or establish.  It is an event, an event of God’s own doing.

There can be no knowledge of God that God Himself does not impart.  That is, you might know the answer to a difficult mathematical question either because you figured it out for yourself, or else because someone who knows the answer told you.  Either way, you can get the right answer.  But to the question of how one knows Elohim, the articulate, divine, unity-in-plurality, there are not two ways, but one:  God must tell you.  God must tell you because, “What is offered to man’s apprehension is not truth concerning God but the living God Himself” (Temple, Nature, Man and God, p. 322).  Read that sentence over again until its full force sinks in:   “What is offered to man’s apprehension is not truth concerning God but the living God Himself.” 

Unless God begins, no beginning is possible.  Those who deny this point fail to recognize that God has begun.  He made Himself known by us, and in so doing He (1) validated the mind and senses He made for us, and, more importantly, He (2) regenerated us so that we are able to receive the knowledge of Himself that He so graciously gives.  Without that regeneration, we would unleash our fallenness upon special revelation the way we do upon general revelation, and with the same deleterious and devilish effect.  God Himself, and only God Himself,  is the origin, content, Subject, and Object of our Knowing Him.  He is its root, ground and cause; we are its recipients.  He does it; He does it to whomever He wills, whenever He Wills.  He brings Himself to us; we do not bring ourselves to Him, not even if our name is Aristotle.