R.C. Sproul

Do you relate to this sense of ambivalence of which Rudolph Otto speaks in his book?

Does the presence of God make you glow or does it make you shudder?

Or perhaps, like most of us, it does both.

Think about that.

The best we can ever get when we're talking about a transcendent, eternal, infinite being is language that describes Him in ways in which He is like, but no metaphor, no analogy can ever contain or grasp Him in its fullness.

God is infinite in His perfections, infinite in His being.

Now, whatever else you and I are, we are finite.

And John Calvin once had a very famous slogan that went like this in Latin, Finitum non capox infinitum.

The finite cannot contain or grasp the infinite.

If I have a glass of water which has a finite volume to it, I cannot put in it an infinite amount of water because a finite receptacle can't hold an infinite amount of anything.

And as finite creatures, we can never grasp God fully in His infinitude.

And even in heaven where so much more about God will be revealed to us, and the way in which our struggling understanding now is affected by ongoing sin will be improved, and that mirror that we look at now darkly will be so much more bright when we step across the threshold into heaven.

Even in heaven, even in our own glorification, we will remain creatures.

we will still be finite, and even in heaven we will not have a totally comprehensible knowledge of God.

And that's why one of the most important elements that we'll see later is this doctrine of the incomprehensibility of God, which means that no creature can ever fully and exhaustively understand God.

Now because of that distinction between the creature as finite and the Creator as infinite,

we meet this crisis of how do you bridge the gap?

How can the finite understand anything about the infinite, and how can the finite say anything meaningful about the infinite?

And one of the great controversies of the twentieth century in theology was called the God Talk Controversy, and at the heart of that was that popular movement called the Death of God Theology that made Time Magazine and so on.

and behind the scenes what was going on there was this debate about the adequacy of human language, since it is finite, to speak meaningfully about God.