Why Speculative Theology Gives Us No Knowledge of God

Being a witness to many debates between Christian theologians can be exhausting. The amount of people declared heretics because they don't fully align with the exacting definitions of speculative theologies has become the favorite past time of many a tradition these days. "You're too Thomistic!" "You're not Thomistic enough!" "You need to be a Platonist!" "You need to be an Aristotelian!" "You're a Modernist!" "You got your jot right but your tittle is wrong so you clearly must be put outside the faith!" The amount of knowledge these people think they have about God is astounding. I might reacclimate the apostles' question asked in horror to our day, "If these things be true, who can be saved?!"

One of my favorite pass times in seminary was sitting for hours with my friends who were Philosophy of Religion majors. The biggest lesson I took away from those conversations though is that anything can be justified by philosophy as long as you have a coherent system, but since there are many contradictory coherent systems, this means that even if your system is coherent and all works theoretically, there is still nothing to confirm that it is actually true.

Call me a skeptic but I am just a radical presuppositionalist at heart. I don't believe that any knowledge is possible without either omniscience or a reliable report from one who is omniscient. This makes me a radical advocate of sola Scriptura and the high church view when it comes to qualified exegetes as the exclusive interpreters of that Scripture. As such, I don't think much of speculative theology. This is usually why I tell people that I'm not a systematician but a biblical scholar. That doesn't mean I'm not a theologian but that I'm a biblical theologian. 

What I mean by that is. not that I don't use logic or am aware of my own philosophical presuppositions (indeed, I would argue being a biblical theologian requires these things), but rather that Scripture must confirm or deny my theology either explicitly or by good and necessary consequence. The further our speculations get from being confirmed by Scripture, the more doubtful they become, as knowledge must be confirmed by it. If my speculation cannot be confirmed by Scripture, it cannot be known even if it may be true. 

But being a biblical theologian helps me to understand what God wants us to know about Him. He has clearly revealed Himself as a singular Being in Trinity, but He has not described for us the "mechanics" of His Being or interrelations of the Persons. We have often speculated about these things using various philosophical ideas about God and how He might exist and relate to both His creation and within the Godhead itself.  

But, biblically speaking, God doesn't seem to care whether we figure that out. In fact, I would argue that those things are the secret things that don't belong to us. What God has declared belong to us is what He has revealed in Scripture. I would argue that this primarily has to do with God's expressed character over and against our knowing His essence. If I can say it this way, God cares more about people knowing who He is than He cares about people knowing what He is. 

This is why we do not get books in the Bible that are intellectual descriptions of God's Being. Instead, we are told of what God does and what God requires of us to do in order to be like Him in His character. Hence, in the Book of Exodus, God reveals His "name," i.e., His personhood, by showing Himself to be the Savior of His people, the Giver of life to His people, the Creator of His people, their faithful God who seeks a relationship with them in order to give to them life and freedom from slavery and death. In other words, He is the One who has loved them and will continue to faithfully love them. God is love. He further reveals Himself as just as He reveals His moral will in the law. God is love because He is good and just. This is what God wants His people to know about Him. 

The Trinitarian nature of God is revealed as a part of His revelation concerning His activity to save His people from slavery and death. God is so much the Savior that even when His own goodness and justice become a threat to our well-being, He fulfills the very requirements of His own goodness necessary to have a life-giving relationship with Him Himself, i.e., through the Second Person of the Trinity, in order to save us because He loves us. Having saved us from the death our own rebellion would merit in the presence of God, He then conforms us to His just and good character as a people who have received His life in us and now produces life through us by the Third Person of the Trinity. 

This is what God primarily wants us to know about Himself and this is all that we can know about Him. He is the only God, existing in three persons, the Savior of His people, the only good and just One, who has given and gives life to all things that have or will have life.

There is no treatise in the Bible concerning essence and energies, divine aseity, exitus and reditus, perichoresis, etc. I believe things about these things, but I cannot know them. I cannot know them because God has not described them in such a way so as to confirm that I have the right view of them. But here is the real point: I don't need to know them. I don't need to understand any of them in order to know God. In fact, I may be detracting from the Scriptures in which God has revealed Himself to discuss and write about the things He has not revealed about Himself. I might argue that along with what God has revealed about Himself sits silently an implication of divine mystery that God demands His people acknowledge so that they spend their time meditating upon who He has revealed Himself to be and not what He might be or how he might exist as He does.

One might even construct an entirely different religion than that of the Bible by making it about philosophical speculations about God to the point of diminishing the emphasis of Holy Scripture concerning God. the Trinity, the Incarnation, eschatology, etc. All of these sound like very Christian things to talk about, and yet, they may actually detract from a biblical Christianity that would have us focus on what we know as it has been confirmed by divine revelation about these topics. 

If life is found in a particular relationship with God as His people, and God wishes to give us life in what He communicates to us above all else, then God will glorify Himself in a way that is sufficient to accomplish that goal. We, therefore, have a sufficient knowledge of God but not an exhaustive knowledge of God, a knowledge which would require us having the omniscient mind of God Himself to obtain. 

Speculative knowledge gives us theories. They are fun to talk about. But we can never know the truth of them if Scripture does not confirm either explicitly or through necessary consequence (i.e., via implication) their veracity. This should cause us to ask the question, therefore, if we are spending too much time talking about these things. Are we exerting our own reason above the Word of God without realizing it? Are we, therefore, by doing so, asserting ourselves into conversations where God should be exalted instead? Are most heresies not created in such ways? I cannot understand God and have a need to make Him more understandable to me. Hence, maybe Jesus had a beginning even though Scripture indicates He has the full nature of God, which would include eternality. Maybe Jesus is just a man because He learns and grows and may not seem to know certain things during His ministry on earth. Maybe the God of the Old Testament is a different God than that of the New because it seems that a shift has been made between the two. All sorts of heresies are created via speculations that are not confirmed by Scripture but I am talking even more about the orthodoxies that can replace our confessional emphases that are created via speculations that are not confirmed by Scripture. 

An adjustment in our understanding concerning what we believe to be true and what we know to be true with our emphasis on what we know to be true as superior and subsequently given the floor in our conversations is needed.