Interpreting Words About God: Part 3 of 5, "The Creator-creature Distinction"

• Monday) "Test case: Genesis": Authorial use of anthropomorphic language.
• Tuesday) "Bugs on a quarter": A very brief introduction for the following two days that will discuss Creator-creature relationship, the archetypal-ectypal distinction, and univocal vs. equivocal vs. analogous interpretation. We will explore the power of accommodative truth.
• Today) "The Creator-creature Distinction": The Creator-creature ontological relationship and the archetypal-ectypal distinction.
• Thursday) "Humbling ourselves before The Transcendent": The argument advocating use of only analogous interpretation for ALL words attributed to what God does and about who He is.
• Friday) "An answer to the critics of analogy and closing remarks": That pretty much sums it up.

Continuing the series now, there is an article we read and discussed during the "Providence and Suffering" class with Dr. John Mark Hicks. It has been a huge influence on me. Here is a link to the article if you want to read it in full: Michael Horton, "Hellenistic or Hebrew?" Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 45 (June, 2002): 317-341 (pdf).

The article concerns itself with exegetical methods. I am leaving a big amount of great information out, and in respect of space I will only include some brief pieces from it that I found especially helpful when wrestling with the language used in the Scripture to describe God and what He does.

For today, we will explore the Creator-creature ontological relationship and the archetypal-ectypal distinction (or, original and perfect understanding [how God understands] vs. understanding as reproduction or copy [how man understands]).

Note: Where I quote Horton it is indented. My comments start on the left side.

First, there is the Creator-created relationship.

[There] is the 'hidden-revealed' distinction. 'Truly you are a God who hides yourself. . .' (Isa 45:15). We are reminded in Deuteronomy, 'The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law' (Deut 29:29). God has his own independent intratrinitarian life apart from the creation, and this life is hidden from view and unknowable to creatures. Yet God has condescended not only to create and enter into a personal relationship with creatures, but to reveal his character in so far as it pleases him and benefits us. It does not benefit us to know the secret essence of God or probe the hiddenness of his Trinitarian life, but it does benefit us to know that God the Creator is also our Redeemer in Jesus Christ. (321)

As a result of these distinctions, [we must focus] on the dynamic outworking of God's redemptive plan in concrete history, tak- ing very seriously the twists and turns in the road—including God's re- sponses to human beings. But it does so without denying the clear biblical witness to the fact that God transcends these historical relationships. Transcendence and immanence are not antithetical categories for us, compelling us to choose one over the other. Neither Plato nor Aristotle, Kant nor Hegel, Kierkegaard nor Cobb gives us a biblical model for either transcendence or immanence. (321-322)

So there is a transcendent and immanent distinction. Creator and creature is an ontological distinction and it is a fundamental distinction. I believe we must uphold the Aseity of God (independence of God; what God is in Himself). Therefore God is beyond all physical and metaphysical descriptions.

As creatures, we participate in love, justice, holiness, and a host of negatives. But God doesn’t participate in the same way because God is an independent reality. However, God is love, God is Being, God is justice, God is the ground of all things. This reminds us that God’s relationship to the creation is one of grounding and sustaining and creating and not one where He participates ontologically alongside of creation itself. He is Holy Other. He is a Different Reality. He is the Ground of all ontology itself.

So maintaining that God is transcendent is not just saying He is simply higher or at a higher level; but that He is the ground of being; He is other than us. So the limitations and even descriptions of creaturehood do not apply to the Transcendent One.

Second, an epistemological correlary is:

the ‘archetypal-ectypal’ distinction. Although it had been a category in medieval system, Protestant dogmatics gave particular attention to this distinction and made it essential to their method. Just as God is not merely greater in degree ('supreme being'), but in a class by himself ('life in himself,' John 5:26), his knowledge of himself and everything else is not just quantitatively but qualitatively different from that of creatures. Theologians as diverse as Carl Henry and Langdon Gilkey have had trouble accepting this, claiming that it leads to irrationalism to say that God’s knowledge of an object and our knowledge of an object are never identical at any point. And yet affirmation of this distinction is essential if we are to maintain with Scripture that no one has ever known the mind of the Lord (Rom 11:34, where the context is predestination), that his thoughts are far above our thoughts (Isa 55:8), and that he is 'above' and we are 'below' (Eccl 5:2)—if, in other words, we are to truly affirm the Creator-creature distinction. (323)

Tomorrow we will continue to look at Horton's discussion in regards to the argument of analogous vs. equivocal vs. univocal interpretation of words about God.

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