Herman Bavinck on The Incomprehensibility of God

“Knowledge of the absolute, accordingly is a contradiction in terms. It indicates that one has knowledge of something that is "absolute," that is, detached, without relation, and is at the same time related to a knowing subject because it is known. Now if this is the structure of thought and we still want to think (about) and know God, we invariably either lower the Absolute to the level of the finite and make God into a personal, limited, human like being;or attempt to transcend all the limitations of space and time, strip our idea of God of all likeness to a finite creature, and end up with a empty abstract idea devoid of value for religion. Indeed,even the idea slips away:under the sway of our thinking the Absolute has been reduced to nothing.Absoluteness and personality,infinity and causality, immutability and communicability, absolute transcendence and likeness to the creature-all these pairs seem irreconcilable in the concept of God. We are caught up in an insoluble antimony. It is as if we are only left with the choice between gross realism and vacuous idealism between a God who is nothing but an enlarged version of a human person and a cold abstraction that freezes and destroys the religion of the heart....To a considerable extent we can assent to and whole heartedly affirm this doctrine of the unknowability of God. Scripture and the church emphatically assert the unsearchable majesty and sovereign highness of God. There is no knowledge of God as he is in himself. We are human and he is the Lord our God. There is no name that fully expresses his being,no definition that captures him. He infinitely transcends our picture of him, our ideas of him, our language concerning him. He is not comparable to any creature. All the nations are accounted by him as less than nothing and vanity. God has no name. He cannot be defined. He can be apprehended;he cannot be comprehended. There is some knowledge but not thorough grasp of God....It is completely incomprehensible to us how God can reveal himself and to some extent make himself known in created beings: eternity in time, immensity in space, infinity in finite, immutability in change, being in becoming, the all, as it were, in that which is nothing. This mystery cannot be comprehended; it can only be gratefully acknowledged.”

herman bavinck reformed dogmatics