Responses...#2 "The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God"

This response is what I wrote after reading a portion (first 100 or so pages) of "The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God" by John Frame. This book served as a major stepping stone in my thought process as it introduced a pivotal concept. Actually, I had the concept already, Frame just put it in words for me. Anyway, here you go....

I have had this circle rolling around in my mind that I have been struggling to verbalize for about six months now. The circle is not an object, but rather a process that started forming as I read Longing to Know. Actually, let me rephrase that. The process had always been there, but my ability to recognize it as something to be able to describe, something to convey, has been becoming more and more developed, and, as a result, the struggle has become active. While reading Longing to Know I began to piece together this process that involved seeing things, everything, as parts of a whole. I saw a natural progression in which these wholes, the patterns, themselves also played the role of parts of a larger whole. This process, if taken at its face value, would seem to go on ad infinitum: you just keep on knowing and knowing as wholes become pieces which are part of whole that are pieces, etc., etc., etc.. However, this would seem to make knowing futile. For if we cannot see an end, or rather a culmination, an ultimate whole, to our knowing, than can it be said that we can truly know anything? Pieces need a whole or they are not truly pieces.
So what is this whole that is the ultimate culmination of our knowledge? In my circle, it is God. God is the whole that all the pieces fit into. As the clues, which come from the universe created by God, form into patterns they reveal God to us in some way; and as those revelations mesh with others, forming a new pattern or whole, they reveal yet something else. That is the upward arc of the circle. Now, describing the downward arc is where I run into trouble. It is one of those classic instances of knowing more than I can tell. It’s not that I’m not sure of how it works; rather I am not able to find the words to put it into a picture.
When I read the introduction to the first chapter of The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God, I nearly cried. Not of sorrow, but of joy, relief, confidence, assurance. I saw my circle, or least a representation of it. “The biblical God is the God of the covenant, the Creator and sustainer of the world, the Redeemer and judge of men. So we cannot know God without knowing other things at the same time,” (Frame, 10). I believe this is pretty much what I have said. Things we come to know reveal God. But he goes on. “And, quite importantly, we cannot know other things rightly without knowing God rightly.” Oh, my! Like Evangelist pointing the way to Pilgrim, this Frame has been where I’m going! The relationship between the things that we know revealing God and God revealing the things that we know, is what I have always been aware of but have been unable to relay. But, in sentences preceding these two, Frame offers what I see to be the missing link between the circle in my head and the circle in my mouth. “The biblical God is the God of the covenant, the Creator and sustainer of the world, the redeemer and judge of men.” The covenantal relationship between God and all creation, a separate covenant from the one between Him and His elect people, defines the operation of not only revealing Himself through the clues, but revealing the clues through Himself. We start off seeing, to use an example from Frame’s book, a rose, and we, believer or unbeliever, say truly that the rose is red. But, if and when we are given the grace to see that the redness of the rose reveals God, we then say, more truly, that God has made the rose red, which illuminates the true being, the true beauty of the rose. God revealed himself to us through the rose, and now, in knowing the culmination of knowledge that the rose attends to, we see the rose differently than we did before. The rose is then revealed to us through God as it fulfills its covenant role. Because all creation, the very cosmos is in covenant with Him, We cannot rightly know God without knowing things, and we cannot rightly know things without knowing God.
This is how I now reconcile Frame’s assertion that unbelievers cannot but know God. The unbelievers, though in rebellion against God, are given their rebellion and mutinous will by God. They can do nothing other than rebel, thus they are in obedience to, or fulfillment of their role in the covenant. This is how they know God, and, unless determined otherwise by God alone in His divine order, they will be clues to, a piece of the whole of, God as they are used to demonstrate God’s justice and wrath. Just as the rebellious generation was doomed to die in the wilderness, unbelievers are on the same journey as believers, and are therefore beneficiaries of the blessings of that journey, but they will not reach the Promised Land. Their unbelief and their condemnation point to God and His various characteristics. Unbelievers cannot but glorify God in their covenantal lot; they know Him through their unalterable obedience and inescapable role in God’s covenant with them of history and purpose, His covenant of how He determined things should be. God is the unavoidable known.
The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God is a natural progression of Longing to Know. Meek’s book declares that we can know God and, as the final chapter states, we are known by God. Frame continues that discussion by saying that not only can we know God, but that, indeed, we can’t not know Him, and by explaining exactly what that requires of, and how it bears on, our tacit knowing.
In journaling while reading Longing to Know for the first time I had said that I felt like a newborn learning to see. Colors became clearer, edges sharper and more defined, and light began to separate from darkness. As I read Frame, I felt like a toddler learning to talk. It seems that I’m starting to grow up.