The limits of our understanding
bWe must now analyze what
human reason can discern with regard to God’s Kingdom and
to spiritual insight. This spiritual insight consists chiefly in three things:
(1) knowing God; (2) knowing his fatherly favor in our behalf, in which our
salvation consists; (3) knowing how to frame our life according to the rule of
his law. In the first two points—and
especially in the second—the greatest geniuses are blinder than moles!
Certainly I do not deny that one can read competent and
apt statements about God here and there in the
philosophers, but these always show a certain giddy imagination. As was stated
above, the Lord indeed gave them a slight taste of his divinity that they might
not hide their impiety under a cloak of ignorance.66 And sometimes he impelled them to make certain
utterances by the confession of which they would themselves be corrected. But
they saw things in such a way that their seeing did not direct them to the truth, much less enable them to attain it! They are
like a traveler passing through a field at night who
in a momentary lightning flash sees far and
wide, but the sight vanishes so swiftly that he is
plunged again into the darkness of the night before he can take even a step—let
alone be directed on his way by its help. Besides, although they may chance to
sprinkle their books with droplets of truth,
how many monstrous lies defile them! In short, they never even sensed that
assurance of God’s benevolence toward us (without which man’s understanding can
only be filled with boundless confusion). Human reason, therefore, neither
approaches, nor strives toward, nor even takes a straight aim at, this truth: to understand who
the true God is or what
sort of God he wishes to be toward us.67
Do not claim to know all about Bible translations, the Hebrew Bible, and the Greek Bible! Do not claim to know where the perfect Bible is or how to precisely translate it!
b edition of 1539
66 I. iii. 1, 3.
67 Calvin, John. 2011. Institutes of
the Christian Religion & 2. Edited by John T. McNeill. Translated by Ford
Lewis Battles. Vol. 1. The Library of Christian Classics. Louisville, KY:
Westminster John Knox Press. Cf. I. i. 2; I. x. 2; III. ii. 16.
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