The Only Foundation of True Theology: Archetypal and Ectypal Theology With the Use of Analogy – Part II

III. Mere men: man’s limitations in knowledge  

When crossing a desert, water does a traveler little good if he does not have a vessel to transport the water. If his canteen is cracked, then it cannot hold water. In this situation, water is only useful to the traveler if canteen itself works. Likewise, Ectypal theology (man knowing divine things) can only be valuable if men have the capacity to obtain and maintain divine thoughts.   

The Bible proclaims in its first chapter that God made man in the image of God (Gen 1:26). Being made after God’s image shows why man is unique among other creatures.⁸ God created Adam (and all humankind) with a capacity to know God in a way that no other creature can (angels have a true knowledge of God, but that is outside the scope of this essay).⁹ As early as Genesis 1:26, we can be certain that the knowledge of God that humankind has is different from the knowledge God has of himself. This distinction is due to man’s knowledge being bound by his image-bearing; his knowledge is only a reflecting knowledge.¹⁰ 

Because man’s knowledge is a reflective, or imaging knowledge, he is bound in at least two ways. First, he is bound qualitatively, and, second, he is bound quantitatively (this latter limitation is not often disputed). The quality of man’s knowledge is always creaturely. “It is God himself,” wrote Herman Bavinck, “who discloses his self-knowledge, communicates is through revelation and introduces it into human beings,”¹¹ which mandates that man, in all knowledge, obtains knowledge of God only because he receives knowledge from God. God made man able to acquire knowledge of himself, which he graciously gives through revelation. From this viewpoint, he only receives what God gives him. Paul wrote, “And what do you have that you did not receive? Now if you did indeed receive it, why do you boast as if you had not received it?” (1 Cor 4:7). This is true preeminently of the knowledge of God. To say man knows God as God knows God would be as impossible as a man trying, as it were, to fit into God’s shoes. “Can you search out the deep things of God? Can you find out the limits of the Almighty?” (Job 11:7).

Francis Turretin summed up these two limitations of ectypal theology when he wrote: “For theology treats of God and his infinite perfections, not as knowing them in an infinite but in a finite manner; nor absolutely as much as they can be known in themselves, but as much as he has been pleased to reveal them.”¹² Ectypal theology is finite knowledge of the infinite God limited in number and quality. He can increase in knowledge of divine things, but, in drinking from that well, he will never empty it.  

IV. Identifying The Gap

There is an inherent gap between God and man in knowledge (and therefore theology), which must be identified, maintained, and bridged. Job, in his prayer to God, proclaims the impassable (from man’s side) gap between man and God. He wrote, “For He is not a man, as I am, that I may answer Him, and that we should go to court together. Nor is there any mediator between us, who may lay his hand on us both” (Job 9:32,33). Job understood his unworthiness and inability to come before God on his own terms and by his own methods. He knew that he needed God to send a mediator if there could be any interaction between God and man that would not end in judgment by God. A man cannot work his way to God’s thoughts, ideas, or knowledge. Nevertheless, at the same time, God commands us in the Scriptures, to “‘Come now, and let us reason together,’ Says the Lord” (Isaiah 1:18). Thus, Scripture presents both man’s inability to come in his power and reason with God, and it professes that man must obey God by coming and reasoning in divine matters.  

The gap between God’s wisdom and man’s abilities are evident in scripture (Romans 11:33-36). Man has the created capacity to receive divine wisdom, yet on his own he is an empty vessel. How might he be filled with wisdom? Man can only know what God reveals to him. Bavinck wrote, “It is the Father who, through the Son as Logos, imparts himself to his creatures in the Spirit.”¹³ Apart from the works of the persons of the Trinity, no man can discern the wisdom of God. Instead, the natural man wrongly sees the wisdom of God as foolishness (1 Cor 2:13,14). The necessity for God’s work in the lives of men to produce true theology is evident; it is the Father who sends the Son as the Word of God, which the Spirit applies to the hearts of men, so that they may come to know divine things. However, the question remains: is this communication univocal, equivocal, or analogical? Do men know divine wisdom as God knows it, are man’s thoughts and God’s thoughts utterly different in quality, or are there similarities with a distinction? Before these questions are answered, two items must be brought to the foreground and harmonized with the theology of knowing God. 

V. Maintaining the Gap 

More significant than any distinction in the created realm is the distinction between God and creation. God created the heavens and the earth out of nothing, by the word of his power (Hebrews 1:3). The fact that God created all things from nothing draws a stark ontological contrast between God and all that he created. God is God. The creation is not God, including human beings. The scriptures ascribe the term “Creator” to the Father, the Son, and the Spirit alone, and therefore man is in a totally different logical category from God’s”¹⁴ Bavinck wrote: 

The teaching of creation out of nothing maintains that there is a distinction in essence between God and the world. The creation does not exist as a result of a passage of the world from being in God to being outside of God, nor from being without God to being by God, but from nonexistence into existence. The world is certainly no anti-God; it has no independent existence, and remains in God as its ongoing immanent cause as will have to be demonstrated later in the teaching of preservation, against Manichaeism and Deism. But according to the teaching of Scripture the world is not a part of, or emanation from the being of God.¹⁵ 

One must never abandon the distinction between God and man if he is to understand how one knows God and how one does theology. If the theologian blurs this gap between Creator and creature, then his theological system will not match the character of ectypal theology itself. Without distinguishing between God and man, man can never live unto God through Christ, and the foundation of religion is lost.¹⁶ This is the case for at least two reasons. First, in faulty thinking, one might try to ascend to the level of God’s thoughts and God’s ways, but Isaiah says that this is impossible (Isaiah 55:8-9). If a man were able to think as God thinks, then that man would need to ascend to the place of deity and become divine himself. Such a pursuit would contradict Scripture’s view of creation by making that which is created into the Creator; that which is finite infinite, and that which is mortal immortal. All of these things are impossibilities.  

Second, another faulty position that would destroy the Creator creature distinction would be to have too low of a view of God. This viewpoint actually stems from unbelief. The unbeliever misrepresents God by conceiving of Him as merely greater and more glorious than man, placing God in the same category of being as his creatures. Some do this by subjecting God to the standards of perceived human reason and logic. It is one thing to say God is rational and logical (both are true), but it is another thing to say that reason or logic binds God. If one understands God and man to both be bound by the logic, then his thinking fails because he makes God subject to his creation, e.g., logic. God uses reason and logic as a tool (regulated by Scripture) to know Him, but these are created things, as are the birds of the air and the fish of the sea. Man can never ontologically or epistemologically ascend to the place of God, and God can never abandon divinity.  

VI. Bridging the Gap 

We have placed man on one side of a ravine, as it were, and God on the other. Logically, we could say that God and man are in two separate categories of being and knowing. Theology says that God is the Creator and that man is a creature. The question arises, how can man come to know God? As we have first built up, and wish to maintain, the distinction between Creator and creature, the following task is to implement a bridge between the two that does not destroy one side or the other.  

Some may propose that we know God’s thoughts when His thoughts become our thoughts through propositional truths (as an object) residing in our mind as in His mind.¹⁷   This thinking involves univocal language describing our study of theology. This type of theologian holds that communication is only possible if the same thought is in two minds at once. This view rejects archetypal/ectypal distinctions in theology on the grounds of any such distinction in knowledge necessarily destroying meaningful communication between God and man.¹⁸ This is an overstatement. Univocal theology is authentic communication, but to say we have exactly the same thought as God would require that we be God himself. This point can only be adopted if there is no Creator-creature distinction. Instead, the theologian must use approximate imaging knowledge, which arrives at true communication without conflating God and man. As soon as God speaks, in time (by which man is bound) and through language (which can never fully measure up to the glory of God), He is communicating ectypal truth based on the divine archetype. God communicates his divine wisdom on our level by bridging the gap for us through revelation in his Word and illumination by his Spirit. He made us able to contain divine wisdom according to our creaturely limitations. Junius wrote concerning ectypal theology, “God has fashioned the second kind of theology on the model of the divine and immutable exemplar, proportionally to the creatures’ capacity”¹⁹ If God created a second theology to reflect the archetype then it follows that for the finite to apprehend the infinite one must use analogical theology, and by this image-bearers obtain wisdom.²⁰ The moon has no light, yet it reflects the radiance of the sun, as does ectypal theology reflect the wisdom of God’s archetypal theology.²¹  

It is plain in Scripture that man, in Christ, and by His Word and Spirit, can come to know God. Ectypal theology is a description of this task. However, ectypal theology differs from archetypal theology because ectypal theology is wisdom of divine matters from man’s perspective and is done by image-bearers. For, how can man know God from God’s perspective without erasing the distinction between the creature and his Creator? Junius’ definition of ectypal theology is helpful: “Ectypal theology, whether taken in itself, as they say or relatively in relation to something else, is the wisdom of divine matters, fashioned by God from the archetype of Himself, through the communication of grace for His own glory”²² (chapter 5). This definition helps us in several ways. First, he helps us understand that ectypal theology is divine wisdom. Second, that true theology is given to us as a gift from God (John 4:24). These two ideas logically drive the theologian to the conclusion that ectypal theology is rooted in archetypal theology. God has graciously opened His fount of wisdom so that wisdom might pour down from heaven into the hearts and minds of His called people. While they cannot know God as he knows himself, eternal life belongs to them because they know him through his Son (Jn. 17:3). This outpouring of wisdom from God means that archetypal theology is the foundation of ectypal theology, but it differs from archetypal theology in that man receives it, making ectypal theology creaturely. More precisely, “ectypal theology is the wisdom creatures in their way have concerning God, and about the things that are ordered towards God, communicated by him.”²³ Ectypal theology is man’s understanding of divine matters through receiving, understanding, and applying divine revelation.

Man understands divine matters only through revelation.  The connection between the archetype and ectype is, therefore, God’s gift of revelation to intelligent creatures because, as B. B. Warfield puts it, “the religion of the Bible presents itself as distinctively a revealed religion.”²⁴ The Father of the Son reveals himself to us by the Holy Spirit that we might know Him (Ephesians 1:17).  Special revelation (which informs general revelation) is “filial” by the work of the Spirit, making us adopted sons of the Father who come to know God.²⁵ However, to maintain a distinction between archetypal theology and ectypal theology, the fact that believers are adopted son’s of God must lead believers to understand that the knowledge believers have as sons proceeds from revelation and cannot exceed their nature.

Analogical language in theology does imply that there are differences in God’s thoughts and ours, but it still maintains true knowledge. It implies that God communicates on our level.²⁶ We have analogical knowledge, but we do not know an analogy of God; we know God.²⁷ What a gracious work it is that God communicates to us on our level, because if we were required to know as God knows, we would never comprehend nor apprehend true theology. This relation is illustrated well (although all language falls short of describing God) by considering geometry. Geometers often measure physical space with a three-parameter model. The three dimensions normally are given the names x, y, and z. One may take a three-dimensional cube and find it measures a meter on every side; x = 1, y = 1, and z =1. Then, one may take an image of one side of the cube and render a two-dimensional shape: x = 1, y = 1, with no z present. The original cube exists in each measuring, three-dimensional and two-dimensional, but one lacks the quality of z because it can only capture some qualities of the cube. The second is an analogy of the first, it maintains information from the first, but is lesser in at least one quality. Our knowledge of God likewise maintains truth from the original but loses the divine archetypal quality, but the object, God, remains. I would not press the details of this illustration to adequately describe the relationship between our knowledge and God’s, but it does illustrate the point generally.  Analogy in theology satisfies true knowledge and maintains a distinction between God and man and is preferred in describing how we practice knowing divine wisdom. 

VII. Conclusion  

Analogical language describing how we know God’s absolute archetypal theology is not new to the church, it is seen as early as Duns Scotus²⁸ in distinguishing theology between theology in itself (theologia in se) and our theology (theologia nostra).²⁹ Many further questions may arise from a topic like the nature of our and God’s theology, but archetypal and ectypal theology puts us in our place as creatures. This distinction gives a sense of how deep are the ways and thoughts of God. It shows us our limitations. It helps us understand our need to be communicated to by the Father through the Son and made know to us by the Spirit. Archetypal theology is the necessary foundation for true theology; Ectypal theology is necessary if man is to know true theology. B. B. Warfield wrote, “to even the natural mind contemplating this series of supernatural acts which culminate in the coming of Christ, a higher knowledge of God should be conveyed than what is attainable from mere nature, though it would be limited to the capacity of the natural mind to apprehend divine things,” which shows that man’s knowledge is creaturely yet still able to apprehend divine things by analogical knowledge.³⁰ Analogical language, communicated by the Word and Spirit of God, is necessary for maintaining a proper Creator-creature distinction and relationship. God is incomprehensible yet knowable and though we can never know him exhaustively we can know him truly.  This understanding of theology properly harmonizes God and man, the giver of knowledge and the receiver of knowledge, and it comports both with historic reformed theology and Scripture.  Therefore, true theology must incorporate archetypal and ectypal distinctions, analogical knowledge made know to man by Scripture, and maintain both the Creator creature relation and distinction.