Knowledge Exists Because God Exists
00:00:00.000 | We open the week with two episodes with a guest, a friend of ours, Dr. John M. Frame,
00:00:09.960 | who is the J.D. Trimble Professor of Systematic Theology and Philosophy at Reform Theological
00:00:15.180 | Seminary in Orlando. Dr. Frame has published more words in his lifetime than most of us
00:00:20.920 | will read in our lifetimes, and we get him for two days, and no doubt he's going to hit
00:00:24.960 | these out of the park. Thank you for joining us, Dr. Frame.
00:00:27.280 | Well, I'm not a radio personality, and I'm not sure that I'll hit anything out of the
00:00:32.440 | park. Stop it. Just stop it. Tomorrow, I have a
00:00:35.640 | question for you on literature, so we're leading up to that. But first, you have an outstanding
00:00:40.920 | book coming out soon. It's called A History of Western Philosophy and Theology, and it
00:00:46.440 | releases in mid-November from PNR. It's one of the most important books of 2015, I think.
00:00:52.560 | In the book, under the section titled Antithesis in Epistemology, you write this, quote, "We
00:00:58.160 | know God and the world because he has taken the initiative to reveal himself. Otherwise,
00:01:05.020 | we could have no knowledge at all," end quote. Riff on this enormous reality for us for a
00:01:12.800 | few minutes. Fundamentally, how is all knowledge tied to God revealing himself?
00:01:19.720 | Well, God, first of all, is somebody who knows himself, the knowledge of the Father and the
00:01:28.280 | Son and the Spirit and the Holy Trinity for all eternity. And so when God makes a world,
00:01:36.720 | he knows that world perfectly well, because this is a world that he has planned, this
00:01:42.040 | is a world that he has created, this is a world that he has complete control over, and
00:01:47.680 | so he knows everything that there is to know in the world. Now, when he creates a creature
00:01:54.280 | that is also capable of knowing, he creates angels, he creates human beings, human beings
00:02:02.600 | are capable of knowing him in return. So the Bible says that God created Adam in the image
00:02:10.720 | of God, which includes the fact that just as God knows the world, so in a smaller sense,
00:02:20.160 | Adam knows the world. But of course, Adam couldn't know anything unless God had made
00:02:27.360 | him so that he's able to know. And so as Adam goes through the world, he looks at the trees,
00:02:36.640 | he looks at the ground and the rocks and the sky and everything that there is, and he's
00:02:42.600 | always looking at things that God has made, he's looking at things that God has known
00:02:49.520 | beforehand. And so Adam's job is to understand that world. Of course, God gave him the responsibility
00:02:59.160 | to keep the garden and to guard it and to till it, and for that, of course, Adam needs
00:03:05.840 | to gain knowledge of the world, but it's a knowledge that echoes God's own knowledge.
00:03:12.360 | It's a secondary knowledge, it's a knowledge of God's knowledge, if you will. So from the
00:03:18.440 | very beginning, Adam is working according to God's revelation. His knowledge is the
00:03:27.120 | knowledge that God has permitted him to have, and it's the knowledge of the world that God
00:03:33.240 | has made. So we talk about how Adam's thoughts, thinking God's thoughts after him. And so
00:03:41.560 | that's the way we all are now. Of course, the fall has messed us up in that regard because
00:03:48.560 | we suppress the truth, as Romans 1 says, but our job, if we're functioning rightly, is
00:03:57.880 | to think God's thoughts after him, to come to know the world in a way that's analogous
00:04:04.640 | to God's own knowledge of the world. And when God repairs our minds, repairs our hearts
00:04:12.520 | as part of redemption in Christ, then we begin again to think God's thoughts after him. We
00:04:20.480 | begin to think in a smaller way of the great thoughts that God had when he first created
00:04:27.480 | the world.
00:04:28.480 | Fascinating, that's so true. Okay, now this leads me to ask a question that has been on
00:04:33.440 | my mind for a long time, especially how do non-Christian novelists who obviously suppress
00:04:38.660 | the truth in unrighteousness, how do they know so much about the human condition and
00:04:42.960 | so much about what is true and good and beautiful? That's the question I want to ask tomorrow
00:04:48.760 | on the Ask Pastor John podcast with guest John Frame. Dr. Frame and I will be back tomorrow.
00:04:54.160 | Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast.
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