Knowing We Can't Know
How Theological Retrieval Changed (And Eased) My Mind
Admitting that you don’t know something is intimidating. It’s not something I enjoy doing, since it feels like I have to know what I’m doing, whether it’s around the house, within the boys’ small group I lead, or in my theological endeavors. The world tells us that knowledge is power, and if we confess our lack of it, then by deduction we don’t hold power. Even further, in our age of information, where we’ve essentially come of age with access to Google (and now AI-powered searches through Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini, and more that almost do the thinking for us), it’s anathema to show even the slightest shadow of ignorance.
This thinking has seeped its way into our faith. It’s made “faith” itself, what the author of the biblical letter to the Hebrews defines as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1 ESV), more of an antiquity to put on a shelf to admire rather than a practice that belongs in the here and now. I’ve heard it said more times than I’ve wanted to that a person I’m talking to can’t get on board with the whole God thing because there are too many unknowns, reflecting the infiltration of this pervasive must-know mentality.
But what if faith is more acknowledgement than knowledge? What if it’s supposed to be acceptance of what we don’t and won’t know rather than attaining all that we can know?
Thus, the train of thought for which I hope to argue and demonstrate emerged: when it comes to God, knowing we won’t and can’t know it all is oddly comforting. The theological and spiritual geniuses that came before us figured this out pretty quickly. Call it the prevailing cultural Platonic or Aristotelian philosophy, or simply the more localized context in comparison to how globalized we are as a society, but it’s undeniable that the minds of the early church worked from a presupposition akin to accepting our limitations in understanding the Divine.
The Book That Sparked The Thought
Now, I cannot take all of the credit for pressing into the research that follows. Outside of dwelling and spending the past month in the Gospels, I’ve been dwelling heavily in Gavin Ortlund’s works. A prolific author, thinker, and explainer (if that’s even a word), Ortlund first caught my attention not in and of himself, but actually after reading Ray Ortlund, his father. For time while we lived in Nashville, we were mere blocks from Immanuel where Ray pastored, attending for a season before COVID-19 broke out.
While What It Means To Be Protestant was formative in my understanding and grasping of our evangelical heritage (and, at the time of writing this piece, the subject of a forthcoming Journal of Theological Studies review I’ve written), it was his more academic and conceptually denser work, Theological Retrieval for Evangelicals, that laid the pavers and trail markers for this journey. The main thesis is that evangelical Christians ought to undertake a “theological retrieval” of the church’s patristic and medieval heritage—not so as to abandon their evangelical identity, but rather to deepen it: by drawing on earlier theological reflection (reasoned from Scripture) they can meet contemporary challenges more faithfully, as one of the church’s greatest resources for navigating her present challenges is her very past. In his words, “A posture of reception and transmission is a basic part of Christian identity, and the church has always drawn from her past to meet the challenges of her present.”1
It’s worth nothing that, as expressed in the thesis, the answer is not converting to Catholicism or Orthodoxy; after all, it’s not a return but a retrieval, pulling forward instead of going backward. Rather, what occurred in the Reformation was more like a family sitting down to argue and work out a disagreement, an effort to confront what went wrong so that we could continue as a family. Ortlund clarifies, “The early Protestants sought nothing other than to pare off novel deviations from catholicity and to return to those mainstream practices and beliefs that can be plausibly related back to apostolic teaching.”2 Yet, we know from hindsight that the intended result was not what occurred.
In the case studies Ortlund conducts on how the patristic and medieval theologians viewed and understood God, his observations regarding both their presuppositions and conclusions brought to a head many theories and ideas swirling around in my mind, particularly in relation to how we formulate an understanding of God in our modern minds.
The Creator/Creation Distinction as a Comfort
One of the most stabilizing insights recovered through theological retrieval is the classical insistence on the Creator/creation distinction. The fathers did not begin with a God who resembled a larger, wiser, slightly more impressive version of ourselves. They began with the God who is other—the One who creates, sustains, names, and orders all reality. This distinction was not a philosophical flourish. It was the bedrock that allowed the early church to confess mystery without collapsing into despair. If God is truly the Creator and we are truly His creatures, then our limits are not threats to faith but signs of our proper place in the cosmos. When Augustine writes of the heart’s restless longing or Gregory of Nazianzus reflects on divine incomprehensibility, they are not panicking at the edges of knowledge. They are acknowledging that the gap between God and creature is good and right and strangely life-giving.
To retrieve this distinction today is to recover the grace of finitude, a gentle counterweight to the restlessness produced by our hyper-connected, hyper-informed age. It should be comforting, not off-putting, to acknowledge that we cannot know God in full. We cannot “figure out” God and still place our faith in Him; if we had all the information, it wouldn’t be faith at that point. What I love most about how Ortlund tackles this subject is by “[imagining] God and creation in terms of a specific author and book, J. R. R. Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings.”3 Not only because I personally am a Middle Earth nerd, but the analogy as a whole clarifies and rightly sets such a distinction in terms that make sense. His summary statement encompasses the point of the argument: “It is not as though God is simply more real or more important than the world—rather, reality is fully God’s possession, and our contact with it is wholly derivative. God is the great truth, the great Fact that simply is—and we are his story.”4
Divine Simplicity as an Illumination
A second point of illumination emerges in the doctrine of “divine simplicity.” For many modern believers, simplicity sounds abstract—perhaps even irrelevant. Despite having two theology degrees, I hadn’t given much thought to the doctrine in its specific context prior to reading this book. Yet to the patristic and medieval theologians, it was indispensable for worship. If God is not composed of parts, if He is not a bundle of attributes stitched together, then His being is not contingent, fragile, or subject to change. Divine simplicity protects us from imagining God as one more complex entity in the universe. It grounds His faithfulness, His goodness, His beauty, and His love in His very being. Ortlund’s retrieval of these earlier voices reminded me that simplicity is not an exercise in metaphysical gymnastics. It is a safeguard for the gospel. A God who is love in Himself is a God whose love does not wax or wane with the tides of human history. A God who is life in Himself is not exhausted by the world’s sorrow or threatened by the world’s rebellion. To contemplate divine simplicity is to learn again that the God who cannot be fully comprehended can nevertheless be fully trusted. Yet again, Ortlund’s concluding thoughts speak volumes on the doctrine for us today: “Divine simplicity is a difficult doctrine, to be sure. But then would we not expect at the outset difficulties of its kind? Why should God not be different than we expect and other than we can fathom? It would be strange indeed if God were not strange.”5
Now What?
If all of this is true—if the church’s past can steady our present, if our limitations can anchor rather than unsettle us—then the invitation before us is simple: receive. Faith becomes less an achievement of intellectual mastery and more a posture of humble attentiveness. To know that we cannot know everything about God is not an abdication of theological seriousness. It is the beginning of it. The retrieval of earlier voices is not an indulgence in nostalgia. It is a way of remembering that we are not the first generation to wrestle with God, nor will we be the last. The fathers and medieval theologians hand us a way of seeing that is both ancient and fresh—a way that reminds us that mystery is not the enemy of discipleship but one of its essential tutors.
This is the very dynamic that emerges in the Gospels themselves. The Samaritan woman in John 4:39 does not come to Jesus with a complete doctrinal system. She comes with astonishment: “He told me all that I ever did.” The man born blind in John 9:25 does not offer a metaphysical treatise on the divine nature. He simply confesses, “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” Their testimony is not grounded in exhaustive comprehension but in the recognition that Jesus Christ confronts, reveals, restores, and calls.
In this way, theological retrieval does not shrink our world; it enlarges it. It frees us from the modern demand to possess exhaustive certainty and invites us into a form of confidence shaped by encounter, worship, and wonder. Perhaps knowing we cannot know everything about God is not a failure of the Christian life. Perhaps it is one of its greatest consolations. The God who exceeds our understanding is the same God who makes Himself known in Christ, and the same God who will one day make all things new. The mystery that humbles us is the mystery that ultimately heals us.
And if that is true, then the path forward is not fear of what we cannot grasp but gratitude for the One who holds us fast, even when our knowledge reaches its end.
Gavin Ortlund, Theological Retrieval for Evangelicals: Why We Need Our Past to Have a Future (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2019), 18.
Gavin Ortlund, What It Means to Be Protestant: The Case for an Always-Reforming Church (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2024), 220.
Ortlund, Theological Retrieval for Evangelicals, 91.
Ortlund, Theological Retrieval for Evangelicals, 115.
Ortlund, Theological Retrieval for Evangelicals, 139.