Lord’s Day Quote: Louis Berkhof

God is the Principium Essendi.  This is equivalent to saying that all our knowledge of God has its origin in God Himself.  God possesses a complete and in every way perfect knowledge of Himself.  He knows Himself in the absolute sense of the word, not only as He is related to His creatures, nor merely in His diversified activities and their controlling motives, but also in the unfathomable depths of His essential Being.  His self-consciousness is perfect and infinite; there is no sub-conscious life in Him, no subliminal region of unconscious mentality.  And of that absolute, perfectly conscious self-knowledge of God, the knowledge which man has of the divine Being is but a faint and creaturely copy or imprint.  All human knowledge of God is derived from Him, Matt 11:27; 1 Cor 2:10 f.  And because there can be no knowledge of God in man apart from self-consciousness in God, Pantheism spells death for all theology.  It is impossible to deduce a conscious creature from an unconscious God, a creature that knows God from a God that does not know Himself.  We can find the principium of our theology only in a personal God, perfect in self-consciousness, as He freely, consciously, and truly reveals Himself.

 

Louis Berkhof, The Idea and History of Dogmatic Theology