Norman Shepherd's Circle and the Mystery of God

John Frame tells the story of how Dr. Norman Shepherd came into class one day and wrote a circle on the board. This circle, and more particularly the space inside the circle, represented our knowledge of God. The circumference of the circle represented our exposure to the mystery of God and everything about God that we don't know that lies outside the circle. Shepherd then postulated that as the size of our circle increases as our knowledge of God increases, the circumference of our circle also increases. This means that our exposure to the mystery of God increases, which means that the more we know, the more we come to realize how much we don't know. Shepherd's circle is instructive, but it is also potentially dangerous if taken too far.

Positively, Shepherd's circle squarely puts us in our place with regard to our understanding of God. Put simply, the more we study, the more we contemplate, the more we seek after God's will, and the more we pray and watch for God in the events of the world, the more we will know about God and the better we will understand him on some level. But this comes with the danger of becoming arrogant and puffed up in our knowledge if we don't take heed of the increasing circumference that gives us an increased taste of how much we don't know God that paradoxically accompanies our increased knowledge of God. This is the inevitable result of Van Til's Creator-creature distinction, and of all attempts by finite beings to understand the infinite. What this means practically is that theologians in particular ought to be far and away the most humble people we ever meet, since they ought to have the most vivid appreciation of how much they don't know by virtue of having accumulated all the knowledge they do have. The fact that humility is so often in short supply among the theological elite speaks volumes about the quality of their knowledge and lack of grasp of divine mystery, and it serves as a warning to the rest of us in our novice studies of the eternal and infinite character of God.

Negatively, Shepherd's Circle, if misunderstood, carries with it the danger of overemphasizing mystery and 'otherness' in ways that undermine the reality of authentic divine revelation. Shepherd, of course, came after Karl Barth. But the early Barth is a classic example of how divine 'otherness' can obscure the reality of revelation. For the early Barth, God was 'wholly other', which made it very difficult to affirm any concrete knowledge of God (though that didn't stop Barth from writing 13 volumes about God in his Church Dogmatics). To his credit, Barth was reacting against the domesticated God of theological liberalism that made God a tame and all too knowable entity that could be easily grasped and manipulated by finite humans. But in properly rejecting this domestication, Barth lurched in the direction of unbridled mystery and 'otherness' that made it difficult to ascertain a firm foundation for human knowledge of God. This is the danger that comes with underappreciating what we do know and what God really has revealed to us and the world through his Son, through the Scriptures, and through creation. Put simply, if in thinking about Shepherd's Circle, we become exclusively fixated on the circumference of mystery, we will lose sight of all that is inside the circle that helps us preserve a sense of biblical knowability (1J 2.13-14).

In wrestling with Shepherd's Circle in our own lives, we have to be cognizant of both knowability and mystery. Instead of emphasizing one and deemphasizing the other, we have to radically stress both to ourselves and to others. God is beyond our complete understanding, and there is an incalculable amount of knowledge about God that we do not possess. Barth is right that God cannot be domesticated without arriving at a God that is completely foreign to the Scriptures. But on the other hand, the whole biblical account, and even Scripture itself, is a story of how God reveals himself to humanity. The God of the Bible is not a God who runs and hides from us because he doesn't want us to know him. To the contrary, God wants to be known and worshipped in truth. As humans, we are left with the sobering reality that there is so much about God that we don't know, and that all we do know about God is the result of God proactively revealing himself and giving us eyes and ears to process his revelation to us. Humility and awestruck gratitude are the only acceptable responses, and are in fact requirements for us to know God rightly (Proverbs 11.2, 22.4; James 3.13).