Human Limitations on Perceiving God's Nature

Cunningham, Richard B. C.S. Lewis: Defender of the Faith. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1967.

Richard Cunningham discusses Lewis’s journey of finding Christ in his book C.S. Lewis: Defender of the Faith and how he struggled with accepting the reality of Christianity. When Lewis learned more about the Christian narrative, he was intrigued but not initially convinced, which is understandable. Cunningham explains how the limitations of Christian present a struggle of understanding God’s nature based on the restrictions of human language. Our words, constructed through human understanding, limit God to descriptions based on our own experiences. For example, we can describe God as having traits that we see in other people, such as being “all-intelligent,” "all-good" and “all-powerful.” Unfortunately, these descriptions do not do justice to the true nature of God.
On the other hand, we attempt to define God based on words that describe Him from the negative, such as being INfinite, IMmaterial, IMpassible, IMmutable, etc. This view also has its limitations, as it focuses on abstractions that depict God by what He is NOT rather than by what He IS. Cunningham emphasizes the importance of keeping a “balance between metaphysical and theological abstractions and anthropomorphic images” (104). He goes on to explain that these descriptions, while both are “concessions” to human limitations, are not fully accurate when taken independently, but allow a “mutually corrective” perspective when applied together (105).