Nicholas Lash on divine and human knowledge

“The supposition that there could be a single ‘basic sense’ of ‘know,’ held constant ‘across the divine-human gap,’ risks giving the impression that bodiliness is, in the last analysis, incidental to what, in human beings, knowledge means, and to how we come to know things. It is, after all, our being in the body, being in time, being historically, socially and culturally produced and nurtured, which makes human knowing the experientially grounded interpretative and responsive negotiation of circumstances not of our creating. Whereas God’s knowledge lovingly and gratuitously creates the things God knows, ex nihilo, ours does not.”

Nicholas Lash, “Contemplation, Metaphor, and Real Knowledge,” in The Beginning and the End of ‘Religion’ (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 129.