THE HEART
The knowledge of God is a heart-knowledge (see
Exod. 35:5; 1 Sam. 2:1; 2 Sam. 7:3; Pss. 4:4; 7:10; 15:2; Isa. 6:10; Matt. 5:8;
12:34; 22:37; Eph. 1:18; etc.). The heart is the “center” of the personality,
the person himself in his most basic character. Scripture represents it as the
source of through, of volition, of attitude, of speech. It is also the seat of
moral knowledge. In the Old Testament, heart is used in contexts where conscience
would be an acceptable translation (see 1 Sam. 24:5).
The fact that the heart is depraved, then,
means that apart from grace we are in radical ignorance of the things of God (Part
One). Only the grace of God, which restores us from the heart outward, can
restore to us the knowledge of God that belongs to God’s covenant servants—the knowledge
that is correlative with obedience.
One implication of this fact is that the believer’s
knowledge of God is inseparable from godly character. The same Spirit who gives
the first in regeneration also gives the second. And the qualifications for the
ministry of teaching (theology) in Scripture are predominately moral
qualifications (1 Tim. 3:1ff.; 1 Peter 5:1ff.) Thus the quality of theological work
is dependent not only on propositional knowledge or on skills in logic, history,
linguistics, and so forth (which, of course, believers and unbelievers share to
a large extent); it is also dependent on the theologian’s character. (We saw in Part One how knowledge and obedience are linked in Scripture.)
A second implication is that the knowledge of God
is gained not only through one “faculty” or another, such as the intellect or
the emotions, but through the heart, the whole person. The theologian knows by
means of everything he is and all the abilities and capacities that have been
given him by God. Intellect, emotions, will, imagination, sensation, natural
and spiritual gifts of skills—all contribute toward the knowledge of God. All
knowledge of God enlists all our faculties, because it engages everything
that we are. (John M. Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God [A
Theology of Lordship; Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1987], 322-23)