Tuesday, March 8, 2022

A.W. Pink and John Dick on the Beatific Vision and only "Seeing" God Through a Form of "Spiritual Eyes"

  

The saints in heaven will see God with the eye of the mind, for He will always be invisible to the bodily eye; and will see Him more clearly than they could see Him by reason and faith, and more extensively than all His works and dispensations had hitherto revealed Him; but their minds will not be so enlarged as to be capable of contemplating at once, or in detail, the whole excellence of His nature. To comprehend infinite perfection, they must become infinite themselves. Even in Heaven, their knowledge will be partial, but at the same time their happiness will be complete, because their knowledge will be perfect in this sense, that it will be adequate to the capacity of the subject, although it will be progressive, and that as their views expand, their blessedness will increase; but it will never reach a limit beyond which there is nothing to be discovered; and when ages after ages have passed away, He will still be the comprehensible God. (John Dick, 1840). (Arthur Walkington Pink, The Attributes of God [Watchmaker Publishing, 2011], 104)