Can God's attributes be known?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Usually considered reconciled

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

This tension softens considerably once each text's actual claim is parsed, and on the standard exegesis it dissolves into a familiar theological distinction rather than a contradiction.

Paul's statement in Romans 1:20 is a carefully bounded claim about general revelation. The Greek specifies what is perceptible: *ta aorata autou*, "his invisible attributes," further defined as *he aidios autou dynamis kai theiotes*, "his eternal power and divinity." These are "clearly seen" (*kathoratai*) and "understood" (*nooumena*) through the created order, with the explicit forensic purpose that humans be *anapologetous*, "without excuse." Joseph Fitzmyer in the Anchor Bible Romans and James Dunn in the WBC both stress the polemical function: Paul is constructing a courtroom indictment of Gentile humanity, depriving it of the plea of ignorance regarding God's existence and power. He is not asserting that the divine essence is exhaustively or perfectly knowable. There is a long-running lexical debate here, but it cuts both ways. A classic line of interpreters — R. C. Trench in his *Synonyms of the New Testament*, followed by C. E. B. Cranfield in the ICC — distinguishes *theiotes* (Rom 1:20: "divinity," the quality of being divine) from *theotes* (Col 2:9: "deity," the fullness of the Godhead). But this is contested, not settled: BDAG and a number of commentators treat the two words as effectively synonymous and caution against pressing the distinction, so it overstates the case to read a firm narrowing as Paul's certain intent. The distinction also lives entirely in the Greek — the KJV renders *both* terms "Godhead," so an English-only reader sees no contrast. The point that survives the debate is the modest one: Paul names eternal power and divinity in service of culpability, and nothing in the verse claims that creation yields an exhaustive account of God.

The Wisdom-tradition texts make a different claim. Job 11:7, on the lips of Zophar, asks "Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection?" — the operative term being *ad-taklit*, "to the limit" or "to perfection," i.e., exhaustively. David Clines notes that the rhetorical question denies comprehensive knowledge, not the existence of any knowledge of God. Isaiah 40:28 declares "there is no searching (Hebrew *en heqer*) of his understanding" — a statement about the unfathomable depth of divine wisdom, set within a disputation meant to assure exiles that the Creator's purposes exceed their grasp. Joseph Blenkinsopp reads it as consolation grounded in transcendence, not as a denial that God can be known at all.

So the two clusters operate at different scopes. Romans 1:20 affirms minimal, propositional knowledge of God's existence and power from creation; Job and Isaiah deny exhaustive comprehension of God's full nature and understanding. Both can be true simultaneously: that God is, and is powerful, may be evident, while what God is, in the totality of his being, remains unsearchable. This is the classic distinction between knowability of existence and incomprehensibility of essence, and most apologists and most critical scholars alike accept it.

The residual tension is not textual but a matter of deployment. Romans 1:20 has frequently been pressed into service for a robust natural theology that claims to derive substantive divine attributes — omniscience, omnipotence, eternality, even moral character — directly from observing nature. That maximal reading does collide with Job 11:7 and Isaiah 40:28, which deny precisely such exhaustive access. But the maximal reading exceeds what Paul's own words assert; he names only eternal power and divinity, in service of culpability. When Romans 1:20 is read as Paul wrote it — minimally, forensically — there is no contradiction with the Wisdom tradition's insistence on incomprehensibility.

This entry is therefore weaker than it first appears. The verses can be reconciled by delimiting what "knowing God" means in each context, and that delimitation follows the grammar and rhetorical purpose of each passage rather than being imposed artificially.

Where the critical reading lands: overstated; harmonizable through the standard distinction between general revelation of God's existence/power and the incomprehensibility of his full essence.