Sin and human cognition of God

In this article I argue that the effects of sin for our cognition of God primarily consist in a lack of knowledge by acquaintance of God and the relevant ensuing propositional knowledge. In the course of my argument, I make several conceptual distinctions and offer analyses of 1 Cor 13:9–12 and Rom 1:18–23. As it turns out, we have ample reason to think that sin has had and still has profound consequences for our cognition of God, but there is no reason to think that sin has taken away all knowledge of God or that sin has resulted in a loss of specific cognitive faculties which are orientated towards knowledge of God. Introduction The aim of this article is to state what we should consider as the consequences of sin for our cognition of God. In other words, the goal is to spell out what sin has done and currently does to our thinking, our beliefs, disbeliefs, withholdings, knowledge, lack of knowledge and so forth concerning the triune God or, in some cases, more specifically the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. There might be many more cognitive consequences of sin; perhaps sin also affects our cognition of good and evil,1 that of ourselves, that of other human beings, that of concrete material entities and that of all sorts of abstract immaterial entities. Here, however, I will confine myself to the noetic effects of sin for our cognition of God, leaving the treatment of these other cognitive consequences for another occasion. That sin has (had) effects for human knowledge of God is something widely acknowledged in the tradition of the church. We find this view both in the writings of well-known theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas,2 and official church documents, such as the Canons of Dordrecht.3 An account of what these noetic effects precisely amount to, however, is hard to find. Given that knowing God is in some sense of the word the primary goal of 1 For more on the effects of sin upon our moral cognition, see Rik Peels, ‘The effects of Sin Upon Human Moral Cognition’, Journal of Reformed Theology 4/1 (2010), pp. 42–69. 2 See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, vol. 1 (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1948), pp. 58, 478 (Ia, Q.13, art.12, Q.94, art.1). 3 See Canons of Dordrecht III/IV, arts. 1, 4.