The Paradox of Knowing Jesus: Accessible Yet Beyond Comprehension

The Word of God in its veiling, its form, is the claiming of man by God.

We meant by this the fact that the total Word of God, whether veiled and unveiled, or unveiled and veiled, always encounters us, and that this is each time something specific for us, that it is one-sided for us, that now it encounters us in its veiling and now in its unveiling, that it is not manifest to us in the unity of the two, and yet that it always seeks to be heard by us as a complete Word of God.

Barth, K., Bromiley, G. W., & Torrance, T. F. (2004). Church dogmatics: The doctrine of the Word of God, Part 1 (Vol. 1, pp. 207–241). T&T Clark.

Jesus Christ can be known, but he is not easily known. Because he is God with us, he is genuinely accessible; yet because he is God with us, he also remains far beyond our full grasp. In this way he is just like his Father. God can be known, but never comprehended. We truly know something of God, but far more remains beyond us — perhaps always will — because finite creatures cannot contain infinite reality, not even in eternity. Karl Barth captured this paradox by saying that God is both veiled and unveiled, and that even in unveiling, God remains veiled.

But why, then, does the world fail to recognize even the unveiled part of Jesus — his word, his works, his love, his glory? How could such things be missed?

Here we meet the mystery of iniquity, a darkness that includes willed ignorance and self‑deception. Lewis Smedes once described self‑deception as a corrupted consciousness that, like a clever computer fraud, covers its own tracks: first we deceive ourselves, and then we persuade ourselves that we are not deceiving ourselves at all.