"An idea in man is first impressed upon him and afterwards expressed in things, but in God it is only expressed, not impressed, because it does not come from anywhere else"
About this Quote
Ames is drawing a bright, almost clinical line between human thought as reception and divine thought as pure production. In people, ideas arrive with the dull thud of contact: the mind is acted upon, stamped by experience, teaching, tradition, the world. Only afterward do we translate that interior imprint into “things” - words, tools, institutions, art. The sequence matters. It makes human creativity dependent, secondhand, and therefore fallible.
In God, Ames argues, the order collapses. There is no prior “impressing” because there is no outside source to do the impressing. Divine ideas are not learned; they are identical with God’s own nature and will, and therefore they come out already formed as expression. The subtext is a defense of divine aseity and omniscience, but it’s also a quiet polemic against any theology that smuggles contingency into God - as if God reacts, updates, or takes in information.
The rhetorical finesse is the pairing of “impressed” and “expressed,” a metaphor borrowed from early modern print culture and artisanal making: the stamp and the product. Ames was a Reformed scholastic writing in a period when Protestant thinkers were systematizing doctrine with an almost architectural rigor, wary of Catholic sacramental mediation and skeptical of mystical “infusions” that might blur the Creator-creature divide. He’s not romanticizing inspiration; he’s disciplining it. Human minds are porous; God is not. That asymmetry underwrites everything that follows: revelation as gift, creation as act, and humility as the only sane posture for creatures who do not originate their own first causes.
In God, Ames argues, the order collapses. There is no prior “impressing” because there is no outside source to do the impressing. Divine ideas are not learned; they are identical with God’s own nature and will, and therefore they come out already formed as expression. The subtext is a defense of divine aseity and omniscience, but it’s also a quiet polemic against any theology that smuggles contingency into God - as if God reacts, updates, or takes in information.
The rhetorical finesse is the pairing of “impressed” and “expressed,” a metaphor borrowed from early modern print culture and artisanal making: the stamp and the product. Ames was a Reformed scholastic writing in a period when Protestant thinkers were systematizing doctrine with an almost architectural rigor, wary of Catholic sacramental mediation and skeptical of mystical “infusions” that might blur the Creator-creature divide. He’s not romanticizing inspiration; he’s disciplining it. Human minds are porous; God is not. That asymmetry underwrites everything that follows: revelation as gift, creation as act, and humility as the only sane posture for creatures who do not originate their own first causes.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
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