"God is therefore unknowable. This is the fundamental premise of the Bible"
About this Quote
Strauss drops a grenade into the tidy assumption that the Bible is a user manual for metaphysics. If God is "therefore unknowable", then the most important biblical claim isn’t a set of propositions about the divine; it’s a limit placed on human certainty. The word "therefore" matters: Strauss is not emoting, he’s deducing. He’s treating revelation as a disciplined encounter with the boundaries of reason, not as an excuse to stop thinking.
The line also performs a characteristic Straussian maneuver: it protects faith from the pretensions of philosophy while simultaneously protecting philosophy from the totalizing claims of theology. An unknowable God is a rebuke to both the smug rationalist who thinks the cosmos is fully legible and the religious literalist who treats scripture as a data dump from heaven. What’s left is a productive tension: the Bible doesn’t hand you God; it hands you a posture of humility, awe, and restraint about what can be said.
Context sharpens the edge. Writing in the shadow of modern ideologies that promised scientific mastery of politics and history, Strauss was obsessed with how certainty becomes tyranny. If the fundamental premise is unknowability, then any regime, church, or thinker claiming privileged access to God’s full intentions is suspect. Subtext: reverence is not the same as possession. The Bible, for Strauss, is less a map of God than a warning label on the human impulse to turn the infinite into something manageable, quotable, and obedient.
The line also performs a characteristic Straussian maneuver: it protects faith from the pretensions of philosophy while simultaneously protecting philosophy from the totalizing claims of theology. An unknowable God is a rebuke to both the smug rationalist who thinks the cosmos is fully legible and the religious literalist who treats scripture as a data dump from heaven. What’s left is a productive tension: the Bible doesn’t hand you God; it hands you a posture of humility, awe, and restraint about what can be said.
Context sharpens the edge. Writing in the shadow of modern ideologies that promised scientific mastery of politics and history, Strauss was obsessed with how certainty becomes tyranny. If the fundamental premise is unknowability, then any regime, church, or thinker claiming privileged access to God’s full intentions is suspect. Subtext: reverence is not the same as possession. The Bible, for Strauss, is less a map of God than a warning label on the human impulse to turn the infinite into something manageable, quotable, and obedient.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
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