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καθοράω (Kathoraō): Seeing Clearly What God Has Made Plain · Reformed Thinking

• 0:00
  Hello and welcome back. We are trying something a little
• 0:03
  different with the introduction today, just for today, because
• 0:06
  the material we're covering really, I think, demands a
• 0:09
  specific frame of reference. You're listening to reformed
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  thinking. We've gathered a stack of
• 0:16
  lexicons, theological dictionaries, commentaries.
• 0:19
  I mean, this stack would probably break a smaller table.
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  And our goal is to sift through all that density to find the.
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  Gold, and it is dense. It is, but we're looking at
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  these things specifically through the lens of Scripture as
• 0:33
  the final authority, which, you know, is really the heartbeat of
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  reformed thinking. It's good to be here and looking
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  at that stack of books, I think formidable.
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  It's absolutely the right word. We're dealing with Greek
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  philology and biblical theology, which can sound so dry with.
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  So dry. But we're actually tackling A
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  tension that sits right at the center of the Christian life.
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  It's a massive tension. Honestly when I first started
• 0:56
  reading through the prep material for this I thought we
• 0:59
  might have hit a dead end. It just feels like a genuine
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  contradiction it. Does on the surface.
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  We serve a God who is explicitly described as invisible.
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  The Scriptures call him Aretos. We're told in John 1.18 flat out
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  no one has seen God at any time. I mean that seems like a closed
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  case. It does.
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  God is spirit, He doesn't have a body.
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  He doesn't reflect light waves. You cannot see him.
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  And that is the Orthodox Christian position.
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  God is invisible by nature. If you can see it with your
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  physical eyeballs, it's not God in his essence.
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  Right. But then, and this is where it
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  gets messy, we turn to Romans 1.20.
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  The Apostle Paul is building this massive legal case for why
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  every human being is guilty before God, and he says
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  something that just stops me in my tracks.
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  It's a jarring verse. He says God's invisible
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  attributes are clearly seen. The Greek word is cathorati, so
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  I have to ask, how can something that is by definition invisible
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  be clearly seen? It's the central question.
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  Is Paul just being poetic or is there actual logic here?
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  Because if I told you I clearly saw the oxygen in this room,
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  you'd think I was hallucinating. You would.
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  It sounds like a paradox or even nonsense on the surface.
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  How do you clearly see the unseeable?
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  But this is where the language is so precise.
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  When we dig into that word cathora, and when we step back
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  and look at how the Bible handles the concept of sight
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  versus hearing, the contradiction, just it
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  disappears. It's not a malfunction in logic.
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  It's a description of how the human mind processes reality.
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  So our job today is to take this apart piece by piece.
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  We're going to look at the cultural war between the Greeks
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  and the Hebrews regarding the senses, which I think explains a
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  lot of why the New Testament is written the way it.
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  Is really does? Then we need to break down the
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  different words for seeing to understand why Paul picked this
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  specific one. And finally, we have to figure
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  out how this fits into a reformed understanding of
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  general revelation. Because if we're saying God is
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  clearly seen, that has huge implications for the atheist,
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  the agnostic, and, you know, for the believer.
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  Too. That changes everything.
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  It means that the problem of the world isn't a lack of evidence,
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  it's a problem of suppression. But, well, we're getting ahead
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  of ourselves. We are.
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  Let's rewind. Let's rewind to the cultural
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  context. This was part of the research
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  that really surprised me. I sort of assumed everyone in
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  the ancient world thought about the senses the same way we do.
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  It's a common assumption. But the history books paint a
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  very different picture. They call the Greeks a people of
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  the eye. It's a distinction you see all
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  over historical theology. The ancient Greek culture was,
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  you could say, visually obsessed.
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  For them, sight was the supreme sense.
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  The top of the pyramid. Oh.
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  Absolutely. It was the primary highway to
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  truth. If you wanted to really know
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  something, you had to see it. There's a fragment from the
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  philosopher heraclitus #101A where he just bluntly says eyes
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  are more accurate witnesses than ears.
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  And that feels very modern. Actually.
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  We still say seeing is believing.
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  We do. We want video evidence.
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  If we hear a rumor, we say I'll believe it.
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  When I see it, it seems the Greeks were the original
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  empiricists. They were, and you see it in
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  their architecture, in their religion.
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  Think about a Greek temple. It's designed to be looked at.
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  It's filled with statues, marble, gold, ivory.
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  The gods were things you gazed upon.
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  Things to be seen. Yes, and Plato and Aristotle
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  built their entire philosophies around this.
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  Aristotle argued that sight was the most beloved sense because
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  it revealed the most differences between objects.
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  It gave you data. Right.
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  It categorizes the world for. You exactly.
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  But Plato went even further. He called philosophers
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  Philippiomonas. OK, what does that mean?
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  It translates to levers of the spectacle of truth.
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  Lovers of the spectacle that is vivid, they viewed the world as
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  a show to be watched and analyzed.
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  Yes, precisely. The visual form the idos was
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  connected to the essence of the thing.
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  To see the form was to know the reality.
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  So you have a culture that just equates seeing with knowing.
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  But then you cross the Mediterranean to the Hebrews and
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  you are in a completely different universe.
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  A different planet, almost. If the Greeks were the people of
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  the eye, the Hebrews were the people of the ear.
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  The contrast is so sharp, the Old Testament prioritizes
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  hearing above everything else. What is the central confession
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  of Israel? It's the Shima here, O Israel,
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  the Lord our God, the Lord is 1. It's not look O Israel, it's.
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  Not look O Israel, it's here. And when you think about their
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  temple experience compared to the Greeks, it's striking.
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  The Holy of Holies didn't have a statue of Yahweh.
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  It had the ark, sure, but above the ark, between the cherubim,
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  there was empty space. That is such a critical point to
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  make a visual representation of God was the ultimate sin.
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  Idolatry. It was idolatry.
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  The second commandment is explicit.
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  You shall not make for yourself a carved image, and you have to
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  ask why. Because you cannot reduce the
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  Creator to a visual form. In the Greek mindset.
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  If you can sculpt it, you can understand it.
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  In the Hebrew mindset, if you sculpt it, you've just lied
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  about it. You've reduced the infinite to
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  the finite. So God is heard, not seen.
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  He reveals himself through his word.
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  And God said, let there be light.
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  And the word of the Lord came to the prophets.
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  It's auditory again and again. That is the mechanism of
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  revelation. God speaks, and this connects
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  directly to the Reformed emphasis on the preached Word.
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  We don't come to church to watch a performance, we come to hear a
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  proclamation. That's good.
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  And Paul picks this up in Romans 10.17.
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  Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.
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  Notice he doesn't say faith comes by seeing miracles.
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  Right, because you can see a miracle and still not believe.
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  Pharaoh saw plenty, but faith comes by hearing.
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  The notes mentioned a philosopher named Melissos who
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  argued that the senses are inadequate to grasp true nature.
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  That feels much closer to the Hebrew view.
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  It's this idea that your eyes can trick you.
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  A stick looks bent in the water, but it isn't.
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  But the word, the logic, the logos, that's where truth lives.
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  The Hebrew mind understood that the physical eye stops at the
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  surface. It sees the skin, the shape, the
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  color, but it cannot penetrate to the heart of the Spirit.
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  To know a person, you don't stare at them, you listen to
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  them speak. That's how you know God.
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  OK, so here's the setup. You have the New Testament
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  writers, who are mostly Jewish in their theology, believing in
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  a God who is heard. But the writing in Greek, a
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  language designed by people who are obsessed with sight, that
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  has to create some friction. It creates a lot of friction,
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  but it also creates opportunity. The Holy Spirit inspired these
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  writers to take those Greek words, words just loaded with
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  visual baggage and redeem them. OK.
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  They twist the definition slightly to convey spiritual
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  truths. And that's why we have to get
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  into the weeds with the vocabulary.
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  If we don't understand the nuance of the words, we miss the
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  theology. Let's do it.
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  Let's break down the four verbs for seeing that came up in the
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  research. I think this is helpful because
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  in English we just say see. Right, it's all one word for us.
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  I see a bird, I see what you mean.
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  I see a movie, but the Greeks had different buckets for these
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  things. Let's start with the most basic
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  1 Harash. Right Harass is your utility
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  player. It's a generalist term.
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  It means to see, to perceive, to look.
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  But in ancient Greek, specifically in Homer, it often
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  carried the weight of participating in life.
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  Participating. Yes, there's a phrase to see the
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  light of the sun, which was just a poetic way of saying to be
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  alive. So it's experiential.
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  It isn't just the mechanics of light hitting the retina.
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  No, not at all. It implies personal involvement.
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  If I say I saw the horrors of war, I don't mean I watched a
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  documentary. I mean I was there.
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  I felt the mud. I smelled the smoke.
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  You. Experienced it.
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  You experienced it, and the Hebrew usage of seeing often
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  bleeds into this too. In the Psalms you have phrases
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  like seeing death or seeing corruption.
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  You don't look at death with binoculars, you undergo it.
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  So Horat is often about the subjects experience.
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  OK. That's bucket #1 experiential
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  seeing then we have BLEPO. This one felt a bit more
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  clinical to me. That's a very fair assessment.
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  Blepo emphasizes the function of the eye itself.
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  It's the opposite of being blind.
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  If you go to an optometrist, they're testing your Blippo.
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  OK. They want to know if the
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  machinery is working. But even that gets used
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  metaphorically in the New Testament, doesn't it?
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  Oh, constantly. Jesus often uses the physical to
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  point to the spiritual. He asked the disciples having
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  eyes, do you not see? He uses the word bleep out to
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  talk about spiritual blindness. He's saying the equipment is
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  fine, but. You're saying your physical
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  machinery is working fine, you aren't bumping into walls, but
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  your internal receiver is broken.
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  Got it. Then we get to the third one,
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  which is my personal favorite, the Shreish.
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  It sounds like theory, and I assume that's not a coincidence.
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  It is the direct ancestor of our word theory.
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  No coincidence at all. The route is Theros Theros,
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  which was the title for a spectator at a public festival
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  or games. So imagine you were sent to the
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  Olympic Games as an official envoy.
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  You aren't just glancing at the athletes.
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  No, you're studying. Them you're studying.
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  Them you're watching the techniques, you are intent on
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  the spectacle. I like the sports analogy.
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  It's the difference between someone who has the game on in
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  the background while they wash dishes and the coach who is
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  watching the game film. That's it.
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  The coach is theorizing. He's connecting the dots.
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  Why did the linebacker move of there?
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  What's the strategy? That is the church.
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  It implies A sustained gaze that leads to understanding.
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  It moves from observation to interpretation.
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  When we do see an antific theory, we are observing data
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  points and constructing a model to explain them.
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  That's what this word captures. It's not a passing glance, it's
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  an investigation. Which leads us to the
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  heavyweight champion for today's discussion, Cathoris.
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  This is the word Paul uses in Romans 1.20.
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  It's a compound word, right? It is.
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  You have the root Horus to see and you add the preposition kata
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  to the front. Kata can mean down, like looking
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  down from a high vantage point, seeing the whole valley.
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  But often in Greek kata acts as an intensifier.
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  It implies thoroughly or completely.
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  So it means to see distinctly, to perceive clearly.
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  It denotes a successful definite apprehension.
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  It means you haven't just looked, you have grasped, you
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  have acquired definite information.
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  It is the moment the blurry image snaps into focus and you
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  say aha, that's a lion. And this is rare in the New
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  Testament. Very rare, but it's usage in
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  Romans 1.2 is extremely strategic.
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  Paul picks this specific intensified word to describe how
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  we view God through creation. Let's go back to the text then.
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  Romans 1.21 for the invisible things of him from the creation
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  of the world are clearly seen. Katharathai being understood by
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  the things that are made. I want to push on this.
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  We have established that God is invisible.
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  So when Paul says his attributes are clearly seen, he cannot mean
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  physical sight. You cannot see an attribute.
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  You can't see omnipotence floating in the sky.
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  No, you absolutely cannot. And Paul clarifies his own
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  statement immediately. He says they are clearly seen
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  being understood. The Greek participle there is
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  numena. Numena.
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  Which comes from nose, meaning the mind.
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  This is the key. This is what unlocks the
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  paradox. It's not optical sight, it's
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  mental sight. The eye of the mind.
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  Exactly. Think of it this way.
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  Imagine you walk into a room and you see a glass of water, water
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  spilled on the floor, and you see wet footprints leading out
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  the door. You did not see the person spill
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  the water. The event is invisible to you
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  because it's in the past. But you look at the evidence,
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  the glass, the water, the footprints, and your mind
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  reconstructs the event. You clearly perceive that
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  someone was here and walked out. So the detective analogy works
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  here. The detective sees the clues.
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  Physically that would be blue, yes, but his mind sees the
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  motive and the perpetrator. That's Cathora.
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  That is the mechanism. Paul is saying the creation is a
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  crime scene. Or, well, maybe a better analogy
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  is an art gallery. An art gallery I like.
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  That when you look at the complexity of a single cell, or
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  the fine tuning of the gravitational constant, or the
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  moral law written on the human conscience, your physical eyes
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  just see biology or physics, right?
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  But your nows, your mind acts as a lens, right?
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  It processes that data and concludes, inevitably, that
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  there is a designer, there is a lawgiver.
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  And this is where the Reformed doctrine of general revelation
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  comes in. We believe God reveals himself
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  in two books, the Book of Scripture and the Book of
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  Nature. And Paul is arguing that the
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  revelation in the book of nature is not vague.
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  It isn't a misty, ambiguous feeling of Mother Earth.
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  It is cathora. It's distinct.
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  It was distinct, clear perception.
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  We perceive His eternal power and His divine nature.
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  But this leads to a hard question.
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  If it's so clear, if it's clearly seen, why are there
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  atheists right? Why doesn't everyone believe if
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  I walk outside in the sky essentially screams God made me.
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  Why do people deny it? And that is where the Reformed
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  part of our thinking is so essential.
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  The problem is not with the transmission, the problem is
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  with the receiver. Paul goes on in Romans one to
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  say that men suppress the truth in unrighteousness.
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  It's not that they look at the evidence and honestly conclude
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  there is no God so. It's not an intellectual
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  problem. No.
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  So they look at the evidence, perceive the God it points to,
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  and they hate him. They hold the truth down like
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  like holding a beach ball underwater.
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  That's a great image. Yes, the knowledge is there.
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  The Catherine happens. The mind perceives the Creator,
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  but the fallen heart, the Sinner, immediately engages in a
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  suppression campaign. We trade the truth of God for a
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  lie. So the atheist isn't blind to
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  the evidence. He is at war with the evidence.
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  That is a terrifying thought. It means no one is truly
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  ignorant. We are all without excuse, as
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  Ball says. That is the legal verdict, yes.
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  If the revelation were blurry, we could plead ignorance.
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  God, I didn't know you were there.
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  The universe looked like an accident.
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  But because it is Katharitai clearly seen, we have no
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  defense. The breakdown is moral, not
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  intellectual. I want to pivot to another
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  difficulty because if we don't address it, the sharp listener
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  is going to e-mail us. I'm sure they will.
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  We're saying God is invisible, seen only by the mind.
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  But the Old Testament is full of people claiming to see God.
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  Isaiah says I saw the Lord, Ezekiel sees visions.
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  Moses speaks to God face to face.
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  Are we saying they were hallucinating or is the text
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  wrong? It's a valid challenge.
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  You have Isaiah 6.1. In the year that King Uziah
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  died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne.
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  That sounds like physical sight it.
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  Really does. But we have to look at how the
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  Hebrew text handles these encounters.
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  It is incredibly careful. I was looking at Ezekiel 1
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  during the prep. It is a wild chapter.
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  Wheels within wheels, eyes everywhere.
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  Fire, lightning. It's Agadelic.
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  It is, but when he finally gets to the figure on the throne, he
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  doesn't say and there sat God. No, he doesn't look at the
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  language. He describes the appearance of
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  the likeness of the glory of the Lord.
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  OK. That's a mouthful.
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  It is it's layer upon layer of removal.
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  He sees a fire, he sees a form like a man, he sees a rainbow.
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  But he is seeing a manifestation, not the essence.
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  So it's like a suit or a projection.
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  They give it like a welding mask or looking at an eclipse through
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  a pinhole projector. You cannot look at the naked
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  sun. It will burn your retinas out.
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  God is the sun. He dwells in unapproachable
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  light. If Isaiah saw God as he is,
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  Isaiah would cease to exist. So God accommodates himself.
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  He clothes himself in vision robes, smoke, fire so that the
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  Prophet can survive the encounter.
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  So when Isaiah says I saw the Lord, he means I saw the visual
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  interface God created for me. Precisely.
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  And notice what happens in those visions.
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  The visual is always secondary to the verbal.
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  The vision captures their attention, scares them half to
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  death. But the point is always the
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  message. Whom shall I send?
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  The visual is just the packaging for the word.
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  What about Moses? Numbers 12 is the tricky one.
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  God is rebuking Aaron and Miriam and he says I speak to prophets
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  and dreams, but not Moses. With him I speak mouth to mouth
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  clearly and not in riddles, and he beholds the form of the Lord.
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  That sounds direct. It sounds as direct as you can
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  get. It's the most direct
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  communication in the Old Testament, but we have to
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  balance Scripture with Scripture.
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  In Exodus 33, Moses asks to see God's glory.
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  And God says you cannot see my face, for no man shall see me
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  and live. There's the contradiction again.
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  It seems so, which means #12 cannot mean Moses saw the divine
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  essence. So beholding the form means
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  what? The Hebrew word for form there
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  implies a shape or a likeness. Again, it's a manifestation.
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  Moses saw that she can a glory cloud more clearly than anyone
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  else. He spoke with God as intimately
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  as two friends talking, but he still did not see the Uzia, the
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  naked being of God. Philo and Josephus, the Jewish
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  historians, were really aggressive on this point,
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  weren't they? They refused to let anyone think
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  God had a body. They had to be.
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  They were writing to Greeks and Romans who had statues of Zeus.
• 18:00
  They had to be crystal clear. Our God is not like that.
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  So they insisted that these seeings were mediated.
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  God used angels or fire or clouds, but the infinite cannot
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  be trapped in a visual form. It's a vital distinction.
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  It protects the holiness of God. If we could see him, we could
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  contain him. And we would die.
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  We are sinful creatures. The holiness of God is dangerous
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  to sin. The fact that he hides himself
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  is actually an act of mercy. That brings us to the New
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  Testament and specifically the Gospel of John.
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  We move from No one can see God and live to Jesus saying he who
• 18:32
  has seen me has seen the Father. It's a huge shift, and John is
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  the great synthesizer here. He takes that Hebrew reliance on
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  the Word and the Greek desire for sight and crashes them
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  together in the incarnation. The Word became flesh.
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  The Word became flesh, and we have seen His glory.
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  So Jesus is the image of the invisible God.
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  Yes, but here's the catch. Thousands of people saw Jesus
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  physically. Pontius Pilate saw him.
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  The soldiers who whipped him saw him, but they did not see the
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  Father. They just saw a Jewish man from
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  Galilee. Because they were only using
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  beliefo physical sight, they weren't using the Eye of Faith.
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  Right in John's Gospel, true seeing is believing.
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  When Jesus says he who has seen me has seen the Father, he's
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  talking about spiritual perception.
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  It's the work of the Holy Spirit regenerating the heart so that
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  when you look at Jesus, you don't just see a Carpenter, you
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  see the glory of the only begotten.
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  It's that cathora mechanism again, but elevated.
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  In creation, the mind infers a creator.
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  In Christ, the Spirit reveals the Redeemer.
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  And this is where we have to be humble.
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  We walk by faith, not by sight. Paul uses that famous image in
• 19:40
  First Corinthians 13. For now, we see in a mirror
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  dimly. I always pictured a glass mirror
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  when I read that, but the historical context changes the
• 19:48
  meaning completely. Yeah, they didn't have silver
• 19:50
  glass. They had polished bronze or
• 19:52
  copper. If you've ever looked at your
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  reflection in a shiny pot, you know it's distorted.
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  It's WAVY. It's dark.
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  It's dim, you can see the outline, but you can't see the
• 20:00
  details. So our theology, our
• 20:02
  understanding of God right now is mediated, it's true, but it
• 20:06
  isn't full high definition. Not yet.
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  We see the reflection to God in Scripture.
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  We see the reflection in the sacraments.
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  We see the reflection in the face of Christ.
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  But we are not yet seeing the thing itself directly.
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  We're navigating by instruments. But we aren't stuck with the
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  bronze mirror forever. There's a promise.
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  The Beatific vision This is the end point of all Reformed
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  theology. The Westminster Catechism asks
• 20:27
  what is the chief end of man to? Glorify God and enjoy Him
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  forever. And that enjoyment culminates
• 20:34
  insight. First, John 3.2 We know that
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  when he is revealed, we shall be like him, for we shall see him
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  as he is. As he is not a reflection, not a
• 20:45
  burning Bush, not a cloud, the essence.
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  How is that possible? You just said if we see God, we
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  die. We die now in our unglorified,
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  sinful state, but the promise of the gospel is that we will be
• 20:57
  changed. We will be glorified.
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  Our capacity will be expanded. God will fit us to be able to
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  stand in His presence without being incinerated.
• 21:06
  We will have the capacity to withstand the weight of glory.
• 21:08
  That's the blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God
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  promise. It's the ultimate hope.
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  It satisfies the Greek desire to see and the Hebrew desire to
• 21:16
  hear. In the New Jerusalem, the word
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  is visible and the vision speaks.
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  So let's bring this all the way back down to earth.
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  We've covered a lot of ground. We started with the people of
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  the eye versus the people of the ear.
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  We looked at how cathore it means a distinct mental
• 21:29
  perception, like a detective solving a case.
• 21:31
  We saw that the invisible God is clearly seen in creation,
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  leaving us without excuse. And we resolved the tension of
• 21:38
  Theophanies, God appearing in masks or forms to protect us
• 21:43
  until the day when we are made pure enough to see his face.
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  I want to leave the listener with something to chew on.
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  This week we talked about how the atheist suppresses the
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  truth. But as Christians, I think we
• 21:53
  can be guilty of a softer version of that.
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  Oh, absolutely. We get so used to the world that
• 21:57
  we stop seeing it. We stop using the nuss, we stop
• 22:00
  engaging the mind. Exactly.
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  We look at a tree and just see wood.
• 22:04
  We look at a child and just see family.
• 22:06
  We stop looking through the object to the artist.
• 22:08
  That is the challenge of Romans 1.20 For the believer, the world
• 22:12
  is a theater of God's glory. It is broadcasting 24/7.
• 22:17
  The invisible attributes, His power, his genius, his beauty
• 22:22
  are screaming at us from every atom.
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  So the question is, are you paying attention?
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  Are you walking through life with your spiritual eyes shut?
• 22:29
  Or are you actively practicing cathora?
• 22:32
  Are you perceiving the architect in the architecture?
• 22:34
  If you start looking for it, you'll see it everywhere, and
• 22:37
  that turns the mundane into worship.
• 22:39
  That's the goal, to turn sight into worship.
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  Thanks for diving in with us. Until next time, keep thinking.