Appreciative and Faithful? Karl Barth's Use of Herman Bavinck's View of God's Incomprehensibility

This article is intended to assess Karl Barth's appreciative use of Herman Bavinck's view of God's incomprehensibility in Church Dogmatics II/1. The main argument is that despite Barth's appreciative gesture, Barth in fact offers an unfaithful or mistaken reading of Bavinck's view. Whereas Bavinck makes God's knowability the presupposition of the divine incomprehensibility, Barth renders the veracious knowledge of God predicated upon God's incomprehensibility, which is in turn grounded in God's hiddenness. In any event, Barth's appreciative gesture toward Bavinck should not cover up their divergent lines of reasoning in demonstrating the doctrine of God's incomprehensibility.