God beneath All Our Philosophizing

Part Five: the Knowledge of God
Chapter 30: Human Knowledge

There are three categories of things we can know: divine revelation, the world, and ourselves.
This fits Frame's ever present triangle of norm, situation, and experience.

Revelation
Modern philosophers have trouble sorting out subjects of knowledge, the knower, from objects of knowledge, the thing known.  This problem goes away when we accept revelation as the standard for determining truth.  The focus of this revelation is scripture, though parts of general revelation in the world help us understand it (language and cultural study, etc.).  In a sense, everything is revelation, either special or general.

World - Everything that exists and happens, as it is known by us.

Ourselves - everything, as we experience it.  To know God is an experience we are having.  Calvin said first thing in his Institutes that we can't know God without knowing ourselves.  We are not trapped in ourselves, because our knowledge of Scripture tells us there is something out there beyond our thoughts.  We never have purely objective knowledge with no subjective element.  We need not try to get rid of our subjective perspective, as long as we are using the right assumptions (presuppositions).

Philosophers have sought a firm foundation in reason (Descartes, norm of triangle), or sense experience (Hume, situation of triangle), while skeptics of each are trapped in subjectivism (Wittgenstein, experience of triangle).  But the real foundation is God, the creator of reason principles, world and mind.  Without Him, inconsistencies appear and men lean to one of these three ways for an anchor, but it isn't there without God and His revelation.

The same is true of theories of truth.  Correspondence theory seeks to match ideas to reality in the world (situation of triangle), coherence theory seeks logical consistency (norm of triangle), and pragmatic theory goes with what works (experience of triangle).  The real foundation is God, and without Him we lean toward one of these theories, when a synthesis of them, each resting on God, is needed.