Let us consider the human activity of learning. Man learns. Man is a learner. Man habitually relies on what he knows while working to know more. For man, it is impossible to learn apart from thinking, considering, reflecting, concentrating, evaluating, comparing, categorizing, qualifying, analogizing, and summarizing. Man’s activity as learner is unique to man. Man can learn because man is made in God’s image, but man is limited by learning because man is not God. God cannot learn; He is unchangeable, eternal, infinite, and omniscient. God knows all and always has known all. From all and to all eternity God has known everything about everything, and he never had to learn any of it. This is incomprehensible to man. God’s thought is qualitatively and quantitatively different from man’s thought because God never learned a thing and yet he knows it all!

However, all these orientations, the ethical and mystical as well as the speculative, suffer from a significant one-sidedness.  By limiting religion to one human faculty, they diminish man’s universal character.  They divide man in two and separate what belongs together.  They create a gulf between religion and culture, and they run the danger of reducing religion to moral duty or aesthetic emotion or a philosophic view.  But according to the Christian, confession religion is other than and higher than all those views; religion must not just be something in one’s life, but everything.  Jesus demands that we love God with all our heart, all our soul, all our strength.  In our thinking and living, there can be no division between God and the world, between religion and culture; no one can serve two masters.