When the Apostle Paul referred, in his letter to the Romans, to “the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God” (11:33), he was speaking from the authority of his own life experience, in which he had felt God’s mighty power redeeming him in a way beyond what the human mind could understand. He recognized his relationship to the one all-wise, all-knowing God, and this radically changed his life for the better.
Of itself, the human intellect can glimpse little of the wisdom and knowledge of God. So in order for us to know and understand God more deeply and broadly, the human intellect must yield more fully to the divine intelligence. Then we grow in grace as we see beyond the limitations of an intellectual sense of God, or good, and progressively understand and prove that God, the divine Principle of all real being, meets our legitimate needs and heals us.
Paul was familiar with the benefits and limits of intellectual thinking; he was from Tarsus, a city famous for its pursuit of culture and philosophy, and which had a distinguished university. In his book The Mind of St. Paul, scholar and theologian William Barclay, writing about the influences on Paul as a young person, explains that Tarsus was “a city with such a desire for knowledge, such a respect for scholarship, and such an intellectual ferment of thought that no thinking young man could entirely escape the contagion of the thronging ideas which crowded the air.” It’s easy to imagine the young Paul (then called Saul) grappling with this intellectual activity. And it seems that his exposure to ideas, knowledge, philosophy, and culture was an important element in his individual development, urging him to think deeply and more expansively.
