True knowledge of our status as creatures, however, implies a confrontation of the creature with its Creator: it is not possible except in reference to a personal God, For awareness of our creaturely status is more than a mere awareness of our debility and limitation. It amounts to experiencing not only our relative imperfection and the restrictions to which we are subject, but the infinite distance between us and absolute Being; it requires a full understanding of the fact that we have received “all that we have and are”—except sin—from God.

So long as he fights shy of a confrontation of the infinite Person with his finite person, so long as he clings to an atheist or pantheist conception of the world, howsoever flexibly formulated, man can never attain to a fully weighted awareness of his status as a creature. Either he will confine himself to an awareness of his dependence on his body and on the surrounding nature or else he will see himself in terms of his participation in an absolute Whole. To the atheist, who knows no absolute being, no more than an awareness of our relative limitation and impotence is possible.’

Again, in the pantheist’s view we are parts of the Absolute, be it even so small and unimportant parts as to be negligible when taken individually.

Here the distance between us and the Absolute is transposed to the level of quantity. We still imagine ourselves to be of the stuff of the Absolute, as it were, and sharers in its glory. A hidden playground is still reserved for the antics of a certain refined species of pride; the nerve of pride has not been cut; the idol of self-glory has not been thoroughly uprooted. This becomes even clearer when we further consider the distinction between a mere avowal of our weakness and true humility. It is only the overwhelming contrast between creature and personal Creator that discloses to us, in all its depth, the principal fact about ourselves: that we receive all our being from God; that He is That Which Is, whereas we are “as though we were not.”

Humility joyfully assents to creatureliness