One of the Bible's chief lessons is that Knowledge comes from God; that we know "stuff" (Truth) because He revealed it to us (made it visible). "To know" even has the sense of intimacy; the first three chapters of Genesis, for example, demonstrate that He shares the knowledge of the intricacies of His created universe because he is our friend.
Because the Bible speaks of "the mysteries of God", we acknowledge that there is some or even much stuff (Truth) about which we know approximately nothing. They are invisible to us. A Christian earnestly desires knowledge, but he understands that the process of its discovery is not merely scientific. There is a spiritual element. By endeavoring to see and understand the mysteries of creation, we get to know the Creator. We also understand God's warning that the ultimate discovery is the "knowledge of Good and Evil", something for which man ought not to wish, for his own sake. In this way the Christian hears the story of man in the Garden of Eden, of the seen and the unseen, that seeing (knowing) some things is a burden man cannot bear apart from God's enabling Grace.
This is a crucial understanding for men of the 21st century, for our knowledge of God's creation as a result of science is now so great that we must bear it with proportionately greater humility. Unfortunately, the age of secular "Enlightenment" which came to us in the 18th century and continues with us even today sets forth God as the enemy of Truth and Knowledge, and proposes that man should take from God whatever knowledge he can while proclaiming himself as Truth's only arbiter.
Let's recognize that a prime duty of the Christian believer is to uphold the honor of God who promises to reveal everything that is Good... and to "deliver us from Evil." This brings us once again to the Nicene Creed, that crystalized statement of doctrine that all Christian denominations purport to hold in unison. In the last 40 years, English revisions of the Nicene Creed (inspired of God and written for the Church in the 4th century) have appeared, revisions that alter its original words and original meaning.
One such revision can be found in "The 1979 Book of Common Prayer." Episcopalians (liberal Anglicans in the USA), always eager to exercise the rule of Reason rather than of Scripture or Tradition, gladly welcomed the 1979 Revisions. Generations of Episcopalians have now passed through that church who can scarcely remember the original words and meaning. One of the most notorious 1979 revisions is this same doctrine concerning Knowability of Truth... of God; Revelation.
- In the 1979 BCP it says "... maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen."
- In the 1662 BCP (and every version until 1979), it says "... Maker of heaven and earth, of all that is visible and invisible." Again, to say that things are "visible or invisible" is to acknowledge that no matter how much we know about our universe, there is some part of understanding which God keeps to Himself. By contrast, to say that things are either "seen or unseen" is to suggest that man can possess knowledge, even of "good and evil" if only for trying, that we are the masters of all we survey and that God is powerless to prevent us from discovering the full extent of what can be known. Through the words "visible and invisible" in the Nicene Creed of the 1662 BCP, God teaches the lesson of the Garden of Eden, that we can know Truth only as He reveals it, and that we ought not to claim for ourselves anything that He has reserved for Himself.
Ironically, most of the new Anglican churches that have left The Episcopal Church have not yet jettisoned from their weekly liturgy the proximate cause of these revisionist doctrines, the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. When they have returned to the traditional Nicene Creed, they will find not merely Biblical and Apostolic truth but also the Faith of the Church catholic, for the traditional wording is found in Prayer Books of most Anglicans worldwide from 1662 until 1979, and in the traditions of Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Reformed branches of the Church.