Revelation

The standard division is between general and special revelation. General revelation is what God discloses of himself to everyone, everywhere, through the created order, the moral sense, and the ordinary run of history. Special revelation is what God discloses in particular acts and particular words at particular times: the call of Abraham, the exodus, the prophets, and supremely Jesus Christ, with scripture as the deposit in which that disclosure is given to us. The categories are not biblical words. They are a filing system, imposed on the material in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and like every filing system they are useful until they are trusted too far.

Two things ought to be said before the distinction is used. First, both sides of it are revelation, which means both are God's act and neither is a human achievement. Psalm 19 does not say that clever people infer God from the sky; it says the heavens declare. Romans 1:19 does not say that God can be worked out; it says God has made it plain to them. Whatever the argument in section 3 turns out to be about, it is not about whether God discloses himself in creation, because every party in it affirms that he does.

Second, the boundary leaks in both directions. The exodus was a public event in ordinary history before it was anything else, and history is supposed to be the general side. Conscience is usually filed under general revelation, but Romans 2:15 has the work of the law written on the heart, which is the content of special revelation appearing on the general side. And a reader who thinks she can cleanly separate the two should try sorting the wisdom literature, where Proverbs draws on shared human observation of how the world goes and files it under the fear of the LORD. Use the distinction; do not defend its edges.

One more term, because it is the source of most of the confusion in this lesson. General revelation names what God discloses. Natural theology names an enterprise: the attempt to establish truths about God by reasoning from what is naturally available, without appeal to special revelation. Those are different things, and almost every misreported version of the arguments below comes from treating the second as though it were simply the first. A theologian can affirm general revelation with enthusiasm and reject natural theology flatly, and the most famous theologian in this lesson did exactly that.

Psalm 19 is built as two panels with a seam down the middle, and the seam is the point. In the first panel the heavens declare, the sky proclaims, day pours out speech to day and night reveals knowledge to night, and the sun runs its course. The verbs are verbs of telling. The witness is continuous, global and wordless: verse 3 is a line that translators have rendered in opposite directions, either that the testimony has no words and still sounds, or that there is no language in which it goes unheard. The BSB's text takes the first ('Without speech or language, without a sound to be heard,' running on into 'their voice has gone out into all the earth') and its footnote gives the second ('There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard'). The Hebrew allows both, and neither weakens the point: either way the reach is universal.

Then the psalm changes subject and vocabulary at once. From verse 7 the subject is the law of the LORD, the testimony of the LORD, the precepts, the commandments, the fear, the judgments. The verbs change too: these things revive the soul, make wise the simple, rejoice the heart, enlighten the eyes, and warn the servant. The heavens tell of glory. The law revives a person. The psalm never says the heavens revive anybody, and it never says they are sure, or warn, or make wise the simple. The whole doctrine of general and special revelation is a commentary on that difference, and it is available to any reader who will notice which verbs go with which half.

Notice also the psalm's ending, which is the part usually left off. It runs from the law to the psalmist's own hidden faults and willful sins, and closes asking that the words of his mouth and the meditation of his heart be acceptable. The movement is from the sky, to the word, to the conscience, to prayer. That is not an argument for God's existence. It is a man being found out by what he has read, which is what special revelation characteristically does and what the sky, in this psalm, does not do.

Romans 1:18-23 is the other pillar, and it is more aggressive. Verse 19 says that what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. Verse 20 says that since the creation of the world his invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from his workmanship, and concludes that men are without excuse. That is a strong claim about the availability and the clarity of the disclosure, and any position that softens it is not reading the verse.

But read what the sentence is for. The paragraph opens at verse 18 with the wrath of God revealed against the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, and it runs on through verse 21, where although they knew God they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks, and their foolish hearts were darkened, into verse 23, the exchange of the glory of the immortal God for images of mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. Paul is not laying a foundation for a doctrine of God that he will build on in chapter 2. He is constructing an indictment. The clarity of the revelation is the premise of the charge, and the word he ends on, without excuse, is a courtroom word. Whatever else this passage establishes, it establishes universal guilt, and every party in the argument that follows agrees about that much.

Acts fills the picture out in two directions. At Lystra, to a rural pagan crowd, Paul says God has not left himself without testimony to his goodness, for he gives rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling hearts with food and gladness. At Athens, to an audience that included Epicurean and Stoic philosophers, he speaks of a God who made the world and gives everyone life and breath, who determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their lands, intending that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, and he quotes their own poets. The content is recognisably the same in both. So is the destination: both speeches end in a summons to turn, and the Athens speech ends at a man appointed and raised from the dead, which is not available from the sky.

The developed Catholic position runs through Thomas Aquinas and is more careful than its summaries. Aquinas distinguishes the preambles of faith from the articles of faith. The preambles, such as that God exists and is one, are in principle reachable by natural reason; the articles, such as the Trinity and the incarnation, are not, and must be revealed. The five ways in the Summa Theologiae, at the third article of the second question of the first part, are arguments for the preambles. But Aquinas does not conclude from this that revelation is a convenience. At the very first article of the Summa he argues that it was necessary for God to reveal even those truths reason could reach, because otherwise they would be known by few, after a long time, and with an admixture of error. That is not the triumphalism about reason that the position is usually charged with. It is a doctrine about how little unaided reason in fact delivers to actual people.

The First Vatican Council made a version of this binding for Catholics in the dogmatic constitution Dei Filius, promulgated on 24 April 1870, which teaches that God, the principle and end of all things, can be known with certainty by the natural light of human reason from created things, and attaches a canon against denying it. Read the claim precisely, because its shape is regularly missed. It says can be known, not is known, and not known savingly. The same document insists that revelation was necessary so that divine truths might be known by everyone readily, with firm certainty and without error. The Catholic position is not that a person can reason their way to salvation. It is that the human mind is not so ruined that the creature can no longer point to the Creator, and that denying this concedes too much to unbelief.

The Eastern Orthodox account gets the natural knowledge of God to a similar place by a route of its own, and it should not be filed as a variation on the Latin one. The Greek Fathers read creation as shot through with the divine purposes: Maximus the Confessor speaks of the logoi, the inner principles of created things, held in the Logos and contemplated in what Orthodox writers call natural contemplation, so that the world is not evidence to be reasoned from but a text to be read by a purified mind. Athanasius argues from the order of the cosmos in Against the Gentiles, and Basil's homilies on the six days of creation assume that the creature discloses its maker. What restrains the enterprise in the East is not a doctrine of total depravity but apophaticism and the distinction defended by Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth century and upheld at the Constantinopolitan councils of the thirteen-forties and fifty-one: the divine essence is unknowable to any creature, while the divine energies, which are truly God and not a created intermediary, are genuinely participated. So God is known and God is unknown at once, and the limit on natural knowledge is set by what God is rather than by how badly the knower has failed.

The everyday argument for the enterprise is worth stating in its own right, because most people who hold it have never read Aquinas. It is that the alternative leaves the Christian with nothing to say to an unbeliever except an appeal to a book the unbeliever has no reason to trust. If no argument from the world reaches anywhere, then the conversation cannot begin, and Paul at Athens did in fact begin it. Defenders point to Acts 17 as apostolic precedent, to Psalm 19 and Romans 1 for the material, and to the plain fact that Christians have always argued from design, from contingency, from the reliability of reason, and from the existence of moral obligation, and have sometimes persuaded people.

The cost of the position, which its serious defenders admit, is that the arguments do not in practice compel, that the God of the five ways is a long way short of the Father of Jesus Christ, and that a theology which starts here can slide into deism if it forgets that the preambles were never meant to stand on their own. Aquinas did not forget. Some of his eighteenth-century successors did, and the natural religion of the Enlightenment is what that slide looks like when it finishes.

The Reformed objection is not to general revelation. It is important to get this right, because the Reformed confessions are emphatic on the other side: the Belgic Confession of 1561, in its second article, says God is known by two means, first by the creation, preservation and government of the universe, which is before our eyes as a most elegant book, and second, more clearly and fully, by his holy and divine word. Calvin opens the Institutes with a sense of divinity implanted in every human mind and describes the world as the theatre of God's glory. What Calvin adds is the argument that this testimony, though real and sufficient to leave us inexcusable, is useless to us in practice, because we are blind; and so scripture is given as spectacles, which do not create the letters on the page but let a dim-sighted reader see them. The Westminster Confession opens in exactly that order: the light of nature and the works of creation and providence manifest God's goodness, wisdom and power so far as to leave men inexcusable, yet they are not sufficient to give that knowledge of God and of his will which is necessary unto salvation.

Luther put the same instinct differently and more sharply, in the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518. A theologian of glory looks at the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in the things that have been made, and calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross looks at God where God has chosen to be found, in suffering and in the cross, and calls a thing what it is. Luther's objection is not that creation says nothing; it is that a theology built on the majesty of God in his works will get God's character wrong, because God has hidden himself in the opposite of what human beings expect glory to look like. The Wesleyan tradition takes a third road: John Wesley held that what people commonly call natural conscience is not natural at all but the work of prevenient grace, already at work in every person before they know it, which means that on this account there is no purely natural human being for a natural theology to address.

The objection has a modern form worth knowing, and it comes in two versions that are not friendly to each other. Cornelius Van Til argued that natural theology concedes the decisive point before it starts, because it invites the unbeliever to weigh evidence by a standard he has set for himself, and Van Til's alternative was to argue that no fact is intelligible at all except on Christian assumptions. Alvin Plantinga took a different road from the nineteen-eighties onward, arguing that belief in God can be properly basic, rationally held without being inferred from anything else, much as belief in other minds or in the reliability of memory is, and that Calvin's sense of divinity names a faculty rather than an argument. That is a criticism of natural theology's job description rather than of its arguments, and Plantinga has himself offered a long list of theistic arguments while denying that anyone needs them. Name the cost of this whole family of positions, because its defenders do. If there is no common ground at all, it becomes hard to say what Paul was doing at Athens, hard to explain why people have in fact been moved by arguments, and easy for a refusal to argue to start looking like a refusal to be checked.

Now the exchange of 1934, which you will meet quoted by people who have not read it. Emil Brunner, a Swiss Reformed theologian and until then Karl Barth's closest ally in the dialectical theology, published Natur und Gnade, Nature and Grace, subtitled a conversation with Karl Barth. Set out what Brunner actually argued, since it is habitually inflated. He held that the image of God in man is materially destroyed by sin but formally retained: a human being remains a responsible subject, capable of being addressed, which stones and animals are not. He held that there is therefore a point of contact, an Anknuepfungspunkt, in that formal humanity, to which the word of God can be addressed. He held that God's preserving grace sustains the created ordinances, and that scripture teaches a real revelation in creation which sinful people always distort. And he called for the church to take up the task of a Christian natural theology, eristic rather than apologetic, arguing on the ground the modern world stands on. What Brunner did not say, and is constantly reported as saying, is that anyone can come to a saving knowledge of God apart from Christ. He denied that explicitly. He also opposed National Socialism, and inferring otherwise from Barth's polemic is a straightforward historical error.

Barth answered the same year with Nein! Antwort an Emil Brunner, No! An Answer to Emil Brunner, and the tone was as brutal as the title. State his case at its strength too. Barth denied that any point of contact exists apart from the act of the Holy Spirit: the capacity to hear God's word is created by the word in the hearing of it, not found lying in the hearer beforehand, and a formal image that survives the fall is either empty or it is a foothold for something other than grace. He denied that Romans 1 supplies a foundation to build on, reading Paul's argument as an indictment framed from the standpoint of faith rather than as the first storey of a doctrine of God. And he held that the question was not academic in Germany in 1934. Barth was the principal author of the Barmen Declaration of May that year, whose first thesis confesses Jesus Christ as the one Word of God the church has to hear and rejects the teaching that the church may recognise other events, powers, figures or truths alongside him as God's revelation. Barth saw in any independent point of contact the same door through which blood, soil and nation were then walking into German pulpits. The two men never worked together again, and the split disfigured Protestant theology for a generation.

Two corrections, because this exchange is misreported in both directions. Against the anti-Barth version: Barth did not deny that God is free to speak through creation, and in the later Church Dogmatics he wrote at length about true words spoken outside the church, lesser lights that shine by the one Light, while continuing to insist that such words are recognised by Christ and not the reverse. Against the anti-Brunner version: Brunner was not proposing a route to God around Christ, and calling his position natural theology in the scholastic sense misses that he was arguing about the doctrine of humanity, about whether sin destroys the creature as creature. The English translation which put both texts in one volume under the title Natural Theology, published in 1946 with an introduction by John Baillie, has itself done some of the damage, since the title names a thing Brunner's essay was not simply defending. It is also worth knowing how it is said to have ended: in 1966, with Brunner dying, Barth is reported to have sent word to him that the time when he thought he had to say No was long past, because we all live only by God's gracious Yes. That story reaches us through the biographical literature rather than through anything Barth published, and this lesson has not traced it to a source you could check, so hold it as a well attested story and not as a document.

What is settled and what is not. Settled: scripture says God discloses himself through what he has made, that the disclosure is real and clear, and that it leaves people without excuse; and scripture also says that nobody comes to saving knowledge of God this way, that faith comes by hearing the word of Christ, and that the world did not know God through wisdom. Every position in this section affirms both halves. What is not settled is what follows for method: whether the Christian may argue from the world to God as a genuine, if limited, theological enterprise, or whether every step of the way has to be taken from within revelation, with the world read afterwards in its light. That question is open, capable people hold each answer, and a student who can state the other side in a form its defenders would recognise has done what this course asks. A student who can tell you which answer this lesson prefers has found something that was not put there.

God reveals himself by doing things and by saying things, and the two are not alternatives. Hebrews opens on exactly this: on many past occasions and in many different ways God spoke to our fathers through the prophets, and in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son. Speaking is the governing verb, and the Son is the last thing said. The Second Vatican Council's constitution on revelation, Dei Verbum, put the relation in a sentence Protestants have often found they can sign: the plan of revelation is realised by deeds and words having an inner unity, so that the deeds manifest and confirm the teaching signified by the words, while the words proclaim the deeds and clarify the mystery contained in them.

The reason this needs saying is that the twentieth century tried both halves on their own and both failed in public. In the nineteen-fifties a large body of writing, of which G. Ernest Wright's God Who Acts of 1952 is the best-known example, made revelation a matter of God's mighty acts in history, with scripture as the record of and response to those acts rather than as revelation itself. James Barr pressed the obvious objection in the early sixties: the Bible is full of God speaking, in direct address, in commands, in named words to named people, and an account that reduces all of it to human interpretation of events has quietly dropped a great deal of the evidence. The deeper problem is that an act does not interpret itself. Israel came out of Egypt; so, Amos 9:7 remarks, did the Philistines come from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir. What makes the exodus a revelation of this God rather than a migration is that it was announced beforehand and expounded afterwards, in words.

The other half has the same defect inverted. Treat revelation as a set of propositions and you have made God's self-disclosure into information, and you have to explain why the Bible is mostly narrative, poetry, law and letters rather than a list. The argument here is live and has been for a century. Carl Henry, in the six volumes of God, Revelation and Authority, defended propositional revelation on the ground that if God has not told us anything statable then we cannot say we know anything, and that the retreat into encounter ends with a God nobody can be wrong about. On the other side William Temple, in the twelfth lecture of Nature, Man and God, wrote that the essence of revelation is the intercourse of mind and event, not the communication of doctrine distilled from that intercourse, and drew the conclusion: 'From all this it follows that there is no such thing as revealed truth.' Read the sentence that comes immediately after it, because it says what he meant positively and it is usually left off: the event in which the fullness of revelation is given must be the life of a person. So the provocation is not a claim that nothing true can be stated about God. It is a claim about what was given, which on Temple's account is a person met rather than a sentence handed over.

The position most traditions have settled into holds both without collapsing either. Revelation is personal at its centre. John 1:18 ends, in the BSB, 'the one and only Son, who is Himself God and is at the Father's side, has made Him known', and the verb behind that last phrase is the one our word exegesis comes from, so that the Son is the Father's exposition. Read the footnote while you are there, because this verse is a working example of the thing this lesson is about. The BSB's footnote reads 'Or but the only begotten God, who; BYZ and TR but the only begotten Son, who'. That is, the manuscripts the BSB follows differ from the Byzantine tradition and the Textus Receptus over whether the key word is God or Son, and the BSB's phrase 'who is Himself God' renders the first. The readings differ over whether this verse calls the Son God, which is not a small difference, and the translators' choice shapes the English a student meets first. Translations make these choices without much warning, so check what your own copy does and what its footnote says before you quote it at anybody. Christ is not a set of statements. But a person who has acted and spoken can be truly spoken about, and the church has never been able to confess him without using sentences that are either true or false, which is what the councils of the fourth and fifth centuries were arguing about. Karl Barth's own way of holding it together was to speak of the Word of God in three forms, revealed in Christ, written in scripture, and preached in the church, with the first governing the other two. You do not have to adopt his scheme to see the shape of the problem it was solving.

One practical consequence, which is where this lesson lands. If revelation is God's act, then theology is a response and never a discovery, and the discipline you are learning has no independent access to its subject. That is a limit and it is also a relief. Deuteronomy 29:29 states it about as well as it can be stated: the secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, so that we may follow all the words of this law. Two claims in one verse. There is a reserve in God that is not ours to open, and there is a disclosure that is genuinely given, genuinely ours, and given so that it may be followed. A theologian who forgets the first half becomes a speculator. One who forgets the second becomes a mystic with nothing to teach. The next lesson takes up the second half and asks what it means that the disclosure came to us in a book.