Changes over thirty years
FOREWORD (1993)
The older I get, the more I want to sing my faith and get others singing it with me. Theology, as I constantly tell my students, is for doxology: the first thing to do with it is to turn it into praise and thus honour the God who is its subject, the God in whose presence and by whose help it was worked out. Paul’s summons to sing and make music in one’s heart to the Lord is a word for theologians no less than for other people (Eph. 5:19). Theologies that cannot be sung (or prayed for that matter) are certainly wrong at a deep level, and such theologies leave me, in both senses, cold: cold-hearted and uninterested. I would think it tragic if this present book affected anyone like that.
I ask, therefore, that its contents, which are indeed theology, be received first and foremost as matter for praise, even though my argument is cast into the form of an extended sermon of a somewhat anxious kind. My main aim in these pages is to celebrate God’s gift of revealed truth about Himself, through which we find fellowship with Him, receive salvation, and learn how to live. I should like the book to be understood as echoing and undergirding two hymns which I reproduce here for my readers’ meditation. (The italics - need I say? - are mine.)
The first dates from 1953, twelve years before the first edition of this book. It runs thus:
God has spoken - by his prophets,
Spoken his unchanging word,
Each from age to age proclaiming God the One, the righteous Lord:
Mid the world’s despair and turmoil One firm anchor still holds fast,
God is King, his throne eternal,
God the first and God the last.
God has spoken - by Christ Jesus,
Christ, the everlasting Son,
Brightness of the Father’s glory,
With the Father ever one;
Spoken by the Word incarnate,
God of God, ere time began,
Light of Light, to earth descending,
Man, revealing God to man.
God yet speaks - his Holy Spirit
Speaks into the hearts of men,
In the age-long word expounding
God’s own gospel, now as then;
Through the rise and fall of nations
One sure faith yet standing fast,
God abides, his word unchanging,
God the first and God the last.
The second hymn, written by Charles Wesley in the first flush of England’s great evangelical awakening two and a half centuries ago, is better known.
O for a thousand tongues to sing
My great Redeemer’s praise,
The glories of my God and King,
The triumphs of his grace!
Jesus - the name that charms our fears,
That bids our sorrows cease;
’Tis music in the sinner’s ears;
’Tis life and health and peace.
He breaks the power of cancelled sin,
And sets the prisoner free:
His blood can make the foulest clean;
His blood availed for me.
He speaks; and, listening to his voice,
New life the dead receive;
The mournful, broken hearts rejoice;
The humble poor believe.
Hear him, ye deaf; his praise, ye dumb,
Your loosened tongues employ;
Ye blind, behold your Saviour come;
And leap, ye lame, for joy!
My gracious Master and my God,
Assist me to proclaim
And spread through all the earth abroad
The honours of thy name.
Let me say as plainly as I can that my goal in writing about the fact and process of revelation is to clear the path to a grasp of the realities that have been revealed - the knowledge of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, in creation, redemption, regeneration, and the upbuilding of the Church. Here are the wellsprings of Christian life, which preachers must spend their strength proclaiming, for the glory of God and the good of souls. Modern uncertainties about revelation have had the effect of damming the springs. It is my hope and prayer that this book might help to unblock them.
A book that has grown
A cat, says the proverb, may look at a king. Discerning readers will already have spotted that as I write this Foreword I have a king in my eye, one who may truly be called a king, namely John Calvin, who in the four books of the final edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion dealt with creation, redemption, regenerate life and the Church, in that order, and whose passion for the glory and praise of God shone through every paragraph. In my role as observant cat, I feel some rapport with Calvin.
In the first place, I think the substance of this book would have his approval (look at Inst. I.i-ix and IV.viii.1-12 if you doubt me).
In the second place, it is a fact that Calvin’s Institutes grew through five editions between 1536 and 1559 from a pocketbook on practical Christianity for general reader-ship into a landmark treatise several times longer. This was mainly through the addition of relatively technical material relevant to the educating of preachers, material called forth in most cases by ongoing disagreements with what Calvin had originally offered. As a result, though he tried to keep everything at an educated layman’s level, and to a remarkable extent succeeded, there are some rough gear changes as he moves from catechetical homiletic to theological apologetic and back again. I am somewhat in the same boat. God has Spoken began life in 1965 as a ninety-six-page paperback. It is now twice its original length, and the additions are mostly a degree more technical than the material to which they have been added. I can only ask my readers’ indulgence, and state that I have tried hard to keep the style as simple as the argument allows.
Changes over thirty years
Although still, I believe, saying things of central relevance on a topic of central relevance, this basically 1965 book is now inevitably something of a period piece. It may ease the task of tuning in to it to note briefly three developments in the discussion of revelation and the Bible that make the 1993 scene different from that of 1965.
First, evangelical theology, of which this book is a sample product, is far stronger in the English-speaking world than it was a generation ago. The production of much written material of high quality to guide and support Bible-believers, and the scholarly work sponsored by the Tyndale Fellowship for Biblical Research (British), the Evangelical Theological Society (American), the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy during its decade of action (1977-87), and many publishers and theological colleges in addition, has given evangelical theology the status of a newly promising option, as distinct from that of a hopeless rearguard action, which is how it was widely rated in the 1950s and 1960s. When James Barr wrote his biggest book yet to attack evangelical scholarship as phoney and evangelical piety as pathological,1 the most observable effect was to make his peers wonder what had happened to stir up in him so much anger and contempt: his jeremiad was not taken seriously, and his votes of censure were not seconded. I detect in God has Spoken a note of defiant defensiveness, especially in relation to the liberal theology that rode high in the England of the 1950s, as it had done for half a century before; but that tone would hardly be called for if I were writing from scratch today.
Second, the academic agenda in ongoing discussions about the Bible has shifted from revelation and inspiration to canon and hermeneutics, which means, in practical terms, interpretation. That is where most of the present-day action is, especially in North America, where the canonical (i.e. objective and organic) interpretation of Scripture that is maintained by the reformational forces, namely evangelicalism and biblical theology, stands in direct opposition to the selective, subjective hermeneutic of the various liberation theologies, most notably the feminist. As a discourse organized round the themes of revelation and inspiration, God has Spoken may therefore seem a bit old-fashioned, as Brahms does compared with Britten or Cliff Richard with Michael Jackson. However, clarity about revelation and inspiration is needed before canon and hermeneutics can be discussed to any good purpose, so the line of argument that this book develops is still, I believe, of fundamental importance. I have made some additions to the text to engage with these more recent interests, but revelation and inspiration continue to be my basic concerns.
Third, the main flow of the professional convictional stream among English-speaking theologians seems to have reversed itself. In place of the corporate assumption in what we may call the theologians’ guild that constructive theology must embrace in some form the anti-supernatural unitarianism -deistic or pantheistic - of the Enlightenment, fresh delvings into Nicene trinitarianism, Chalcedonian incarnationalism, and soteriology of an Athanasian or Augustinian sort have become the accepted order of the day. The world of thought to which God has Spoken belongs is thus no longer marginal, as it seemed to be in 1965, when Bultmann, Tillich, John Robinson and their camp-followers dominated the scene. It is now centre stage. How long this reversal will last none can say, but for the present, at least, listening to what the Bible teaches about the three divine persons and the three Rs of apostolic faith - ruin, redemption, and regeneration - is less of an exotic oddity in the church than some of the rhetoric in God has Spoken might suggest. I, for one, am very thankful to God that this is so.
From my standpoint, then, some things have changed for the better; but not by any means all. Classical Christian theology, based on the classical Christian estimate of Scripture as the inspired Word of God, is still a minority position in the older Protestant world on both sides of the Atlantic. Arrogant teachers in schools and colleges are still trying to beat out of young people any vestiges of evangelical belief that they find in them. The tatters of a liberal establishment remain in control of most of the mainline denominations and of the World Council of Churches. The uncontrollable relativism, pluralism, and ultimate nihilism, to which the subjective method of liberal theology was bound sooner or later to give rise, are currently being worked out in liberal and radical circles as the terms ‘God', ‘Christ', ‘faith' and ‘love' turn more and more into flexible noses of wax. The growing pressure in the older churches to accept multi-faith syncretism as a working principle, and to give a clean bill of health to the homosexual lifestyle, are just two illustrations of this. The thrust of God has Spoken is to reassert biblical authority and the biblical method of living under that authority. I reissue the book in the belief that the job it seeks to do is one that still needs doing. May God use it to that end.