Revelation To Sinners
CHAPTER THREE
GOD’S WORD SPOKEN (I)
Basic to the New Testament is the claim that Christianity is a revealed religion. The Greek word translated ‘reveal’ (apokalypto) means to unveil something that was previously hidden, or to bring into view something that before was out of sight. Christianity rests on an unveiling of the hidden Creator Himself; Christians enjoy ‘the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ’ (II Cor. 4:6). The process, whereby through His dealings with a single national family - Israel - God revealed Himself to men, reached its climax in the person, words, and works of Jesus of Nazareth, God’s incarnate Son. So the Christian revelation-claim finds its final statement in the majestic opening words of the epistle to the Hebrews: ‘In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son’ (Heb. 1:1 f.). Of this revelatory process the sixty-six books of the Bible are both the product and the proclamation. The first thirty-nine (the Old Testament) span well over a thousand years of revelation to Israel; the last twenty-seven (the New Testament) were written in the second half of the first century. All these last have to do with God’s crowning revelation in Jesus, who was crucified ‘under Pontius Pilate’ and raised from the dead, at some date between a.d. 26 and 30.
The opening words of Hebrews present the work of revelation as a divine activity (‘God spoke') which in form was verbal (‘God spoke') and cumulative (‘through the prophets . . . by his Son'). In this and the next chapter we shall seek to open up the theme of revelation by exploring the significance of these three facts.
Revelation is a divine activity: not, therefore, a human achievement. Revelation is not the same thing as discovery, or the dawning of insight, or the emerging of a bright idea. Revelation does not mean man finding God, but God finding man, God sharing His secrets with us, God showing us Himself. In revelation, God is the agent as well as the object. It is not just that men speak about God, or for God; God speaks for Himself, and talks to us in person. The New Testament message is that in Christ God has spoken a word for the world, a word to which all people in all ages are summoned to listen and to respond.
To show what this means, we must here discuss three questions.
THE CHARACTER OF GOD
The first question is: Who is this God who has spoken? What sort of being is He?
The question is important, partly because misbelief about God’s nature involves false views of revelation, partly because, according to the record, this is the basic thing that God’s revelatory action was meant to make clear. God Himself was the supreme object of revelation from the start.
What, according to Scripture, has He revealed Himself to be?
First, He has shown Himself to be a personal being, one who calls Himself T and speaks to man as ‘you’. When, before the Exodus, He spoke to Moses at the burning bush, He gave His name as T am who I am’ (perhaps more correctly, T will be what I will be’: Ex. 3:14^, N.I.V. margin; cf. 6:2.f.) - ‘YahwelT [Jehovah] for short. This name, like other God-given names (Abraham, Israel, Jesus, etc.), was a source of information about its bearer: it declared, on the one hand, God’s transcendent personality, His freedom and purposefulness, and, on the other hand, His self-sufficiency and omnipotence. The name ‘Yahweh’ is a standing witness against any notion of God as a mere impersonal principle: it declares that back of everything stands, not an aimless force - blind fate, or chance - but an almighty Person with a mind and will of His own.
When God brought His work of revelation to its climax by sending into the world His Son and His Spirit, He thereby showed Himself to be tri-personal - three Persons in one God. The Trinity is at the heart of the Christian revelation. ‘Father, Son, and FJoly Spirit’ is God’s New Testament ‘name’ (see Mt. 28:19) - in Karl Barth’s happy phrase, His ‘Christian name’, expressing a basic truth about Him which only Christians know.
Second, God has shown Himself a moral being, One supremely concerned about right and wrong, whose dealings with human beings must be understood in moral terms, since they are determined by moral considerations. When at Sinai Moses asked to see God’s glory, God proclaimed before him the following exposition of His ‘name’: ‘The Lord, the Lord (Yahweh), the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers . . .’ (Ex. 3 4:6f.). God is perfect, not only in power, but also in love and purity, a God ‘of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness’ (Article I), ‘a Spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable, in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth’ (Westminster Shorter Catechism, Answer 4). God’s own exposition of His name rules out all thought of Him as capricious, inconstant, untrustworthy, or unloving.
The impression is still abroad, despite many years of refutation, that the two Testaments represent God differently, the Old depicting Him as fierce in retribution, the New portraying Him as too merciful and mild to condemn anyone. But this is not so. The goodness and severity of God stand side by side in both Testaments. In the Old, the Holy God is unspeakably gracious to His people, as the Psalms constantly declare (cf. Pss. 92, 104, i05:iff, io6:if., 107, 108, etc.); while the New enlarges our view, not only of the glory of God’s mercy, but also - largely through Christ’s own words (see Mt. 8:12, 10:28, i3:4off., 25:41; Mk. 9:42-48; Lk. 13:1-5, 16:23-29, etc.) - of the terrors of God’s judgment. In its picture of God, as in other things, ‘the Old Testament is not contrary to the New’ (Article VII), and the New, so far from cancelling the Old, merely endorses and amplifies it, thus fulfilling it. The God of both Testaments is one.
Third, God has revealed Himself to be the source, stay, and end of all creation, and of mankind in particular. ‘For from him and through him and to him are all things’ (Rom. 11:36). Paul develops these foundation-truths of theism in his sermon to the Athenian idolaters about the ‘unknown God’ (Acts i7:22ff.). First, he speaks of God as our source, the One who brought us into existence. ‘The God who made the world and everything in it’ (verse 24) ‘from one man . . . made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth’ (verse 26). Then Paul speaks of God as our stay, the One who ‘gives all men life and breath and everything else’, so that ‘in him we live and move and have our being’ (verses 25, 28). We depend upon God every moment for our existence: creatures only remain in being through the constant exercise of His upholding power (cf. Heb. 1:3). He, God transcendent, above and beyond and apart from His world, and entirely independent of it (cf. Acts 17:24f), is also God immanent, in the world as the One who is over it, permeating and upholding it as the One who orders its goings and controls its course. Lastly, Paul speaks of God as our end. God made men, he says, ‘so that men would seek him’ (verse 27). Man exists for God, and godlessness is a denial of man’s own nature. Humanity is only perfected in those who know God. ‘Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever’ (Westminster Shorter Catechism, Answer 1).
This God, Paul adds, ‘is not far from each one of us’ (verse 27). Though He is ‘Lord of heaven and earth’ (verse 24), infinitely great, He is not remote. Just the opposite is true. The God who made the world is always, inescapably, our environment. Omniscient, omnipresent, unsleeping, undistracted, He is before and behind us, ever taking knowledge of us, whether or not we acknowledge Him. T the Lord search the heart and examine the mind . . .’ (Jer. 17:10; cf. Ps. 139:1-5). We cannot hide from Him, even if we would; we live, willy-nilly, under His eye; and when He speaks it is our wisdom, no less than our duty, to heed what He says.
In 1963 J. A. T. Robinson’s Honest to God was heralded by an article in one of England’s national newspapers entitled Our Image of God must Go’. It is worth pointing out, however, that this ‘image’ of God as personal, transcendent, immanent, holy, the source and goal of all things, is actually a revealed description. Any alternative ‘image’ of God, therefore, is false and idolatrous. In revelation, God tells us what He is like, and it is not for us to amend His testimony, as if we knew Him better than He knows Himself!
Certainly, the writer to the Hebrews thinks of the God who has spoken as corresponding to the description given above. God, to him, is the living Lord of the Old Testament (3:12, 10:31), the maker and upholder of all things (1:2, 11:3); a personal Being who talks to us (1:1, iiryf., 12:25, 13:5), whose word searches the heart (4:12), and who knows us through and through (4:13); a God who keeps His promises (6:13-18); a just Judge (10:30, 12:23, 13:4), and a consuming fire against the defiant and contemptuous, who spurn the law and the Gospel (2:1-3, 6:6-8, 10:26-31, 12:29); a loving Father to His own people (12:5f); a King whose throne is a throne of grace (4:16), and who rewards all who seek Him in faith (11:6, cf. verse 16). This, and none other, the writer tells us, is the God ‘To whom we must give account’ (4:13).
THE PURPOSE OF GOD
Our second question is: Why has God spoken? He is self-sufficient, and does not need men’s gifts or service (Acts 17:25); to what end, then, does He bother to speak to us?
The truly staggering answer which the Bible gives to this question is that God’s purpose in revelation is to make friends with us. It was to this end that He created us rational beings, bearing His image, able to think and hear and speak and love; He wanted there to be genuine personal affection and friendship, two-sided, between Himself and us - a relation, not like that between a man and his dog, but like that of a father to his child, or a husband to his wife. Loving friendship between two persons has no ulterior motive; it is an end in itself. And this is God’s end in revelation. He speaks to us simply to fulfil the purpose for which we were made; that is, to bring into being a relationship in which He is a friend to us, and we to Him, He finding His joy in giving us gifts and we finding ours in giving Him thanks.
That God made man to be His friend appears from the third chapter of Genesis, where we find God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, looking for Adam to join Him and share His company (Gen. 3:8). That, despite sin, God still wants human friends appears from Christ’s statement that God seeks true worshippers (Jn. 4:23); for worship, the acknowledging of worth, is an activity of friendship at its highest (hence ‘with my body I thee worship’ in the marriage service). God wants men and women to know the joy of the love-relationship from which worship springs, and of the worship itself in which that relationship finds its happiest expression. The supreme example of such a relationship with God is that of Abraham, who worshipped God and trusted and obeyed His word even to the point of being willing to surrender his son for sacrifice - and Abraham, we are told, ‘was called God's friend’ (Jas. 2:23, alluding to Is. 41:8; cf. II Chr. 20:7). It is to make us His friends, as Abraham was, that God has spoken to us.
And if He was to succeed in making friends, it was absolutely necessary that He should speak to us; for the only way to make friends with a person is by talking to him and getting him to talk back to you. Friendship without conversation is a contradiction in terms. A man with whom I never speak will never be my friend. The thing is impossible.
Friendship is never fully enjoyed while the friends are out of each other’s sight. Looks express affection better than mere words can, and the delight of a love-relationship can only be complete when we are looking into the beloved one’s face. So, when someone we are fond of is away from us, we write, ‘I’m longing to see you again.’ The Bible looks on to a day when the relationship between God and His human friends will be made perfect in this way, a day when, in addition to hearing His voice, they will see His face. ‘Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face' (I Cor. 13:12). Similarly, Scripture tells us that in the New Jerusalem those whom Jesus called ‘friends' when He was on earth (see Jn. 15:13-15) ‘will see his face' (Rev. 22:4). Thus, dying Mr. Stand-fast, in Bunyan’s Pilgrim's Progress, could confidently declare: I am going now to see that Head that was crowned with thorns, and that Face that was spit upon, for me. I have formerly lived by hear-say, and faith, but now I go where I shall live by sight, and shall be with him, in whose company I delight myself.5 And by this vision both friendship and revelation will be perfected. But meanwhile God’s friendship with men and women begins and grows through speech: His to us in revelation, and ours to Him in prayer and praise. Though I cannot see God, He and I can yet be personal friends, because in revelation He talks to me.
Some modern divines posit an antithesis between ‘personal' and ‘propositional' revelation, arguing that if revelation were propositional it would not be personal, and that since it is personal (God revealing Himself) it cannot be propositional (God talking about Himself). But this is absurd. Revelation is certainly more than the giving of theological information, but it is not and cannot be less. Personal friendship between God and man grows just as human friendships do - namely, through talking; and talking means making informative statements, and informative statements are propositions. To deny that revelation is propositional in order to emphasize its personal character is like trying to safeguard the truth that cricket is played with a bat by denying that it is played with a ball. The denial undercuts the assertion. To say that revelation is non-propositional is actually to depersonalize it. As Dr. F. I. Anderson says: ‘To belittle propositions because they are impersonal is to destroy human relations by despising their normal medium. The bliss of being loved is different from the words of love-making, but the “proposition", “I love you", is a welcome, nay, indispensable means to the consummation of love in actuality. But in modern theology we have a Lover-God who makes no declarations!’1 From which it appears that modern theology, for all its claim to stress the personal quality of God’s revelation to us and our knowledge of Him, actually takes a sub-personal view of both. To maintain that we may know God without God actually speaking to us in words is really to deny that God is personal, or at any rate that knowing Him is a truly personal relationship.
The God of the Bible, however, is a God who talks to human beings constantly: in visions, dreams, and theophanies; through the prophets, through Christ, through the apostles, and through the written words of Holy Scripture. He talks of His past achievements in creation, judgment, and redemption; He talks of the plans He is currently executing, and of the climax to which He will bring history when the time is ripe; and He talks of human life, telling us what He thinks of the different ways in which men and women live it, what His own scale of values is, what He likes and what He hates. So, by being propositional, His self-revelation becomes truly personal. And by it God makes friends.
THE PLIGHT OF MAN
Our third question is: What is the state of those to whom God speaks? In what condition does His revelation find them?
The biblical answer is that it finds them ignorant of God. The inscription that Paul saw on the Athenian altar reveals humankind’s natural state: our Maker is to us all ‘an unknown God’ (Acts 17:23). None of the philosophies that Athens had mothered could help here: ‘the world through its wisdom did not know him’ (I Cor. 1:21; cf. Gal. 4:8; I Thess. 4:5). No one knows God apart from revelation.
The subject of humanity’s ignorance of God is complex. To clarify it, two points must be made in order, as follows.
In the first place, being creatures, we cannot know God unless He acts to make Himself known to us. For fifty years before the First World War it was fashionable among theologians to maintain a virtual identity between man’s mind and God’s, and to try to distil conceptions of the divine nature from our highest thoughts and ideals. It is good that these notions are now generally given up. For the God of the Bible is One whom we can neither see (Jn. 1:18; I Tim. 6:16), nor approach (I Tim. 6:16), nor search out (cf. Job 11:7, 23:3-9), and we would fool ourselves if we imagined that we could read His mind, learn His character, guess His motives, or predict His movements, by our own unaided brainwork. ‘“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts”' (Is. 5 5:8f.)- ‘How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! Who has known the mind of the Lord?' (Rom. 11:33f). Emil Brunner points the application in a vivid phrase. ‘“Canst thou by searching find out God?” To man’s proud “not yet” the Bible replies “not ever”.’2 In Scripture it is axiomatic that human thoughts about God which do not depend on revelation are worthless. We can know God only through receiving revelation; not otherwise.
But does not God in fact reveal Himself to everyone? How then is it that the world remains ignorant of Him? This brings us to our next point.
In the second place, being sinful creatures, we suppress and pervert such revelation from God as reaches us in the ordinary course of life. That God constantly discloses Himself to every one of us as Creator, Lawgiver, and Judge, through nature, providence and the workings of our own mind and conscience, is perfectly true. Awareness of oneself and of the world really does bring an inseparable intuition of the reality of God and His claims. This is usually called ‘general' revelation in contrast with ‘special' revelation, the historical process recorded in Scripture. The fullest account of general revelation which the Bible gives is in the first two chapters of Romans. There Paul analyses it as God disclosing His eternity, power, and divinity (Rom. 1:20; cf. Ps. 19:1), His kindness (Rom. 2:4; cf. Acts 14:16f.), His moral law (Rom. 2:12ff.), His claim on our worship and homage (1:21), and His condemnation of sin (1:32). As against those who hold that general revelation, and ‘natural religion' based on it, can suffice for mankind without the Bible, we must observe that Paul’s analysis shows up the insufficiency of general revelation. It shows us, first, that general revelation is inadequate as a basis for religion, for it yields nothing about God’s purpose of friendship with man, nor does it fully disclose His will for human life. Even Adam in Eden needed direct divine speech, over and above general revelation, to make known to him all God’s will (cf. Gen. 1:28f., 2:16f.). Second, Paul’s analysis shows that general revelation is doubly inadequate to the needs of sinners, for it lacks redemptive content. It indicates that God punishes sin, but not that He pardons it. It shows forgiveness to be needed without showing it to be possible. It preaches the law without the Gospel. It can condemn, but not save. Any unbeliever who rightly understood it would be driven to despair. However clearly the content of general revelation was grasped, it would by itself provide no adequate basis for fellowship with God.
But in fact we do not find among non-Christians a clear grasp of the content of general revelation. To a greater or less degree, they ‘hold down [suppress, N.I.V.; stifle, N.E.B.] the truth in unrighteousness’ (Rom. 1:18, E.R.V.). This is because they are ‘all under sin’ (Rom. 3:9). Sin, the ruling force, according to Paul, in every Christless individual, is a principle of non-conformity to revelation, and its effects are mental as well as moral. Sin prompts, not only disobedience to God’s law, but also denial of His truth. Paul’s analysis of general revelation in Romans is part of a great indictment against a sinful world for wilfully darkening the light that general revelation gives. General revelation, he says, is inescapable: ‘what may be known about God is plain to them [all mankind], because God has made it plain to them. For. . . God’s invisible qualities . . . have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made . . .’ (Rom. i:i9f.). Therefore idolatry and immorality are in every case ‘without excuse’ (verse 20), for they are always sins against knowledge. The formula explaining their origin is always ‘although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened . . . they became fools and . . . exchanged the truth of God for a lie’ (verses 21-25). Again, in Rom. 2:12-15, Paul appeals to the everyday operations of conscience as showing that all men have received through general revelation some knowledge of God’s law. Paul knows that non-Christian consciences act defectively, and are often silent when they ought to speak (cf. Eph. 4:19), but (he says) when they do speak - and everyone’s conscience, however depraved, speaks sometimes - their method of acting (judging by a standard), the standards to which they appeal, and the actual verdicts they pass, show ‘the requirements of the law are written on their hearts’ (verse 15). Thus their immoral ‘new moralities’, and their actual wrongdoings, are without excuse also.
In all this, Paul’s point is not that of Aquinas, that the existence of God is abstractly provable by argument from created things, but the much more fundamental point that God’s existence and law are actually known to all people, even where both are denied in theory and in practice. Light constantly shines, however much we shut our eyes and protest that we can see nothing. Thus the fact of general revelation proves all people guilty for their irreligion and lawless living, since all without exception - would they but admit it - know better.
In fact, some of the light that shines always gets through. Flashes of true moral and theological insight come to every non-Christian mind (hence Paul, preaching at Athens, could appeal to the poet Aratus, Acts 17:28). But these are only flashes; no more. Calvin compared the isolated insights of the pagan philosophers to lightning flickering over the benighted. ‘Seeing, they saw not. Their discernment was not such as to direct them to the truth . . . but resembled that of the bewildered traveller who sees a lightning-flash glance far and wide for a moment, and then vanish into the darkness of the night, before he can advance a single step. So far is such assistance from enabling him to find the right path.’3 Thus, despite the occasional truths about God and goodness which general revelation has planted in his mind, Christless man remains ignorant of God.
NON-CHRISTIAN RELIGIONS
These considerations throw light on the nature of non-Christian religions. In these days, when Eastern faiths are resurgent, and Christian missionary advance is slowing down, it is often asked whether God is not in fact revealed and known outside Christianity. The question is important, for our whole attitude to missionary work will depend on our answer to it. Do people of other faiths know God? A popular view has been that all human beings share a basic sense of affinity with God (‘the religious a priori,' as Continentals call it), that the only ultimate difference between the world’s religions lies in the degree of success with which they cherish and express this innate God-consciousness, and that what the Bible records is a process of religious evolution through which man’s God-consciousness reached its supreme expression in the teaching of Jesus (understood, or rather misunderstood, as essentially a declaration that God is the Father of all humanity). On this view, Christianity is certainly the Rolls-Royce among religions, the best of its kind, but the same basic sense of oneness with God underlies them all, just as the same basic design is found in all cars.
This amounts to saying that all religions, Christianity included, rest entirely on general revelation, which tells us of a basic harmony between God and ourselves - an insight most luminously crystallized in the thought of God as Father. It follows that no one really needs any more knowledge of God than general revelation can give him. But Scripture disagrees. It contrasts Christianity with other faiths at just the point where this theory links them together. Non-biblical religions (it says) are certainly based on general revelation in one sense, but it is general revelation (and in the case of Judaism and Islam at least, special revelation too) perverted and at certain points denied. Four factors (at least) have conspired to produce them: general revelation, demonic deception (cf. I Cor. 10:20; II Cor. 4:4), the smothering and distorting action of the fallen human mind, and God’s judicial giving up of men and women to the nightmare state of believing what they want to believe and forgetting what they want to forget (Rom. 1:21-23, 25, 28). Non-Christian faiths, therefore, though resulting in one sense from knowledge of God, are actually forms of ignorance of God: modern non-Christians, like the ancient Gentiles, ‘do not know God’ (I Thess. 4:5).
Also, Scripture assures us that apart from the Christian Gospel all thoughts of natural affinity and peace with God are delusive. Where found (and they are not in fact common in non-Christian types of religion) they spring, not from a true reading of general revelation, but from self-deceived wishful thinking. General revelation actually discloses the wrath of God against human sin (Rom. 1:18, 32). There is no true knowledge of peace with God outside Christ. In point of fact, the dominant impression which a study of the great non-Christian faiths gives is of an agonized hunger for peace and fellowship with God, a hunger which these religions can evidently deepen but equally evidently cannot satisfy. Not that they are all entirely wrong, or wholly degraded; isolated truths peep through their theology at many points, and the ascetic discipline of the best of them is deeply impressive as an achievement of the human spirit. But in no case is their overall view of God and of the God-man relationship a true one. In particular, though they have all gained from general revelation some form of belief in cosmic retribution for evil-doing, they none of them know any effective way of reconciliation with the God whom man has offended. They know something of the law, but nothing of the Gospel. They seek peace with God, but, lacking Christ, they cannot find it.
Let me underline that in saying this I am speaking generally and comprehensively about the religions, not about any individual exponents or adherents of them, and what I have tried to put into words is a divine verdict revealed in Scripture, not an expression of human censoriousness or cultural imperialism. Present-day religious education distinguishes the religious dimension of human life from adherence to any particular faith and urges that all faiths must be appreciated in their own terms, which is right; and those who live in multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-faith situations, as most of us now do, having friends and colleagues of persuasions other than our own, will rightly wince at any seeming disrespect for what these latter hold sacred. There remain lurking in the West traditions of contempt for non-Christian religions and their followers, as well as of uncritical confidence that they are all climbing the same mountain and will meet at the top, but the former are as indefensible as the latter. There is also a habit of measuring and censuring non-Christian faiths by reference to features which their own best teachers see as abuses, which is in effect to take them at their worst rather than at their best; this, too, needs to be apologized for and renounced, for if we think it would be unfair for a Hindu to criticize Christianity by referring to the various brands of folk-religion, civil religion, conventional formalism and plain superstition that it has spawned or embraced down the centuries we must allow that it is no less unfair to judge Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam or any other faith in that way. The truth is that not only Christianity, but all the great religions are capable of both degenerating and being reformed and renewed in their own terms; so they are only rightly appreciated in the light of their own highest ideals for themselves and their own intra-mural self-criticism, which means that humble, respectful dialogue is always the proper technique of approach to them while a brash triumphalist critique never is. Even so, however, the Bible reveals non-Christian religion to be as we said, a poignant kind of tragedy in which salvation is sought where salvation is not to be found.4
PEOPLE IN DARKNESS
Christless men and women, then, all the world over, are ignorant of God with an ignorance that is to some extent wilful and therefore guilty. ‘Since they did not think it worth while to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done’ (Rom. 1:28) - that is the divine diagnosis of all non-Christian religion and irreligion, and all sub-Christian conduct in the world. Underlying all the observable factors conditioning our beliefs and actions, which the human sciences can and do study, is the act of man refusing to respond to God’s light, and the act of God giving him up to intellectual and moral darkness. God in judgment allows recalcitrant man to believe and do what he likes -hence all the false faiths and immoralities, pre-Christian, anti-Christian, and post-Christian, which filled the world as Paul knew it, and which still fill it today. (Could there be any account of the state of our race, as we know it from our newspapers and our own experience, more shatteringly up-to-date than Rom. 1:23-32; Eph. 4:17-19; II Tim. 3:1-8?)
There is in Anglicanism a strong rationalistic and moralistic tradition of thought, going back beyond last-century liberalism to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Lati-tudinarians (‘Latitude-men’), and beyond this to the Platonism of the Renaissance. Its habit is to assume that all human beings naturally aspire towards God and goodness, to treat the moral and religious intuitions of educated people as ultimate certainties, and to take seriously only those elements of biblical teaching that fit in with them. Naturally, those who stand in this tradition concentrate on ethics, soft-pedal the themes of sin and grace, and tend constantly to endorse in practice the allegedly Anabaptist doctrine of salvation by sincerity (‘every man shall be saved by the Law or Sect which he professeth, so that he be diligent to frame his life according to that Law, and the light of Nature’) - a doctrine which Article XVIII condemns, on the grounds that ‘holy Scripture doth set out unto us only the Name of Jesus Christ, whereby men must be saved’. It is this tradition which has led to the taunt that Pelagianism - salvation by moral effort alone - is the Englishman’s special heresy! Children of this tradition find it hard to believe that men and women without Christ are guiltily ignorant of God, perverse more or less in their thoughts of Him, self-idolizers even in their outward worship of Him, and strangers to His friendship. Yet so it is, and it is vitally important that we should face the fact, and admit that, wise and foolish, rich and poor, young and old, white and black, we are by nature all together in this same boat. Even though general revelation shines upon us constantly, we are people in the dark. Apart from special, saving revelation - the revelation that centres upon the Lord Jesus Christ - we do not and cannot know God.
REVELATION TO SINNERS
The nature of revelation as an act of God is now clear.
Revelation is our personal Creator and Upholder addressing us in order to make friends with us. We do not find Him; rather, He finds us. He sees us as rebels against Him, with our minds blinded and our characters twisted by sin, actively dishonouring Him by stifling His truth and serving false gods. But His Word addressed to us in Christ, though it begins as bad news, with a disclosure to us of the judgment under which we stand, is essentially good news; for it is a word of pardon and peace, a message of reconciliation by the death of Jesus and of ‘a way back to God from the dark paths of sin’.
From this it appears that our study of God’s revelation should be controlled by a recognition of two basic truths. The first is that what we are dealing with is a work of grace to sinners, a work, that is, of free undeserved favour towards persons who have forfeited all claim to favour. The Word that God has spoken in His Son concerns a costly and unmerited salvation that God has provided on our behalf. To speak such a word of grace is itself an act of grace, and only those who see revelation as grace can understand it aright.
The second truth to recognize is that knowledge of special revelation can only be drawn from special revelation itself. Only in the light of revelation - God’s light, shining into our darkness - can we sin-blinded creatures see light on any spiritual matter. And if we cannot know the truth about God save by revelation, it is surely evident that we cannot know the truth about revelation save by revelation. This means, as we shall see, that the truth about revelation must be learned from the Bible, just as the truth about God’s character must be learned from the Bible. We must not be surprised if we find the Bible contradicting our own ideas, nor must we hesitate to recognize that if we depart from the biblical account of revelation, we go wrong. Many Protestant writers today err here, accepting the witness of revelation to other truths yet sitting loose to its witness to itself. Notions such as that revelation took the form of a progress from faulty thoughts of God to more exact ones, or that it took place by divine deed and not by divine word, or that the divine inspiration of statements does not guarantee their truth, or that the scriptural record of revelation is not itself revelation, get copied from book to book without regard for the fact that they contradict revelation’s own account of itself. Even ‘neo-orthodox’ theologians, who rightly stress that revelation is known to us only by its own light, and that the Bible is integral to God’s revelatory action, have distorted their understanding of revelation by importing into it rationalistic, non-biblical axioms, such as the allegedly non-propositional character of personal revelation (Brunner) or the supposed paradox that God speaks His infallible word to us through fallacious words of men (Barth).5 We must be on our guard against such lapses. We only truly honour the God who has spoken in His Son to us blind sinners by listening humbly, teachably, and without interrupting, to what He has to say, and by believing, on His authority, all that He is pleased to tell us - about revelation, no less than any other subject.