The Progress Of Revelation
CHAPTER FOUR
GOD’S WORD SPOKEN (II)
In the last chapter, we thought of God’s general revelation of Himself as Creator, a revelation given to all people through their own self-awareness and knowledge of God’s world (see Rom. m^f.), as well as of His special revelation of Himself as Saviour, the revelation which is made known to us in the Gospel (see Rom. i:i6f.). In this chapter, however, we deal only with the latter.
The second major truth which the opening words of Hebrews teach us, is that revelation is a verbal activity. ‘God spoke.’ This is not a metaphor for some non-verbal mode of communication; the verb is being used as literally as any human words about God can ever be. The writer means, quite simply, that God has communicated with man by means of significant utterances: statements, questions, and commands, spoken either in His own person or on His behalf by His own appointed messengers and instructors. The rest of the epistle makes this quite plain.
THE PROPHETS
The writer introduces God as ‘having of old time, spoken unto the fathers in the prophets’ (E.R.V.). Who and what were the prophets? The currently standard New Testament lexicon, that of Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich-Danker, defines the Greek word prophetes as ‘proclaimer and interpreter of the divine revelation’. The older lexicon of Grimm-Thayer gives a fuller definition: ‘one who, moved by the Spirit of God and hence his organ or spokesman, solemnly declares to men what he has received by inspiration, especially future events, and in particular such as relate to the cause and kingdom of God and to human salvation.’ These definitions are indisputably correct. In the Hebrew Old Testament, there are three words for prophet: ro’eh and bozeh, meaning one who sees (a ‘seer’), and nabi meaning one who calls (a ‘crier’, like the old English town crier). These words together give us the biblical idea of a prophet. We tend to think of prophets as essentially men who tell the future, but in the Bible the thought of the prophet as predicter is founded on something more basic, namely, the thought of him as a man to whom God speaks and shows things, who is then charged to go and tell others in God’s name the things he has seen and heard.
The nature of the prophetic vocation is crystallized in God’s words to Jeremiah: I appointed you as a prophet . . . you must go to everyone I send you to and say whatever I command you. . . I have put my words in your mouth' (Jer. 1:5-9; cf. Is. 6:8ff.; Ezek. 2; Amos 7:14f). To put words in someone else’s mouth is to tell him exactly what to say (see II Sam. 14:3, 19). This was what God did with the prophets. As they repeatedly tell us, ‘the word of the Lord came’ to them, telling them what they must go and say to others in God’s name. Amos describes their position, as mediators of revelation, in two consecutive verses (Amos 3:7f)· ‘Surely the Sovereign Lord does nothing, without revealing his plan to his servants the prophets.’ There is the prophet as seer and hearer, the recipient of revelation. Then Amos says: ‘The lion has roared -who will not fear? The Sovereign Lord has spoken - who can but prophesy?’ There is the prophet as speaker and messenger, constrained to declare the ‘secret’ that God has shown him. Essentially, therefore, prophets were forthtellers of God’s word, human agents through whom He made His statements public and relayed them to the people to whom they were addressed. But because God’s ‘secret’ often included His future plans, as well as the meaning of His present actions, the forthtellers of God’s word often appeared as foretellers of things to come. That is how the idea of prophets as predicters fits in.
The hallmark of Old Testament prophecy was the prefatory formula: ‘The Lord says.’ This formula proclaimed the source and authority of the prophets’ messages: it told the world that the things they said were to be heard and received as God’s words, His royal announcements, and not just pious productions of man. Commonly the prophets spoke in God’s own person: the T of their oracles is more often than not Yahweh Himself. The psychology of prophetic inspiration, in which auditory, visionary, intuitive, and reflective factors were all involved, is necessarily mysterious to us who do not share it. But both Testaments tell us that, however mysterious, prophetic inspiration was a recurring fact in Israel’s history from Moses on, and that this inspiration had definite and characteristic effects. It was more than natural insight, more even than spiritual enlightenment; it was a unique process whereby the human messenger was drawn into such complete identification with the message God had given him to deliver that what he said could be, and indeed had to be, treated as wholly divine. Though the prophet’s own powers of thought and craftsmanship were fully exercised in apprehending God’s disclosures and, so to speak, preparing them for publication, whether orally or in writing, the resulting product was as uniformly and uncorruptedly The word of the Lord’ as were the Ten Commandments which Moses received on Sinai, written, we are told, with the finger of God (Ex. 31:18, 32:i5f.). The effect of inspiration was that the oracles of the prophets declared, not the prophets’ own mind simply, but God’s. Nothing that they said ‘by the word of the Lord’ (I Ki. 13:2, 20:35) might be dismissed in the way that ‘all the arrogant men’ dismissed Jeremiah’s oracle (Jer. 43:2), as being a mere human mistake. What the prophets said, God said; as Hebrews 1:1 put it, God spoke in and through them, or as II Pet. 1:21 expresses it, ‘For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along [impelled, N.E.B.] by the Holy Spirit.’
No wonder then, that the New Testament always treats Old Testament prophecies as true and decisive expressions of God’s mind, and finds the chief proof of the divine origin of Christianity in its fulfilment of the prophetic Scriptures (cf. Acts 2:16-36, 3:i8ff., 10:43, i3:22ff., i7:2ff., etc.). No wonder that Jesus took Old Testament prophecy as containing His Father’s blueprint for His own Messianic ministry, and taught that He had come, not to overthrow the prophets, but to fulfil them (Mt. 5:17; cf. 26:53-56; Lk. 18:3ff., 22:37, 24:25ff., 44ff.; Jn. 13:18, 15:25, 17:12). No wonder that the apostles at once fell into the habit of citing texts from the prophets as utterances of God, or of the Holy Spirit (cf. Acts 1:16, 3:21, 4:24ff., 7:48ff., 13:22, 33-35, 47, 28:25ff.). No wonder that the writer to the Hebrews twice specifies the Holy Spirit as the speaker of particular prophetic messages (3:7 and 10:15, citing Ps. 95:7-11; Jer. 31:33?.; cf. Acts 4:25, 28:25).
When our author tells us that in Old Testament times God revealed Himself by speaking the words spoken by the prophets (for that is what it comes to), it is important to see the range of his reference. We are apt today to restrict the term ‘prophets’ to the authors of the prophetic books of the Old Testament, along with Samuel and his successors in Israel’s history. But we need to remember that to the New Testament writers Moses the lawgiver and David and his fellow-psalmists are also among the prophets. The New Testament hails them all as foretellers of Christ (Lk. 24:44; Jn. 5:47; Acts 2:25-31, 7:37). Moses, indeed, was regarded throughout as the supreme prophet (see Deut. 34:10), and the Mosaic body of teaching as the supreme and basic prophetic revelation. When Stephen says that Moses ‘received living words to pass on to us’ (Acts 7:38), it is the law of Moses that he has in mind; the law, seen from this standpoint, was entirely prophetic.
A further truth to notice here about the things God said through His inspired messengers is that, once spoken, they retained validity and authority for the future. They are to be thought of, therefore, not merely as what God said, but as what He says. Within the stated range of their application, His promises and threats bind Him, and His commands bind men, as long as the world stands. ‘The word of the Lord stands for ever’ (I Pet. 1:25, citing Is. 40:8). ‘Until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished’ (Mt. 5:18). Since God’s character and plans do not change, it could hardly be otherwise. And as God stands for ever to what He has said, so men in every generation stand under it. The words of the Lord never lose their binding authority. We express our sense of the abiding force of the law of the land by using the present tense when quoting it: The law says'. In the same way, the writer to the Hebrews expressed his sense of the abiding authority of the words of Ps. 95:7-11 and Jer. 31:33f by using the present tense when speaking of their divine origin: The Holy Spirit [not said, but] says' (3:7); The Holy Spirit also [not testified, but] testifies to us’ (10:15).
Not, of course, that the New Testament writers regard all the Old Testament words of God as retaining their original application. They interpret them, not in terms of the old, preparatory, typical dispensation under which they were spoken, and to which in most cases they had immediate reference, but christologically - that is, they reapply them in terms of the new situation created by the fulfilling of prophecy in the life, death, resurrection, and reign of the Lord Jesus Christ. The way in which, as we saw, Hebrews interprets Ps. 95:7f. and Jer. 31:33f. as testimony by the Holy Spirit to New Testament Christians is a case in point. Accordingly, the New Testament recognizes that some requirements of the Mosaic law were only meant for the old covenant epoch, and were never intended by God to bind Christians: the law of circumcision, for instance (cf. Acts 15 and Galatians), or the Levitical festal calendar (cf. Gal. 4:10; Col. 2:16-23), or the sacrificial cultus (cf. Heb. 7-10,13:9-16). The coming of Christ superseded these typical ordinances, and the divine instruction which Christians are to draw from them concerns, not God’s will for their own present action, but the truths concerning God, man, and Christ, which the observing of these ordinances was always intended to inculcate upon Israelite minds. Similarly, the detailed Old Testament legislation applying the moral law of the Decalogue to the realm of public justice was only ever meant for the era of the Israelite church-state, though its ideal of fair, respectful and generous dealing with others should operate always and everywhere.
It is in this sense - that is, as witnesses to abiding principles and obligations - that these sections of the Old Testament law abide in force. We must remember that in the biblical conception of law (Hebrew, tor ah, literally ‘instruction’) theological teaching and ethical enactment are organically united, so that amended or expanded expositions which confirm the original theological teaching (as did Jesus’ expositions in Mt. 5:21-48) could not be held in any significant sense to ‘destroy’ the law (cf. Mt. 5:17).
THE OLD TESTAMENT
We have not yet done with the witness of the author of Hebrews to the verbal character of revelation. We must now observe that he regards, not only individual prophetic and legislative oracles, but the whole Old Testament, as verbal revelation from God. This appears from a fact which makes his letter unique in the New Testament - namely, that he bases his whole argument, from start to finish, on Old Testament passages; all of which he treats as prophetic in the sense explained, that is, as authoritative disclosures of God’s mind, even though some of them (those in 1:6-12, 2:6ff., and i2:5f.) are not, in their original contexts, words spoken by God in His own person. Thus, in chapter 1, the deity and kingship of God’s Son are set forth on the basis of an appeal in verses 5-13 to Ps. 2:7, II Sam. 7:14, Deut. 32:43 (a part of the text which was only known from the Septuagint version till the Hebrew original was found at Qumran), Pss. 45:6f, io2:25ff., 110:1. Chapter 2 speaks of the manhood of the King in the light of Ps. 8:4ff. (itself an echo of Gen. 1:28), which is cited in verses 6ff. In chapters 3 and 4, an expository application of Ps. 95:7-11 is made, to show the need for believing adherence to the Gospel. In chapters 5 and 7, the Melchizedek priesthood of Jesus is expounded from Ps. 110:4. Chapter 6 treats briefly (verses 12-19) of God’s faithfulness to His promises, the point being made by appeal in verse 14 to God’s promises to Abraham, recorded in Gen. 22:16. In chapters 8 and 10, the fulfilment of Jeremiah’s new covenant prophecy (Jer. 31:31-34) is announced and explained. In chapter 9, the meaning of Christ’s sacrifice is shown from the significance of God’s directions, enjoined upon Moses in Ex. 25:40 (cited, Heb. 8:5), for the structure and service of the tabernacle. Chapter 10 invokes Deut. 3 2.13 5ff. and Hab. 2:3f. (verses 30, 27) to underline the danger of apostasy and the need for steadfastness. Chapter 11 ranges widely through Old Testament narratives of how God spoke to His servants, and how they responded, in order to make the point that faith is a practical embracing of God’s promises and adhering to them against all odds. Chapter 12 deals with the place of chastisement in the Christian life, by generalizing from Prov. 3:11 f., cited in verses 5f. Chapter 13 sets forth the basis of Christian contentment in God’s promise to Joshua (Josh. 1:5), which is quoted in verse 5 and followed by Ps. 118:6 as expressing our proper response to it.
Clearly, to this writer (and the whole New Testament is with him) the sentences and sentiments of the Old Testament are so many units of divine instruction, true testimonies to God’s will, works, and ways, proceeding, in the last analysis, from His own mouth. The epistle to the Hebrews thus impressively illustrates what it means to believe that ‘all Scripture is God-breathed and [therefore] is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness’ (II Tim. 3:16). The writer’s position is that not only the words of the prophets, but the entire Old Testament, first to last, is ‘God’s Word written’ - that is, verbal revelation.
REVELATION IN CHRIST
Then the writer tells us that God has now spoken ‘by His Son’. Some today argue as if revelation in the person of Christ takes us beyond the realm of verbal revelation altogether. But our author does not think so; rather, he regards verbal revelation as of the essence of our Lord’s own revelatory ministry. This appears from his reference in 2:3 to the ‘great salvation’ which ‘was first announced by the Lord, [and] was confirmed to us by those who heard him’. Here he focuses our attention on the verbal instruction - the ‘word’ - which Jesus and His apostles gave men in the Father’s name. In this, be it noted,
our author was simply following in Jesus’ own footsteps: for Jesus Himself regularly reduced the question of whether men perceived God’s saving revelation in Him to the question of whether they received and responded to His instruction, as to divine truth. (On the divine origin of Jesus’ ‘word’, see Jn. 3:I4, 34, 7:16f.,8:2 6,28, 38, 40, 43 with 47, 14:10, 24, 15:15, 17:8, 14, 18:37. On the implications of receiving or rejecting it, see Mt. 7:21-27; Lk. 6:46-49, 8:4-21, 11:28; Jn. 3:11, 8:31, 37, 43, 47, 12:48, 14:21-23, 15:7, 17:6-8, 18:37.) Also, the writer is chiming in with the claims of Paul; for Paul announced his Gospel as God’s long-hidden ‘mystery’ (secret), now made known to Christ’s ‘apostles and prophets’ by revelation (Eph. 3:3-5; Rom. 16:25f., cf. Gal. 1:12; I Cor. 2:10-13), so that it was ‘not . . . the word of men, but . . . actually . . . the word of God’ (I Thess. 2:13). For himself, Paul’s claim was that by virtue of his apostolic enduement with the Holy Spirit (cf. I Cor. 2:i2f.) he spoke as Christ’s mouth, just as the prophets had spoken as God’s mouth. Thus his evangelical teaching really was God’s pure truth (cf. Gal. i:6ff.) and his injunctions really were ‘the Lord’s command’ (I Cor. 14:37). (On the divine source and truth of the apostles’ ‘word’, see also Jn. 14:26, 15:26f, 16:12-15, 17:20; and cf. Rev. 1:1-3, 19, 22:6-9, i8f.). This array of evidence compels us to recognize that revelation in Christ, however great an advance it marked on what had gone before, did not involve any breach of the principle that what God reveals is made known to men by means of verbal instruction from God Himself. True as it is that the incarnate Christ was not only God for man but also man for God and that in Him we not only hear God speaking but also watch God blessing and man obeying, and that this is richer revelation than words alone could ever give, yet the centrality of verbal revelation remains, and it is precisely to the divine words that the Gospel calls us to respond.
Accordingly, at the end of the letter to the Hebrews, having referred to the ‘voice speaking words’ which Israel heard at Sinai (12:19), the writer sums up his appeal thus: ‘See to it that you do not refuse him who speaks. If they did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth, how much less will we, if we turn away from him who warns us from heaven? At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, “Once more I will shake not only the earth, but also the heavens,”’ (i2:25f., citing Hag. 2:6). The italicized words make it clear beyond all shadow of doubt that to this writer (and, once more, he has the whole New Testament with him) the essence of the Christian revelation is verbal communication from God, conveyed through Christ and His apostles.
VERBAL REVELATION UNDER CRITICISM
We have now reached the first of the watersheds at which the streams divide in modern discussions of revelation. The cleavage comes over whether or not we think of revelation as the writer to the Hebrews does, as divine verbal communication, God using human language, spoken and written by His special messengers, to make His mind, and so Himself, known to mankind. Many today hold views of revelation in history and in experience which move them, not merely to reject this idea, but to attack it, as positively harmful. This being so, it is important to be clear on just what the apostolic position does and does not involve.
First, some negatives, made necessary by current misconceptions.
1. The idea of revelation as essentially verbal communication does not imply the concept of God as a celestial rabbi who does nothing but sit and talk. It does not, therefore, cut across the stress which mid-century theology rightly laid on the fact that the God of the Bible (and, of course, of Hebrews!) is a living, active Being, the Lord and Maker of history, who discloses Himself by means of mighty acts of redemption; and that the Bible itself is essentially a recital of His doings, an explanatory narrative of the great drama of the bringing in of His kingdom, and the saving of the world.1 Belief that the mode of revelation is verbal is in no way inconsistent with recognizing that the subject-matter of revelation is the living God and His redeeming work, as the epistle to the Hebrews itself shows plainly enough.
2. Nor does this belief imply that the receiving of revelation is simply a matter of sitting down and learning biblical doctrines. It is ironical when holders of the Hebrews position are accused of intellectualizing and depersonalizing faith. No modern theologian could make the point that faith is not orthodoxy alone, but ‘existential' trust in the living God, more forcibly than Hebrews n does. In fact, as we observed earlier, and as Hebrews n shows (verses 7, 8, 11, 13, etc.), such trust is only possible on the basis of verbal communications from God - divine commands and promises - recognized as such.
3. Nor does the belief that revelation is essentially verbal communication from heaven militate in any way against the New Testament identification of Jesus as Himself the Word of God (Jn. 1:1-14) who discloses the Father (Jn. 1:18, 14:9). To argue otherwise, as some do, is like arguing that, because ‘Flying Scotsman' is the name of a locomotive, it cannot also be the name of a train.2 ‘Word' (logos) denotes the expression of mind in reasoning and speech. God’s Son is called His ‘Word' because in Him God’s mind, character, and purposes find full expression. God’s revelation is called His ‘Word' because it is reasoned verbal discourse which has God as its subject and its source. The verbal ‘Word' bears witness to the personal ‘Word', and enables us to know the latter for what He is, which otherwise we could not do. There is no inconsistency here. It is noticeable that, though Hebrews begins by hailing God’s Son as the perfect image of His Father (1:3), three times out of four the phrase ‘Word of God' is used to denote, not Christ, but the divine message concerning Him (4:12, 6:5, 13:7). (For other uses of ‘Word' in Hebrews for God’s verbal communications to men, see 2:2, 4:2, 7:28, 12:19.)
But what the claim that revelation is essentially verbal does imply is that no historical event, as such, can make God known to anyone unless God Himself discloses its meaning and place in His plan. Providential happenings may serve to remind us, more or less vividly, that God is at work (cf. Acts 14:17), but their link, if any, with His saving purpose cannot be known until He Himself informs us of it. No event is self-interpreting at this level. The Exodus, for instance, was only one of many tribal migrations that history knows (cf. Amos 9:7); Calvary was only one of many Roman executions. Whoever could have guessed the unique saving significance of these events, had not God Himself spoken to tell us? All history is, in one sense, God’s deed, but none of it reveals Him except in so far as He Himself talks to us about it. God’s revelation is not through deeds without words (a dumb charade!) any more than it is through words without deeds; but it is through deeds which He speaks to interpret, or, putting it more biblically, through words which His deeds confirm and fulfil. The fact we must face is that if there is no verbal revelation, there is no revelation at all, not even in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
A CURRENT ALTERNATIVE
This point is crucial for current debate, since the view of revelation which, following writers like William Temple and Leonard Hodgson,3 many British theologians have held in one form or another, really depends on denying it. According to this view, God revealed Himself in history by illuminating chosen observers of significant events so that they perceived what the events meant, in terms of God’s character and plan. The events thus gained revelatory status through the coincidence with them of divinely enlightened minds. But this enlightening, though it heightened the observers’ intuitive and reflective capacities, and sharpened their moral and spiritual perceptions, was not in itself an infusing into their minds of truths from God. As Temple put it: ‘There is no such thing as revealed truth. There are truths of revelation, that is to say propositions which express the results of correct thinking concerning revelation; but they are not themselves directly revealed.’4
Many find this view appealing because, while it purports to safeguard the reality of revelation in history, it does not oblige us to treat all the contents of Scripture as truths of revelation. Fallible men, however enlightened, may yet make factual and theological mistakes, and on this view we have no reason to regard biblical authors as exceptions to the rule. Thus this teaching comes to terms with the methods of conventional Protestant biblical criticism, which for over a century has worked on the basis of a deliberate rejection of the idea of inerrancy. Those who take Temple’s approach are thereby set free to enthrone historical criticism as the basic technique of Christian theology; and it appears that the number of those who see the theologian’s task as, first, to reconstruct biblical history (‘what really happened’) from the biblical narratives, and then, in the light of this reconstruction, to assess the adequacy of the interpretations of this history which the biblical writers propound, is now large.5 But the approach itself is vulnerable on many grounds.
First, it effectively overthrows the whole biblical idea of knowing God, having fellowship with God, and being God’s friend. It holds that God’s way of making Himself known, both to the biblical writers and to ourselves, is not to address words to any of us, but simply to guide our minds into right thoughts about Him as we watch Him in action. But this cannot in principle yield personal knowledge of God at all. As a Gloucestershire boy, I knew all about Walter Hammond, and when I saw him in action I had enough insight into cricket to tell why he swung his bat the way he did.6 But I was never a friend of his, for I never knew him personally; he never spoke to me. On the basis of the view under discussion, we should have to conclude that no one, in Bible times or since, has ever had personal acquaintance with God, and, further, that the biblical idea of communion and friendship with God within a covenant relationship, in which He is committed to me as my God by promise, is an unrealizable dream.
Second, this view overthrows the biblical idea of faith, which is essentially of honouring God by tenaciously trusting to what He has said. When Abraham, whom the New Testament hails as the man of faith par excellence, ‘believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness’ (Rom. 4:3; Gal. 3:6, citing Gen. 15:6), the object of his faith was a specific promise. (See also Heb. 6:i3ff., 11:8-13, 17.) Hebrews 11:33 says that the Old Testament heroes ‘through faith ... gained what was promised’; but if the teaching under discussion is the whole truth about revelation, there never were any promises for them to obtain, or us either.
Third, this view compels the conclusion that God never in fact addressed words to any prophet or apostle at any stage, so that all their recorded experiences of hearing His voice must be dismissed, as C. H. Dodd dismisses the divine words of commissioning which Jeremiah heard, as 'actual hallucinations’.7 This implies that, whatever they, in their hallucinatory state, may have believed about the source of their messages, we should never take their 'the Lord says . . .’ as really meaning more than: Ί feel quite certain that if God spoke He would say . . .’ Accordingly we must understand their authority, not as that of God speaking through them directly, but rather of themselves as theological pundits and religious experts, sharing with us their own beliefs about One who, though active in other ways, is dumb, and never speaks for Himself. But all this is highly unbiblical.
Then, fourth, this view overlooks the fact that in the case of all events of importance in the history of salvation (not to speak of many others), God did not leave their significance to be perceived during or after their occurrence, but prefaced them, often at a very long range, by verbal predictions of what He was in due course going to do. This happened, we are told, in the case of the Exodus, the conquest of Canaan, the setting up of the kingdom, the exile, the return, the coming of Christ, the Cross and resurrection, the sending of the Spirit, the calling of the Gentiles - the list could be lengthened further. These are facts with which the theory under review cannot cope; it can only be saved, therefore, by wholesale denial that these predictions ever really took place. Thus the theory disallows the claim made in Isaiah 46:9f, Ί am God, and there is none like me; I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come . . .’ If Temple’s theory stands, then not only is this claim not a revealed truth, it is not even a truth of revelation.
Fifth, if there are no revealed truths, then the theological statements made by the Lord Jesus Christ are not revealed truths; and what, in that case, are we to make of His solemn assertions, 'my teaching is not my own. It comes from him who sent me'; ‘I . . . speak just what the Father has taught me'; ‘the Father who sent me commanded me what to say and how to say it . . . whatever I say is just what the Father has told me to say'; ‘I judge only as I hear'; ‘I am telling you what I have seen in the Father’s presence . . . the truth that I heard from God'; ‘my words will never pass away' (Jn. 7:16, 8:28, i2:49f., 5:30, 8:38ff.; Mk. 13:31)? Did our Lord suffer from hallucinations? Did the Father, after all, never speak to His Son? A theory that fails to allow for even the possibility that the words of Jesus have the status of verbal revelation surely stands self-condemned.
Further objections might be brought, but it already seems plain that this theory is untenable, and so we forbear.
GOD REVEALED THROUGH HIS WORDS
It will be helpful to set alongside this unbiblical, indeed, anti-biblical, theory a recapitulation of the position that we ourselves are arguing.8 This may be summed up as follows:
What is revelation? From one standpoint it is God’s act, from another His gift. From both standpoints it is correlative to man’s knowledge of God, as on the one hand an experience and on the other a possession. As God’s act, revelation is the personal self-disclosure whereby He brings us actively and experimentally to know Him as our own God and Saviour. As God’s gift, revelation is the knowledge about Himself which He gives us as a means to this end. Revelation as God’s act takes place through the bestowing of revelation as God’s gift; the first sense of the word thus comprehends the second. Accordingly, revelation in the narrower sense ought always to be studied in the setting of revelation in the broader sense.
How does God reveal what has to be revealed in order that we may know Him? By verbal communication from Himself. Without this, revelation in the full and saving sense cannot take place at all. For no public historical happening, as such (an exodus, a conquest, a captivity, a crucifixion, an empty tomb), can reveal God apart from an accompanying word from God to explain it, or a prior promise which it is seen to confirm or fulfil. Revelation in its basic form is thus of necessity propositional; God reveals Himself by telling us about Himself, and what He is doing in His world. The statement in Hebrews 1:1, that in Old Testament days God spoke ‘in various ways’, reminds us of the remarkable variety of means whereby, according to the record, God’s communications were on occasion given: theophanies, angelic announcements, an audible voice from heaven (Ex. 19:9; Mt. 3:17; II Pet. 1:17), visions, dreams, signs, the sacred lot (Urim and Thummim: I Sam. 28:6), supernatural writing (Ex. 31:18, Dan. 5:5), inward locutions, and what from the outside looks rather like clairvoyance (cf. I Sam. 9:15-10:9), as well as the more organic type of inspiration, whereby the Spirit of God so controlled the reflective operations of people’s minds as to lead them to a right judgment in all things. But in every case the disclosures introduced, or conveyed, or confirmed, by these means were propositional in substance and verbal in form.
Why does God reveal Himself to us? Because, as we saw, He who made us rational beings wants, in His love, to have us as His friends; and He addresses His words to us - statements, commands, promises - as a means of sharing His thoughts with us, and so of making that personal self-disclosure which friendship presupposes, and without which it cannot exist.
What is the content of God’s revelation? This is determined primarily by our present plight as sinners. Though we have lapsed into ignorance of God and a godless way of life, God has not abandoned His purpose to have us as His friends; instead, He has resolved in His love to rescue us from sin and restore us to Himself. His plan for doing this was to make Himself known to us as our Redeemer and Re-creator, through the incarnation, death, resurrection and reign of His Son. The working out of this plan required a long series of preparatory events, starting with the promise to the woman’s seed (Gen. 3:15) and spanning the whole of Old Testament history. Also, it required a mass of concurrent verbal instruction, predicting each item in the series before it came and applying its lessons in retrospect, so that at each stage people might understand the unfolding history of salvation, hope in the promise of its full accomplishment, and learn what manner of persons they, as objects of grace, ought to be. Thus the history of salvation (the acts of God) took place in the context of the history of revelation (the oracles of God).
But the epoch of revelation ended with Christ and the apostles: how, then, does God reveal Himself to us today? By saying to us the same thing that He said to others long ago, only now in direct application to ourselves, in the situation in which we are. The biblical idea, as we saw, is that God’s words, spoken at particular moments in biblical history, have binding force for all succeeding generations. He does not change; and therefore His assertions, once made, remain true, to govern every individual’s thinking. The judgments He once passed on particular individuals or groups stand for ever as a revelation of His character and of the standards by which He measures us all. Similarly, His moral instruction remains valid as declaring His ideals for all our lives. God’s historical utterances thus operate like statute law in society. Enactments of various dates, once on the statute book, remain continually in force, applying in principle to everyone (though it may need hard thinking and careful arguing to show just how), and each generation is obliged to comply with what The law says’. In the same way, we are all under obligation to God, to do as His words, spoken at different times in biblical history, require - or, as we put it, to be ruled by what The word of God says’.
The utterances of God thus function (to change the illustration) like the words of a university tutor in a group tutorial, where one person brings and reads an essay and the rest of the group learns by hearing the tutor’s comments on it. As the history of the words of God passes before us in our Bible reading and our hearing of sermons, it is as if we were in a group tutorial with Abraham, Moses, David, Elijah, Peter, the Israelites, the Christians of Rome, the Galatian believers, the seven churches of the Apocalypse, and all the rest of those to whom particular words of God were addressed, and with whom His dealings are recorded. We overhear what God is saying to them as He comments on what they have done and gives them advice and guidance for the future, and from this we learn what He would say to us about our own lives. And, just as the listener in a joint tutorial under a shrewd teacher who knows his pupils will often feel, and with reason, that the comments called forth by the essay have been ‘angled’ to give needed instruction to all present as well as to the essayist himself, so Christians studying the recorded words of God will often feel that what God said to someone thousands of years ago speaks to their own condition so perfectly that it might have been written specially for them. (And so, of course, it was! - for, just as all Christians can truly say, with Paul, that Christ ‘loved me and gave himself for me’ [Gal. 2:20], so they can truly say that God ‘loved me, and wrote this book for me’. What God caused to be written for the Church in general [cf. I Cor. 10:11; Rom. 15:4] He caused to be written for each Christian individually. The devotional maxim that one should read the Scriptures as one would read a personal letter from one’s best friend rests not on pious fancy, but on the hardest theological fact.)
This illustration is one-sided (aren’t they all?); it could leave the impression that God only speaks to us to get our thoughts straight. So I add to it another, that of the trainer who coaches you in a sport. His job is to drill you into doing everything correctly - which means, among other things, better than hitherto. He is, therefore, a perfectionist, and he makes you vividly aware of that fact. He invades the privacy of your comfortable bad habits with intrusive words which sometimes make you smart. He watches all your movements, letting nothing pass, requiring you to do things differently in a way that at first seems awkward and chiding you, fiercely perhaps, when you go on in, or fall back into, the old ways. Sometimes he will act angry at you, and denounce you before others, or get them to watch and criticize you, in a way which your pride resents; sometimes he makes you hate his guts and wish he were not there. But in your sober moments you know it is in a good cause; he is committed to changing you for the better, and his very persistence in bawling you out for second-rate performance is really an affirmation of you, for unless he saw that you could improve he would not waste time and energy on you. Nobody was ever ruder and more savage with the musicians whom he rehearsed than the late Arturo Toscanini, but he trained orchestras to achieve a balance and precision of which they had never before dreamed, and most of those who experienced him said afterwards that there was no one under whom they would rather play. Here is a further picture of what God is doing to you and me through His words to us and His providential ordering of things. He reproves, corrects and instructs in righteousness; He is training us ‘that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it’ (Heb. 12:1 of.). This is what God is aiming at when He speaks afresh His words of long ago in application to our lives.
THE PROGRESS OF REVELATION
The final truth which the opening words of Hebrews teach is that revelation is a cumulative activity. God’s revelation in Christ does not stand alone, but comes as the climax of a long series of revelatory disclosures. The statement that in Old Testament times God spoke (as the New English Bible puts it) ‘in fragmentary and varied fashion through the prophets’ covers the earlier items in the series. ‘But in this the final age’, the same version continues, ‘he has spoken to us in the Son.’
‘In fragmentary and varied fashion ... in the Son . . .’ Here is implied, not only a climax, but also a contrast between a revelation, or series of revelations, that was partial and incomplete, a thing of bits and pieces, not fully integrated, and a revelation that was comprehensive, unified, and final. How should we interpret this contrast? The rest of the epistle shows us. It is the contrast, not between crude and refined, ‘primitive’ and ‘evolved’, partly false and wholly true, but between promises and their fulfilment, types and the antitype, shadows and substance, incompleteness and perfection, in the two successive dispensations of divine grace under which God’s covenant people have successively lived. It is a contrast to be expounded in terms, not of better conceptions of God, but of the better covenant (Heb. 7:22), the better priest (7:26ff.), the better sacrifice (9:23), the better promises (8:6), the better hope (7:19), the fuller access (9:8f., io:i9ff.), and the livelier foretastes of glory (6:4f.), that Christians have through Christ as compared with Old Testament believers; as also in terms of the fact that the Gospel of Christ is for Jew and Gentile alike, whereas the Old Testament revelation was addressed to Jews only (cf. Ps. 147:i9f.). The phrase ‘in fragmentary. . . fashion’ denotes simply, as John Owen saw long ago, that ‘the will of God concerning His worship and obedience, was not formerly revealed all at once to His Church, by Moses or any other’, but that its revelation was a gradual process, ‘by the addition of one thing after another, at several seasons, as the Church could bear the light of them, and as it was subserving to His main design of reserving all pre-eminence to the Messiah’.9 Then, in New Testament times, just as all roads were said to lead to Rome, so all the diverse and seemingly divergent strands of Old Testament revelation were found to lead to Jesus Christ, prophet, priest, and king, mediator, sacrifice, and intercessor, crucified, risen, and coming again.
Since the New Testament represents in these ways an advance on the Old, may we not speak of revelation as progressive? It all depends on what we mean by ‘progressive’. If our meaning is simply that God’s Old Testament utterances, however diverse, all contributed in one way or another to His ‘build-up’ for the coming of His Son, the word is acceptable enough. But much liberal theology has used the word to express the idea that the history of revelation is really the history of how Israel’s thoughts of God evolved from something very crude (a tribal war-god) through something more refined (a moral Creator) to the conception of God taught by Jesus (a loving Father); and has set forth this idea in such a way as to imply that Christians need not bother with the Old Testament at all, since all that is true in its view of God can be learned from the New Testament, and all the rest of what it says about Him is more or less false. But this is not so. God was certainly amplifying people’s knowledge about Himself throughout the revelatory process, but the idea that what was revealed later contradicts and cancels what was revealed earlier is wrong. So is the widespread neglect of the Old Testament to which this idea has led. The New Testament revelation rests at every point on the Old as its foundation, and to remove the foundation once the superstructure is in place is the surest way to dislodge the superstructure itself. Those who neglect the Old Testament will never make much of the New. When, therefore, the phrase ‘progressive revelation’ is used as a label for this myth of evolutionary religious development, and hence as a justification for disregarding the Old Testament, it is false, and since the word ‘progressive’ has been pressed into service so often in this sense, it is best to eschew it - simply to avoid confusion - when stating the biblical position. The belief that later revelation, so far from conflicting with what had gone before, presupposed it and built on it at each stage, is best expressed by calling the revelatory process ‘cumulative’ rather than ‘progressive’.
But if the progress of revelation in history over a thousand years and more was cumulative, and if the later items in the series of God’s words built on those that had gone before, then it is clear that these later items can only be interpreted in the light of the series as a whole, and in particular that the last item of all - God’s Word spoken by His Son - is further from being self-interpreting than any, and needs to be set in the context of all God’s earlier words before it can be properly understood. Which means that the very nature of the revelatory process itself made it necessary that a unified record of God’s words should be provided. Just as, if we sinners were ever to know God as our Friend, He had to speak to us about redemption, so, if the sequence of His words was to have its intended effect upon us, there had to be a total presentation of it in permanently accessible form - in other words, there had to be a Bible. Confirmation of this reasoning lies in the fact that God actually has given us just such a Bible - a book made up of many books, which grew to its present size in step with the ongoing revelatory process itself, and which now stands as a full explanatory narrative of the saving words and deeds of God. As Calvin put it, ‘in order that, with the constant forward march of divine instruction (continuo progressu doctrinae), God’s truth might remain a survivor in the world in all ages, He willed that the oracles which He had deposited with the fathers should be, so to speak, consigned to public records.’10 So the Bible, a book thrown up by the revelatory process in history, was no accidental by-product of that process, but an integral and indispensable part of it; for without a record of God’s earlier revelations, His later words and, most of all, His last Word, could not be fully understood. Nor, without a permanent record of the whole process, could God’s revelation as a whole be preserved against corruption to do in each generation its own proper work of bringing sinners to know God.
So God’s work of producing and preserving the books that make up the Bible should be celebrated as displaying not only His power, but His wisdom too; and any denial that we can fully trust the Bible for our knowledge of Christ and His salvation should be seen as, in effect, accusing God of real impotence, or real folly, or both.