God is the all-powerful, all-knowing, morally perfect creator
of the universe; and we are his creatures—no less, but also no
more. Thus, an unimaginable distance must exist between God and us;
and this fact has led some theologians to despair of knowing anything
about him for sure, not even that he actually has these attributes of
deity. It might seem, furthermore, that some biblical texts encourage
such a view. Psalm 92:5 recognizes the distance: “How great are
your works, O Lord, how profound your thoughts!” Psalm 145:3
says that “no one can fathom” God’s greatness.
According to Ps. 147:5, “Great is our Lord and mighty in power;
his understanding has no limit.” In Ps. 139:6, David tries to
comprehend God’s perfect insight and concludes, “Such
knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.”
The doxology of Rom. 11:33–36 exults in the uniqueness of God:
“Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of
God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing
out!” In Isa. 55:9, God says, “As the heavens are higher
than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts
higher than your thoughts.” Based on these passages and others,
and knowing what the difference between creator and creature must
generally imply, one might suspect that we can know nothing of
substance about God.
In
fact, however, the biblical writers tell a different story, being
cautiously optimistic about theology’s prospects. On the one
hand, they note our creaturely limitations and God’s
transcendence, as seen above. We cannot fully comprehend our Creator.
We never will, not even through the eons of eternity. God will always
have something more to show us about himself, more that we can learn
and adore. In that sense, the biblical writers are cautious about
what theology can grasp. On the other hand, we must be able to learn
some things about God; otherwise, the Scriptures themselves would not
exist, since they tell us about God and much else besides. Divine
omnipotence, therefore, includes the ability to produce in us
adequate theological understanding. We always lean on God, and no one
understands him at all apart from his initiative. He remains
sovereign over this event, as with any other. But God has made
himself known in two general ways, according to Scripture.
General
and Special Revelation
First,
the biblical writers expect each of us to grasp something of God’s
nature, based on what is called “general revelation.”
General revelation operates in a broadcasted way, so to speak,
relying upon commonplace experience and the latter’s God-given
ability to make us aware of his existence and nature. We all see the
heavens that “declare the glory of God” (Ps. 19:1). Paul
argues that every person can detect the “invisible qualities”
of God, his “eternal power and divine nature,” in what he
has created, so that we have no excuse for decadent theology and
behavior (Rom. 1:20). The law of God is “written on [our]
hearts” (Rom. 2:15), so that we grasp what we owe to him and
each other. Even though God has not spoken directly to every nation,
“he has not left himself without testimony”; he has shown
all people “kindness by giving [them] rain from heaven and
crops in their seasons” (Acts 14:17). We can learn some things
about God from these sources given to us, and thus we are accountable
for right conduct in relationship to them. However, general
revelation lacks the detail and assurance of what is called “special
revelation.”
Special
revelation differs from general revelation in having a target
audience. It conveys information about God, human beings, and our
world that cannot be deduced from everyday, highly accessible
experience. Jesus suffered for our sins. Our trust in his death on
the cross will save us. God is a Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit, though there is one God. Christ will return in power and
glory to judge all nations. We can think of God as our heavenly
Father, a morally perfect deity who cares about the individual
person. The Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness as we wonder how to
pray. God is always sovereign, even over the wicked deeds of human
beings and the suffering that they cause. These are essential points
of Christian doctrine. Yet we cannot substantiate any of them by
carefully observing ourselves, our world, or the facts of history.
Indeed, sometimes our own thoughts lead us to resist these claims
because they entail great mysteries. One can easily (but wrongly)
equate “I do not understand this” with “This is
false.” Thus, our knowledge of these doctrines rests upon God’s
willingness to speak and our readiness to hear what he says with
humility and trust, without having all our questions answered. The
vehicle for this latter kind of knowledge is called “special
revelation.”
All
revelation is “special,” simply because we can learn
nothing about God apart from his self-disclosure. However,
theologians use the technical term “special revelation”
to capture the idea that God has revealed some matters of doctrine
only to specific people, with the expectation that they will preach
these truths to others as he requires them to do. These doctrinal
matters include the claims given above concerning some aspects of
God’s nature, his attitude toward human beings, the plan of
salvation, and so forth. Thus, the Bible is special revelation par
excellence; likewise, the preaching of prophets, Jesus, and then his
chosen apostles (to list them in chronological order) is special
revelation. Of course, since we do not have access to prophetic
teaching and the life and words of Christ apart from Scripture, the
latter is our sole source of special revelation. We cannot now see
and hear Jesus as his first-century observers did, but we encounter
him as the incarnate Word through the inerrant written word of
Scripture. Theology, therefore, concerns what the Bible says about
God, humanity, Christ, and so forth, and it looks to general
revelation, if at all, merely to corroborate or illustrate what
Scripture substantiates. Likewise, the promises of God to bless the
preaching of his truth attach to special revelation rather than to
what one might glean from other sources (Isa. 55:11).
The
Bible as Special Revelation
The
Bible stands alone in revealing who God is and showing what pleases
him. Its exact contents were ordained by God through inspiration.
Scripture is “God-breathed” (2 Tim. 3:16), having
been produced when people “spoke from God as they were carried
along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Pet. 1:21). Consequently,
even though prophecy occurs in NT churches (1 Cor. 14), it is
not received there as the unchallengeable teaching of OT prophets,
Jesus, or his apostles. Rather, observers are to weigh carefully what
prophets say (1 Cor. 14:29). John expressly warns of false
prophecy in the churches: “Dear friends, do not believe every
spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God,
because many false prophets have gone out into the world”
(1 John 4:1). These facts should lead one to be cautious in
using such phrases as “God told me that . . . ”
and in urging other Christians to act upon anyone’s private
sensations of being led by the Spirit, absent any objective reasons
for doing so. Prophecy given by the Holy Spirit today should involve
the application of biblical truth to present challenges and
opportunities. The same principle applies to subjective promptings
from the Holy Spirit. They should apply received doctrine without
revising it and must always be tested by the church.
The
sixty-six books of the Bible were written by real people, living in
concrete historical settings, and using ordinary language. Yet they
intend to speak of heavenly things and of a holy God. Consequently,
theologians face the challenge of “seeing through” the
Bible’s figurative statements and artistic forms to the truths
they convey, but without landing in unhelpful abstractions. Most
people who read the book of Exodus assume that God does not have an
actual “arm” to outstretch (6:6) or a “face”
that one may not see and live (33:23). But Moses chose these words to
reveal something about God, and thus we have to ask how far the
analogy goes and to what degree it reaches down to our human level of
understanding. We know that God must somehow “talk down”
to us, using our own language, even as he gives us historical and
theological claims having real content. Balancing these two
realities—the “otherness” of God and the earthiness
of the written, human word that reveals him—is the delicate
task of exegesis.
The
interpreter must also negotiate the various kinds or genres of
literature found in the Bible, especially the ones that seem most
alien to our own ways of communicating. Our own documents do not
(usually) feature the elaborate images of the book of Revelation or
the structures of Hebrew poetry found in the Psalter, and we do not
live in the first-century world. Therefore, to read the Scriptures
correctly, we must become culturally literate, so that we see our
texts through ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman eyes. These fields
are studied with care, based on the assumption that the Bible’s
forms of literature were customary for their own time. They were not
entirely strange to their original audiences. Thus, they can become
less strange to us; and since the Bible is fully human as well as
fully divine, reading its pages through the appropriate cultural
lenses will give us access to what the Spirit says to the churches.
Human
Limitations
An
analysis of general and special revelation should consider the
so-called noetic effects of sin—that is, the effects that sin
has upon our ability to reason and to learn. Human beings were
created in the image of God (Gen. 1:26–27), having the capacity
to interact with their Creator. They bear some “family
resemblance” to God, notwithstanding their materiality and
finitude. But when Adam and Eve sinned, they corrupted themselves and
their descendants, so much so that Paul can describe them as being
enslaved to sin and death (Rom. 5–6). Since the fall, the
biblical writers have proclaimed the blindness of human beings to the
things of God. All people are “under the power of sin,”
and “there is no one who understands” (Rom. 3:9–11).
In Eph. 2:1–3 Paul describes unrepentant sinners as being “dead
in [their] transgressions and sins,” so that they follow carnal
“desires and thoughts.” Even someone as naturally
qualified as Nicodemus fails to see who Jesus is apart from the
sovereign power of the Holy Spirit (John 3:1–15). Fallen human
beings do not see what they ought to see and grasp what they ought to
grasp. They can even say in their hearts, “There is no God”
(Ps. 14:1).
Human
beings do not have 20/20 intellectual vision, and our desires are
corrupted. Consequently, we do not benefit from God’s
self-revelation as Adam did, not to mention the glorified Christian
who knows fully (1 Cor. 13:12). In some cases, the sinner does
not want to acknowledge the disclosures of God and thus does not
perceive them. Habitual sin and doc-trin-al innovation can “sear”
the conscience as with an iron, making “hypocritical liars”
impervious to sound teaching (1 Tim. 4:2). Although the heavens
declare the glory of God, and although “in these last days he
has spoken to us by his Son” (Heb. 1:2), fallen human beings
will not grasp these truths. Yet they remain accountable to God
because the disabling wounds of sin are self-inflicted. Even the
demons of Scripture, who identify Jesus accurately, recoil from what
they clearly perceive (Matt. 8:29; Mark 3:11; 5:7), as do the
Pharisees who attribute the Spirit’s work to Beelzebul (Matt.
12:22–32). In these cases, the difficulty is not cognitive but
affective. Character becomes intellectual destiny.
The
world abounds with religious viewpoints, each one claiming to reveal
how it works and what constitutes the good life. It is also unlikely
that each of them contains only false statements and no true ones. On
the contrary, the major rivals to Christianity gain some converts, we
may assume, by including fractions of truth and addressing some
perceived human needs. Islam is not wrong in its rejection of
polytheism and idolatry. Buddhism is right in its belief that
suffering raises key philosophical questions. However, we should
avoid saying that God has actually revealed something of his nature
through these sources, as if their existence were a subset of general
revelation. Paul may note the Athenians’ religiosity and
illustrate a point by quoting one of their poets (Acts 17:22, 28),
but his overall polemic makes it clear that he views their ideas as
mistaken responses to general revelation. Similar remarks would apply
to cults that mix some orthodoxy, based on Scripture, with enough
error to pervert the whole. God is not speaking indistinctly through
them; rather, they are mishandling what he has said through the
biblical writers. In this sense, therefore, the Bible stands alone as
the unique word of God.
