Whatever problems the evangelical view may create, it commendably upholds the inspiration and revelation-status of Scripture. This recognition keeps faith with the witness of Scripture itself, and with the historic Christian confidence in the Bible.
A Fairer Hearing
For many years misunderstood and often misrepresented, the evangelical view today seems to be evaluated more objectively and temperately. No doubt the evangelical position is still deplored in some circles as anti-intellectual, in much the same spirit as a generation ago some groups disparaged and dismissed original sin, the atonement and other realities that now once again are lively centers of theological interest. The recent volume Fundamentalism and the Church by Gabriel Hebert reveals that the old innuendos about “bibliolatry” and “mechanical dictation” are not gone, but failure to stigmatize fundamentalism with a mechanical and naive literalist view of inspiration is increasingly evident. Fundamentalists have long been unable to recognize their own view in such attacks, since they themselves reject the formulas so frequently ascribed to them. One of their British theologians, J. I. Packer, recently commented that the “dictation theory” of the psychology of inspiration is “a complete hoax.” He insists that evangelical and Protestant theologians have never held it; that there is no evidence to think that even the Church Fathers used the “dictation” metaphor to explain the mode of inspiration (The Christian News Letter, July, 1957, p. 37). Even its larger outlines should dissolve complaints that the evangelical view narrows revelation to the Bible, that it is anti-intellectual, or that it is wholly disinterested in the bearing of the actual textual phenomena on the doctrine of Scripture.
Pivotal points of the evangelical view of revelation are:
1. The evangelical view distinguishes the personal Word of God, the Logos Theou, from the Word of God written, or the Hrema Theou. It affirms the priority of the personal or speaking Word over the spoken or written Word.
2. All revelation of God is revelation by the Logos.
3. This revelation is both general and special. God is revealed in nature, history and conscience, as well as in Scripture. The Bible witnesses to the reality of this general revelation (Ps. 19, Rom. 1:19 ff., 2:15 ff.).
4. Special revelation is itself broader than Scripture. While the Bible states all the essentials for salvation and spiritual maturity, the written record has not always existed. Abraham received special revelation but we have no reason to think he had scriptures. While our Lord’s spoken word was revelation, not all his teaching is recorded. Moreover, there is an eschatological fulfillment yet to come. For another reason special revelation must be considered broader than the Bible, which is shaped for a fallen race in need of salvation. Even by creation and before the fall, God specially revealed his will to man (Gen. 2:16). This fact indicates that even man’s creatureliness, and not his subsequent sinfulness alone, involved this special dependency on God.
5. Special revelation includes God’s redemptive events climaxed by the incarnation of the Logos, his atonement and resurrection. Without these great realities, special revelation is reduced to an inspired literature. What lifts Hebrew-Christian religion head and shoulders above the pagan religions is not simply its possession of “the oracles of God,” but the dynamic related plot these writings record. The living climax of that plot is the Logos who makes all things, illumines man in the divine image, discloses himself as the secret center of nature and history, and by his triumph over sin and death rescues a doomed race.
6. These redemptive events do not stand before us without interpretation. Scripture gives the authentic sense or meaning of the divine saving acts. While the Bible mirrors both general and special revelation, and affirms that the incarnate Logos translates God into the world of flesh, the Bible also captures that revelation in intelligible language. Revelation is dynamically broader than the Bible, but epistemologically Scripture gives us more of the revelation of the Logos than we would have without the Bible.
7. What then is the connection of the Bible and special revelation? According to the evangelical view, the Bible is a record of special revelation, and a witness to special revelation, if by the terms “record” and “witness” we do not mean the Bible is only a record and witness. Even to affirm that the Bible “contains” special revelation is quite acceptable if one intends no distinction between essence and content, but implies thereby, as does the Westminster Catechism, the unique inspiration of the whole of Scripture. For the evangelical view affirms that alongside the special divine revelation in saving acts, God’s disclosure has taken the form also of truths and words. This revelation is communicated in a restricted canon of trustworthy writings, deeding fallen man an authentic exposition of God and his purposes. Scripture itself therefore is an integral part of God’s redemptive activity, a special form of revelation, a unique mode of divine disclosure. It is, in truth, a decisive factor in God’s redemptive activity, interpreting and unifying the whole series of redemptive deeds, and exhibiting their divine meaning and significance.
Whether one appeals to Augustine or Aquinas, to Luther or Calvin, he finds the selfsame confidence in this revelatory character of the Word written as characterized the biblical writers. The Bible is for them, as for evangelical theology generally, special revelation in a normative and trustworthy form. Its difference from other sacred books of the world religions is no mere matter of degree. Rather, a special activity of divine inspiration differentiates it in kind from every other literature. This explains why the Hebrew-Christion religion has characteristically identified itself with a canon of unique writings that fulfill a divine intention of communicating special revelation. This idea of a canon did not originate suddenly in the early Christian centuries, as if by accident or by human impulse; it was a conviction already cherished by Hebrew religion, and accredited to the Christian conscience by Jesus of Nazareth. What the spirit says to the churches is, for evangelical Christianity, what is written in the inspired books. The content of this special divine revelation is to be found by historical-grammatical exegesis.
Evangelical Landmarks
While a generation ago it was customary to disparage this view as anti-intellectualistic, today it is popular to despise it as rationalistic. This remarkable change in the militant mood of apologetics reflects, of course, some important facts about recent Protestant theology. One is its basic philosophic instability that lodged first in the mires of Hegelian rationalism, and then in the muck of post-Hegelian irrationalism. Another feature is its persistent failure to rise above the fictitious disjunction that Schleiermacher first impressed upon the history of Christian thought, namely, that divine revelation consists in impartation of life, not of doctrine. The Protestant Reformers were careful to guard the Christian heritage against such errors of rationalism, irrationalism and mysticism. To prevent Christianity’s decline to mere metaphysics, they indeed stressed that the Holy Spirit alone gives life. But to prevent debasement of the Christian religion to formless mysticism or to speculative rationalism, the Reformers emphasized the Scriptures as the only trustworthy source of the knowledge of God and his purposes. These historic positions are still landmarks of the evangelical view.
Every exposition of revelation and inspiration stands in some larger context. The doctrine of Scripture necessarily implies a compatible and congenial doctrine of God; it cannot be isolated from actual dependence upon the nature and manifestation of God. Overarching the evangelical view is the cardinal fact of God’s sovereignty in his being and activity, in his goodness and truth, and especially in his supremacy in the realm of truth as God of the Covenant. Unlike the irrationalistic metaphysics that surcharges the theology of Kierkegaard, Barth and Brunner, the evangelical doctrine postulates a view of God, of his image in man, of the divine renewal of that image coherent with the biblical representations of revelation.
God And His Image
The biblical delineation of revelation and reason does not hesitate to lodge the Logos unreservedly in the Godhead. Truth and goodness are not external criteria to which the Deity is answerable. Rather, truth and goodness are God’s essence, so that his very nature itself defines rationality and morality. This concept we know to be basic in the Hebrew-Christian doctrine of God.
A rational God has ordered a rational universe in which rational creatures created in his image are to think his thoughts after him and to do them. This fact of a rational Creator maintains the unity of the general divine revelation in nature, history and man. That man bears the image of God by creation (Gen. 1:26), that he is uniquely lighted by the Logos (John 1:9), is one of Scripture’s profoundest teachings about him. It supplies the setting also for some of the most intricate controversies in contemporary theology. Barth has had at least two theories of the imago Dei thus far, and Brunner at least three. It may be fruitful, by way of contrast, to consider a view currently advocated in evangelical circles as an alternative, since it transcends the tensions tearing many of the newer theories. The image of God in man constitutes man a spiritual-rational-moral agent. It includes therefore, at very least, the forms of reason and conscience, and the idea of God. What man knows, he knows through the law of contradiction, or he does not know. The laws of logic therefore belong to the imago Dei. This propels us directly into the analysis of the form and the content of reason. Recent generations largely accepted the view of Kant or of the evolutionists. Kant said that the form of reason is innate, but that experience supplies its content; the evolutionists said that experience supplies both form and content. The scriptural view requires a reference to the imago Dei for both the form and content of reason. Moreover, the Scriptures do not separate reason, conscience and worship as if these were independent considerations.
The imago Dei does include man’s formal realization that truth and error, right and wrong, God and not-God are genuine distinctions. But the imago Dei is more than formal; it is material as well. The very forms of the imago (including the laws of logic; the essential unity of the ideas of truth and goodness and God) belong to its content. Man as sinner no doubt crowds the imago with a distorted and perverse content; he falsifies the truth and dignifies the lie; he misjudges the right and consecrates the wrong; he revolts against the one true God and worships false gods. But he is not wholly lacking, on that account, of a transcendent imago-content that confronts him throughout this perversion and judges him. Even in his rebellion, man is confronted moment-by-moment in his experience by knowledge of the one true God—disclosed in nature and history around him and in conscience within. He is unable wholly to destroy this knowledge in his very corruption of it. Therefore conscience, like a sheriff, marshals him constantly before the judgment throne of God. You will discern here the familiar outlines of the Bible doctrine of general revelation, pieced together from Psalm 19 and Romans 1 and 2.
From the outset this exposition sets human experience in the context of revelation and faith. But it does not devalue the intellect, as does contemporary theology. Nor does it exaggerate the role of reason, as does Thomistic philosophy. Before the Fall, man’s reason was subject to God and his will subject to reason; therefore, his voluntary actions were conformed to truth. After the Fall, man’s reason was in the service of a will in revolt against God. Yet man is not on that account without some knowledge of God and the truth and the right, however much he may distort them.
Redemption aims not simply at man’s restoration to obedience, but to truth as well. It seeks his return both to the service and to the knowledge of God. The immediate end of redemption is renewal of man’s knowledge of God for the ultimate end of man’s total conformity to the image of Jesus Christ. Redemptive revelation and regeneration, therefore, encompass the predicament of the whole man, who was fashioned by creation for the knowledge and service of God. Redemptive revelation and regeneration seek reinstatement of intellect, no less than of volition and emotion, to the fellowship of divine conversation. If it were not so, theologians and seminarians could proclaim the great fact of special divine revelation, and yet would be free to stuff this form with a thought-content and a word-content of their own. But God wishes man both to walk in his ways and to think his thoughts after him; hence the language of revelation, like the language of prayer, takes the form of concepts and words.
Editor Carl F. H. Henry’s address was delivered at Union Theological Seminary in New York City recently under auspices of the Student Forum Committee. An evangelical symposium on the same theme will be published later this year by Baker Book House. Dr. Henry is serving as general editor of the project, which will include chapters by distinguished evangelical scholars from many denominations in many lands.
