Evangelicalism is currently experiencing serious tensions over the questions of revelation and Scripture. More and more one hears declared evangelicals disputing the relation between the Bible and revelation. Recently much attention has been given to the issue of inerrancy. The eye of the storm, however, is propositional revelation—that is, the doctrine that God has revealed information about his nature and his will. The question of inerrancy cannot even arise unless God reveals propositional truth.
During the last three decades, the doctrine of propositional revelation has been one of the major differences between Protestant orthodoxy and neo-orthodoxy. According to neo-orthodoxy, God reveals himself not through propositions or information but through personal presence or encounter. Man does not require knowledge about God (that is, propositional truth) as a precondition for a personal relationship with God. Revelation is God’s personal disclosure of himself.
It was in conscious reaction to the neo-orthodox repudiation of revelation as a vehicle of truth or information that orthodox theologians like Gordon Clark, Cornelius Van Til, Carl Henry, E. J. Carnell, and Kenneth Kantzer began to emphasize the cognitive dimensions of God’s revelation. By this they meant that revelation must be viewed as including God’s communication of information to man. This was something that earlier Christian theologians like Augustine, Aquinas, and Calvin had presupposed. The modern evangelicals agreed with J. I. Packer that “the essence of revelation is conceptual communication, whereby God makes known His own nature, thoughts and knowledge” (The Bible—The Living Word of Revelation, edited by M. Tenney).
But contemporary evangelicalism is full of surprises. Some younger evangelicals seem to be saying that the fight their elders led against neo-orthodoxy was misguided. While neo-orthodoxy has been losing respect in the non-evangelical world, these young evangelicals act as if they have discovered a fountain of truth in the Barthian attack on the concept of revealed truths. One might expect that such an important doctrine would be abandoned only for the most weighty reasons. It is distressing to see, however, that their arguments against propositional revelation are shallow and irrelevant thrusts against a straw man.
A fresh examination of propositional revelation is in order. We need to clear up the misunderstandings that have arisen about its character and to show the irrelevance of the host of feeble objections voiced by its critics. In an effort to promote dialogue about the real issues, I shall not object to abandoning the label “propositional revelation.” There is some evidence that this name by which the doctrine has been known during the past thirty years has caused confusion. In fact, it is clear that the label must be dropped unless all parties to the dispute agree to its proper use.
We can clarify what evangelicals have meant by the doctrine of propositional revelation by referring to a central tenet in neo-orthodoxy, the view that no revelation can communicate information. Revelation, according to neo-orthodoxy, is always an event in which God reveals himself; it is never information about God or anything else. Concerning the question at issue here, then, the central claim of neo-orthodoxy was: No revelation expresses cognitive information.
The doctrine of propositional revelation is best understood as the denial of this thesis. The contradictory of the neo-orthodox thesis is: Some revelation expresses cognitive information. And this statement is the core of the doctrine of propositional revelation. Man can have cognitive information about God. Since a proposition is the minimal vehicle of truth, the information about God is contained in divinely revealed propositions.
Note that this view does not state that all revelation must be cognitive or capable of being reduced to human language. It asserts only that some revelation is cognitive and has been expressed in human language. It is compatible with the evangelical position that some revelation is personal and non-cognitive and that some revelation is expressed in forms other than language. God’s revelation through his mighty acts in history would be an example of non-cognitive revelation.
Evangelicals must make it clear that they believe revelation can be both personal and cognitive. Orthodoxy contends that the ultimate object of revelation is God, not some truth about God. Whatever God reveals and whatever means he uses, his purpose is to bring man into a personal, saving, loving, serving relationship with Himself. Those evangelicals whose appreciation of the cognitive character of revelation is waning sometimes speak as if the doctrine of propositional revelation involved a rejection of personal encounter. They respond as if they thought Karl Barth discovered the idea of personal salvation.
Orthodoxy insists that personal knowledge of God is not in competition with propositional knowledge about God. The more person A knows about person B, the better A can know B in a personal way. Bernard Ramm once asked what kind of encounter could take place between two blind, deaf, and dumb people who had no information about each other. God does not treat mankind in this impersonal way. Scripture declares that man requires information about God that He has taken the initiative to supply (Heb. 11:6; John 20:30; 1 John 1:1–3). Personal encounter cannot take place in a cognitive vacuum. Saving faith presupposes some genuine knowledge about God (1 Cor. 15:1–4; Rom. 10:9).
But, neo-orthodoxy counters, there is at least one catch to all this. The disjunction between personal and propositional revelation is exclusive because cognitive knowledge about God is unattainable. Because God is totally transcendent, because he is unlike anything else in our experience, human language is an unfit instrument to capture ideas or express truths about God. Nor are man’s rational faculties adequate to allow him to have knowledge about the transcendent. Cognitive knowledge about God is unattainable. Students of the history of philosophy will recognize this as a revival of Immanuel Kant’s skepticism regarding knowledge about God or the even earlier view I have called “Hume’s Heresy” (see CHRISTIANITY TODAY, August 6, 1976). The implication is that God could not communicate genuine information about himself to man even if he wanted to do so. (A significant response to this theological skepticism is presented in such books as Gordon Clark’s Religion, Reason and Revelation and Carl Henry’s recently released God, Revelation and Authority. The early roots of this historic Christian view are discussed in my book The Light of the Mind: St. Augustine’s Theory of Knowledge.)
On this issue, neo-orthodoxy takes a radical all-or-nothing, either-or position. Since revealed knowledge about the transcendent God is impossible, revelation must be personal encounter; there is no alternative. Orthodoxy affirms the less extreme position that some revelation is encounter and some revelation is communication. The two modes of revelation complement each other. In order to experience genuine encounter, man requires information about God and about his need for God. In order to distinguish genuine encounter from the ever-present threat of spurious religious experience, man needs information about God so he can determine whether his encounter is with the God who discloses himself to man. Man requires information about how he should manifest his love for God. And he needs divinely given interpretations of God’s mighty acts in history if he is to penetrate beyond a historical enigma to the truth that God has acted in history.
Scripture recognizes a distinction between true and false doctrine. Those who preach false doctrine are worthy of God’s severest judgment (Gal. 1:6–9; 1 John 4:1; 5:10–12). The Christian is obliged to recognize this distinction. But just how does he come to know true doctrine? The Barthian asserts that the cognitive assertions that constitute church doctrine arise from reflection about a non-cognitive encounter, one that discloses no information. But if this is true, if God never reveals truth to man, what is the source of the truth that the New Testament deems such an important part of genuine Christian commitment? If revelation has no informational content, how can it yield doctrine?
When we interpret the doctrine of propositional revelation as I have done here, what becomes of the major criticisms that have been leveled against it?
First of all, we should note that propositional revelation should not be confused with the quite separate doctrine of verbal inspiration. A person could accept propositional revelation but reject verbal inspiration. The converse would not be true. The doctrine of verbal inspiration has to do with the extent to which God’s revelation is conveyed in words, notably the written words of the Bible. It has to do with the role of the Holy Spirit in guiding the human authors of Scripture in their selection of words to convey the inspired ideas. (None of this, of course, entails the mechanical view of dictation frequently and erroneously attributed to all evangelicals.) The doctrine of propositional revelation expresses a conviction on a quite different question: Is God’s revelation a disclosure of truth? Does it have cognitive content?
The advocate of propositional revelation does not hold that God’s written revelation must assume a particular literary form. Countless critics have assumed that if one accepts propositional revelation, one must also believe that all written revelation assumes the form of assertions. In reality, comparatively little of the Bible is written in this form. Scripture contains more than historical assertions or doctrinal statements. God uses human language as a medium of revelation, and language has many different functions. Language can be used assertively to teach (consider the book of Romans) or to record history (consider the book of Acts). Language may be used to command (Matt. 28:19, 20), to exhort (Rom. 12:1, 2), or to proclaim (Matt. 5:1–10). God uses poetry and allegory as well.
While all Scripture is inspired, not all Scripture is concerned to declare truth in sentences that are to be interpreted literally. The evangelical believes that all Scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness (2 Tim. 3:16). But there is no need to assume that this list is exhaustive. It may be only illustrative of the multiple functions of language in Scripture.
The orthodox view does not lead to “bibliolatry,” the veneration of the Bible with a reverence appropriate to God alone. It is difficult to see how even the most crude, unimaginative theory of mechanical dictation would justify the charge of bibliolatry. Perhaps the critic means to suggest that because the evangelical regards the Bible in a very real sense as the Word of God, he is in danger of diverting from God the reverence and honor due him. But is any person of normal intelligence likely to do this? If a king issued a proclamation, those of his subjects who honored and reverenced him would hardly show their respect for the king’s person by ignoring his words or by denying that he had even spoken. But what kind of sensible person would confuse honor for the king’s person with honor for his word? It is precisely the fact that genuine knowledge is available about the nature and the will of God that makes bibliolatry sin. The presence of some true revelation of God’s nature, character, and will permits man to know the difference between worshiping Almighty God and worshiping a book.
Belief in propositional revelation does not mean that one denies the human element in Scripture. God used human authors whose writings reflect their personal backgrounds, their personalities, their distinctive vocabulary, their cultural milieu. Nor does propositional revelation cause one to subvert the notion of faith as personal commitment to God by confusing it with the notion of faith as an acceptance of true propositions.
It is also wrong to suppose that the doctrine of propositional revelation minimizes revelation in the sense of event. God does reveal himself in his mighty acts in history. But even though God’s acts in history may be a type of non-propositional revelation, these acts require a divinely given interpretation. The Romans crucified thousands of Jews. From the perspective of event, the crucifixion of Jesus was simply one more instance of Roman legal practice, and many eyewitnesses of the death of Jesus interpreted his crucifixion from this perspective. Similarly, many theologians accept the historicity of Jesus’ death but fail to see that death as God’s atonement for man’s sin. Only through the perspective of God’s revelation is Jesus’ death seen as what it is, the decisive point in the history of redemption. Biblical revelation is a conjunction of event and the interpretation of that event.
Belief in propositional revelation need not involve a reduction of God’s revelation to something static. Plato realized there was a problem whenever ideas were put into writing: matters reduced to writing die in some sense while the spoken words of men live on. This observation should not be taken lightly. God’s revelation is not static or dead; it is a gracious act of God. Evangelicals must beware lest their emphasis on a revelation inscripturated in human language degenerate into a de-emphasis of the living and active nature of God’s speaking. The God whose voice can raise the dead is not one who can be limited by “dead” words. The activity of the Spirit of God insures the vitality of God’s revelation. He speaks and his word is recorded. He continues to speak through that record, and these words live, energized by the Spirit of God.
This last point raises the issue of the relation between the objective and subjective poles of revelation. It is one thing for revelation to be objectively given through divinely aided spokesmen. It is quite another for that revelation to be received and understood. Neo-orthodoxy over-emphasized the subjective side of revelation at the expense of its objective side. Evangelicals must reject the claim that Scripture is not revelation but becomes revelation when illuminated by the Spirit. They must remember that “revelation” can refer both to the act of revealing (the subjective side) and to that which is revealed (the objective side).
Perhaps the following example will help clarify the relation between these two senses of revelation. Imagine a situation, perhaps a time of war, in which a mother and her child are separated. By chance, years later, the mother and her now adult son live, unrecognized by each other, in the same village. The one person who knew their real relationship kept it to himself until he decided to reveal the truth in a letter. But that person died before the letter was delivered, and the letter remained hidden for years. Suppose finally that the letter was discovered and the actual relationship of the mother and son was revealed. Certainly there is an important sense in which the revelation was objectively contained in the letter. But it is also true that the relationship between the mother and son was revealed to them when certain conditions were realized. The Barthian may insist that the only revelation that counts is the subjective one. No one should deny, perhaps, that it is the important revelation. But the subjective revelation could not have taken place unless the truth of their relationship had been objectively revealed in the letter. When speaking about Scripture, it is important to affirm the objective character of God’s revelation. The basic error of religious subjectivists is that they confuse the proclamation or delivery of truth with the reception of truth.
These are some of the common misunderstandings of propositional revelation. It may be that if we could clear up these misunderstandings we could rehabilitate the label “propositional revelation.” But there is some evidence that the term itself has contributed to the misunderstanding and has outlived its usefulness. For example, it is easy for the uninformed to equate revealed propositions with sentences.
It is sobering to remember that the phrase “propositional revelation” has been in use for only thirty years, and that it probably was not coined by evangelicals. One of the earliest references to the distinction between personal and propositional revelation occurs in a review of Emil Brunner’s The Divine-Human Encounter by E. G. Homrighausen published in Theology Today (1944). “Propositional revelation” appears to have been used by non-evangelicals as a term of derision for the position they wished to repudiate. Evangelicals gradually picked up the phrase in the late 1940s, and it has stuck.
Given the phrase’s parentage, then, there should be no sentimental reason to continue using it. Rejecting the label may help evangelicals resist the temptation to set up some new formula that will continue the error of an exclusive disjunction between encounter and knowledge. Instead of an alliterative formula, evangelicals should simply insist that some revelatory acts have a cognitive or informational character, and that this revealed truth is inscripturated in the several different literary forms found in the Bible.
“Let Not Man Put Asunder”
St. Mark 10:1–12
Committed by command and habit to fidelity
I’m snug in the double bed and board of marriage:
spontaneity’s built-in
to the covenantal dance,
everyday routines arranged
by the floor plan of the manse.
This unlikely fissiparous alliance
embraces and releases daily surprises.
The ego strength we’d carefully hoarded
in certain safe-deposit boxes
we’ve now dispersed, unlamented,
in dozens of delicate paradoxes.
A thousand domestic intimacies are straw
for making bricks resistant to erosion:
with such uncomely stuff we’ve built
our lives on ordinary sod
and grow, finally, old. My love is
not a goddess nor I a god.
“Asunder” is the one unpronounceable word in the
world of the wed, “one flesh” the mortal miracle.
What started out quite tentatively
with clumsy scrawls in a billet-doux
has now become the intricacy
of bold marriage’s pas de deux.
Blind Bartimaeus
St. Mark 10:46–52
Good at getting what he wanted
Blind Bart was holding forth
as usual on the best corner in
Jericho, collecting his usual
handouts, heard the name Jesus,
a word whose meaning he understood,
made a quick decision to get,
if he could, not what he wanted
but what he had always and everywhere needed,
and, under the Mercy, got it.
EUGENE H. PETERSON
D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.
