Types In History

By Gerald R. McDermott

[Gerald R. McDermott is the Anglican Chair of Divinity, Samford University, Beeson Divinity School, Birmingham, Alabama.]

[This is the fourth article in the four-part series “A Typological View of Reality,” delivered as the W. H. Griffith Thomas lectures at Dallas Theological Seminary, February 7–10, 2017. The ideas presented in these lectures have been adapted and expanded in Everyday Glory: The Revelation of God in All of Reality (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018).]

When Paul was in Athens talking to Greek philosophers, he said that one of their poets got it right when he wrote, “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). In other words, not only is God in history, as every Christian can and indeed must say. But history is in God! Nothing therefore is outside God, as if anything could happen without his holding it in existence nanosecond by nanosecond. After all, Paul wrote elsewhere that “in [Messiah] all things hold together [συνέστηκεν]” (Col 1:18). Therefore not only is popular deism—the idea that history proceeds without God’s intervention—absurd for a biblical Christian, but even the common Christian conception that God moves major actors in history with everything else thereby pulled along—falls far short of Paul’s claim. Types in history, then, are the patterns we can recognize amidst the mostly unrecognizable ways in which everything is in God and mysteriously directed by him—if not directly by impulse then indirectly by permission.

That’s the first thing that has to be said about types in history. They are recognizable patterns in human affairs that point toward their Trinitarian author, and they are thereby divine direction for that purpose, among others. Scripture tells us that God made known his acts to his people Israel, but his ways to Moses (Ps 103:7). Moses apparently learned God’s ways through the patterns or types revealed in his acts, informed by his words.

The second thing that should be added about history in general before we consider types in history is that it is at once directed and fragile. By fragile I mean that nothing in history per se determines inexorably its future direction. It could go in any one of a variety of ways, with long-term consequences for the whole world. The great Cambridge University historian Herbert Butterfield wrote in his magisterial Christianity and History (1949) of the “unspeakable liquidity” of history. “Indeed, if Mr. Churchill had been ill or had lost heart in 1940[,] the mind must reel before the multitude of alternative courses that the world might have taken.”[1] Hitler might have won, we would all be speaking German, and I would be afraid of saying something that might offend our new Führer. So while we will see that history is full of types that point toward the end of history, their presence does not mean we can predict the intermediate future. Christ will win in the end, and the types point to that eventual victory, but our Lord has not told us of the twists and turns that will take place before the End.

But he has told us, according to Jonathan Edwards, some of the patterns in those twists and turns, and those patterns are types. One of the most significant is the pattern of revivals directing the biggest twists and turns. Religious revivals and reformations are the engine of the historical drama, driving its sudden turns and, to some degree, its later twists. Edwards points to major junctures in Israel’s history as examples of this pattern or type. Covenant renewals, for example, under David, Hezekiah, and Josiah were religious revivals that forever changed the history of redemption. The rise of the church in the first century was an enormous revival that eventually conquered the Roman Empire. Constantine’s conversion was the leading edge of another revival in the fourth century that shaped medieval Europe. The Reformation was still another revival, and it was the principal historical movement that gave shape to modern Europe.[2] We can then use this Edwardsean approach to history to argue, with some historians, that the Great Awakening was an American revival that helped precipitate the American Revolution. Many historians would also agree that the Civil War would not have occurred without the revival of the Second Great Awakening and the abolitionist movement that the Awakening spawned. Hence the last two millennia bear witness to what can be called the historical type of revival producing revolutions of various sorts. This is a historical type pointing back to a biblical pattern of God’s ways with his human creatures.

The National Covenant

I have been declaring that these patterns are types in history, without actually arguing for the validity of such a phenomenon. So I will now try to make my declaration—my claim—more plausible by discussing the national covenant. This is a long tradition going back to the early church—and the whole Bible, I would argue—that teaches that God deals with whole societies, not just individuals. Although most Christians have believed this for most of the last two thousand years, and it is hard to deny if you pay serious attention to the Bible, it has been a minority view since the Enlightenment and especially in this last century. Theologians, particularly since the 1960s, have tended to regard it as presumptuous and inevitably leading to idolatry of the nation. This way of thinking was heightened after the Vietnam War, which most intellectuals thought was a terrible mistake. They wondered where the idea came from that saw the United States as a “redeemer nation” whose mission it was to bring its political salvation (the American form of democracy) to the rest of the world.[3] Historians and theologians laid the blame at the feet of the Puritans, who came to the New World on what Perry Miller called an “errand into the wilderness.” They came, he argued, for the purpose of reforming England and then the world by being a “city on a hill” whose light would shine far and wide, transforming those who beheld its glory.[4]

Is it true that God deals with whole societies? He certainly dealt with the nation of Israel as a whole, promising rewards for its obedience to the covenant and punishments for unfaithfulness (Lev 26; Deut 28). Edwards argued that God deals with other societies as well. He quoted Proverbs 14:34: “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.” Look, he preached, at how God treated the whole world in Noah’s day as a society that deserved punishment by a flood. Look at Sodom and Gomorrah destroyed for their wickedness, Egypt punished by plagues, and Canaan, whose tribes were defeated and ousted because of their egregious sins.

Edwards told his congregation—the largest outside Boston, in an 18th-century megachurch of 1,000 souls—that in droughts and plagues and earthquakes God was chastising New England for its failures to live up to its national covenant.[5] According to this tradition, the national covenant had to do with this life only, not the next (which was administered by the covenant of grace). God is more strict in punishing a wicked nation in this world than a wicked person. After all, it is clear that wicked persons often prosper in this world. But nations as nations are punished only in this world. Often God endures their wickedness for a long time. But it is a biblical pattern, Edwards insisted, that when wickedness becomes open, unashamed, and pervasive, and when that nation’s leadership endorses and defends perversity, then that nation is close to destruction.

God first warns the nation of impending doom in a variety of ways. One is to permit other nations to threaten an attack of some kind. Edwards said this happened when various nations arrayed themselves against Judah in the first century before Rome finally destroyed Jerusalem in AD 70. Another is to bring lesser judgments before a great judgment. According to Edwards, this happened when Pharaoh was warned of his coming doom by the ten plagues. A third warning was judgment on a neighbor, as when the captivity of the ten northern tribes in 721 BC was a warning to the southern tribes, who were captured a little more than a century later. Fourth, God sends messengers to warn, as he sent Noah, Jonah, and other prophets. A fifth kind of warning was God’s sending a revival, such as the revivals under Josiah and Hezekiah before final destruction in 586 BC. Other revivals as warnings came under Jonah to Nineveh and under Jesus and the apostles before the fall of the city (Nineveh and then Jerusalem) just decades later.[6]

Note the counterintuitive motif: revivals can be a sign of looming judgment. They can actually increase a nation’s guilt if they do not bring repentance and reformation.

All of these patterns are historical types. That is, they are words in events, sent by God, to point to future events in biblical and postbiblical history.

Recent Thinking On National Covenant [7]

We have heard from Edwards on historical types. But have more recent theologians seen types in history? The short answer is that even during the last century a minority of theologians and philosophers have argued that God’s providence can be seen in a society and in ways that undermine national self-righteousness.

Robert Bellah, for instance, asked, “What Christians call the Old Testament is precisely the religious interpretation of the history of Israel. Is it so clear that American analogizing from the Old (or New) Testament is necessarily religiously illegitimate? Why should the history of a people living two or three thousand years ago be religiously meaningful but the history of a people living in the last two or three hundred years be religiously meaningless?”[8]

Philosopher Leroy S. Rouner argues, similarly, that America has historical significance and suggests that this “fact is largely lost at present because the left has fallen out of love with its homeland, and the right has celebrated it for mostly wrong reasons.”[9] The great Lutheran theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg thought that the notion of national covenant had often accurately described the fortunes of a people relative to other peoples: “It would be unfair to belittle the obvious element of truth in this sense of historical destiny. The English revolution [for example] did indeed pioneer the political emancipation in the Western world.” Pannenberg added that the idea of a national covenant has explanatory power. The destruction of Germany in World War II, for instance, “may have been” a judgment on Germany’s persecution and attempted annihilation of the Jewish people.[10]

H. Richard Niebuhr interpreted historical contingencies from a similar perspective. He suggested that the rise of Marxism was a judgment on the injustices and class-interests of “Christian” communities, and interpreted dust storms on the American prairies in the 1930s as “signs of man’s sinful exploitation of the soil.”[11] Niebuhr’s explanation of these interpretations by his doctrine of responsibility was remarkably analogous to Edwards’s doctrines of divine sovereignty and national covenant. In all actions impinging upon the self, Niebuhr contended, God is acting. The responsible self must therefore respond to all actions so as to respond to God’s action. The same interpretation must be given to the events happening to a community.

At the critical junctures in the history of Israel and of the early Christian community the decisive question men raised was not “What is the goal?” nor yet “What is the Law?” but “What is happening?” and then “What is the fitting response to what is happening?” When an Isaiah counsels his people, he does not remind them of the law they are required to obey nor yet of the goal toward which they are directed but calls to their attention the intentions of God present in hiddenness in the actions of Israel’s enemies. The question he and his peers raise in every critical moment is about the interpretation of what is going on, whether what is happening be, immediately considered, a drought or the invasion of a foreign army, or the fall of a great empire.[12]

Pannenberg said this idea of national covenant, which sees types in history pointing to God’s ways with whole societies, undermines any potential idolatry by placing a nation under the judgment of God: “Christian theology should consider such a pledge [to a national covenant] to be of positive value, because it renders the policies of a nation accountable to the will of God as expressed in the Bible and places the nation under the judgment of God. . . . It [the nation] makes itself accountable to the terms of God’s covenant.”[13]

Such accountability, Panennberg suggested, enables those with spiritual eyes to see a range of types. One is the pattern of pervasive secularism and later judgment. This is the biblical motif of God’s withdrawal of his manifest presence from a society that has rejected him: “When God seems absent not only from the world but from the hearts of human beings, this does not indicate, as a superficial evaluation would suggest, that perhaps he died. Rather, it foretells impending judgment over a world that alienated itself from the source of life.”[14]

Another biblical pattern that is a recurring type in history is war as divine judgment. For an earlier “public theologian” who believed in the national covenant and used it to find this type in American history, I turn to Abraham Lincoln, who referred to America as “the almost chosen people” and “the last, best hope of earth.” In terms not unlike Edwards’s invocation of the national covenant, Lincoln proclaimed in an 1863 announcement of a general fast,

We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God.

We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied, enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us! It behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.[15]

Like Edwards, Lincoln believed that God punishes a people corporately for its corporate sins. Lincoln applied this paradigm to the Civil War and concluded that it was just such a punishment.

And, insomuch as we know that, by His divine law, nations like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war, which now desolates the land, may be but a punishment, inflicted upon us, for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole People?[16]

Two years later, in his oft-quoted second inaugural address, Lincoln again referred to the war as a judgment of God.

If God will that it [the Civil War] continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.”[17]

What Are Some Historical Types?

In his Cambridge lectures Butterfield identified some other discernible types in history. The first I would call mediation in judgment. God uses wicked nations to judge other wicked nations. God used wicked nations such as the Philistines, Assyrians, and Babylonians to judge sinful Israel repeatedly. The lesson from that type is humility. Just as we would never call those nations righteous because they were God’s servants in judgment, so too British and Americans should not have concluded after World War II that they were righteous because God used them to destroy the wickedness of Nazism and Japanese imperialism.

Judgment is sometimes remedial. That is another historical type. The exile in Babylon seems to have cured Israel of overt idolatry. So not every judgment renders its object null and void. The fall of Rome “releas[ed] Europe for a new phase of human experience,” which one might say brought a measure of good out of a corrupted empire.18 Germany’s radical departure from Nazism after its destruction and surrender in 1945 allowed for a postwar boom that continues to this day. While there was no extensive turn to God, there was a genuine national humility and lamentation of the nation’s behavior in the preceding decade and before.

But Germany’s destruction might represent yet another historical type, that of the sins of the fathers being visited on the third and fourth and succeeding generations. Butterfield traces the genesis of Nazism to Frederick the Great’s pursuit of militarism as a national ideal for eighteenth-century Prussia and Bismarck’s unification of Germany into a powerful European state. But he says the day of punishment was postponed for several generations because both Frederick and Bismarck “called a halt to a career of conquest, precisely because they had a curious awareness of the importance of the moral element in history.”[19] In the latter stages of their lives, they sought to maintain the peace of Europe.

Hitler had no such goal and committed the greatest historical sin, thinking himself to be a god. On this sort of leader, who worships the work of his own hands and says that the strength of his own right arm gave him the victory, “judgment in history falls heaviest.”[20] For “such a man by aping providence blasphemes God, and brings more rapid tragedy on the world and on himself, than the people who give half their lives to wine, women and song.”[21] This is the most reliable type in history, that of the leader or people who in pride think they can displace the Deity.

But Germany’s destruction was not inevitable. If the German people had regarded their disastrous defeat in 1918 and the ruinous reparations imposed by the Versailles Treaty as God’s judgments and had sought to discover what they had done to offend heaven, then good could have come from evil.22 Redemption could have emerged from judgment. This is another type, the type of redemption through repentance and faith, that appeared in a limited and secular way after 1945.

The most interesting historical types involve Israel in post-biblical history. The first is that of the remnant. The prophets, and then Paul, distinguished between larger Israel and remnant Israel. Only the two southern tribes survived invasion and exile. Empires have come and gone, and many of them have killed Jews in the thousands and the millions. But while the Assyrians and the Babylonians and the Romans and Nazis tried to destroy Israel, all of those empires were destroyed instead—and Israel alone remains. A Jewish remnant has always survived, with its culture, language, and religion intact. Every remnant that emerged after successive incarnations of Amalekites arose to exterminate them was a type of the holy remnant that is to come, Jesus’s “little flock” that will join Gentiles with a purified Israel in the new heaven and new earth.

Even more intriguing is the type of vicarious suffering. We know that Isaiah’s suffering Servant is a man who will suffer for the sins of God’s people. But Isaiah also speaks of all Israel as the Servant: “You, Israel, my servant” (41:8), “my servant Jacob, and Israel my chosen” (45:4), “The Lord has redeemed his servant Jacob” (48:20), “You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified” (49:3). Butterfield proposes that this is a new kind of vicarious suffering. Israel suffers not because God is judging her at the hands of her persecutors, but because she is actually better than her persecutors and has a mission. She suffers as God’s messenger “in order to expiate the sins of the Gentiles; she took their guilt and punishment upon herself, and accepted the consequences of their sins.”[23]

If this is true—and I should add that I do not regard this as dogma—it need not conflict with traditional Christian Christology and soteriology. If Christ is the embodiment of his church, then he is also the embodiment of faithful Israel. And what faithful Israel suffers, Christ suffers, just as Paul identifies his own suffering with the Messiah’s afflictions in Colossians 1:24, and just as Jesus said that when the church was persecuted so was he. Hence it should be no surprise that while Christ’s suffering in his passion was a fully sufficient sacrifice, the suffering of his ongoing body on earth—faithful Israel, both Gentile and Jew—is also his. This is why the risen Jesus told Paul that when he was persecuting the church he was really persecuting Jesus. Therefore, if Jesus’s suffering was vicarious for the sake of his body, all later vicarious suffering by his body points back to his suffering and participates in it, just as Paul said his suffering participated in the Messiah’s afflictions by somehow “making up what was lacking” in them (Col 1:24). So if Paul’s suffering somehow participates in the Messiah’s suffering, which expiates the sins of the Gentiles, and if the Messiah as suffering Servant is the embodiment of faithful Israel as suffering servant, then perhaps there is a mysterious way in which faithful Israel’s sufferings participate in the Messiah’s redemption of the Gentiles.

Martin Luther King Jr. did not believe, as far as I know, in an ontological connection between the suffering of his civil rights workers and the suffering of Jesus in his passion. But he taught the power of vicarious suffering. When the editor of the Christian Century urged him in 1960 to describe his own sufferings, King wrote,

I have known very few quiet days in the last few years. I have been arrested five times and 1960 [sic] put in Alabama jails. My home has been bombed twice. A day seldom passes that my family and I are not the recipients of threats of death. I have been the victim of a near fatal stabbing. So in a real sense I have been battered by the storms of persecution. I must admit that at times I have felt that I could no longer bear such a heavy burden, and have been tempted to retreat to a more quiet and serene life.[24]

King was reluctant to detail his own sufferings because he didn’t want to develop a martyr complex or make others think he was seeking sympathy. But he said these trials taught him “the value of unmerited suffering.” They led him to think that suffering could bring transformation to himself and healing to “the people involved in the tragic situation.” He became convinced “that unearned suffering is redemptive.”[25] King was pointing to a profound historical type of vicarious suffering that benefits others, pointing back to and perhaps even ontologically connected to the antitype, Jesus’s redemptive suffering in his life and death.

The last historical type in Butterfield’s masterful account is the most pervasive throughout history and perhaps the most powerful: the secret piety of the unnumbered billions of faithful Christians who have lived lives of beautiful faith by virtue of their union with their Lord. This is a type because it can be seen in history—at least to those who come close to these living saints—and it points to its antitype, Jesus the Jewish Messiah. The infinite varieties of faithful experience point in typological fashion to the infinite aspects of the Trinitarian God, the God of Israel. They are types in history pointing to—and teaching about—the living Triune God. As Butterfield puts it, these were the lights “that never went out” throughout the millennia of God’s church on earth. Through the darkest periods of heresy and schism priests and ministers were preaching the gospel week in and week out, “constantly reminding the farmer and the shopkeeper of charity and humility, persuading them to think for a moment about the great issues of life, and inducing them to confess their sins.”[26] In every age the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world became known to millions if not more. In this way the church never failed to produce new historical types.

Discerning The Types

How then are we to discern? To know the difference between authentic types that God has placed in history and our imagined types that we ascribe naively to God?

First of all, we should always recall that just as Jesus was often not recognized as Messiah when he was present in the flesh, so today his footprints in the world—let’s say for now that historical types are just that—usually go unrecognized. Not only are they hidden from the eyes of the natural man, as Paul insists in 1 Corinthians 1 and 2, but even the regenerate often miss them.

Second, we should recognize that history is not only horizontal but also vertical. Because we distinguish Christian philosophy of history, which focuses on the linear, from ancient and eastern philosophies that tend toward the cyclical and circular, we can become too focused on the telos. We imbibe the nominalist fallacy that history is simply a linear temporal continuum without ongoing participation in God’s active providence. This is not only a metaphysical mistake but also a failure to apply biblical theology to our philosophy of history. After all, Scripture says that we can “share Messiah’s suffering” (1 Pet 4:13) so that we can now “partake in the glory that is to be revealed” (5:1) and now “become partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4).[27]

Another way of putting this is to see with Butterfield that every generation is equidistant from eternity.[28] Every instant is eschatological.[29] In that sense the purpose of life is not the future but the present, to participate in eternal life now. And one way of doing that is to see the types all around us, in nature and history, especially history as present. History then is not so much a train traveling toward a destination—although of course in one sense it is—but it is more like a symphony whose every part is to be enjoyed, not just the ending.[30] The architecture of the whole work, as Butterfield put it, can be experienced in every part of the work, or in our case every moment of history.

For yet another analogy, think of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. This amazing feat of engineering goes for 23 miles, and so do you. Once on it, you cannot stop without getting hit from behind and thus withdrawing permanently from linear history. There are no exits or off-ramps until the end. That is how many Christians think of history: it will have no final meaning or clarity until its end, and types are manmade and therefore unreliable at best, idolatrous at worst.

But imagine, if you can, the old Route 66 that was finished in 1926 and carried travelers for 2, 400 miles from Chicago to California. Drivers could stop almost wherever they wanted to enjoy the land or scenery, and they did. This is like history as we should imagine it, not merely linear but also participatory. It stops at every point to look up and around into eternity. Types are real and all along the way.

But to get back to the question that opened this last section, how do we discern the true types?

Two final rules. The first is the rule of written revelation. The types need to be suggested or authorized by God’s written revelation in Scripture, just as God through words showed Moses his ways (Ps 103:7). My previous lectures have elaborated a bit on what that means.

Second, it is always safer to recognize judgment on our own ideas and works than on others. And if we do venture the latter, we should beware of unwitting self-righteousness. For example, if we say the looming defeat of ISIS is a type of God’s judgment of pride and blasphemy pointing to the final judgment, we must not presume that we are inherently better than members of ISIS. There is no doubt that the Christian faith (distinct from my apprehension of that faith) is infinitely superior to that of Islam, but my appropriation of that faith was a gift of God to this poor sinner. Right now my ideas are hopefully better than those of the ISIS fighter, and thankfully my inner character has been shaped to a degree by a Jewish stonemason. But I am what I am by the grace of God. And when I think of that ISIS soldier, I must remind myself that “there but for the grace of God go I.”

Notes

1. Herbert Butterfield, Christianity and History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949), 111.
2. See Jonathan Edwards, Typological Writings, ed. Wallace E. Anderson and Mason Lowance Jr., vol. 11 in The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 9. This and the other citations in this lecture are from Edwards’s notebook “Images of Divine Things.” This and other volumes in the Yale edition will be cited as follows: WJE 11:9.
3. Ernest Tuveson, Redeemer Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). For the national covenant tradition and its decline, see Gerald McDermott, One Holy and Happy Society (University Park: Penn State Press, 1992), 11–36.
4. Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (1956; repr., Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2000).
5. McDermott, One Holy and Happy Society, 11–36.
6. Ibid., 29–34.
7. This section adapts parts of my “Jonathan Edwards and the National Covenant: Was He Right?,” in TheLegacy of Jonathan Edwards: American Religion and the Evangelical Tradition, ed. D. G. Hart et al. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 147–57. Used by permission.
8. Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” in The Religious Situation in 1968, ed. Donald R. Cutler (Boston: Beacon, 1968), 391, emphasis added.
9. Leroy S. Rouner, “To Be at Home: Civil Religion as Common Bond,” in Civil Religion and Political Theology, ed. Leroy S. Rouner (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 137.
10. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Human Nature, Election, and History (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977), 79, 104.
11. James Gustafson, “Introduction” to H. Richard Niebuhr, The Responsible Self: An Essay in Christian Moral Philosophy (New York: Harper, 1963), 34–35.
12. Niebuhr, The Responsible Self, 67.
13. Pannenberg, Human Nature, 81, 97. Interestingly, two recent American Lutheran ethicists also interpreted national crises as visitations of divine “wrath.” Robert Benne and Philip Hefner, Defining America: A Christian Critique of the American Dream (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974), 125–35.
14. Pannenberg, Human Nature, 93.
15. “Proclamation of a National Fast, March 30, 1863,” in Mark A. Noll and Roger Lundin, Voices from the Heart: Four Centuries of American Piety (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), 172.
16. Ibid.
17. Abraham Lincoln, “Second Inaugural Address” (1865), quoted in Mark A. Noll, One Nation under God? Christian Faith and Political Action in America (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988), 101.
18. Butterfield, Christianity and History, 61.
19. Ibid., 49.
20. Ibid., 60.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., 50.
23. Ibid., 84.
24. Martin Luther King Jr., “Suffering and Faith,” Christian Century 77 (April 27, 1960): 510, accessed January 26, 2017, http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclo-pedia/documentsentry/suffering_and_faith.1.html.
25. Ibid.
26. Butterfield, Christianity and History, 131.
27. See Matthew Levering, Participatory Biblical Exegesis: A Theology of Biblical Interpretation (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 1–7.
28. Butterfield, Christianity and History, 66.
29. Ibid., 121.
30. Ibid., 67.

Types In Nature: Jonathan Edwards On Typology

By Gerald R. McDermott

[Gerald R. McDermott is the Anglican Chair of Divinity, Samford University, Beeson Divinity School, Birmingham, Alabama.]

[This is the third article in the four-part series “A Typological View of Reality,” delivered as the W. H. Griffith Thomas lectures at Dallas Theological Seminary, February 7–10, 2017. The ideas presented in these lectures have been adapted and expanded in Everyday Glory: The Revelation of God in All of Reality (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018).]

The great Anglican priest and poet George Herbert wrote about looking through a window,

A man that looks on glass,
On it may stay his eye,
Or, if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And then the heav’n espy.[1]

Two centuries later the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote of nature radiating the glory of God:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.[2]

Both of these British poets were Christians who saw the world in the way much of the Great Tradition has seen it—not just spotted here and there with signs, some near and some far, but as a sign in and of itself, with meaning from top to bottom. In other words, it’s not “turtles all the way down,” but wheels within wheels of glory, each layer and dimension full of words and images pointing up and out to the Creator and Redeemer.

I suggest that it is not only tradition that teaches this but also Scripture. Or, in what Heiko Oberman famously called Tradition I, this is the Great Tradition’s understanding of Scripture, which for most of the church until the Council of Trent meant simply the traditional (or orthodox) way of understanding Scripture.[3]

For example, this is the way the Great Tradition read the author of Job. “Ask the beasts, and they will teach you; the birds of the heavens, and they will tell you; or the bushes of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you. Who among all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this?” (Job 12:7–9, ESV).

For in this, the beasts and birds and bushes and fish talk. They all say, “The Lord made me, and he is glorious!” Jesus suggested the same when he regularly pointed his hearers to the world of nature for confirmation of what he was teaching. “Take a look at the lilies of the field, how they grow. They neither labor nor spin. Let me tell you, not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed as one of these. If God clothes the grass of the field that is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, don’t you think He will care for you, O you of little faith?” (Matt 6:28–30, author’s translation).

My pedestrian translation: “The world of nature is constantly talking, reinforcing what I (Jesus) am teaching you.” In his parables Jesus compared houses built on sand and houses built on rock when storms bring floods; trees that produce good fruit and trees that produce bad fruit; seeds that are thrown onto a path, rocky soil, thorny soil, and good soil; tiny seeds that produce huge bushes; the way a bit of leaven spreads throughout a lump of dough; and the way weeds and wheat grow together in a field. He granted that many people see nothing about God in any of these things of nature, but for those with eyes to see, there are “sermons in stones,” as Shakespeare put it, lessons about the kingdom of God.

For Paul, this ought to be obvious to a Christian. He seemed exasperated that the Corinthian Christians didn’t see from nature that there must be a resurrection of the body: “You foolish person! What you sow does not come to life [again] unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or some other grain” (1 Cor 15:36–37, ESV). Paul was saying that nature has been teaching us all along that out of death comes new life that is different from its first form.

James B. Jordan suggests reasons why all of nature is one giant type containing an infinite number of types: “God is infinite and man is finite. We simply cannot grasp God’s infinite tri-personality all at once. For this reason, God chose to reveal the infinity of His personality in the diversity of this world. Various things in the world reveal various things about God.”[4]

John Frame, a Protestant Reformed theologian, is not afraid to say that this world of nature is full of analogies to God.

Everything in creation bears some analogy to God. All the world has been made with God’s stamp on it, revealing Him. Creation is His temple, heaven His throne, earth His footstool. Thus Scripture finds analogies to God in every area of creation: inanimate objects (God the “rock of Israel,” Christ the “door of the sheep,” the Spirit as wind, breath, fire), plant life (God’s strength like the cedars of Lebanon, Christ the “bread of life”), animals (Christ the “Lion of Judah,” the “lamb of God”), human beings (God as king, landowner, lover; Christ as prophet, priest, king, servant, son, friend). . . . All this can be boiled down to a simple fact: The universe and everything in it symbolizes God.[5]

So all the world is full of types, and the whole world is one massive type. But the presence and meaning of the types are not visible to those who cannot see. Like the Pharisees who searched the Scriptures but missed its inner meaning (John 5:39), the world is full of people who fail to see the meaning of the world. They miss the riches that lie under every rock, the message behind every bush. The eyes of their hearts need to be healed, said Augustine.[6] But if they seek that healing and their eyes are opened, then the sound of the world around them, as Michael Polanyi suggested, changes from noise to music.[7]

A Sampling From A Master Typologist

Jonathan Edwards, a master typologist, thought extensively about the world of nature. He insisted that he was not merely inventing correspondences as an Origenist allegorist would. He would say that Scripture had taught him the grammar of the language sampled here.

His “reading” can be divided into three categories or realms of nature. We will move, with Edwards, from the world outside of us in the heavens and the atmosphere, to the world of living things among the flora and fauna, and then to the world of “us” and inside us—the human person.

First, nature out there. The sun is Edwards’s primary type in the heavens. Scripture makes clear that the sun is a type of Christ because it speaks of Jesus as the “sun of righteousness” and the “light of the world.” Besides, the sun withdrew its light at the crucifixion of Jesus, and his resurrection took place at the same time as the rising of the sun.[8]

If Scripture proves the sun is a type of the Messiah, what does it show us about Messiah?[9] Or, to trace Edwards’s typological method more closely, how does the sun illustrate what Scripture teaches about Messiah Jesus? The answer for Edwards is several-fold. That the sun never diminishes in light or heat throughout the ages shows the “all-sufficiency and everlastingness of God’s bounty and goodness.” Nature’s dependence on the sun (“vegetables growing and flourishing, looking green and pleasant”) shows our need for the Holy Spirit’s “effusions” in order to be spiritually healthy.[10]

But the sun is not perfect. If you view it “with glasses” (a rudimentary telescope), you see that it has spots. They show us that even the most excellent created things have imperfections. The sun’s absence, in times of clouds and rain and darkness, highlights those imperfections. Plants need those times of rain and relative darkness in order to take advantage of the times when the sun is bright and clear. This shows, according to Edwards, that the “rains of affliction” are necessary to prepare the soul for “the clear shining of the Sun of Righteousness.” If a person receives only comfort and light and is “not prepared by humiliation,” it makes “the heart worse.” Pride then grows in the soul as a disease and eventually destroys it.[11]

The rising and setting of the sun is full of types. Overall, it is a type of the death and resurrection of Messiah. As the sun rises and brings the world out of darkness into light and warmth, so Messiah at his rising brings the church with him to happiness, life, and glory. The sun’s setting is red and promises a fair day on the morrow because Messiah’s death was “with blood and dreadful sufferings” and brought us “a fair day.”[12]

The moon is a type of the church. Just as the moon forever changes, rising and falling, waxing and waning, moving from full splendor to total extinction, so too the church’s lot on earth is to rise and fall in outward prosperity, succeeding and suffering intermittently through time. The moon’s glory represents the prophets and apostles of the early church, and “possibly” that of “the Blessed Virgin Mary,” because their glory is a reflection of the glory of Christ just as the moon reflects the light of the sun.[13]

Edwards also reflected on the seasons as types. Spring is meant to make us think of an outpouring of the Spirit of God. Seeds sprout, even those sown in rocky ground. They look fair for a while, but then because of dry and shallow conditions their pretty flowers wither and come to nothing. So too for souls in times of the Spirit who talk excitedly about God but whose affections dry up after a while. This is the difference between birds and frogs in the spring, both of whom lift up their voices then. The birds are the saints whose songs delight God during times of revival, while the croaks of hypocrites bring him no pleasure.[14]

The blazing heat of summer that dries up pools of water and withers herbs and plants that shot up in the spring should remind us of trials and sufferings that kill the shallow affections of hypocrites. Just as “sound fruit” persists through this heat, so too does the faith of the truly regenerate.[15]

The fading of leaves, grass, flowers, and all their glory in winter is a sharp contrast to the unfading brightness of the heavens—which is the same in summer and winter, age after age. God means for us to be reminded of the great difference between “earthly glory, riches, and pleasures” that fade like the flower of the field and “the glory and happiness of heaven which fadeth not away.” This typology of the seasons, Edwards noted, is “agreeable to many representations in the Scriptures.”[16]

Second, Edwards turned to the world of flora and fauna. Flowers are innumerable, he wrote, and so few of them become ripe fruit. The same is true of the near-infinite number of seeds that are sown, so few of which sprout. It seems a great waste, unless we recognize that God created these as types of the disproportion between those who endure in the faith and those who do not. So few are saved of the many who hear the Word. We are reminded by flowers and seeds that many are called but few are chosen.[17]

The progress of fruit is a type of growth in Messiah. When fruit is young, it is very tender and “easily hurt” by frost or heat or vermin. So too for young converts who are easily led astray. They must grow in perfection all through the course of their lives, just as fruit requires a term of growth before it is ripe. Fruit taken too early is bitter and sour when green and becomes sweet and pure only after suffering heat and other pressures. Usually it becomes red or its juice starts to look like blood, just as the blood of Messiah “fitted” the fruit of the tree of life for us. Young believers must suffer afflictions and persecutions—“in a word, the cross of Christ”—if they are to become sweet with meekness and Christian love. If heat destroys some fruit, so too affliction accomplishes nothing for hypocrites. But when true believers are ripe they are ready to quit this life for heaven, just as ripe fruit is ready to quit its tree at the touch of the hand.[18]

The flowers that eventually become trees start with slender shoots. Notice, Edwards observed, that when they are young they are easily bent, representing the more pliable nature of children, and the necessity of reaching children with the gospel while they are still malleable. Just as with a tree, with age comes stiffness, until it is impossible to direct in another direction without destroying the tree.[19]

Trees more fully grown represent human beings and the church. Each starts with a tiny seed, barely visible. Each becomes either barren or fruitful. Each is known by its fruit. The church is signified by special trees—grape (vines), olive, palm, and apple.[20]

Finally, there is the world of animals. Edwards saw meaning in a number of classes of animals, and the following are only a few of the ones he mentioned. Birds, he wrote, represent the inhabitants of heaven. This is why they are generally more beautiful than beasts and fish, and why some have “gorgeous plumage.” This is also why they create music, “sweetly praising their Creator.”[21]

While it is not a pleasant music, the cockadoodling of the cock at dawn is a type of preachers of the gospel who wake up sinners out of their sleep. This is also represented by the special singing of birds in the spring, which we have already seen is a type of an outpouring of the Spirit of God.[22]

The British Anglican John Stott was a lifelong bird-watcher, or as he puts it, an “orni-theologian.” Stott liked to quote Martin Luther on birds, from Luther’s commentary on the Sermon on the Mount:

[God] is making the birds our schoolmasters and teachers. It is a great and abiding disgrace to us that that in the Gospel a helpless sparrow should become a theologian and a preacher to the wisest of men. We have as many teachers and preachers as there are birds in the air. Their living example is an embarrassment to us[!][23]

Stott wrote in his marvelous book The Birds: Our Teachers that storks in their annual migrations are examples to us of repentance. The prophet Jeremiah tells us, “No one [in Judah] repents of his evil. . . . Yet even the stork in the heavens knows her times” (8:6–7). Jeremiah was referring to the nearly half a million white storks that migrate over the Middle East every spring and summer between southern Africa and northern Europe, flying some 8, 000 miles each way. They teach us to return to the God of Israel after we sin.[24] Other species of birds teach typical lessons, according to Stott: owls teach us to face both ways, to the past and the future; pigeons, gratitude; hummingbirds, work; eagles, freedom; larks, joy; and all birds in their breeding cycles, love.[25]

Fish, said Edwards, typify the inhabitants of hell. We know this, he wrote, because water is the place for the dead in Scripture. The Rephaim, whales, and sea monsters in the Bible represent devils and the wrath of God. Scripture portrays the miseries of death and God’s wrath as the sea, the deeps, floods, and billows.[26]

Edwards once preached about dogs as types insofar as they are quick to show gratitude to their masters.[27] His point was that we should be quicker to show gratitude to our heavenly Father. Elizabeth Haysom is a Christian dog-trainer at a prison in Virginia. In prison with a 90-year sentence, she is a dynamic Christian who inspires all who know her. Elizabeth has noticed an abundance of types in dogs that teach us about the kingdom of God. One of those types is the way they learn obedience.

When training a dog, we build the behavior slowly step by step. We don’t expect a dog to magically understand what “stay” means. We build a habit of a good stay. And a good stay is one that holds through distractions (people, food, toys, other animals), that holds through distance (being out of sight) and that holds through duration (several minutes). Even one that holds for different trainers, who have different meanings for the word.

Christians will make mistakes and fail, just like dogs. But just as we trainers don’t let a dog quit, so too we should not let our failures excuse us from training in godly habits and attitudes.

Every dog trainer knows that no behavior remains “clean”—properly performed—unless it is regularly maintained. Regular practice of all cues is essential for readiness. Regular practice builds the habits until they are nearly perfect.[28]

Finally, Edwards found types inside us. Deep inside us he found filth, and this too is a type. By this he meant the filth that is inside our bowels, the dung that represents our inner corruption and filthiness, typified by the self-glorifying pride that thinks God is lucky to have us. Edwards believed that the twisting and turning of our intestines stand for the wiliness and shiftiness of our hearts in their natural self-deception. The fact that this is hidden from the outer eye means that our inner corruptions are secret, known in their fullness only to God (and those with whom we live).[29]

The filth is not a recent development in us but goes all the way back to our condition at birth. There too we emerged in filth, signifying our inner pollution. We were naked, to represent our spiritual nakedness before God. We were crying, to show that sorrow fills much of our lives. We were born “backward” (perhaps most babies in Edwards’s day were delivered face down), with our backs facing God and heaven, and our faces to the earth and hell, to demonstrate “the natural state of our hearts.”[30]

The natural state of our physical life, dependent on every breath of air we inhale, is also a type. The Bible teaches this in Ezekiel’s story of the dry bones coming to life by the Lord’s breathing on them, and Jesus’s breathing on the apostles to impart to them the Holy Spirit in John 20. Just as our physical life depends on breath every moment, so too our spiritual life depends on the breath of the Spirit of God infilling us. Job said, “Our lives are but a breath” (7:7), like a blast of wind that blows past and does not return. So too, when the warm heat of our breathing goes out of us, cold death “suddenly” comes in to replace it. It is a comfort to believers that when they see the sudden cold come to a corpse, they can reassure themselves that they have the supernatural breath that will keep them warm forever.[31]

Lastly, among “us” we can see types in children and assemblies. Children gradually grow into adulthood, showing us by their gradual growth not only the gradual spiritual growth of every saint (no room for Christian perfection here!) but also the gradual perfecting of the church into knowledge, holiness, and blessedness.[32]

The great assemblies of the human community have much to teach us of the kingdom of God. Because they are the assemblies of natural men, they teach us of nature’s types. The solemnity of a prince’s coronation is a “shadow” of the procession we will see at the end of the world as the saints receive their crowns of glory. This is also a shadow of what happened at Christ’s ascension when he was crowned “in his person.”[33]

The solemnity of great criminal trials and executions of criminals is a type of the great solemnity that will pervade the final judgment. So too the joy we experience at weddings is a type of the joy the saints will taste at the great wedding supper of the Lamb.[34]

Beauty As The Ultimate Type

Including other thinkers and other kinds of typology in nature would give a more complete picture of the range of types in nature. We might talk about types in human intimacy that neuro-science is discovering. Or we could talk about the types in cosmic physics that are revealing how finely-tuned the cosmos is, thus illustrating the createdness of nature by an intelligent Mind. Or we could explore the nature of the human mind that remarkably produces moral codes the world over that resemble one another, thus demonstrating the imprint of divine law on the human mind, no matter the culture. Calvin, who wrote so much about the sensus divinitatis, would see this as a confirmation of what he preached and wrote.

But that would miss what is perhaps more interesting, and certainly more beautiful, about Edwards’s typology of nature. For it has to do with beauty itself. Deep within the structure of nature, he suggested, is beauty as a type of the divine beauty. This is not a major theme in the tradition, at least not as deeply structural as Edwards’s. And most theologians, including historians of theology, are unaware of how singular Edwards’s thinking on beauty was.

In 1992 Patrick Sherry published Spirit and Beauty: An Introduction to Theological Aesthetics, in which he argued that the three greatest names in the history of theological aesthetics are Augustine, von Balthasar, and Jonathan Edwards.[35] But of the three, he insisted, the one who made beauty most structurally central to his vision of God was Edwards. For Edwards beauty describes better than anything else who God is. Edwards claimed,

God is God, and distinguished from all other beings, and exalted above [th]em, chiefly by his divine beauty, which is infinitely diverse from all other beauty. . . . This is the beauty of the Godhead, and the divinity of the Divinity (if I may so speak), the good of the infinite Fountain of Good; without which God himself (if that were possible to be) would be an infinite evil.[36]

For Edwards, not only is beauty the innermost meaning of who God is, but it is also the key to all the types in nature, both “out there” and “in here.” Being and beauty are interconnected and perhaps interchangeable, and both are refractions of God’s beauty:

God is the foundation and fountain of all being and all beauty, from whom all is perfectly derived, and on whom all is most absolutely and perfectly dependent; of whom and through whom and to whom is all being and all perfection; and whose being and beauty is as it were the sum and comprehension of all existence and excellence: much more than the sun is the fountain and summary comprehension of all the light and brightness of the day.[37]

What we see of beauty around us is a type of the divine beauty: “All the beauty to be found throughout the whole creation, is but the reflection of the diffused beams of the Being who hath an infinite fullness of brightness and glory.”[38]

But what does Edwards mean by beauty, and how is it seen in nature? Beauty for Edwards is most essentially proportion or consent. It might be a simple proportion or agreement between two apples, or a complex proportion or harmony of a beautiful human face. These are simple and complex beauties. The latter is a harmony among things that are different and even jarring. It might contain partial irregularities or even ugly disagreement. But if those partial or ugly features are parts of a larger harmony, then the ugliness or disproportion is aufgeheben, lifted up into a higher harmony that is a complex beauty.

So while there is the symmetrical harmony of a French garden at Versailles, there is also the asymmetrical harmony of a Japanese garden or a jazz chord that sounds dissonant when played alone but fits well within a progression of chords.

In nature we can see this in a mountain range. When I am hiking on a mountain trail in Virginia, I look at other mountains around and see no particular pattern or harmony, just irregular shapes and seemingly random piles of rocks and trees. But when I look down from an airplane at these same mountains, I see a beautiful pattern called the Blue Ridge Mountains. Their long patterns of ridges snake this way and that but generally in the same direction and often nearly parallel to each other. The pattern is pleasing to the eye and seems to have been designed by an intelligent Designer. In every dimension of nature, from subatomic particles to distant galaxies, we see objects that are discordant when observed close-up, but in perfect harmony when seen from afar.

Edwards said the same pattern exists in that part of nature called human and moral relations. Morally it seems wrong to be selfish. But Adam Smith observed two hundred fifty years ago that when a person tries to make money by making and selling something out of self-interest, he learns that he must make it well to please his customer so that the customer will come back later to buy another. If he prices it too high, the customer will go to another maker. The smart artisan, then, will make a good product and keep the price within an affordable range. What seems ugly—self-interest—after a while takes on a certain attractiveness because society constrains this self-interest so that it serves the interests of others. That overall pattern has a certain beauty to it.

Now, I know, you will say that life is not so simple. That artisan could collude with other artisans and fix the price, keeping the product out of reach of all but the upper classes. Or a multinational corporation could buy up all the raw materials and producers and fix the prices similarly. But as Winston Churchill once said about democracy, the free market is the worst economic pattern for society except for all of its alternatives. And I would venture to say that a twenty-first-century Edwards would say the same, that in this fallen world with its imperfect market system in the West, despite all of these problems, which come ultimately from sin, there is a certain beauty when I can go to a store in Alabama to buy fresh coffee that was harvested on the other side of the world. I am satisfied, and the small farmer in Africa is able to support his family. This is a kind of harmony that joins interests not initially allied to produce a limited but genuine harmony. This is a type in the very natural realm called human society and its economics.

Now let’s say one of the middlemen in this global coffee chain decides to live at a lower standard of living because he is impressed that the Second Person of the Trinity decided to do the same. The result is that he is able to buy coffee beans from forty percent more African farmers than otherwise. Thus more poor farmers are able to have the self-respect of working to be able to support their families. This is a moral and spiritual beauty, Edwards would say, that is a type of the ultimate beauty, which is the mutual love and service among the three divine Persons. In this way the patterns in nonintelligent nature and human society that join discordant members to form a higher concordance point toward, and are types of, the ultimate harmonies of self-denying service and love among the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The ultimate picture of that inner-Trinitarian service and love is the culmination of redemption. I say culmination because for Edwards its history started in the Garden, not at the cross, and required the entire history of Israel and the redeemed repristination of that history in the whole life of Jesus, which according to Paul is what saves us (Rom 5:10). There we see the ultimate harmony, self-sacrificial love in the ugliest evil of all history, the murder of the Son of God. In this unspeakable evil and ultimate ugliness genuine beauty is forged by the mutual love of three Persons—the Father suffering the passion and death of his Son, the Holy Spirit feeling the pain of the Father and enabling the Son to endure the horrors, and Jesus himself taking on the physical tortures we deserve.

This is the culmination of the whole history of redemption that is prefigured or typed in all of nature. As Edwards, Newman, and others have pointed out, all of nature is full of life coming out of death, and so a figuring or typing of resurrection proceeding from death is found in nature. This is but one among the millions of other correspondences—types—in nature to the world of super-nature.

This is Edwards’s version of the analogy of being, as John C. Cunningham has put it. The spiritual beauties of God are communicated “ectypically” into created nature as forms of beauty.[39] The person who sees these beauties in nature, and their pointers to the divine beauty, sees what Edwards called “the beauty of holiness,” which is the epistemological key to reality. “He that sees the beauty of holiness sees the greatest and most important thing in the world, which is the fullness of all things, without which the world is empty, no better than nothing.”[40]

The person who sees the patterns of beauty in nature, even amidst what seems disharmony and ugliness, sees the ultimate antitype, which is the meaning of all reality. Elsewhere Edwards suggests that this then enables, or is the very sign of, union with the Creator of all reality. Hence ontology is connected to epistemology. To see the types of nature is to be one with the Creator of nature.

Notes

1. George Herbert, “The Elixir,” quoted in Alister McGrath, The Open Secret: A New Vision for Natural Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 68.
2. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur” (1877), Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44395.
3. Heiko Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001), 366–69.
4. James B. Jordan, Through New Eyes: Developing a Biblical View of the World (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1999), 22.
5. John Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1987), 230; cited in Jordan, Through New Eyes, 23.
6. Augustine of Hippo, Sermon 88, 5; cited in Alister E. McGrath, The Open Secret: A New Vision for Natural Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 197.
7. Michael Polanyi, “Science and Reality,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 18 (1967), 191; cited in McGrath, The Open Secret, 184.
8. Jonathan Edwards, Typological Writings, ed. Wallace E. Anderson and Mason Lowance Jr., vol. 11 in The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). This and the other citations in this lecture are from Edwards’s notebook “Images of Divine Things.” This and other volumes in the Yale edition will be cited as follows: WJE 11:120.
9. I replace “Christ” with Messiah from time to time for two reasons: because some of these materials are inspired by Edwards’s notebook “Types of the Messiah,” and because we need to be reminded of the Jewishness of Jesus that is often obscured by our use of the English transliteration (Christ) of the Greek translation (Christos) of the Hebrew (mashiach).
10. WJE 11:54.
11. WJE 11:125, 85.
12. WJE 11:64, 66, 81–82.
13. WJE 11:65–66.
14. WJE 11:105–6.
15. WJE 11:88.
16. WJE 11:96.
17. WJE 11:70.
18. WJE 11:115–16, 123, 93.
19. WJE 11:59.
20. WJE 11:57, 80–81, 89, 98.
21. WJE 11:84–85.
22. WJE 11:92–93.
23. Martin Luther (1521), The Sermon on the Mount, in Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, American Edition 21:197–98, quoted in John Stott, The Birds: Our Teachers: Biblical Lessons from a Lifelong Bird-Watcher, collector’s ed. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2011), 10.
24. Stott, The Birds, 18–19.
25. Ibid., 23–94.
26. WJE 11:84–85.
27. WJE 14:195.
28. Elizabeth Haysom, “Dog Notes,” notebook loaned to the author.
29. WJE 11:92, 94.
30. WJE 11:54, 57, 96.
31. WJE 11:55, 70–71, 100, 129.
32. WJE 11:61.
33. WJE 11:119.
34. Ibid.
35. Patrick Sherry, Spirit and Beauty: An Introduction to Theological Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
36. WJE 2:298.
37. WJE 8:551.
38. WJE 8:550.
39. John C. Cunningham, “Jonathan Edwards and the Trinitarian Shape of Beauty” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2015), 74.
40. WJE 2:274.

General Revelation Throughout History

By Gerald R. McDermott

[Gerald R. McDermott is the Anglican Chair of Divinity, Samford University, Beeson Divinity School, Birmingham, Alabama.]

[This is the second article in the four-part series “A Typological View of Reality,” delivered as the W. H. Griffith Thomas lectures at Dallas Theological Seminary, February 7–10, 2017. The ideas presented in these lectures have been adapted and expanded in Everyday Glory: The Revelation of God in All of Reality (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018).]

My last lecture dealt with the typological view of reality seen in the Great Tradition from Gregory Nazianzus and Augustine through Aquinas and Bonaventure to Calvin and Edwards and Newman. What follows is the theological pushback on this view, starting with Martin Luther in the sixteenth century.

Martin Luther

Luther had a hard time separating properly Christian natural theology from the theologies of glory that he thought responsible for the Catholic Church’s late medieval teaching of semi-Pelagianism. In his Heidelberg Disputation (1518) he famously asserted, “That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things which have actually happened [sic]” (Rom 1:20).[1] His targets were late medieval philosophical theologians who thought they could use reason alone, apart from Scripture, to speculate about God’s attributes. Luther insisted that apart from the revelation of the Cross, nothing about God can be truly known by reason. In the absence of revelation from the Bible, reason—which is never static or neutral—immediately concocts a god whom the human self can manage. So Luther talked about a monk who imagines a god who forgives sins and grants eternal life in exchange for good works. He clings to and trusts in this god. The problem is that this god does not exist. It is an idol. And this, according to Luther, is what naturally happens when reason looks at the created world and analogizes from its beauty and goodness to a god who has as much beauty and goodness as the monk’s little mind can imagine. Not only is it a foolish exercise—how could the infinite God be anything like what our little minds could imagine?—but also the categories of beauty and goodness are devised by the monk. How is he to know that the true God’s goodness and beauty are anything like what he conceives beauty and goodness to be? Remember, this is a monk-philosopher who is deliberately setting the Bible aside and presuming to use reason alone to tell him about God. This, said Luther, is a theologian of glory, who cannot imagine that beauty is found in the ugliness of the Cross or that goodness is precisely where a Father permits his Son to be murdered.[2]

Yet for all of Luther’s insight into the folly of unaided reason’s presumptions about God, Luther joined what good Christian theology had separated: scriptureless philosophical theology on the one hand and biblical natural theology on the other. He failed to distinguish them appropriately and so prejudiced legions of followers against all natural revelation and Christian natural theology.

He did this by ignoring the plain sense of the Bible where it most clearly speaks of the glory of God in the creation. In his sermon on Psalm 19, one of the classic biblical texts on God’s natural revelation in creation, Luther commented on “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims His handiwork” (v. 1):

That is to say: “The glory of God is preached everywhere in all the lands under all of heaven.” The emphasis is on the word “telling,” to remind us that we should esteem the oral and external Word. The “glory of God” is the Gospel, for through the Gospel God is known. The “handiwork” of God is all the works wrought by the Gospel, like justification, salvation, and redemption from sin, from death, and from the kingdom of the devil.[3]

When verse 2 proclaims that “day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge,” Luther said, “This is to say that the Gospel will always be preached and that the Christian Church will stand and remain eternally.”[4]

Notice what has happened. Here, where the Bible contains a clear instance of its theology of creation—that God’s glory can be seen in the heavens and earth—Luther has replaced it with a theology of redemption. The heavens are not the stars, he asserts, and the firmament is not the sky; instead, they are the oral preaching of the Word at church, and the good works that are produced by that preaching. The verse for Luther speaks not of the beauty in the night sky, but of something going on inside the church. Just as the moon is obscured by the rising sun at dawn, the glory of nature has been swept from view to reveal instead a preacher in a pulpit.

If Psalm 19 is one of the best-known Old Testament passages about types in the creation, Romans 1:18–23 is one of the best-known New Testament passages. We have just seen how Luther used it in his Heidelberg Disputation, insisting that the invisible things of God mentioned in this passage are not perceptible through what is visible. When he commented more directly on Romans 1, Luther declared again that the invisible things of God, which Paul said “have been clearly perceived . . . in the things that have been made” (v. 20, ESV), are not clearly seen. Luther wrote that while God does indeed reveal his existence and power and even goodness through nature, and while unaided reason does indeed discern those realities, nevertheless those realities are immediately obscured by sin. Sin inevitably corrupts this true knowledge. That is why Paul said in verse 21 that they “became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened.”[5]

Later Lutheran theologians used this treatment of natural revelation by God to characterize all natural theology. Roland Ziegler has written recently: “In the hands of man, the natural revelation of the true God is turned into an idolatrous concept of god and gods. The problem of man is therefore not simply an intellectual one, but it is sin. The remedy for this is not a return to a purer, better natural theology but the proclamation of Christ.”[6] Ziegler’s interpretation is similar to that of nineteenth-century Lutheran theologian August Graebner: “God’s handwriting still covers every inch of the universe; but man’s defective mental vision prevents him from making out, even with his telescopes and microscopes, what the heavens as well as the mustard seeds declare.”[7]

For these Lutheran theologians, God’s types in nature are useless because they are inevitably distorted by sinful human minds. They serve only to condemn, for they show that human beings have no excuse for their idolatry, since they were originally given revelation of the true God but replaced it with images of false gods. This is what happens when hapless Christian theologians think anything useful is made of God’s revelation in nature. As a contemporary Lutheran theologian writes, “If any constructive space is given natural revelation, it becomes natural theology and the consequences are dire for the scriptural doctrine of the Trinity and our confession of the pure gospel.”[8]

Luther and these Lutherans are right about the consequences of a natural theology that presumes that unregenerate reason can be disinterested and neutral and that presumes it can “ascend” (as Luther put it) to the divine realm without the guidance of revelation. Luther wrote that when unbelievers see God in nature, they see only his wrath, for Paul wrote that the “wrath of God,” not the righteousness of God, is being revealed from heaven (Rom 1:18). The philosopher using reason alone can have a “left-handed and partial knowledge of God,” but he cannot know God’s will for him, particularly whether God will forgive him. Sin confuses all knowledge gained from natural revelation; so all so-called natural knowledge must die before it is to be taken up in faith. And at that point, it must submit to the revelation of God in Scripture.[9]

But what if reason is used in the way that most of the Great Tradition used it? What if it is faith seeking understanding, as Augustine first put it? What if it is a prayerful exploration, carefully mining the riches of revelation in the Bible, as it was used by Cyril of Jerusalem, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory Nazianzus, and Augustine? They spoke of faith’s reason and reason’s faith, faith informing reason and giving fullness to reason. Gregory of Nazianzus, for example, used biblically informed reason to write a hymn to nature that inspires humility before God. He used it to argue the irrationality of reason trying to know God without the use of biblical revelation from God.

Despite Luther’s blasts against reason as “that whore,” even he seemed to allow for this kind of humble and pious typological theology. In the Heidelberg Disputation he wrote that it is useless for a person to try to see God’s glory and majesty “unless he also recognizes him in the humility and shame of the cross” (AE 31:52–53). Notice the “unless,” which implies that God’s glory and majesty can be seen by those who embrace the shame of the Cross, who know that God’s beauty is in that very ugliness. Those believers can then go on to see God’s glory in the creation. In fact, Luther said just that in this Disputation: “He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross” (AE 31:52).

Luther was brilliant in his denunciation of presumptuous natural theology that tries to soar to heaven without the wings of revelation. He rightly protested that that flight was headed toward a dark realm of alien beings. But Luther was so obsessed with human presumption about glory that he gave little attention to believers who humbly considered the beauties of God scattered throughout the creation. They knew the greatest glory was in the Cross, and therefore they could also know the glory of God that was in and beyond the physical heavens. They could see God’s handiwork in the firmament.

Later Lutheran (and other sorts of) theologians warned that all the analogies we use to talk about God are rooted in human terms and human concepts, things in nature as perceived by our limited minds. They suggested that it borders on the illegitimate to imagine that God could be anything like the things we see in nature and history—and that we should hesitate to so imagine. Yet the authors of Scripture showed no such hesitation. They regularly compared God to a rock and a storm and the sun. His wrath, they wrote, is like the ocean, and his righteousness like the mountains. He himself is like a human father, a shepherd, a vineyard owner. Jesus said he is bread, a vine, a king.

Perhaps there is a place after all for believing, biblical use of natural revelation.

Karl Barth

Barth argued that there is no “point of contact” between things of earth and things of heaven and that when we think there is, we inevitably confuse the two, assigning something of earth to the heavenly sphere, turning it into a god by trusting in it and loving it. This sounds a lot like Luther. Barth was indeed steeped in the Reformers, Luther as well as Calvin. Luther helped Barth make sense of the insanity of early twentieth-century Europe, when millions of young men were mowed down in line after line as they climbed out of filthy trenches to face a faceless enemy whom their leaders had told them was a threat to civilization. Barth was horrified to learn that his liberal theology professors had endorsed this senseless First World War, confusing German ideals with God’s purposes. This made him rethink theology and God himself, and it drove him back to the Reformed scholastics whom he found in Heinrich Heppe’s Reformed Dogmatics. These theologians took seriously what Barth called “the strange new world of the Bible.” Unlike his liberal theology professors, who questioned the historicity of both Testaments, these Reformed theologians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries believed that God had inspired every word of Scripture and that the relation between each word and its historical referent was less important than the fact that the living God was speaking through that Word.

Then in the 1930s, when the most Christianized country in Europe turned against its fathers, the Jews, and when the most educated country in history allowed itself to believe lies, Barth turned again to Reformed theology—and Luther—to make sense of the madness. Barth was struck by Luther’s rejection of Aquinas and his turn to this world of being to find analogies to the Author of being. Even though Aquinas said that these analogies tell us more about what God is not than what he is, Luther considered all such analogies to this world to be dead ends. In the end they turn us to our own ideas of the world and suggest that we can contribute something to the search for God and eventually to our being accepted by God.

Both Lutheran and Reformed theologians have made these arguments against Aquinas. They think that Aquinas held that saving faith comes from adding data from special revelation to what reason can find on its own, and that Aquinas’s analogies use merely human concepts to interpret and replace biblical concepts. But Aquinas, who was writing when there was widespread acceptance of the Bible as the Word of God and when the capabilities of reason were debated by thinkers who assumed near-universal acceptance of the gospel, was discussing in his Five Ways not what naked reason could do to prove God to unbelievers but how reason could show to believers that faith is reasonable.

So it is not true that Aquinas thought saving faith relies on reason, even if, as he did teach, that reason could give believers “preambles” to saving faith. Saving faith, he wrote in his Summa Theologica, is not one of the intellectual virtues but one of the theological virtues, which are “above man’s nature” and from outside us.[10] Faith “has as its cause God, moving us inwardly through grace” (ST 2.2. Q6.a.1). Faith comes by revelation or preaching: “Because those things which are of faith surpass human reason, hence they do not come to man’s knowledge, unless God reveals them. To some, indeed, they are revealed by God immediately, as those things which were revealed to the apostles and prophets, while to some they are proposed by God in sending preachers of the faith, according to Romans 10:15, ‘How shall they preach, unless they be sent?’ ” (ST 2.2.Q6.1).

The word “preambles” has led Protestant observers astray from almost the beginning. They have assumed epistemological necessity, that one cannot believe unless reason has demonstrated basics, such as that God exists. But these basic truths are theological not epistemological preambles—preambles only in the sense that in any ordering of Christian thinking the believer must start with these and go on from there. Aquinas “holds ‘God exists’ to be a fundamental article for faith, to be, in other words, basic in the noetic structure of faith: one must either believe or know it so that one can order everything else that is believed in relation to it. For instance, it is quite obvious that one must believe that God exists if one believes that he is the rewarder of those who seek him.”[11]

Therefore when a person comes to God for the first time, according to Aquinas, it is entirely by grace and not by any preparation made by that person (contrary to later scholastics who famously argued that God waits for the person seeking grace to first facere quod in se est, “do what lies in themselves”): “Whilst we are being justified we consent to God’s justification by a movement of our free-will. Nevertheless this movement is not the cause of grace, but the effect; hence the whole operation pertains to grace” (ST 2.1.Q 111).

If we speak of grace as it signifies a help from God to move us to good, no preparation is required on man’s part, that, as it were, anticipates the Divine help, but rather, every preparation in man must be by the help of God moving the soul to good. And thus even the good movement of the free-will, whereby anyone is prepared for receiving the gift of grace is an act of the free-will moved by God. And thus man is said to prepare himself, according to Proverbs 16:1: “It is the part of man to prepare the soul”; yet it is principally from God, Who moves the free-will. Hence it is said that man’s will is prepared by God, and that man’s steps are guided by God (ST 2.1Q 112).

When it was asked if grace comes necessarily to someone who “does what he can”—as Biel and Ockham later taught—Aquinas denied it: “Man is compared to God as clay to the potter, according to Jeremiah 18:6: ‘As clay is in the hand of the potter, so are you in My hand.’ But however much the clay is prepared, it does not necessarily receive its shape from the potter. Hence, however much a man prepares himself, he does not necessarily receive grace from God” (ST 2.1.Q112.a3). And no man can merit the first grace (ST 2.1.Q114.a5).

It is true that Aquinas said that all analogies used by humans, even those used by the human authors of Scripture, derive their initial sense from ordinary human use: “[A]s to the names applied to God—viz. the perfections which they signify, such as goodness, life and the like, and their mode of signification. As regards what is signified by these names, they belong properly to God, and more properly than they belong to creatures, and are applied primarily to Him. But as regards their mode of signification, they do not properly and strictly apply to God; for their mode of signification applies to creatures” (ST 1.1.Q13.a.3).

But at the same time, Aquinas knew the noetic effects of sin and acknowledged the need for Scripture to correct faulty human conceptions: “For human reason is very deficient in things concerning God. A sign of this is that philosophers in their researches, by natural investigation, into human affairs, have fallen into many errors, and have disagreed among themselves. And consequently, in order that men might have knowledge of God, free of doubt and uncertainty, it was necessary for Divine matters to be delivered to them by way of faith, being told to them, as it were, by God Himself Who cannot lie” (ST 2.2.Q2.a.4); “[O]n the other hand, faith adheres to all the articles of faith by reason of one mean, viz. on account of the First Truth proposed to us in Scriptures, according to the teaching of the Church who has the right understanding of them. Hence whoever abandons this mean is altogether lacking in faith” (ST 2.2Q5.a.3). And finally,

Error arises, if, in matters of faith, reason has precedence of faith and not faith of reason, to the point that one would be willing to believe only what he could know by reason, when the converse ought to be the case: wherefore Hilary says, “While believing [in a spirit of faith], inquire, discuss, carry through your speculation. . . . By using [philosophical doctrines] in such manner as to include under the measure of philosophy truths of faith, as if one should be willing to believe nothing except what could be held by philosophic reasoning: when on the contrary, philosophy should be subject to the measure of faith, according to the saying of the Apostle, ‘Bringing into captivity every understanding unto the obedience of Christ.’ ”[12]

Van Til, a recent Reformed theologian, like many others, blamed Aquinas for assuming that reason was a neutral instrument untouched by sin, and therefore dismissed his doctrine of analogy. Yet Van Til’s acceptance of analogy as a principle of thinking for both unregenerate and regenerate alike was remarkably similar to that of Aquinas:

Christ was the Logos of creation as well as the Logos of redemption. The things of nature were adapted by him to the things of the Spirit. The lower was made for the higher. And because all things are made by God, that is, through the eternal Logos of creation, we too can use symbolism and analogy and know that, though we must always look for the tertium comparationis (the third element, the point of comparison, which explains the relation of the symbol to reality) in all symbolism, nevertheless it is at bottom true. . . . If we start, as Calvin started, by thinking of the mind of man and its a priori laws as created and controlled by God, then the facts of ‘nature’ have intelligence written in them.[13]

In Thomistic theology this is known as the analogy of being, which, in short, asserts that in the creation humans can see signposts of the Creator, earmarks left by the Designer. We can use our unaided reason to study these signposts and earmarks, and we can conclude from them that they point to an intelligent designer—indeed, a creator.

For Barth, however, this approach to the creation was exactly the one used by the new generation of German theologians who were supporting the religion of “blood and soil” suggested by Adolf Hitler. Hitler gave hope to a generation of Germans who felt inferior after the Versailles Treaty had left them penniless because of its draconian reparations. Hitler told them they were not inferior but superior, and his rearmament of Germany was giving them jobs. Now they could put food on the table, and with self-respect. He told them he read the Bible every day, was protecting them from godless communism, and that God raises up leaders who enable a people to find their God-given strength and destiny.

For Barth, this was the handwriting on the wall. This showed why the analogy of being was damnable, from the infernal pit, in fact “the invention of Anti-Christ.”[14] It claimed to find God in the creation and in a particular people. It made the human being its own creator and redeemer.

We can understand, in hindsight, why Barth connected Aquinas’s analogy of being to the Nazi blut und boden. But that same hindsight reveals that Barth overreached. As Hans Urs von Balthasar argued in his seminal study of Barth’s theology, Barth had attacked a straw man. The analogy of being that Barth condemned was not the one taught by Thomas Aquinas. Barth had claimed that for Aquinas nature was able in its purity, apart from grace, to see the meaning of reality. It was not only able to see but then also to contribute to its salvation. Aquinas, however, never taught such a “pure nature” that could of its own being, apart from regeneration, see the meaning of nature and the identity of the true God. Aquinas always insisted that nature required grace to find itself and that only the historical event of Christ’s life and death and resurrection saves a fallen nature. As Balthasar put it, Aquinas wrote that the Word did not come to all of nature but to his own (John 1:11), and that that part of his own who received him had been prepared by grace. They were born not of blood or the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God (v. 12).[15]

Therefore the analogy of being, which depends on grace to see and grace to be redeemed, teaches that being is indeed “epiphanic.” All of nature is created with the capacity to “show” the grace that birthed it and lies beyond it. For example, all genuine love surrenders to the other, and it points to the surrender of each divine Person to the Trinity’s plans for creation and redemption. All of the fallen creation goes through death in order to make way for new life, just as death to sin is necessary for the resurrection of new life in redemption and sanctification. In these two ways, and millions of others, the creation shows that God is the fulfillment of the world’s being.[16] But only eyes that have been opened by the Holy Spirit can see this. This is where the true analogy of being is different from its counterfeit in deism and liberal theology.

But Barth was never able to see this distinction, or to separate analogia entis from general revelation in any clear way. For him, the two were of a piece. Claims for both assumed “an inborn or acquired property of man” rather than the result of an act of God, or that man “has created his own faith,” which we “acquire on our own,” or involve “an abstract metaphysics of God, the world, or religion which is supposed to obtain at all times and in all places.”[17]

He insisted in Church Dogmatics 2.1 that Romans 1:18–20 “is not speaking of man in the cosmos in himself and in general.” Paul referred not to some knowledge of God possible apart from knowledge of Jesus Christ, but only “the truth of revelation proclaimed by the apostle of Jesus Christ.” “It is impossible to draw from the text a statement . . . concerning a natural union with God or knowledge of God on the part of man in himself and as such” (CD 2.1, 119, 121).

In discussing Romans 1 and Paul’s Mars Hill sermon in Acts 17, Barth denied any natural analogy between the creation and its creator (analogia entis) and any revelation available to all apart from the revelation of Jesus Christ, hence general revelation (CD 2.1, 117–23). The rejection of the analogy and of general revelation went together.

What about Barth’s appeal later in his career to “little lights” and “parables of the Kingdom”? Did those discussions represent a change of mind on general revelation? Apparently not. Barth argued that the occurrence of such parables was not to be ascribed to “the sorry hypothesis” of natural theology. As George Hunsinger explains, Barth could not accept any true apprehension of God without personal conversion.[18] The notion that there could be objective revelation that was there even if a person could not apprehend it—this was impossible for Barth to accept.

James Barr agrees that there was no change in the later Barth. “There was no talk of a revision, still less of an abandonment, of the violent earlier attacks on natural theology. . . . Since this is so, we are justified in taking the position of complete denial of natural theology, Barth’s position in his Gifford Lectures, in his controversy with Brunner, and in the earlier volumes of the Church Dogmatics, as the classic Barthian position.”[19]

The great Lutheran theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg studied under Barth and saw this problem in Barth’s theology. Pannenberg observed that Barth could not distinguish between natural knowledge of God and a natural theology constructed by autonomous man. As a result, according to Pannenberg, Barth created a false dichotomy—either Enlightenment-style natural theology that thinks natural revelation is enough for saving knowledge of God or no general revelation at all. Either knowledge of God apart from knowledge of Christ was something independently possessed by a human being for personal use, or there was no knowledge of God at all apart from revelation of the gospel.[20]

The great Dutch Reformed theologian G. C. Berkouwer joined Pannenberg in criticizing Barth for failing to distinguish between the natural theology of the Enlightenment and explicitly Christian natural theology based on general revelation. More recently, Alister McGrath has added a similar critique, along with a new call for revival of properly Christian natural theology.[21]

Barth misinterpreted the classic texts, not only Acts 17 but also Psalm 19 and Romans 1. On Psalm 19, he pointed to verse 3, “their voice is not heard,” and argued that the voices of creation are dumb, mute. After all, he wrote, the Old Testament shows that no one outside of Israel knew the true God. On Romans 1, Barth argued, following Luther, that all the so-called revelation of God to man through nature results only in condemnation. Therefore, Barth reasoned, since the testimonies of God in nature are invariably misunderstood, they are not revelation at all. They falsify rather than illumine. The only true knowledge we have of God is in the face of Jesus Christ. By implication, all the supposed types that observers say they find in nature and history and that point to the true God are counterfeit, pointing instead to things other than the true God, merely imagined in likeness to the observers. In a word, they are idols. The search for types is a wild goose chase, with a pagan god at its end.

Barth was practicing eisegesis rather than exegesis. He was reading into rather than out of the text. When the psalmist said the voices of the creation are “not heard,” he probably meant that their voice is not understood rather than that it is not sounded. For he went on to say that these voices “go out through all the earth” and reach to “the end of the world.” The point seems to be that their voices are sounded to all the world, not just Israel. Something is being proclaimed to the world outside of Israel, even if it is not always understood or received.

In Romans Paul said the same thing. In seven different ways he claimed that God makes himself known to what seems to be every human heart, on which he has written his law (2:15). That is the first way. In Romans 1, Paul claimed, “For what can be known [γνωστὸν] about God [that’s the second] is plain [φανερόν] to them [the third], because God has shown [ἐφανέρωσεν] it to them [fourth]. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood [fifth] and seen [νοούμενα καθορᾶται] [sixth] through the things he has made. So they are without excuse; for though they knew [γνόντες] [seventh] God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him” (Rom 1:19–21a).

Barth is right that Paul suggested that this general revelation simply leads to condemnation. After all, Paul said that these same human beings “exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (1:25). But we must remember three things. First, Paul was speaking of the universal tendency of every human being to turn away from God to self and the world. This was true of every believer before the grace of God turned him to God. It speaks of the Fall, not redemption from the Fall. It speaks of the tendency to misread the signs in creation, not the legitimacy of the signs themselves. Just because our sinful tendency before redemption is to misread creation, this does not mean that once redeemed we cannot learn to read properly.

Second, Paul repeatedly declared that the message comes through loud and clear that there is a Creator who is divine and eternally powerful. Third, Scripture suggests that some fallen creatures can see something in the signs to encourage a search for the true sign-maker. This same Paul told the Athenians on Mars Hill that God “allotted the times of [human beings’] existence and the boundaries of their places where they should live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him” (Acts 17:26–27).

So Psalm 19 and Romans 1 teach that there is natural revelation from God. God speaks through nature of his existence and power and deity. Most use this revelation most of the time for idolatrous purposes, but it is revelation nonetheless. Scripture suggests that some unbelievers might use this natural revelation as an incentive to search for the true God. This search, if it is successful, always leads to the Trinitarian God of Scripture and is always both inspired and led by the Holy Spirit. Human nature by itself is powerless to see the meaning of the signs or to follow them to the true God. But God uses his signs to open eyes to his glory in the creation.

What can we say about Barth, then? He rightly warned of our temptation to confuse culture with Christ and disastrously so. But his rejection of Scripture’s testimony to natural revelation was “more the result of an a priori view of revelation than an unprejudiced reading of the text itself.”[22] So Barth departed from a majority view of the Great Tradition, that while there is no saving knowledge of God in nature, there is nevertheless true knowledge available to the unregenerate, and that the regenerate have available to them a near-infinite panoply of revelations in man and the world testifying to the truths of redemption by the Triune God. So Barth departed from Basil, Gregory Nazianzus, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and Edwards on this, and even from many of the Lutheran and Reformed scholastics.

Lecture 3 will explore divine types in nature. There is strong Scriptural testimony to this—far more than many Christians have imagined—and there are some surprising examples outside of Scripture.

Notes

1. “Heidelberg Disputation,” in Luther’s Works (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1957), 31:52. The last part of this translation of his statement is curious. “Quae facta sunt” is translated as historical events (“things which have actually happened”) rather than things of nature (“things which have been made”). The latter translation is probably more accurate, and certainly closer to the Greek that lies behind the Latin. Perhaps this played a role in the way twentieth-century Lutherans have regarded this critical Pauline passage and natural revelation
2. Helpful in understanding Luther’s hypothetical monk is Carl Beckwith’s superb recounting of the medieval and Reformation debates about faith and reason in The Holy Trinity (Fort Wayne, IN: Luther Academy, 2016), 1–112. For the monk, see 75.
3. Luther’s Works (St. Louis: Concordia, 1955), 12:140. This American edition will be referred to as AE.
4. Ibid.
5. Beckwith, The Holy Trinity, 74–80.
6. Roland Ziegler, “Natural Knowledge of God and the Trinity,” quoted in Beckwith, The Holy Trinity, 27, italics added.
7. August Graebner, “Doctrinal Theology,” in Beckwith, The Holy Trinity, 27.
8. Beckwith, The Holy Trinity, 87, italics added.
9. Luther, “Lectures on Hebrews, 1517–18, ” in AE 29:111; quoted in Beckwith, 64. For the “left handed and partial knowledge,” see AE 22:152–53. On natural revelation having to die, AE 22:158.
10. ST 1.2.Q62.a.2; 1.2.Q63.a.1; the translation is that of the Dominican Fathers, Summa Theologica, 5 vols., rev. ed. 1920 (Notre Dame: Christian Classics, 1981).
11. Arvin Vos, Aquinas, Calvin, and Contemporary Protestant Thought (Grand Rapids: Christian College Consortium and Eerdmans, 1985), 83.
12. De Trinitate, trans. Rose Emanuella Brennan (St. Louis: Herder, 1946), 2, 1 obj. 1, resp.; 2, 3; cited in Vos, Aquinas, Calvin, and Contemporary Protestant Thought, 73–74.
13. Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2007), 124–25. For his insistence that the unregenerate could use analogy to discover not merely the existence but also many attributes of the true God, see also 138–47, 156–70.
14. Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 214–15.
15. John Webster, “Balthasar and Karl Barth,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar, ed. Edwards T. Oakes and David Moss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 249–50; Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth (in German, 1951; English, San Francisco: Ignatius, 1991).
16. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Epilogue, trans. Edward T. Oakes (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2004), 59, 109; Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat: Aphorisms, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1995), 31; Balthasar, “The Fathers, the Scholastics, and Ourselves,” Communio 24 (Summer 1997 [orig. 1939]): 391.
17. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics [CD] 1.1 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2010), 245, 329, 389, 325.
18. CD 4.3.1, 117; George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 275.
19. James Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 13–14.
20. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 1:73–118.
21. G. C. Berkouwer, General Revelation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), 154; Alister McGrath, The Open Secret: A New Vision for Natural Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008).
22. Berkouwer, General Revelation, 154.