We Speak…in the Words…Which the Holy Ghost Teacheth

By Francis I. Andersen

Ridley College, Melbourne, Victoria

Prominent in current theological discussion are deep probings into the nature of revelation. The most influential writers are almost unanimous in their enunciation of a principle which is taken as axiomatic for all subsequent discussion; the discussion, in fact, often amounts to a defence of this dictum and an exposition of its consequences. The following representative quotations should give a fair idea of the emphasis involved in this pervasive thesis.

• “It has become a commonplace in modern theology that the Biblical revelation is not a system of abstract propositional truths, but, both in form and in substance, a history of the acts of God.”[1]
• Revelation…is primarily God’s activity, not certain eternal ideas or certain divinely authenticated or dictated doctrines.”[2]
• “The Bible…is not centered in a series of moral, spiritual and liturgical teachings, but in the story of a people who lived at a certain time and place.”[3]
• “Divine revelation is not a book or a doctrine; the Revelation is God Himself in His self-manifestation within history.”[4]
• “God does not give us information by communication; He gives us Himself in communion.”[5]
• It is a “wrong meaning” when revelation is “understood as the verbal or conceptual communication of truth by divine authority.”[6]
• “In the last resort it is not information about God that is revealed, but very God Himself incarnate in Jesus Christ our Lord.”[7]
• “The revelation is Jesus Christ Himself, not a doctrine about Jesus Christ. In true faith we have to do with Jesus Christ Himself, not with a doctrine about Him.”[8]
• “What is proclaimed in this Gospel is not a true doctrine or a sound principle, but a Person who is himself the Truth.”[9]
• “In revelation it is God who reveals, and it is God who is revealed. Revelation is not doctrine.”[10]
• “ Revelation…comes in the form of vision, not of information.”[11]

Anyone with a predilection for orthodoxy will welcome a trend that faces the problem of special revelation seriously, and will listen hopefully to its claims to have corrected the too soft doctrine of liberalism while avoiding the over rigid formalism of both mediaeval and reformed scholasticism. But we notice at once that the modern doctrine is unanimous and unequivocal only in what it rejects and is by no means clear as to what it affirms. These writers are wholehearted and united in stating that revelation is not doctrine, but when we examine the reasons they give for this rejection, we find differing, often contradictory, arguments. And while they are agreed that revelation does not include statements of truth, they are unable to concur in what revelation actually is, except that it is dynamic, not static, personal, not conceptual, existential, not formal. It is redemptive, but not instructive; it brings salvation from sin, but not from ignorance, or, at least, it imparts no certain, final or communicable knowledge of the saving Lord.

One of the great virtues of the modern view is its awareness that revelation involved more than the production of the Bible, and that the apprehension of it now involves more than reading the Bible, but in reacting against bibliomonism it has concentrated on other factors in the process, often with a denial that the Bible itself is an integral and vital part of the process.

The emphasis varies. Some emphasise the concrete historical actuality of the saving acts of God as distinct from abstract teachings; others stress the reception of revelation by faith in a contemporary encounter with the living Christ.[12] The usual emphasis on the personal activity of God himself in revelation in the recent phase of discussion is often traced to William Temple’s contribution to the volume on Revelation edited by Baillie and Martin, and the particular elaboration of his point of view in his Gifford Lectures.[13] Here the “Principle of revelation” was defined as “the coincidence of event and aPPreciation”.[14] “Its essence is intercourse of mind and event, not the communication of doctrine distilled from that intercourse.” “What is offered to man’s apprehension in any specific Revelation is not truth concerning God but the living God Himself.”[15]

It is doubtful if Temple would recognise his original thought in the use to which his contrast has been put in an overbalancing that denies that any conceptual element (regulated bv God himself) is involved as an important aid, indeed, an indispensable one, to reaching the event of personal communion.[16] Although he repeats a similar thought in the Preface to his Readings in St. John’s Gospel, “The Word of God does not consist of printed propositions; it is living; it is personal; it is Jesus Christ”, he immediately adds, “that living Word of God speaks to us through the printed words of Scripture; and all our study of those printed words helps us to receive it”.[17] When he comes to the exposition he recognizes fully not only the importance of the historical actuality and particularity of the revealing acts of God, but also the utility and necessity of the written medium of its transmission, not by any formal subscription to some doctrine of verbal inspiration, but by his conscientious attention to the words of the text. For instance, when he comments on John 4:23f, he says of the words “God is Spirit”, “that is the most fundamental proposition in theology”[18] and treats them with ultimate seriousness as the truth because it is God who utters them.[19]

In addressing ourselves to this problem we do not wish now to examine the detailed exposition of the axiom that revelation does not include doctrine but to question the validity of the axiom itself at its very root. When Brunner says that the biblical idea of revelation means “the whole of the divine activity for the salvation of the world”,[20] we wish to ask why the production of the Bible is specifically excluded from the acts of God and regarded primarily as an act of man conditioned by God’s saving acts and therefore only indirectly the result of revelation. In trying to identify the function of the Bible in the total process of revelation we do not intend to simplify the process of revelation to the production of a body of infallible propositions dictated by God to men, so that the content of revelation is now identical with a corpus of inspired documents. So far as I know, no orthodox theologian has ever made this crude identification of revelation with the Bible as such; the traditional doctrine is much more dynamic than its modern critics suppose: but it is part of that doctrine that “revelation, in the Biblical sense of the term, is the communication of information….The purpose of the Lord in granting revelation is to impart knowledge”.[21] It was held that revelation culminated in an infallible, inscripturated record: “Revelation is but half revelation unless it be infallibly communicated; it is but half communicated unless it be infallibly recorded”.[22]

The traditional view, then, is that by progressive revelation God revealed certain truths to his people; that from this instruction he preserved for his church a body of teaching which is co-extensive with the canonical scriptures; that this is the inheritance of the church, which it must assert and defend; the deposit is final and adequate, and any progress in Christian understanding, now after its completion, is achieved, not by a continuation of revelation in the same manner as of old, nor in new forms, but by Spirit-taught comprehension and apprehension of what has been done and taught once for all. The Lord has yet more light and truth to break forth, but it will break forth from his Word, and is not to be sought elsewhere. The Scriptures are normative and are to regulate all our thought and speech about God. We must believe what we read here, we may believe what is not expressly excluded here, we must not believe what is contrary to what we find here, and we must reject what is rejected here.

Whatever absurdities and abuses may have grown up to vitiate or discredit this principle, it has been so central to the thinking of Christendom for so long that the essential heart of it cannot be lightly abandoned, and to retain the lasting worth of this essentially biblical and catholic conception does not require us to revert to the absurd fantasy of the allegorisings of the fathers, nor to the incoherent proof-text methods of the scholastics, nor to the academic aridity of the classical Protestant dogmaticians. Nor does it require us to turn our backs on the results of scientific study of the Bible that have been achieved in recent times.

Revelation may involve instruction in the truth without becoming static or impersonal. Here we intend to maintain that a truly biblical doctrine of revelation will understand it as a dynamic, personal, existential, saving event in which God leads those whom he calls to a living faith into a knowledge of the truth by means of human language, i.e., plain words, and that the holy Scriptures are precisely the instrument of that instruction and the medium of that encounter, created by God specifically for that purpose, and perpetually wielded by the Holy Spirit to that end.

Before we proceed to justify this position, it may be useful to test the weight of the complaints brought against it by contemporary writers, although we cannot deal with them in detail. Some see the orthodox confidence in Scripture as the result of an illicit desire for certainty, and Brunner says “it has always been disastrous” when the Church has “sought for certainties”.[23] Paul Tillich, who agrees with the rest in the rejection of traditional doctrine,[24] sees in it a demonic desire for something absolute in a human existence which is ever bound by relativities.[25] Barth sees in it an idolatrous desire for objectivity.[26] There is no doubt that these complaints point to real dangers and to weaknesses in personal conduct that have disfigured the witness of orthodox theologians; and it may appear a cheap kind of retaliation to reply that the dialectical and existential theologians have not escaped them either, but marred their work by an affectation of finality, by contemptuous and unloving remarks about “fundamentalists” and by a dogmatism altogether at variance with their own professed principles, but characteristic of any man who is carried away by a passionate conviction of the truth. But the comparison may serve to remind us all that we do not measure ourselves by ourselves, but stand nder the judgment of the Word of God. And this means that the vital question for all our theologies, if they are to be Christian, and a question which may be posed without any a priori conceptions about biblical inspiration, is whether they are truly biblical.

It is at this point that contemporary theology betrays an uneasy conscience. Aware that it is rejecting a long tradition, it defends itself with the claim that it is actually orthodoxy that is pernicious and heretical, that neo-orthodoxy is a recovery of biblical truth, and that it is, furthermore, a recovery of the essential positions of the first generations of reformed theologians.

Although the views that dominate the church at the present moment are patently datable to the middle decades of the present century, and their roots easily traceable in the philosophical and theological soil of the last century, they are now read back by their advocates into the decisive moments of the past, so that in the eyes of Bultmann the apostles are seen to be good twentieth century existentialists,[27] and Calvin turns out to be a Barthian before Barth. Thus William Niesel in his study of Calvin’s theology says, “Calvin in his theology is concerned fundamentally about this living Lord; not about certain doctrines which he has extracted from Scripture”.[28] While this antithesis can be paralleled from dozens of passages in contemporary writers, I do not know of a single passage in Calvin that suggests he felt that way. Niesel is clearly motivated by a desire to have the name of Calvin on his side. One could hardly imagine, in fact, a generalisation more foreign to the spirit of the Institutes than this. It is true that Calvin was passionately concerned about Christ, and it was precisely this that made him so careful to give a correct account of Christ and that made him so intolerant of any untruthful statements about his Lord. The true doctrine he found in the Bible with complete certainty,[29] and there is no possible way of distinguishing his concern for Christ from his concern for the truth about Christ, his preaching of Christ from his exposition of Scripture.[30]

There is a curious thing about the claim of contemporary theology to be “biblical”. Since it is the prevailing fashion to despise text-quoters as crude biblicists, the need is not felt to adduce actual passages of Scripture in support of any claim that one’s views are scriptural. The result is that a fantastic array of conflicting views are being foisted on us, all equally declared to be biblical. There are deep reasons for this confusion. It is partly due to superficial knowledge of what the Bible actually teaches, partly due to irresponsible and unscientific exegesis, but mainly due to a low view of the Bible itself as primarily composed of human reflections on the revealing acts of God, and not as itself one of those acts.

As a typical example of these misrepresentations of biblical concepts we may take the article on ἀποκαλύππω in Kittel’s Theologisches WÖrterbuch zum Neuen Testament. Instead of scientific objectivity we find our ubiquitous axiom. In the Old Testament “Offenbarung ist nicht Mitteilung ÜbernatÜrlichen Wissens”,[31] and in the New Testament “Die Offenbarung wird auch in der Folgezeit nicht in Sinne der Mitteilung ÜbernatÜrlichen Wissens verstanden, sondern im Sinne des Aussichheraustretens Gottes, als EnthÜllung der jenseitigen, kommenden Welt”.[32]

When we begin to evaluate this prevailing theology by comparing it with what the Bible actually is, we discover at first some superficial grounds for its contentions. The Bible contains little that could be called doctrine in a formalised or systematised sense. Its message has the form of witnessing, preaching, practical instruction. It would be possible to maintain, of course, that these materials readily lend themselves to systematisation, and that this task has already been begun in certain New Testament writings. But attention to form alone does not disclose the stark contrast between the modern analysis of the process of revelation and the representation we find in the Bible itself.

The message of the Bible may be prophetic rather than propositional, didactic rather than pedantic, but the question remains whether this kerugma and didache are from God himself, or are merely a secondary human witness to God. According to the current view revelation occurred through certain redeeming acts of God and there were certain gifted (or chosen) souls who were able (or enabled) to perceive the revelatory significance of these acts and to testify (more or less effectively) to them as saving acts. The accounts they give of the acts represent subsequent believing reflexion on the existential encounter and function as an invitation to its renewal. Their preaching is not God calling men to himself, but men pointing other men to God. The saving quality of the acts is not declared by God since revelation involves no statements.

Even when some recognition is given to more or less activity of the Holy Spirit in aiding these reflexions and utterances, so that human insight is identified with divine inspiration, the final result is still said to be encumbered by many limitations which partially vitiate its divine quality—the sinful finitude of the individual messenger, the circumscribing views of the times, the feebleness of human thought and language—so that it remains partial, incomplete, fallible and in no sense final, authoritative, binding. The speech of such men is not to be taken as God’s own doctrine.

In contrast to this the Bible represents the activity of God in the historical processes of revelation as comprising both the performance of the saving acts and the sending of messages explaining their saving quality. Both sides of revelation are achieved through human agencies, in and through the events of history and the events of their personal lives, and are, in fact, part of a single whole; both are fully human and adventitious in their historical realisation and at the same time fully divine in their inner source and meaning. Although both act and teaching are accommodated to the capacities of the chosen agents (for God never does violence to the freedom and humanity of his instruments) this does not vitiate the essentially divine quality of the deeds and of the explanations. How many times is it asserted in the Bible that God’s acts are righteous and his words are true?

Already in the Old Testament there is a burning concern about truth as well as justice. The fact that its writers were apparently not acquainted with the logicl analysis and systematic ordering of concepts makes no difference to the fact that they could tell a correct statement from a lie, and felt the holy consequences of right speech about God and the disastrous results of wrong remarks about God. The tremendous struggle with false prophets was not a struggle between conflicting insights, but, in biblical terms, was the express condemnation of men who said things about God that were not true because they spoke from their own hearts; whereas the authentic prophets delivered messages that God himself had given them. The tests recommended for distinguishing the true from the false, moreover, imply that God had given his people a knowledge of himself and of his ways sufficient to enable them to identify his genuine spokesman. The details of this do not concern us here, but it is worth pointing out that even when the Bible pays the fullest attention to the circumstantial conditions and psychological processes which brought the message to its utterance in an individual, as with Jeremiah and others whose life and message are indistinguishable, the ultimate core of the situation was that they declared the Word of the Lord, and trust in the Lord was displayed in heeding what they said. It is true that the prophets were witnesses, pointing away from themselves to the Lord; but they were also spokesmen, standing over against the people, speaking as if what they said is what the Lord says. But modern theology has no place for a “thus saith the Lord”; it allows only a recital “thus did the Lord”.[33]

Modern writers speak about the destructive effects of the notion that the Bible contains God-given doctrines.[34] But in the Bible itself, revealing acts are not merely accompanied by, but the consummation of revelation in its reception by men is achieved by, the instrumentality of statements about God which are regarded as entirely true because God gave them. How many times does the Old Testament speak of God as a God of knowledge and wisdom, and of his Word as pure and true? God does not often speak from heaven; but he is never silent. He did not meet the minds of men in a blank subject/subject confrontation, but in stern rebukes and gentle consolations. The rebukes came in a double experience—a disaster coupled with a denunciation; the consolations came as a combination of some incident of rescue from danger with spoken assurances of divine favor. And as the justness of God ensures the rightness of what he does, even when his agent is a sinful human king, so his truthfulness ensures the correctness of what he says, even when his mouthpiece is a sinful human prophet. If we allow that God can do things to us in history through fallen creatures, without his acts becoming contaminated by any moral taint, why should it be thought impossible for him to instruct us through fallible creatures, without becoming untruthful?

What the current view amounts to is a denial that God exercises any role as the teacher of his people; yet this is a dominant conception in the whole Bible, and it becomes even more dominant in the New Testament. Jesus accepted the title and exercised all the functions of a teacher. This was not a weak and beggarly element, an interim arrangement; Jesus attached permanent significance to his sayings. His real disciples are those who will continue in his word and thus know the liberating truth; but this “word” is now transported back to heaven, and we are not allowed to identify it with what Jesus actually said! The New Testament knows nothing of an unutterable word in the transcendental realm of personal encounter; Jesus asks us to keep his sayings, he tells his apostles to go into all the world and to teach men to observe everything he has commanded. The theologians of our day can only say that biblical revelation does not produce divine doctrines by ignoring the entire structure of our Lord’s ministry. If we only have a God who performs redemptive acts, but gives no explanation of them, then the apostles were altogether deceived when they proclaimed their account of the achievement of Jesus Christ, not as their reflective witness to God’s act, but as the Word of God (e.g., 1 Thess 2:13).

There is a wonderful passage in Mark’s Gospel (6:34) which tells how Jesus was overwhelmed by compassion when he saw the neglected crowds. In response to their need “he began to teach them many things”. He not only did good; he spoke. The Saviour’s love was manifested by bringing light into the world; he met the full width of human need—to heal the body, to restore the spirit, to instruct the intellect. Only thus fully aided could men obey the highest commandment to love the Lord with heart and soul and mind. This saving-teaching ministry of the Christ is explained elsewhere in the New Testament in terms of an analysis of sin as blindness of heart through the darkness of ignorance that is in men through unbelief. The blindness is healed and the darkness dispelled by the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. This has no resemblance to the Socratic equation of sin with ignorance so that men are saved by knowledge as such; in the New Testament unbelief is a deeper factor than sin, and salvation is not by information through knowledge, but by grace through faith. But at the same time knowledge does have a saving function, partly as a means to faith but chiefly as a fruit of it.

Paul rejoiced that in Jesus Christ were hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge and the noble contentions of the later Alexandrine school set this wisdom against all the rich philosophical heritage of the ancient world, not as its negation but as its fulfilment. These claims do not mean that Jesus was thought of, in Kierkegaard’s contemptuous phrase, “as if Christ were a professor, and as if the Apostles had formed a little scientific society”,[35] for against the pretensions of the gnostics to have secret enlightenment for the select initiates, the Christians insisted that the wisdom of God was available to all men by public proclamation in plain words, and had been guaranteed by God himself through the creation of holy Scriptures.

If now our theological teachers tell us that we may no longer rely on the Bible in this old-fashioned way, we must humbly ask them in reply how they can claim that their views are dominical when the only tradition we have of the Lord’s outlook is that he called his followers fools for not believing everything that the prophets had spoken and interpreted his saving work to them out of these Scriptures (Luke 24:25); and how they can say that their views are apostolic when Paul said his ministry consisted of “saying nothing but what the prophets and Moses said” (Acts 26:22). This is the issue that troubles us, and it may be faced without becoming involved in arguments about the absurdity or otherwise of theories of verbal inspiration.

This survey shows, moreover, how completely the evidence is falsified when we are told that anxiety about doctrine and the unfortunate indentification of revelation with doctrine marks a hardening and a coldness that came with the loss of the early freedom and courage of Jesus’ disciples and the emergence of the institutionalised church.[36] The fact is that the New Testament is concerned through and through for speaking truthfully about God, and most of it is the direct product of that concern.

We have already agreed that revelation is more than doctrine but are insisting that it includes the giving of doctrines. For this reason we can agree with the distinction that is often made that “the Bible is not revelation, but the record of it”[37] so long as it is understood that the record is also given and guaranteed by God. We may allow that “the Bible itself, when it speaks of revelation, points beyond itself to an event, to which indeed it bears witness, but which is not the Bible itself”,[38] so long as it is understood that it is himself who gives the witness to his own saving deeds—διὰ τοῦ προφήτου λέγοντος. But this is not what these writers mean by their distinction, for they maintain that the “record” and the “witness” is only human.

The modern view makes an unnecessary cleavage between the personal and the propositional in revelation,[39] but the two are complementary, not contradictory. God reveals his very self; but this does not mean that he cannot give, or has not given, reliable information about himself. The information is not God, but it may be a help to one who is seeking God. If it is reliable information, given by God himself, its guidance will be effective. In the New Testament, statements about God in the preaching of the gospel are called a declaration of the truth—truth received by revelation.

To belittle propositions because they are impersonal is to destroy human relations by despising their normal medium.

The bliss of being loved is different from the words of lovemaking, but the “proposition”, “I love you”, is a welcome, nay, indispensable means to the consummation of love in actuality. The fact that the words are feeble, the fact that they may be spoken in deceit, or crippled by mistrust—this weakness of the instrument leaves undiminished its tremendous power in its proper use. But in modern theology we have a Lover-God who makes no clear declarations!

When Bultmann states that “revelation is an event that destroys death, not a doctrine that death does not exist”,[40] what does this mean? There is such a doctrine, and if it results from the actuality of Christ’s victory over the grave and correctly describes it, then the statement of the fact is part of the communication of the revealed event. If one wishes to teach another about this death-destroying event, and to say with Isaiah and Paul, “Death is swallowed up in victory!”, is not this statement the result of, and indeed a part of, the continuing means for the rediscovery of the fact of the self-disclosure of Jesus Christ himself as “he that lives and was dead and is alive for evermore” (Rev 1:18)? Is not this how the Holy Spirit uses the reading and preaching of the Word of God?

There is profound significance in the fact that in the Bible the term “the word of God” has two distinguishable but closely related meanings. It is commonly used for verbal messages purporting to come from God—prophetic oracle, the teaching of Jesus (Luke 5:1), apostolic preaching (Acts 6:2), holy writ as such (John 10:35). The title is also given to Jesus Christ himself (Rev 19:13), though rarely. But frequency does not matter; in the Bible the utterance of God is both personal and verbal, yet there are not two distinct modes or levels of utterance. Jesus the Person, as God’s Message, is disclosed by means of words which are a message about him. The written word points to the living Word because the incarnate Word declared himself by means of human speech, and we have absolutely no knowledge of him apart from the testimony of Scripture. There is no possible way of distinguishing one from the other.

The issue is not, as Brunner says, whether Jesus is identical with “a summary of sentences”.[41] Obviously he is not. The issue is whether certain sentences may properly be called the Word of God, i.e., whether they are given to us by God himself to describe Jesus correctly to us. While we cannot be reminded too often that God is more than our thoughts about him, and more, too, than his own statements about himself, it is utterly impossible to have revelation when the process is shrunk to a transcendental event in which God allegedly discloses himself, but says nothing in the only language we understand, human language. Unless God speaks, all we have is one’s subsequent reflexion on one’s encounter with him, and if one man is sufficiently curious to pry into another man’s private business with God, he might well ask what possible relevance reflexions on one man’s experience could possibly have for another (except a psychologist of religion) unless God himself has purposed to create a community of encounter by giving not only a definitive and normative experience, but, also, by regulating its analysis and expression so that the invitation to encounter is no longer a casual and relative thing, but is enforced by God himself. According to the Bible itself, God calls us personally by his holy Word[42] into the community of encounter, or, in the better biblical language, the holy Scriptures are able to make us wise unto salvation through faith in Jesus Christ (2 Tim 3:16).[43]

We have been conceding throughout that it is one thing to hear somebody talking about God and quite another thing to meet and know the living Lord. But this does not mean that it is improper to talk about God, or impossible to speak about him with some measure of truth. Instead of rejecting verbal revelation because of the limitations of thought and language we need rather to feel the utility of descriptions of God which aid us in gaining direct fellowship with him. This is the proper goal of all discourse about God, but we are left in great jeopardy if this most solemn use of language as an aid to salvation is no better than fallible, albeit believing, meditation on some redemptive experience. Why should it be thought unfitting or impossible that God himself should give us these descriptions so that we may be safely guided to his presence by his own voice and not left to the uncertain direction of human counsels? Is it not rather altogether in keeping with the gracious condescension of the eternal Only-begotten who tabernacled among us in human blood and flesh that the thought of the eternal Logos should be bodied forth in the humble attire of human speech?

Prevailing theology shows how deeply it is infected by the irrationality and scepticism of our age, by its fundamental mistrust of the capacity of language to serve as a vehicle of communication between mind and mind. This contempt for words is seen in the scorn which is hurled at those of us who continue to sustain a high view of biblical inspiration. Because we appeal to the text, because we insist on careful exegesis, because we think it is important to attend to small verbal details in order to hear the Word of God, we are said to be under the tyranny of a mechanical understanding of truth, clinging foolishly to an outmoded literalism.

For the moment we do not care to reply to this with the biblical arguments for verbal inspiration, although we believe that they have immense weight; we are content to insist that it is language that makes man human, and far from being chains around his thought, words are the instrument of his highest spiritual achievements. To belittle the importance of words, to ridicule the scrupulous attention to verbal details as a fussy superstition, is finally to despair of all rational human endeavour. Words are tools. They have their limitations, but they also have a noble and effective use. Because they cannot communicate everything it does not follow that they cannot communicate anything. Because they cannot convey everything without ambiguity it does not follow that they cannot convey anything with certainty. Any successful communication—from poet, scholar, lover—will depend on the speaker’s command of words and on the care and integrity with which the listener heeds them. To be a literalist is to do homage to man’s greatest invention and God’s best gift—language. To be a literalist means to be aware of the flexibility and rigor of language in its infinitude of possibilities and to do justice to it as the only concrete mode of communication we have, or at least as the mode which incomparably surpasses all others in its effectiveness for communication and communion. To take language seriously is to take up communion with the man or with the God who speaks as a serious enterprise.[44]

An understanding of the Bible’s own representation of the processes of revelation will deliver us from this scepticism. While the divine self-disclosure is personal, historic and specific (existential, if you prefer that word) the saving encounter of the redeeming Lord with the needy sinner is achieved by words uttered by God as well as by deeds done. In the Bible God is represented throughout as speaking, by whatever instrumentality, the mind and mouth of a prophet, the sayings of Jesus, the pen of poet or historian. And for the believing reader he continues to speak from the sacred page so that study evokes praise and all is communion. We give him no glory by saying that the instrument is too humble for his grandeur.

This Word of God, spoken in the air or printed in a book seems indeed to be a feeble instrument; but with the breath of the Spirit[45] it becomes a hammer of destruction for the old, and a laver of regeneration for the new. To agree in the truth of God’s holy Word, to set forth his true and lively Word, with meek heart and due reverence to hear and receive his holy Word, is not an act of idolatry, but an act of laudable worship to the Lord and Life-giver whose speech it is and who governs the church by this sceptre.[46]

This dynamic doctrine of the Lordship of the Holy Ghost in the Church does justice to both the formal and propositional side of the biblical revelation and also its essentially personal quality. We do not neglect a man’s personal self-disclosure by paying careful attention to what he says; we do not treat him as a thing because we listen to his words. It is the reverse. Language is the most personal feature of a man’s conduct with others. When the Bible speaks of the living quality of the spoken or written Word of God it is recognising the voice of the Spirit of the Lord, speaking in and with the Word, applying and confirming it with signs following.

Such an estimate of holy Scripture as the speech of the living God is essential for a truly biblical theology.

Notes

1. George S. Hendry, “The Dogmatic Form of Barth’s Theology”, Theology Today, XIII (1956) 3, pp. 312f.
2. Foreword to the American edition of Alan Richardson, A Preface to Bible Study (Philadelphia, 1944), p. 5.
3. George Ernest Wright, Biblical Archaeology (Philadelphia, 1957), p. 17a.
4. Emil Brunner, Revelation and Reason, Eng. tr. by Olive Wyon (Philadelphia, 1946), p. 8.
5. John Baillie, The Idea of Revelation in Recent Thought (New York, 1956), p. 47.
6. Ibid., p. 15.
7. Ibid., p. 28.
8. Emil Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of God (Dogmatics, Vol. I), Eng. tr. by Olive Wyon (Philadelphia, 1950), p. 53.
9. John A. Mackay, “Christian Missions at this Hour”, Theology Today, XV (1958) 1, p. 22.
10. Nathaniel Micklem, Ultimate Questions (New York and Nashville, 1955), p. 20; cf. p. 36.
11. Ibid., p. 60.
12. In its modern development this conception owes a great deal to Buber. In his discussion of the third sphere in which the world of relation arises he emphasises the ineffable nature of the confrontation: “There the relation is clouded, yet it discloses itself; it does not use speech, yet begets it” (I and Thou, Eng. Tr. [Edinburgh, 1937], p. 6). This speech is the language of address, not of expression or description: “You say Thou to it and give yourself to it, it says Thou to you and gives itself to you. You cannot make yourself understood with others concerning it, you are alone with it” (p. 33). Again: “the relation to the Thou is direct. No system of ideas, no foreknowledge, and no fancy intervene between I and Thou” (p. 11). It is needless to point out how different this is from the biblical doctrine of the living God who speaks and who commands his prophets to speak his Word to men. In this area Christian theology is under heavy pressures from the whole existentialist movement, but differs from other modern developments in retaining more of Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the Christ-centered “moment” as well as his more general principle that “subjectivity is truth” (the reiterated theme of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the “Philosophical Fragments”). At the same time the formal historical development of this concept in systematic theology owes a great deal to Schleiermacher who emphatically rejected the notion that revelation involves the impartation of doctrine to man as a cognitive being (The Christian Faith [Edinburgh, 1928], p. 50.) In this respect neo-orthodoxy is still essentially liberal at its core, being the dried-up irrational old age of a romantic passion.
13. “Revelation is given in events, and supremely in the historical Person of Christ” (op. cit., p. 105). The Gifford Lectures are Nature, Man and God (London, 1934).
14. Ibid., p. 315.
15. Ibid., pp. 316, 322.
16. The antithetical denial comes to an extreme in Buber. “For everything that has ever been devised and contrived in the time of the human spirit as precept…has nothing to do with the primal, simple fact of the meeting….Going out to the relation cannot be taught in the sense of precepts being given” (op. cit., pp. 77f). This is altogether different from Kierkegaard’s insistence that the truth cannot be learnt and that salvation cannot be attained by learning or thinking; for S.K. retained the basic Christian category of “witness” and of “apostle” as distinct from “teacher” and “genius” in his thinking.
17. London, 1945; p. ix.
18. Ibid., p. 64.
19. Temple clearly believed that God had given his people a body of certain truth which it was their duty to safeguard and to proclaim. In expounding John 2:11 (“His disciples believed on him”) he makes an important distinction between the private faith of an individual and the public teaching of the church. “They are not here said to believe Him, in the sense of believing that what He said was true, but to commit themselves to Him in personal trust. This is the faith which justifies. To believe true doctrine concerning Christ may help us to believe on Him; but for our spiritual welfare this latter is alone vital. For the Church, commissioned to transmit to all generations the true doctrine which may elicit saving faith, heresy is more deadly than hypocrisy or even than conscious sin; but for the individual the one vital matter is personal trust, and accepted heresy in its effect upon his soul may be quite unimportant. There have been saintly heretics and orthodox worldlings” (ibid., pp. 37f).
20. Revelation and Reason, p. 8.
21. Edward J. Young, Thy Word is Truth (Grand Rapids, 1957), p. 41.
22. B. B. Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible (Philadelphia, 1948), p. 442.
23. Revelation and Reason, p. 8. This judgment also condemns the throbbing certainty of the New Testament!
24. “Revelation is popularly understood as a divine information about divine matters, given to prophets and apostles….Every word of the present discussion contradicts this distortion of the meaning of revelation” (Dynamics of Faith (New York, 1957), p. 78).
25. Systematic Theology: Vol. I (Chicago, 1951), pp. 86f.
26. See, for instance, his long discussion of “The Holy Spirit the Subjective Reality of Revelation” in Church Dogmatics 1/2, The Doctrine of the Word of God, Ch. 2, Part III, especially p. 237 of the English translation.
27. This is particularly evident in his recent commentary on the fourth Gospel.
28. The Theology of Calvin (Philadelphia, 1956), p. 28.
29. Calvin often asserts that certainty comes from reliance on the written Word of God and says of our confidence in Scripture as a whole “the Lord God has made us so completely certain in this matter…” (“Preface to OlivÉtan’s New Testament” in Calvin: Commentaries [Library of Christian Classics] [Philadelphia, 1958], p. 64). The whole preface is worthy of study in the present connection. Note also Calvin’s arguments against the Anabaptists who “dream that the Holy Spirit is injured when men attend to the ‘letter’“ (Com. on Jer 26:4f in op. cit., p. 82).
30. A passage from the “Preface” quoted above will show how inextricably combined these two are in Calvin. “This is what we should in short seek in the whole of Scripture: truly to know Jesus Christ, and the infinite riches that are comprised in him and are offered to us by him from God the Father. If one were to sift thoroughly the Law and the Prophets, he would not find a single word which would not draw and bring us to him….Here, I say once again, is enclosed all the wisdom which men can understand, and ought to learn in this life; which no angel, or man, dead or living, may add to or take away from. This is where we ought to stop and put a limit to our understanding, mixing nothing of our own with it and refusing any doctrine whatever which might be added to it. For anyone who undertakes to teach one other syllable beyond what is taught us in it, ought to be accursed before God and his church (ibid., pp. 70f).
31. Band III, p. 575.
32. Ibid., p. 586.
33. That theology is recital is the theme of G. E. Wright’s excellent study in biblical theology, God Who Acts.
34. Brunner is most unsparing in his castigation. “Of all the mistakes made by the Christian Church this misunderstanding [the fundamental error which equates the revelation with revealed doctrine (cf. n. 12)] of revelation and of faith may be raid to have had the most disastrous results” (Revelation and Reason, p. 8). “This alteration in the understanding of faith, which turned the relation of trust in, and obedience to, the Lord of the Church into the authoritarian doctrinal belief in the Bible, is the ultimate reason for the perversion and weakness in Christianity and the Church, from the second century down to the present day” (p. 39). Although evangelicals do have a characteristic doctrinal belief in the Bible, their passionate insistence on the primacy and simplicity of faith in Christ has laid them more open to the charge of subjectivism and pietism than of intellectualism.
35. Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Princeton, 1941), p. 193. His barb is directed against the speculative Hegelian professors of theology.
36. Brunner certainly minimises the evidence in the New Testament when he points merely to 2 Tim 3:16 as evidence for what he calls “the beginning of this unfortunate identification” (Revelation and Reason, p. 9, n. 13). Baillie also says of the allegedly improper and anxious desire for right doctrine: “A beginning of it can already be detected in the latest books of the New Testament itself, but it appears much more plainly in the generation following, and then grows apace” (The Idea of Revelation, p, 29; cf. p. 87). But sometimes the canonical writings are spared and only the Fathers are blamed. “What else is wrong with the Apostolic Fathers than precisely their attempt to systematize, legalize, moralize, or institutionalize the living encounter?” (Markus Barth, The Journal of Religion, 37 (1957), p. 47b).
37. C. B. Moss, The Christian Faith (London, 1943), p. 211.
38. Brunner, Revelation and Reason, p. 12.
39. Brunner develops the contrast between I-it and I-Thou knowledge to its sharpest, insisting that “error creeps in where the two forms of knowledge become confused with one another” (ibid., p. 40). But he is unable to find any point of contact between descriptive and experiential knowledge of God, so that the former, being empirical, cannot be true, and the latter, being intuitive, cannot be rational. Hence there can be no Christian theology at all.
40. Der Begriff der Offenbarung im Neuen Testament, p. 22.
41. Dogmatics, Vol. I., p. 23.
42. The phrase is used in the Anglican collect for St. Andrew’s day, but is common in Reformed theology.
43. The issue is not “the absolute identity of revelation and Biblical doctrine” (Emil Brunner, Dogmatics I, p. 45), but whether any truth is revealed, whether biblical doctrines are revealed.
44. Christian worship, in public or private, would be impossible without words of penitence and praise from men to God, and words of absolution and edification from God to men through his ministers. The contemporary interest in semantics, the current wrestling with problems in communication and the theoretical linguistic analysis of “shift” with loss and gain in translation are abused if they only cause men to despair of language. The difficulties are to be faced in order to overcome them and to achieve community through language. Thucydides judiciously identified a symptom of the collapse of society when he complained that “the common meaning of words was turned about at men’s pleasure” (History of Peloponnesian War, III, 82). But even when Humpty Dumpty goes to the extreme of social irresponsibility and says, “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less”, conversation is still possible if he is willing to explain the new meaning, or if his listeners are patient enough to learn it from his usage.
45. It may be said in general criticism of neo-orthodoxy, and of Barth in particular, that its studied Christocentrism is always in danger of becoming a Christomonism incompatible with orthodox trinitarianism. This has been patent for a long time in the reluctance of Barth to admit of a relationship of God the Father to men manifested in “natural revelation”. Less attention has been focussed on the matter of the Lordship of the Holy Spirit in the church, but it is one of the reasons for an inadequate appreciation of the place of holy Scripture in the government of the church, since the relation of the church to God is understood solely in terms of the headship of Christ. This doctrine becomes unbiblical and absurd in the popular extension of the Pauline metaphor of the body of Christ to an ontological reality so that the church is an extension of the incarnation. The final, and blasphemous, stage is reached when men identify themselves with God: “The Body of Christ is Christ himself….The Church is Christ as he is present among and meets us upon earth after his resurrection….The Church is, in its essence, nothing other than this presence of Christ” (Anders Nygren, Christ and His Church (Philadelphia, 1956), p. 96).
46. The term was used for the Bible by Calvin in his letter dedicating the Institutes to the King of France (Eighth American edition of Allen’s translation [Philadelphia, 1949], Vol. I, p. 22). It is an interesting comparison that Clement of Rome called the Lord Jesus Christ “the sceptre of the majesty of God” (1 Clem. 16:2). This Christology is profoundly true, and the order of government of the Kingdom of God requires also an acknowledgment of the Paraclete as the true vicar of Christ on earth. The Bible will then be seen in a purely instrumental sense as the sceptre of the triune God.