Part I of this article ran in the November 24, 1958, issue.

Modern theology is, indeed, fully aware of the scriptural and churchly conviction that revelation is objectively and normatively presented in and by the biblical witness to it. In an attempt to do justice to this conviction while still holding Scripture to be no more than fallible human testimony, theologians focus attention on two “moments” in the divine self-revealing activity in which, they affirm, revelation does in fact confront us directly and authoritatively. These are, on the one hand, the sequence of historical events in which revelation was given, once for all, to its first witnesses; and, on the other, the repeated “encounter” in which the content of that original revelation is mediated to each successive generation of believers.

Both “moments,” of course, have a proper place in the biblical concept of revelation; what is distinctive about the modern view is not its insistence on them, as such, but its attempt to do justice to them while dispensing with that which in fact links them together and is integral to the true notion of each—namely, the concept of infallible Scriptures, given as part of the historical revelatory process and conveying that which is mediated in the “encounter.”

Most modern statements make mention of both “moments” in combination (compare Williams’ reference to “a fresh encounter with the personal and historical act of God in Christ”), but they vary in the emphasis given to each. Scholars whose main interest is in biblical history, such as C. H. Dodd and H. Wheeler Robinson, naturally stress the first (cf. Dodd, History and the Gospel, London, Nisbet, 1938; and Robinson, Inspiration and Revelation in the Old Testament, London, Oxford University Press, 1946). Those chiefly concerned with systematic theology and apologetics, such as (reading from the right wing to the left) Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, H. Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich and Rudolph Bultmann, lay more stress on the second (cf. Barth, Church Dogmatics I, 1, 2: The Doctrine of the Word of God, Edinburgh, T. and T. Clark, 1936, 1956; Brunner, The Divine-Human Encounter, London, S.C.M., 1944; Revelation and Reason, London, S.C.M., 1947; H. Richard Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation, New York, 1941; Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, I, London, Nisbet, 1941; Faith and History, London, Nisbet, 1949; Tillich, Systematic Theology, I, London, Nisbet, 1953; Bultmann, “New Testament and Mythology,” in Kerygma and Myth, ed. Bartsch, London, S.P.C.K., 1953).

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These theologians all agree that what is communicated in the “encounter” is that which was given once for all in Christ; where they differ is in their views as to the essential content of the primary revelation and the precise nature of the existential “encounter.” A third group of more philosophically-minded theologians have devoted themselves to fixing and holding a balance between these two emphases: among them, the late Archbishop Temple, Alan Richardson and John Baillie (cf. Temple, loc. cit.; Richardson, Christian Apologetics, London, S.C.M., 1947; Baillie, Our Knowledge of God, London, Oxford University Press, 1939.

Surrender of Objectivity

Can the objective accessibility of revelation be vindicated in these terms? We think not. Consider first the idea that revelation, imperfectly mirrored in the Bible, is directly available in the historical events of which the Bible bears witness. Temple expounded this idea very clearly. He thought of revelation as God’s disclosure of his mind and character in the “revealing situations” of redemptive history. At no stage does God give a full verbal explanation of what he is doing, but he enlightens prophetic spirits to discern it. (The notion somewhat suggests a divine charade, to be solved by the God-inspired guesswork of human spectators.) The biblical authors were prophetic men, and made roughly the right deductions from what they observed; though their recounting and explaining of revelation is marred throughout by errors due to human frailty. Our task is critically to work over the records which they left, checking and where necessary correcting their representations; and the fact themselves, thus discerned, will speak their own proper meaning to us.

But (not to dwell on the arbitrary and unbiblical features of this view, and the fact that, if true, it would create a new authoritarianism, by making the expert historian final arbiter of the Church’s faith) we must insist that, on this showing, so far from being able to use historical revelation as a norm, we can only have access to it at all through prior acceptance of another norm. For, as Alan Richardson points out, commenting on Temple, all our study of the past is decisively controlled by the principle of interpretation which we bring to it; that is, by our antecedent ideas as to the limits of possibility, the criteria of probability and the nature of historical “meaning” and explanation.

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In this case, if we do not already share the supernaturalism of the biblical writers’ faith about God and his work in his world, we shall be debarred from sharing their convictions as to what happened in redemptive history. So the revealing facts of history are only accessible to those who are already sure that Christianity is true. And how do we become sure of this? By faith, says Richardson. But what is faith? Receiving what God has said, on his authority, is the basic biblical idea. But Richardson cannot say this, for he has already told us that until we have faith we are in no position to gather from the human records of Scripture what it is that God has said. He wishes (rightly) to correlate faith with spiritual illumination.

Richardson, however, cannot depict this illumination as an opening of blind eyes to see what objectively was always the case—that the Bible is God’s Word written, and its teaching is His revealed truth; for to his mind this is not the case. He is therefore forced back into Illuminism. He has to represent faith as a private revelation, a divine disclosure of new information not objectively accessible—namely, that what certain human writers said about God is in fact true. On his assumption that Scripture, as such, is no more than human witness, there is nothing else he can say. So we see that the idea of an objective presentation of revelation in history, when divorced from the idea of a divinely authoritative record, can only in principle be maintained on an illuministic basis. Before I can find revelation in history, I must first receive a private communication from God: and by what objective standard can anyone check this? There is no norm for testing private revelations. We are back to subjectivism.

Scope for Encounter

At this point, however, appeal will be made to the concept of “personal encounter.” This, as generally expounded, attempts to parry the charge of Illuminism by the contention that God, in sovereign freedom, causes the biblical word of man to become His Word of personal address in the moment of revelation. Brunner has, perhaps, made more of this line of thought than anyone else. Basing it on an axiomatic refusal to equate the teaching of Scripture, as such, with the Word of God, he treats the concept of personal encounter as excluding that of propositional communication absolutely. God’s Word in the encounter comes to me, not as information, but as demand, and faith is not mental assent, but the response of obedience. Truth becomes mine through the encounter; but this truth consists, not in any impersonal correspondence of my thoughts with God’s facts, but in the personal correspondence of my decision with God’s demand.

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“Truth” is that which happens in the response of faith, rather than anything that is said to evoke that response; “truth” is an event, correlative to the event of revelation which creates it. But this is a very difficult conception. If we are to take seriously Brunner’s Pickwickian use of the word “truth,” then his idea is one of a communion in which nothing is communicated save a command. God speaks only in the imperative, not at all in the indicative. But is it a recognizable statement of the Christian view of revelation to say that God tells us nothing about himself, but only issues orders? And what is the relation between the command given in the encounter and what is written in Scripture? Never one of identity, according to Brunner; Scripture is human witness proceeding from and pointing to communication in encounter; but not embodying its content; for that which is given in the encounter is ineffable, and no form of words can properly express it. So, where Augustine said: “What Thy Scripture says, that (only that, but all that) Thou dost say.” Brunner says: “What Thy Scripture says, that is precisely not what Thou dost say.” But how, in this case, can Brunner parry the charge of uncontrolled and uncontrollable mysticism? Nor would he be better off if he said that what is spoken by God in the encounter is the exact content of Scripture texts, that and no more; for then he would either have to abandon the idea that Scripture is throughout nothing but fallible and erring human testimony, or else to say that God speaks human error as his truth, which is either nonsense or blasphemy.

Has the objectivity of revelation been vindicated by this appeal to the “encounter”? Has anything yet been said to make intelligible the claim that, though we regard Scripture as no more than fallible human witness, we still have available an objective criterion, external to our own subjective impressions, by which our erring human ideas about revelation can be measured and tested? It seems not. By deserting Richardson for Brunner, we mean merely to have exchanged a doctrine of illuminism (private communication of something expressible) for one of mysticism (private communication of something inexpressible). The problem of objectivity is still not solved; and, we think, never can be on these terms.

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Lessons to Be Learned

From this survey we learn three things.

First, we see the essential kinship of the various modern views of revelation. They differ in detail, but all begin from the same starting point and have the same aim: to restore essential biblical dimensions to the older liberal position.

Second, we see the dilemmas in which modern theology hereby involves itself. “Post-liberal” thought turns out to be liberalism trying to assimilate into itself certain biblical convictions which, once accepted, actually spell its doom. The spectacle which it provides is that of liberalism destroying itself by poisoning its own system. For liberalism, as such, rests, as we saw, on a rationalistic approach to the Bible; and the acceptance of these new insights makes it as irrational in terms of rationalism as it always was unwarrantable in terms of Christianity to continue following such an approach. By recognizing the incomprehensibility of God and his sovereign freedom in revelation, while retaining its peculiar view of Scripture—by trying, that is, to find room for supra-rational factors on its own rationalistic basis—liberalism simply lapses from coherent rationalism into incoherent irrationalism. For the axiom of rationalism in all its forms is that man’s mind is the measure of all things; what is real is rational, and only the rational is real, so that in terms of rationalism the suprarational is equated with the irrational and unreal.

By allowing for the reality of God who in himself and in his works passes our comprehension, theological rationalism declares its own bankruptcy, and thereby forfeits its quondam claim to interpret and evaluate Scripture, with the rest of God’s works, on rationalistic principles—a claim which it could only make on the assumption of its own intellectual solvency. It is simply self-contradictory for modern theology still to cling to the liberal concept of Scripture while professing to have substituted the biblical for the liberal doctrine of God. And the fact that it continues to do the former cannot but create doubt as to whether it has really done the latter.

Again, by admitting the noetic effects of sin, and the natural incompetence of the human mind in spiritual things, without denying the liberal assumption that reason has both the right and the power to test and explode the Bible’s view of its own character as revealed truth, modern theology is in effect telling us that now we know, not merely that we cannot trust Scripture, but also that we cannot trust ourselves; which combination of convictions, if taken seriously, will lead us straight to dogmatic skepticism. Thus, through trying to both have our cake and eat it, we shall be left with nothing to eat at all. Modern theology only obscures this situation, without remedying it, when it talks here of paradox and dialectical tension. The truth is that, by trying to hold these two self-contradictory positions together, modern theology has condemned itself to an endless sequence of arbitrary oscillations between affirming and denying the trustworthiness of human speculations and biblical assertions respectively. It could only in principle find stability in the skeptical conclusion that we can have no sure knowledge of God at all.

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Thirdly, we see that the only way to avoid this conclusion is to return to the historic Christian doctrine of Scripture, the Bible’s own view of itself. Only when we abandon the liberal view that Scripture is no more than fallible human witness, needing correction by us, and put in its place the biblical conviction that Scripture is in its nature revealed truth in writing, an authoritative norm for human thought about God, can we in principle vindicate the Christian knowledge of God from the charge of being the incorrigibly arbitrary product of our own subjective fancy.

Reconstructed liberalism, by calling attention to the reality of sin, has shown very clearly our need of an objective guarantee of the possibility of right and true thinking about God; but its conception of revelation through historical events and personal encounter with the speaking God ends, as we saw, in illuminism or mysticism, and is quite unable to provide us with such a guarantee. No guarantee can, in fact, be provided except by a return to the old paths—that is, by a renewed acknowledgment of, and submission to, the Bible as an infallible written revelation from God.

James I. Packer is Tutor at Tyndale Hall, Bristol, England, to which post he was called in 1954 from St. John’s Church, Harborne, Birmingham. He holds the D.Phil. degree from Oxford. His article is an abridgment of his chapter on “Contemporary Views of Revelation” from the volume Revelation and the Bible, a symposium by twenty-four evangelical scholars, scheduled to be published this year by Baker Book House.

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