Reviewing Revelation

The death not long ago of Emil Brunner and of Paul Althaus brought to mind the active parts these two theologians had played in the discussions about the revelation of God in the world around us. The long shadow of Karl Barth, who is now eighty years old, stretches out over those same discussions. For it was Barth who rose in protest against Althaus’s view that divine revelation came from creation as well as in Jesus Christ. It was Barth also who spoke his famous Nein back in 1934 against Emil Brunner’s theology of general revelation. As we recall this storm that so stirred the theological sea thirty years and more ago, and realize that two of the participants are now gone and the other is in the glory of his four score years, we would be wrong if we thought that the subject was not as relevant today as then.

The argument about general revelation is still carried on in a heat measured by its importance. Though Barth accepts the existence of a side stream alongside the mainstream of revelation (the side stream being the light that falls on creation from Christ), he is still critical of Article II of the Belgic Confession, which speaks of a knowledge of God that comes from the creation, providence, and government of the world. Barth sees here a shadow of natural theology like that which got a much clearer formulation by the first Vatican Council. God, said the council, can be clearly known through the natural light of reason from the things that are created.

Brunner, at the appearance of Volume IV/3/2 of Barth’s dogmatics, talked about the “new Barth.” For it seemed then as though Barth had swung around a bit in Brunner’s direction—or at least Brunner thought so. Barth did indeed speak in this volume about the true words and true light that existed outside the Church. He did not talk about an extra-biblical revelation, to be sure, but did stress that parables of the kingdom were manifest in the world and that the Church had to take them seriously: one may unexpectedly hear the word of the Good Shepherd in them.

This did not mean that Barth was restoring natural theology to a place of honor. It did mean that he had not forgotten Calvin’s word about the world as a theater of God’s glory. There is a certain “holiness” about the created world, in spite of the darkness of our sin-blinded eyes. Creation and redemption are not enemies. All truths and every light in the world are set there by God. But, splendid as they may be, they cannot take the edge off this truth—that Jesus Christ is the Revelation of God, the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

Barth was occupied with the same problem which kept Abraham Kuyper busy for so long, and from which came Kuyper’s monumental work on Common Grace. Here, he acknowledged that the Church was often disappointing and the world often looked good. Kuyper explained this by means of the goodness and power of the Holy Spirit, not the native goodness of men. The mercy of God was demonstrated, for Kuyper, in the positive virtues of the world. Kuyper resisted pietistic tendencies to avoid the world; he pointed to the world as the way in which men could walk, not in spite of, but because of, Christ.

Since Bonhoeffer, there has been a great deal of talk, not about the glory of God manifest in the theater of the world, but about the weakness of God. That is, the form of the Cross is the form divine revelation takes in the world today. One thinks of the Japanese theologian Kitamori and his work on The Theology of the Pain of God, recently translated into English after seeing several Japanese editions since its publication in 1945. This book, written out of the horror of the war, has impressed Westerners deeply. The cover shows the ruins of Hiroshima. Kitamori talks about the love of God as suffering love, in connection with John 3:16. “Without apprehension of this tragic love of God, all talk of the Word made flesh is empty formalism.” This is a far cry from a fairly simple assertion that the earth sings an anthem to the power and glory of God, an anthem all who have an ear for beauty can hear. We do not find much of Calvin’s “theater of the glory of God” in Kitamori.

We are reminded how strongly the modern feeling for life is tinged with the tragic and how this penetrates theology. Barth would probably not feel at home with Kitamori’s book. It warns us against cheap and simplistic notions of natural theology and the glory of God shining through creation and history. Paul talked about God’s eternal power and divinity manifest in creation (Romans 1), but he also talked about what men have done with it, how they have held the truth down in unrighteousness.

Now, we must also say that one may not talk as though the notion of general revelation is the same thing as a simple natural theology. Paul speaks in Acts 14 of the fact that God has not left us “without some clue to his nature, in the kindness he shows” (Acts 14:17, NEB). This is one of the amazing words of Scripture. The God whom Paul preached (and whom men did not recognize—Acts 17:23) is in love with life, human life, and is always busy making it better and happier. He “sends you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons, and gives you food and good cheer in plenty” (Acts 14:17). He gives men their places to live, so that they might “seek God, and, it might be, touch and find him” (Acts 17:27).

The distinction between special revelation and general revelation is much more than a theological nicety. True, theologians have played with the distinction as though it were an amusing abstraction. But it comes up again and again whenever men come firmly to grips with the terrible question of the presence of God and his revelation in the world. Behind this distinction lies the mystery of the ways of God with men, a mystery that cannot and does not depreciate the fact that Jesus is the Revelation of God. But it is a mystery that forces us to face up to the reality of God’s presence in the world of men and things, and face up to it in a way that honors the true revelation of God in Christ and is in turn illumined by it.

We do not have the natural discernment to recognize the power and the glory, the love and the mercy, in any clear and unambiguous way. How could we clearly distinguish the power and the love of God in all that happens? Sometimes it seems as though they contradict each other—in fact, as though the love and the power of God cancel each other out. Paul speaks of the God of Revelation in all the aspects of his word but admits that we see through a glass darkly.

Yet the riddles that remain for our minds are not tragic in the end. The wonderful part of the Gospel according to Paul is that these riddles do not silence the song of redemption. The song sounds through them. If we can accept this mystery, we will be careful in our talk about God, careful in our language about his revelation—be it the universal or the very special Revelation of God in Christ.

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