Five Indispensable Principles of Revelation
I propose five indispensable principles of revelation. These will function as a kind of test in exploring our other introductory concepts. If we sense that our understanding of reason, faith, nature, and the like—if this causes us to take back any of these principles, then either one of the principles was incoherent or incomplete, or else the adjustment will need to be made with one of the subsequent concepts.
Those five principles are as follows:
1. Revelation is always initiating, being the act of God.
2. Revelation is always objective, being the communication of God.
3. Revelation is always immutably true, being eternally known by God.
4. Revelation is always all-encompassing, all things ordained to glorify God.
5. Revelation is always harmonious, each form perfectly consistent with the others.
This list is not intended to say that no other principles are equally important. Our focus here is specific to the question of reason and nature at the foundations of systematic theology. Now in order to prevent any misunderstanding, we must clarify a few of these terms and anticipate some wrong uses of the related ideas. With that in mind, let us solidify each principle.
First, revelation is always initiating, being the act of God.
All Christian theologians would recognize two strikes against human knowledge about God. We are finite and we are sinful. Luther spoke of “the hiddenness of God” (Deus absconditus). When considering how God overcomes this, one must not choose between the divine essence and the divine will, as in voluntarism. God’s free will and God’s immutable nature are at one in revelation as much as in any other work. Even aside from the separation caused by sin, the very fact that we are creatures implies limitations ranging from a total impossibility to know anything about God to exactly that degree chosen by God to reveal Himself to us. As He said through Moses, “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law” (Deut. 29:29).
There is a “need to know basis” and there is divine sovereignty that wholly determines that need. We will know what He sees fit that we know, and not a unit of knowledge more. But then also, for his elect people—not a unit of knowledge less than what has been determined in order to achieve our chief end (cf. 1 Cor. 2:7). Another more contemporary definition of revelation, which I think is helpful in this respect, was offered by John McClean. He says,
“Revelation is God’s work to bring people to know him. It consists in all that God does that he intends to terminate in human knowledge of himself.”1
There is a personal dimension to this. Even if we grant the sharpest division between the special grace by which God reveals Himself to His own people in Christ, and the common grace by which God has given good things to man in creation—even if one wants to deny the concept of “common grace,” as some have, still the act of communication in itself would have to be regarded as wholly good on God’s part.
Bavinck is emphatic on this point:
“Revelation therefore is always an act of grace; in it God condescends to meet his creature, a creature made in his image. All revelation is anthropomorphic, a kind of humanization of God.”3
Second, revelation is always objective, being the communication of God.
We call truth objective when we are speaking of the truth in itself. By contrast, when we refer to the subjective elements of truth, we are speaking of the perspectives, preferences, pragmatic uses, or any other performances of such truth by finite actors in their intellectual and moral dimensions. Western man used to be quite clear on the distinction between these two. For some time now the word “objective” has been used to describe a particular kind of subjectivity, namely, an unbiased or dispassionate perspective on the state of affairs or truth in question. It is a legitimate use of the term, but when used in these very contexts, it would show more awareness by the author (and beguile fewer readers) if the irony could be pointed out. After all, however naive or prideful such an alleged vantage point may have, such a perspective is just that. It is a finite perspective. It is subjective. It is not the object of knowledge that is true as revealed by God.
In a later chapter, we will summarize the subjective turn within the Enlightenment and its consequences for theology. For now it is enough to maintain that revelation is always objective. Whether it is general revelation or special revelation, God has communicated realities about Himself that are real independent of any finite agent, and which may be represented in propositions that have fixed truth values independent of any finite mind. It follows that both the reality in each case and the proposition representing each case are communicated by God. This raises questions about the nature of the laws of thought, sense perception, and even memory, and we will come to those finer questions. For now it is enough to say that even the conformity of propositions to true states of affairs have entirely revelatory content. The fact that man forms those propositions is nothing to the point. To attempt to dismiss the objective status of propositions on the basis that they are formed by the minds of men is akin to dismissing the validity of logic on the ground that it was “invented” by man. The symbolic form was; but the reality of the laws and relations that stand behind these expressions are themselves immutable. That brings us perfectly to the next principle.
Third, revelation is always immutably true, being eternally known by God.
This is really the backing for the second principle. If I want to deny that all objects of real, true knowledge are the ultimate production of man, it requires that the truth of each “unit” of this knowledge was already known by God and communicated by innumerable created channels. Each of these truths would have to be eternally true so far as the divine mind is concerned. They could also never become untrue. Two ideas in Augustine’s thought will be particularly helpful here, namely his doctrine of illumination and his realist principle that truth is a universal. When we arrive at that section, we will note how this dual Augustinian insight gives shape to both the mode and substance of this aspect of revelation.
Fourth, revelation is always all-encompassing, all things ordained to glorify God.
The masters of natural theology throughout church history had a category that has been termed “the consent of the nations.” This was even recognized in a disingenuous way by the nineteenth century History of Religion schools, as Orr summarized their conclusion that, “all religion originates in revelation.”3 What this amounts to for the Christian version is that even idolatry proves the existence of God. Paul’s language in Romans 1 carries this suggestion. Not only does all mankind retain the knowledge of God through nature (vv. 19-20), but one of the dimensions of their wicked suppression of this knowledge (v. 18), is by means of perversion (vv. 21ff).
After all, one cannot cast shadows without a light source; and just so, one cannot do idolatry without having done some theology: erroneous theology, but theology all the same. But this point of deviation that all mankind took, from what did they all deviate if it was not a universal truth once known?
At the very least, the Christian should confess that the historical explanation for this is exactly what we find in the Genesis account. If all mankind descended from Adam, and then again from Noah after the Flood, well, then the diverse branches of world religions have shared roots. If we take the present-tense of passages like Psalm 19:1 seriously, then this common field is no mere rhetorical flourish. All things are literally “about” God, even if by means of distortion through sin and its effects. So the words of David in that Psalm, “There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard” (v. 3) come to mean there is no unit of time or space or thought where God’s revelation is not pressing in and upholding all of the content as speech about Himself.
Fifth, revelation is always harmonious, each form perfectly consistent with the others.
This follows from all of the other principles. If divine revelation is God’s communication, objective, immutably true, and all-encompassing, then there is a kind of indivisible unity to it. No one truth of revelation could be called “true” when referenced in philosophical discussions and yet “false” when referenced in theological discussions. The same would apply to divisions such as “sacred” versus “secular,” or perhaps “scientific” versus “spiritual,” or any other such dichotomies meant to suggest that we can compartmentalize equally meaningful yet incommensurate realities. The Kantian aim to protect faith from reason can only do so by conceding what is left of “reason” to the world of appearances, and thus inevitably to the enemies of supernatural religion.
Anyone who has ever taken a freshman science course at the university runs into this with the Fact-Value distinction presented for the masses on Day 1 of class. Unless the professor is particularly bitter, the antagonism to the Christian faith will be set forth more subtly in the bifurcation of reality into the hard sciences which deal in the way that the world works (i.e. “facts”) and then one’s own religion, which is perfectly legitimate in its own sphere (i.e. “one’s own values”). Without direct refutation or further insult, the presentation cements in the mind, in a most agreeable manner, that material science is the domain of reason and religion is the domain of feelings. This was the idea behind the Harvard paleontologist, Stephen Jay Gould’s, so-called NOMA (non-overlapping magisteria) model of the relationship between science and religion.
This is only to reproduce in the science lecture hall what was touted by Averroes in the twelfth century or, under another mask, what Emil Brunner commended in his dialectical approach in the last century. Against this unsustainable dualism, Thomas Aquinas argued that,
“the knowledge of the principles that are known to us naturally has been implanted in us by God; for God is the Author of our nature. These principles, therefore, are also contained by the divine Wisdom. Hence, whatever is opposed to them is opposed to the divine Wisdom, and, therefore, cannot come from God. That which we hold by faith as divinely revealed, therefore, cannot be contrary to our natural knowledge.”4
By “our natural knowledge” here, Aquinas is assuming that it is indeed knowledge and therefore true. Because God is the source of reality, He is also the source of both the light of reason and the light of faith. Truth cannot contradict truth anymore than God could contradict God. This implies both a unity to reality and a unity to human experience. Hence all such units of truth cannot be considered “untrue” simply because its truth may not seem to pertain to religious matters, or to scientific matters, or whatever, in ways that we may be interested in or in ways that we might expect. Nor can the sense of any proposition (A) be its contradictory sense (~A), nor its truth value (True or False) be its contradictory truth value—since in such a case “A” would really equal “A and ~A” at the same time and in the same relationship, which is a textbook violation of the law of non-contradiction.
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1. John McClean in Christopher C. Green and David I. Starling, ed., Revelation and Reason in Christian Theology (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018), 185.
2. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, Volume One: Prolegomena (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 310.
3. James Orr, Revelation and Inspiration (London: Duckworth & Co., 1910), 2.
4. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, I.7.2.
