If we examine the various “models of revelation,” such as those chronicled by Avery Dulles, we may find a situation somewhat similar to rival theories of the atonement. That is, we will find much that is true, but which, when treated fractionally, only shows that the true center of the idea has been de-centered in favor of an element that is not in fact central.

Dulles proposed a typology of five revelational models: 1. doctrine, 2. history, 3. internal experience, 4. dialectical presence, and 5. new awareness.1 Other authors will boil things down to shorter typologies: 1. revelation as event, 2. revelation as self-giving, and 3. revelation as Jesus Christ.2 In this trio, Peter Jensen was summarizing those Protestant views which tend no longer to rest revelation in the written Word of God. Consequently, all three of these views were typically placed on the liberal side of the spectrum.

Of course such narrow labels can often prejudice the question. The revelation of God can take on many of these forms, and yet the written form of Scripture functions as the “source and norm” for our conceptions of the others. It is at this point about criteria that one will want to ask why such models ever come to replace others. We can begin to detect that the shapers of prolegomena are really having a contest over who or what will get to set the rules for the rest of theology. For Bruce Demarest in his work on General Revelation, the exact source or sources of our knowledge of God is the “fundamental question in theology.”3

Conflating “Natural” Revelation with the Non-Revelational

As a final point on the definition of revelation, it will be shown in our sections on historical theology that the critics of foundational natural theology do not consistently hold to one or several of the above five principles. The chief offense in this respect is the habit of equivocation about the term “revelation,” when shifting from talk about the two kinds, general and special, to the contrast between revelation and reason. Those two comparisons are perfectly sound in their own distinct place, and of course they are related. However, they are not addressing the exact same fields.

Properly situated, the one distinguishes between the two kinds of revelation (general and special), and the other distinguishes between the divine act (revelation) and the human act (reason). In many authors who want to minimize the role of reason either in the realm of apologetics or at the foundations of systematic theology, this is either neglected or judged unimportant in comparison to the point the author finds more pressing.

For example, Brunner claimed that, “Revealed knowledge is poles apart from rational knowledge.”4

This is flatly absurd. All knowledge is rational knowledge, as we will see in our sections defining reason and faith. If Brunner wanted to distinguish between specially revealed knowledge and generally revealed knowledge as to its source, or between reason and faith as to activity and disposition of the soul in handling such truth, either category would have been legitimate. In fact, Brunner knew all too well what he was doing, and that was to marginalize the classical conception of a unified field of truth. 

The same subtle maneuverings can be operating in the choice of labeling general revelation “natural revelation,” which may strike most as a mere synonym. General and special revelation were also called “natural revelation” (general) and “supernatural revelation” (special) among the Reformed Orthodox.5 Turretin himself used it without any sense of marginalizing the natural, as we will see.6

Bavinck criticized this at the turn of the twentieth on the ground that the source of both is supernatural in God,7 blaming scholasticism for too hard of a disjunct between them,8 and that they are therefore not suitable synonyms of each other.9 Douglas Kelly distinguishes between realm and source, in that general revelation is often called “natural” due to the former, so long as we understand that “the source of that obligatory knowledge is definitely ‘supernatural’”.10 Joel Beeke calls attention to “a double reason to label special revelation supernatural, for it is such both in its mode and in the means by which we receive it.”11 In other words, the Holy Spirit both inspired the authors (2 Pet. 1:20-21) and illuminates its truth to the elect (1 Cor. 2:11-13).

Let us grant the natural and supernatural distinction, but the reader should be aware that I will be using the more common “general” versus “special” terminology. What is often rather innocent or even a matter of preference is more pointed in the Van Tillian mind.

Like Brunner, Van Til used such terminology to drive a wedge between natural man’s rebellious interpretation and our processing the field of nature in an objective sense. So he could affirm general revelation out of one side of his mind, and yet write, 

“Calvinism cannot find a direct point of contact in any of the accepted concepts of the natural man. He disagrees with every individual doctrine of the natural man because he disagrees with the outlook of the natural man as a whole.”12

Given the nature of the dispute between the classicalist and presuppositionalist—that it is about so much more than a mere “apologetics method,” which would arguably be sufficient enough reason—I contend that authors on this subject have a responsibility to clarify that they are not denying that general (or natural) revelation is in fact revelation. By not making this point, they are only enabling the error (perhaps they themselves hold to it) that the objective truth of propositions about God, gained by discursive reason about objective natures not explicitly spelled out in Scripture—that these identical propositions are somehow untrue when uttered by someone who is unregenerate, or untrue when it pertains to a wider set of discourse concerning natural theology.

________________

1. Avery Dulles, Models of Revelation (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1985).

2. Peter Jensen, The Revelation of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002), 20-23.

3. Bruce Demarest, General Revelation (Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 1982), 14.

4. Emil Brunner, Revelation and Reason (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1946), 16.

5. Richard Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, Volume One: Prolegomena to Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 278-284.

6. Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, Volume One (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 1992), 5 [I.1.2.7].

7. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, I:307.

8. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, I:303.

9. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, I:311-312.

10. Douglas Kelly, Systematic Theology, Volume One: Grounded in Holy Scripture and Understood in the Light of the Church (Fearn: Mentor, 2008), 153.

11. Joel Beeke & Paul Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, Volume 1: Revelation and God (Wheaton: Crossway, 2019), 190.

12. Cornelius Van Til, Christian Apologetics (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2003), 146.