Until recently, I had never thought of revelation as a gift. God’s revealing himself and the truth about the nature of reality just was what it was, revelation. I can’t remember now where I’d read this phrase, but it struck me as profound. Humanity without revelation, without something beyond human experience and knowledge, is in every sense benighted. That is, we are “in a state of pitiful or contemptible intellectual or moral ignorance.” In other words, we don’t have a clue! Most Christians, unfortunately, don’t act as if God’s revelation to us is a gift. Our tendency, all of us, is to take it for granted.
First, what is the nature of this revelation? God has revealed himself to us in three ways: creation, Scripture, and Christ. Western thinkers believed this until the so called Enlightenment, when the latter two became increasingly irrelevant. The result is that philosophy without God’s revelation is speculation, pure and simple, a dead end, an unsolvable Rubik’s cube. If you read philosophers, or philosophy through history, it all seems to come down to, “Well, because I said so.” Then someone else will say, “No, that’s not right because I say so.” Inevitably it all leads to skepticism, or the theory that certain knowledge is impossible. Many philosophers understood the possibility of this and fought against it, but to no avail. Ultimately, without God man is adrift in an inscrutable universe without anchor or hope.
In Western thought this all eventually led to the most honest philosopher of all, Friedrich Nietzsche. He embraced something called nihilism, from Latin nihil, meaning ‘nothing.’ He was a staunch atheist, and hated Christianity, but he knew once you get rid of God, Western society is doomed. He predicted the horrors of the bloody 20th century, but thought getting rid of God was good. Humanity without the religious baggage could finally get beyond myths and fairy tales, and man could make his own values. He died a relatively young man in an insane asylum. The only answer to nihilism and skepticism is the possibility of revelation, of God breaking through the limits of human knowledge and mankind’s finitude.
When you realize man’s fate without revelation, it becomes all the more precious, a gift of literally infinite value. Think of an endless maze, of constant dead ends, the frustration of never seeing a way out. Or in my favorite epistemological metaphor, of an endless array of unrelated puzzle pieces that never seem to fit. Such is life without revelation. No wonder most of our contemporaries just don’t want to deal with it; so much easier to stay shallow and trivial, or, in a phrase from a famous book of not too many years ago, amuse ourselves to death. We can’t really know, so why bother.
But we can know, and know truly. From a Christian perspective, philosophically speaking, our knowledge is justified true belief. Biblically, knowing is never a problem, but Scripture does call for epistemological humility. When you read the Bible carefully from cover to cover, absolute certainty for God’s people always seems illusive, just beyond reach, and it’s clear God planned it that way. Why? In a word, trust. God always gives us enough evidence to trust him, but not so much that we can’t deny him. Atheists and skeptics, by contrast, are fond of defining faith religiously as belief without evidence. The Bible shows us a faith that is trust based on adequate evidence, and our ultimate faith is always in the person and work of Christ. Our faith, or trust, isn’t in creation, nor in a book (or 66 of them), but in a person.
So we don’t confuse means with ends, God’s revelation comes to us in three means or modes:
- God’s “eternal power and and divine nature” are revealed to us in creation. Isn’t it obvious? Every time I’m tempted to buy what the atheist’s are selling, I simply look outside, or at my hand. Really, you expect me to believe it’s all an accident? I don’t think so. But creation by itself isn’t enough, as the history of philosophy proves.
- The next means that further reveals God’s purposes in creation, both created good and fallen, is our Bible. Without the Bible, the beauty and mess that is our inhabited reality makes no sense whatsoever, but with it, it makes perfect if difficult sense.
- Most importantly, though, and especially for conservative Protestants, God’s written revelation is not that into which we put our faith. Rather it all, as Jesus told his disciples in Luke 24 after his resurrection, points to him! We don’t have faith, or put our trust in mere words, but in the Word become flesh.
We can see this revelation unfolding very slowly through history, and finding its ultimate fulfillment in the person and work of Christ. Only he makes sense of any and everything, which is why I put this quote from C.S. Lewis on the front cover of my book:
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.
Merry Christmas!
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