Recently I’ve been thinking about my understanding and views of the doctrine of scripture. Coincidentally — or maybe providentially — not long ago I found a copy of Donald Bloesch’s wonderful book Holy Scripture among some things in my attic. I’m very glad I dusted it off and began reading through it carefully. Bloesch captures many aspects of where I presently am in my journey concerning the nature of revelation and scripture and the relation of these concepts to theories of language and truth.
Let me start what I hope will be a series of posts with some of Bloesch’s thoughts about revelation. Bloesch offers a nice balance between a merely existential understanding of revelation and a rationalistic understanding. He puts it this way:
As I see it, revelation is God’s self-communication through his selected instrumentality, especially the inspired witness of his prophets and apostles. This act of self-communication entails not only the unveiling of his gracious and at the same time awesome presence but also the imparting of the knowledge of his will and purpose for mankind. This knowledge is conceptual as well as existential and can be formulated but never mastered in propositions.
Bloesch thus avoids the unfortunate over-emphasis on propositional revelation in some rationalistic streams of evangelicalism, but without discounting altogether the propositional form revelation sometimes takes. He notes that
I agree with Bernard Ramm that the phrase propositional revelation is ambiguous, because revelation comes to us in a myriad of literary forms. Yet I subscribe to the intent of this phrase — that revelation is intelligible and conceptual. It is more felicitous to say with Thomas F. Torrance that revelation is “dialogical,” for this term combines the personal and the propositional . . . . God’s revelation is his commandment and his promise, and these come to us in the form of written commandments and written testimonies. Yet they cannot be confined to what is objectively written, since their meaning-content includes their significance for those who hear God’s Word in every new situation.
This understanding of revelation as “dialogical” ties into the very human element involved in how the church appropriates the absolute truth of the revelation. Bloesch affirms that “we must not surrender the claim of the Christian faith that in the Bible we are presented with real truth, with truth that is absolute and unconditional because it is God’s truth.” And yet, he is clear that our apprehension of that truth is limited:
Against evangelical rationalism, however, I maintain that we mortals can know this truth only conditionally and relatively. Theology is not the ‘crystallization of divine truth into systematic form,’ but a very human witness to divine truth, a witness that remains tentative and open-ended because historical understanding is not transcendent knowledge, faith is not sight. The truth in the Bible is revealed because it has a divine source, but it is at the same time partial and broken becuase it has a historical matrix. It throws light on the human situation, but light that is adequate only for our salvation and the living of a righteous life, not for comprehensive understanding. As biblical Christians we are neither gnostics (fully enlightened) nor agnostics but pilgrims who nevertheless have a compass (the Word of God) that can guide us to our destination.
I love that last paragraph so much that it now has three exclamation points and a triple-underlined “yes” penciled next to it.
Coming soon: Bloesch’s very interesting, nuanced epistemology.