‘There is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries’ (Daniel 2:28).
The Bible makes colossal claims to knowledge. Its teaching about revelation treats the reasons for these claims and addresses various questions regarding them. Is God known to humanity, and if so, how? What is the origin and nature of our knowledge of God? How do we know about God, and how do we know that we know? Revelation is the biblical notion which responds to these and other issues concerning the origin and basis of affirmations about God, ourselves, and all other creatures in relation to God.1Very many thanks to my marvellous friend and colleague Robert C. Doyle for reading, commenting, and improving an earlier draft.
In the Bible, revelation is the basic condition of knowledge. The concept of revelation is central to biblical faith, and biblical teaching proceeds by appeal to it at all points. Whilst numerous passages of the Bible relate the processes of revelation in terms that can be examined in a quite analytical and investigative manner, its overall approach to God’s revelation is, like its presentation of God’s existence, to take it as given, to express it, and to embody it. That is, God’s self-revelation acts to produce and restore personal relationships, reconciled sinners who now call upon him in Christ as ‘Our Father.’
The basic meaning of revelation is disclosure by God, his voluntary manifestation and making known to humanity by God of what was otherwise unknown. In summary, God can be known, and God is known because God wants to be known and, because God wills to be known, God has acted and continues to act to make himself known; and, crucially, God may be known in no other way than by revelation. We proceed here in a manner appropriate to the Bible’s inherent realism — on the assumption that God is known and that he has made himself known — by way of description, expounding an understanding of revelation defined by and derived from the concrete realities of revelation itself. After all, ‘If no revelation ever took place, all reflection on the concept is futile. If, however, revelation is a fact, it — and it alone — must furnish us the concept and indicate to us the criterion we have to apply in our study of religions and revelations.’2Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 1:299, also 283-4; cf. Letham, Systematic Theology, 41-2; T.F. Torrance, Theological Science, passim.
God’s Personal Communication
The term ‘revelation’ itself is a broad category, having a variety of forms, covering a wide range of phenomena. In the Bible, God tells us things which make him known through a number of means — audible speech, written words, miracles, mighty acts, visible manifestations, dreams, visions, prophecy, the role of the natural world, the life and work of Christ, the proclamation of the gospel, apostolic teaching, responsible interpretation of that teaching, and the eventual manifestation of Christ at the climax of history. The connecting link between this group of phenomena is the free initiative of God himself, acting personally to communicate with his human creatures in order to make known his identity, character, will and expectations. So, we may talk about the revelation of God in a comprehensive way, as God’s self-disclosure and self-manifestation of truth and reality to humanity.
Word and Deed and Presence
Divine revelation may be defined a little more precisely as God’s self-communication through word and deed. God reveals himself to particular people through specific events by speaking and action. God’s mighty acts include God’s mighty words. The things God says, and the things God does, are interlocked, dovetailed, such that the concrete events of God’s self-revelation may never be detached from God’s articulate explanation of them. Further, God’s speech to us is not information from a distance, nor is it impersonal. As the incarnation of his beloved Son shows, God is himself present to us by his Word, and by the words of revelation addressed to us in Holy Scripture and faithful preaching.3John Webster refers to the revelation of God’s Word as ‘the communicative presence of the risen and ascended Son of God who governs all things’ (The Domain of the Word, T&T Clark, 2012, 3. Amongst the Scriptures that reveal and explain the truth that God is present by his Word, see especially John 1:1-18, 14:18 & 23 and also 14:26, 15:26, 16:7, and Acts 2. In that way, revelation addresses the whole human person including affections, yet it is fundamentally informational, cognitive, and intellectual. It is essentially — though not exclusively — to do with the generation and transformation of understanding. Revelation changes understanding and does so by addressing our created human intelligence in verbal form.
Authoritative Commentary on God’s Action
Without accompanying words — propositional content, divine utterances — God’s revelatory acts would be ambiguous. For example, the cross of Christ is at one level an ordinary event until its significance, God’s particular intention and action in and through it, is further revealed, explained, unpacked, interpreted. Christ’s resurrection is intrinsically extraordinary, yet its earth-shattering magnitude still requires authoritative, reliable, explanation; its intelligibility and understandability rests upon the apostolic teaching that interprets Christ’s resurrection as a definitive revelation of God’s power and purpose. Left to our own devices, determining the meaning of these colossal events would be little more than guesswork. The matter is beautifully summarised:
‘The power and authenticity of the Bible lies in the fact that it is the record of actions of God together with his own authoritative commentary on those actions. The Bible is not a record of the acts of God with a commentary from some other source. God is his own commentator. This gives to the Bible an enduring relevance.’4Paul Helm, Just Words? (Evangelical Press, 2019), unpublished manuscript, 5.
Consolation and Challenge
It is of capital importance to recognize that God’s revelation is not what might be naturally expected. Whilst revelation essentially takes the form of address, and whilst its content conveys reliable information from God that is intended to be comforting, consoling, encouraging, liberating, and hopeful, even so the revelation of God is invariably challenging, disturbing, strange, shocking, and surprising. Almost always, God’s revelation is unanticipated, unforeseen, unpredictable. For God to reveal himself, communicating truth about his character and purpose, is hardly routine. It is totally radical. It is absolutely dramatic. Moses is commanded to confront Pharaoh, and lead Israel out of slavery, into God’s presence. King David’s shocking crimes are exposed and made public, whilst Isaiah’s call to speak for God shakes and undoes him. Christ’s appearance to Saul overthrows his violence and antagonism first, and then commissions him to be an apostle – Paul. God’s message through Peter’s vision sets aside ethnic prejudice and includes all peoples in the Divine purpose (Exo 3; 2 Sam 12; Isa 6; Acts 9-10). True communication from God is both gift and challenge. Disruptive and invasive, revelation intrudes, accosts, arrests, unsettles, dismays, and physically terrifies (Acts 9:8; cf. Gen 15:12; Deut 9:19; Dan 8:27; 10:8-9; Matt 17:6). When God speaks in revelation, it is the ultimate wake-up call. Yet blending genuine fear with appropriate personal offense, the revelation of God is also awesome, gracious, generous, enabling, life-giving, life-changing, and wonderful, bringing with it all resources to provide the response it seeks.
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- 1Very many thanks to my marvellous friend and colleague Robert C. Doyle for reading, commenting, and improving an earlier draft.
- 2Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 1:299, also 283-4; cf. Letham, Systematic Theology, 41-2; T.F. Torrance, Theological Science, passim.
- 3John Webster refers to the revelation of God’s Word as ‘the communicative presence of the risen and ascended Son of God who governs all things’ (The Domain of the Word, T&T Clark, 2012, 3. Amongst the Scriptures that reveal and explain the truth that God is present by his Word, see especially John 1:1-18, 14:18 & 23 and also 14:26, 15:26, 16:7, and Acts 2.
- 4Paul Helm, Just Words? (Evangelical Press, 2019), unpublished manuscript, 5.