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SOME ELOQUENT THOUGHTS ON THE NATURE OF REVELATION
Christians have long claimed that God spoke through prophets. I heartily affirm this—the silence of Lord is a terrifying thing. But while I believe God has spoken, I have questions about the clarity of His revelation. I am convinced that God has had something to say to His people, but I am unsure just how clear He has been in His presentation, and of the lengths He has gone to prevent His words from being tinted by humanity.
To be sure, prophecy entails human endeavor. Divine utterances are delivered to people, for people. They are recorded by people, and preserved for centuries by still more people. It must be admitted that man is an essential part of the prophetic procedure—otherwise, presumably, God would be talking only to Himself. If man is so intimately involved with every step of the revelatory process, does it not stand to reason that he may have, at some point, lent some of himself to the revelation proper?
What I mean is, maybe the substance of recorded prophecy is more of a collaborative effort than a direct one-way communication from God to man. Maybe James the half-brother of Christ, for instance, offered not only his writing style but some of his opinions in the penning his great epistle. God had something to say, but James did too, and both availed themselves of the opportunity to have their message heard.
Let me say a few preemptive words. Yes, I know God is omnipotent and thus had the power to protect His word, if He so chose, from any and all matter of human tampering. Yes, I know the original authors of biblical scripture—even Jesus, probably—had nothing like what I'm suggesting in mind, or if they did, we don't have a record of it. And yes, I know we have manuscripts of 2 Peter 1:20-21 dating back to the Flood that confirm all of this. I've been a member of the conservative Protestant community for six years and have read the books, thank you :-)
It's true that we've found remarkable ways to explain the prophetic procedure. I'm thinking here of the American Evangelical views on inerrancy, authority, transmission, and canonization. These views explain, in painstaking detail, the simplicity of the whole of God's revelation. The prophetic procedure in toto is condensed into a single logically consistent package, which can be plainly understood with only a little effort on the part of the Christian.
Nevertheless, I will not admit to the plainness of things. In my mind, things are not plain. The very idea that God would speak to man seems to defy attempts at plain reasoning. Furthermore, the alleged plainness of God's revelation is not a comforting notion. It's too much like the plainness of this or that scientific formulation: a neat, functional theorem systematized with dazzling consistency. The means by which God spoke to man becomes less of an enigma and more of an equation. All element of mystery is lost.
I should add that I've experienced, as of late, a slight disaffection for the church. This doesn't help matters, I know. But repeated appeals to the clarity of God's word (these are found in nearly every church) are hard to take. I suppose I shouldn't be too bothered by this; after all, I can hardly expect the masses to gather around and worship the Great Question Mark. Still, the insistent expectation that I, as churchgoer, subscribe to a particular theological system is not my idea of a good time.
Churches are human societies. Like all societies, they have a vested interest (namely, their own survival) in ensuring that their members believe and act a certain way. Religious societies exercise considerable control over their members, and the social pressures to conform are tremendous. The potency of religious groupthink is so high because the norms of society are validated in divine terms. In simple language, this means that Christians are bred to believe and act a certain way because God said so. God may or may not have actually said so—as far as I'm concerned, the verdict is still out, because as I said above, the situation is less than clear—but in any case, this is the reason given. Of course, I'm not suggesting that churches are nasty human institutions that teach you what to do and think (they are human institutions, and they will teach you what to do and think, but most of them aren't nasty).
So what does this leave me with? A mutilated church and an impotent scripture? No, I don't think so. I've exaggerated my position somewhat, because it makes for better reading. First, the church is no less a human institution than what you'll find in non-religious society. If your church doesn't tell you what to do and think, other institutions—say, your university professors, or MTV—will gladly take the job. Next, the church isn't merely a human institution. God intends for and is pleased when His followers meet corporately to worship Him. Not only is corporate worship good, it is necessary. The Christian faith couldn't survive otherwise. This doesn't mean that our modern churches are designed from formulas that fell magically from heaven—on the contrary, they are products of our culture, and moreover, mini-Babels, towering human edifices designed to reach the heavens. It means that our modern churches are our divinely-sanctioned best efforts at worshipping God, and that they are needed to propagate Christianity from one generation to the next.
Scripture is a trickier matter. The holiness of God demands that I tread carefully; far be it from me to malign divine glory by attributing to man something that was spoken by God Himself! Revelation must to a substantial degree concern the communication of God to us. It cannot be understood apart from this—a human rumination on the eternal may be fascinating, but it is hardly prophetic.
God spoke through prophets. The book of Romans, for example, is much more than the musings of an educated 1st-century Jew who had a curious encounter with the transcendental. It is the word of the Lord—God spoke!
Did Paul also speak? I'm inclined to say yes. The Apostle lived in a specific time and place. He was a product of his age, a man of well-formed beliefs and opinions, biases and prejudices. He was not raised in a social vacuum but was taught in his synagogue, and by the Pharisees and Greeks, to believe and act a certain way. He was therefore predisposed to interpret even the religious world through the "lens" of his own understanding (parenthetically, this is true of us as well).
This is the man who wrote the book of Romans. Paul was not a tabula rasa, or worse, a typewriter in the hands of the Almighty (the latter is a characterization Evangelicals despise, for good reason). Paul wrote the epistle; also, Paul wrote the epistle. My intention here is to emphasize not only the humanity of the Apostle, but his authorship as well. The book of Romans is an actual letter to a particular group of believers in the early Christian church. It raises issues that Paul sought to address with those people at that time. It is an outgrowth of his apostolic responsibility and his concern for the people of the Lord. Yes, Romans is God's word, but it is Paul's too.
This is a good place to bring my argument to a close. I would like to go further, and answer the all-important question of where God stops and Paul begins, but I can't. I simply don't know. The situation is, as I have said, far from clear; it's fuzzy. If there is a clear answer, I clearly don't know it. I could wager a few guesses, but had better not, lest in so doing I end up with a "sword" that isn't sharp enough to cut.
There are some loose ends that have purposely been left out of this discussion, due to my inability to deal with them in any meaningful way. Foremost among these is the actual means God used to communicate His message. Just how does prophecy get from the mind of the Lord to the pen of man, anyway? Also worth considering are the existence of "prophecy editors" within the Jewish and early Christian communities (which in most cases might amount to little more than an argument from silence), and the possibility that God spoke to more than the authors of our meager 66-book Protestant canon—like Christians from Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Mormon traditions. These are areas of great interest to me, and to which I'd like to devote more thought, though I may be short on mental equipment for the task.
Uncertainty need not be troubling. It often is; however, uncertain Christians like me have good reason to avoid such a state. For though God, "at sundry times and in divers ways" spoke through prophets, "He hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son, whom He hath appointed heir of all things" (Hebrews 1:1-2). The magnum opus of God's revelation is found in Christ Jesus. It is to Him that I turn. God speaks peace to me through Christ, setting my oft-uncertain mind at ease. I need but look to the cross; all human doubts, fears, and not knowings vanish in face of the exceeding radiance of the Son.
Murray James Morrison
September 2005
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