One Word,many wordings: The Inspiration of Scripture in its Christological and Pneumatological Dimension of Depth

Revelation as Personal

Scripture, although arguably the final authority in all thought and speech about God, cannot be thought of in an atomistic way but must be properly coordinated within a broader theological landscape. This broader theological landscape, I suggest, is an account of revelation which is personal and participatory as opposed to flatly propositional. It is just such an account of revelation that will properly integrate it with the doctrine of God, as opposed to separating revelation from God as occurs when the burden of revelation is offset to the written words of Scripture. ¹⁰ Methodologically, such a movement carries the implication that Scripture is not properly placed at the beginning of a theological system as if it could be equated with revelation, which may be a cause of concern for some evangelicals. This does not, however, mean that Scripture and revelation are separated from one another. Revelation most certainly retains its propositional mode. Scripture as propositional witness to revelation is to be located as a mode of God’s revelation which participates in the personal mode of revelation through Christ by the power of the Spirit. In such a formulation, the ‘inspiration’ of Scripture may be more closely defined as Scripture’s Spirit-enabled participation in the truth of Jesus Christ. In other words, I am arguing for a more fully rounded trinitarian idea of revelation than Brown’s effectively unitarian account.

Revelation conceived of in personalist categories is the purposive act of God in which, in his readiness to be known, he establishes humanity as subjects of the knowledge of God through Jesus Christ. Although it is the view I hold, it is not necessary that one adopt a strict dialectical version of this commitment whereby revelation is conceived of as event, whereby God gives himself to be known through his act, ultimately through the incarnate Son and in the power of the Spirit. ¹¹ Even if one does uphold a form of general revelation, it still allows the theologian to talk in terms of God’s purposive and personal act in which he established humanity as a responsible agent in relation to him through having a satisfactory foundation to be aware of the existence of the divine, even though it may be ultimately unsatisfactory decoupled from the special revelation of God through Christ. ¹² However, even allowing for general revelation, the validity of any autonomous natural theology is compromised by the fact of the cross where the fundamental dislocation between God and his creation was laid bare and healed through the redemptive love of God. The cross demonstrates the validity of Karl Barth’s central conviction that there is no inherent proportionality between human thought and the reality of God, whereby any proportionality has to be established through the act of God in the freedom of his grace. Revelation, in other words, strikes us from outside as something totally new; an event of the personal act of God.

Yet, revelation is not just the personal act of God in his readiness to be known. It is the person-constituting event in which God establishes us as the knowers of him. This double-sided personal action may be parsed (with some over-simplification) through the traditional delineation of the Son and Spirit, whereby the Son is the objective presence of God before us as a human and the Spirit is the light of God shone into our hearts whereby we subjectively see the light of the glory of the Father shining in the face of Christ. In other words, revelation is the personal act of God in which God makes himself known and humanity is established as personal knowers of God.

The readiness of [humankind] cannot be independent. It is a readiness which cannot finally be grounded in itself, i.e., in the nature and activity of [humankind], so that between it and the readiness of God there is a relationship of mutual conditioning, the readiness of [humankind] meeting the readiness of God halfway, so to speak [. . .]. If there is readiness on the side of [humankind], it can have only a borrowed, mediated and subsequent independence. It can be communicated to [humankind] only as a capacity and willingness for gratitude and obedience. It can be opened and apportioned to [humankind] only from the source of all readiness—the readiness of God Himself. ¹³

At the centre of the personal revelation of God is Jesus Christ, the mediator who fulfils both sides of the revelation event. In his person, Jesus is fully God and fully human. He is, as the writer of the letter to the Hebrews described it, both apostle and high priest (Hebrews 3.1). That is to say, he acts from the side of God toward humanity and he acts from the side of humanity toward God. He is the apostle, the one sent by God to reveal the Father and accomplish his will, and he is the high priest, a representative of humanity responding to the Father with faith, obedience and praise.

The Roman Catholic theologian Edward Schilebeeckx has described this in the helpful format of Christ as the sacrament of encounter between God and humanity. ¹⁴ For Schillebeeckx, Jesus Christ is God’s saving power at work on creation in a way that comes to us in human form, whereby the human form of that power achieves the saving power it signifies. Jesus is the revelation of God’s love for the world by actually being the bestowal of it. ¹⁵ Beyond even this, though, ‘Jesus is not only the offer of divine love to [humanity] made visible, but at the same time, as prototype (or primordial model) he is the supreme realization of the response of human love to this divine offer’. ¹⁶ Not only does Jesus unveil and accomplish God’s saving will, he also vicariously represents us humans in his acceptance of God’s redeeming actions. Jesus both uncovers God’s will toward us and he uncovers our eyes and ears to the will of God. ¹⁷ Moreover, through the full course of his life he accomplishes this great agreement between the Word of God’s love to humanity and the word of human obedience, faith and love to God. Schilbeeckx’s formulation is particularly helpful because it sets Christ as the actualization of communion between God and humanity. Or, we could put it in the terminology of T. F. Torrance whose Christology so consistently affirms that Jesus Christ is the one through whom there is a movement of God which is instantly a movement of revelation and a movement of reconciliation. ¹⁸ So, therefore, the centre of revelation is not the self-identification of God in the transmission of information, but ‘revelation is first of all a function of that divine action by which the redemption of creation is achieved in such a way that human blindness and ignorance are removed. To that extent the doctrine of revelation should be understood as a function of the doctrine of salvation’. ¹⁹

Such an account of revelation encourages us to think of the readiness of God to be known and the readiness of humanity to know as primarily taking place in the person of Jesus Christ. The identification of Jesus as of one nature with the Father (homoousion tō patri) in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed reflects the Scriptural description of Jesus as the manifestation of the very being of God through whom God has addressed us (Hebrews 1:1–3). John Webster has described the implications of this by saying

the content of revelation is God’s own proper reality. Revelation is not to be thought of as the communication of arcane information or hidden truths, as if in revelation God were lifting the veil on something other than his own self and indicating it to us. Talk of revelation is not talk of some reality separable from God’s own being, something which God as it were deposits in the world and which then becomes manipulable. Revelation is divine self-presentation; its content is identical with God. ²⁰

The personalist accounts of revelation found in works such as McGowan’s and Webster’s, with whom I have been in close accord with so far, needs to be supplemented by another aspect, which is the vicarious humanity of Christ as the recipient of revelation.

We are to think of the whole life and activity of Jesus from the cradle to the grave as constituting the vicarious human response to himself which God has freely and unconditionally provided for us. That is not an answer to God which he has given to us through some kind of transaction external to us or over our heads, as it were, but rather one which has made to issue out of the depths of our human being and life as our own. ²¹

T. F. Torrance has explored this theme in great detail in his seminal essay ‘The Mind of Christ in Worship: The Problem of Apollinarianism in the Liturgy’. ²² Apollinarianism was the 4^th-century heresy which held that the divine Logos inhabited a human person, replacing the human mind whereby the divine Son was the centre of activity in human flesh. For Apollinarius, Jesus did not have a human mind, but God the Son took the outward form of humanity as a tool and set aside the human mind. For Apollinarius, the mind is the source of all activity and the human mind has been corrupted by sin, and so if salvation was to take place it would have to be by the replacing of the human mind with a new kind of mind which did not bear the same corruption. The Apollinarian Christ is not able to actualize within our human minds a human knowledge of God because the human mind has been displaced by the divine mind. Christ, Torrance argues, assumes our human mind ‘in order to heal, convert, and sanctify the human mind in himself and reconcile it to God’. ²³

That our human knowledge of God is vicariously accomplished by Jesus Christ is such an important clarification to make because it forms the basis on which a personalist account of revelation can intersect with the propositional. Jesus Christ is the beachhead that the knowledge of God makes in our humanity which folds out to the rest of humanity through the apostolic witness, which, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit participates in the personal revelation that has taken place in Jesus Christ. In other words, the revelation which is the person Jesus Christ, becomes the inner essence of the propositional testimony of the apostles. In other words, an account of revelation which speaks in a personalist dialect is not irreconcilable with a propositional account of revelation. Aware that my particular approach may be impossible for some to accept given that others may prefer to hold Scripture and revelation in a far closer relation of synonymity, it is important to note that, coming from a view that stresses the propositional character of Scripture, Ryan Wellington has argued that propositional knowledge of God is the means of mediating acquaintance knowledge of God, which is an intimate and personal knowledge of God. ²⁴

In what follows, a proposal for relationship between the personal mode of revelation (as constitutive) and the propositional mode of revelation (as derivative and participatory) is set out. The claim is not that revelation does not have a propositional mode because that would be tantamount to placing Scripture outside of revelation, and so excluding the mode by which revelation persists in the Church today. Instead, the propositional mode of revelation participates in the personal. The form of this participation is the divine inspiration of Scripture.

Relationship between Bible and Revelation: Inspiration

Brown has a view of the Bible which is remarkable mainly for the parallels between it and the logical positivists of the 20^th century. Just as A. J. Ayer would attend to phenomena and abstract it from the deep lying coherences within reality itself, so also Brown separates Scripture from its own dimension of depth. In Brown’s view, the inspiration of Scripture pertains to the divine influence upon the biblical text such that its precise wording is ‘divine in origin’, ²⁵ where by inspiration God plays a ‘controlling role’ in the process of the creation of the text which is treated as if the total sum of revelation. However, as Torrance notes, Scripture ‘cannot be divorced from [its] revelational framework, or from the form which the Word and Spirit of God created in the testimony of the disciples and apostles for the actualisation of that revelation’. ²⁶ In other words, the inspiration of Scripture does not constitute it as a body of revelation separate from Jesus; instead, inspiration is the means by which Scripture participates in truth of God made known in Jesus.

One area where the flat perspective Brown employs in thinking about inspiration comes in his short (but very telling) comment that the Bible is both fully divine and fully human in a way that parallels the hypostatic union as a text that is of both fully human and fully divine origin. ²⁷ This correlation illustrates the problem of Brown’s view of Scripture: he sees the Bible as something aside from Jesus Christ through which God’s revelation is accommodated to human ways of knowing through the direct influence of God in inspiration. ²⁸ For his coordination of the hypostatic union and Scripture, Brown appeals to (former) Pope Benedict’s (Joseph Ratzinger) document Verbum Domini. This is an unhappy appeal because the logic of this document is irreconcilable with Brown’s view of inspiration. Primarily, Verbum Domini sets its view of the nature of revelation within a personal and dialogical frame of reference (‘the novelty of biblical revelation consists in the fact that God becomes known through the dialogue which he desires with us’). ²⁹ This personal and dialogical account of divine revelation is irreconcilable with Brown’s uniquely propositional and rather static view of inspiration. The heart of the problem in Brown’s account of inspiration is demonstrated by Ratzinger’s majestic account of the Christology of the word, wherein this dialogue between God and creation is perfected in Jesus Christ, who is both the Word of God to humanity and the word of humanity to God. ³⁰ In a way that parallels Schillebeeckx’s account of Jesus as the sacrament of encounter, Ratzinger positions Jesus as both the divine address to creation and also the response of creation to God. In other words, the human form of the knowledge of God has already been actualized in Jesus Christ. Ratzinger continues, after the resurrection and the ascension the Word of God must assume eschatological form. It is by the Spirit, Ratzinger concludes, that the apostles testify to Christ and it is by the Spirit that subsequent believers may understand that testimony. ³¹ In this way, is the mode of the revelation that took place in Jesus Christ continuing in the form of a propositional testimony to Jesus Christ. It is in this way that the inspiration of the Bible is not the separate act of orchestrating precise words on the page, as if it were fully divine and fully human standing in its own reality distinct from Jesus. The inspiration of Scripture is in the quality of its relation to the dialogical event of revelation in which God’s Word is spoken in full and responded to in understanding, obedience and faith through the person of Jesus Christ.

The precise quality of relation that Scripture stands to God’s self-revelation in Jesus is referential. It is, as Barth put it, a ‘witness to divine revelation’. ³² However, in this reference beyond itself, Scripture does not simply point to the revelation that is beyond it (that would be, once again, to separate Scripture and revelation). Instead, Scripture is an effective sign to revelation, accomplishing that to which it points. It is something like this that Barth appears to have had in his mind when he wrote the following paradoxical passage.

we distinguish the Bible as such from revelation. A witness is not absolutely identical with that to which it witnesses [. . .]. The Bible is not distinguished from revelation. It is simply revelation as it comes to us mediating and therefore accommodating itself to us [. . .] A real witness is not identical with that to which it witnesses, but it sets it before us. ³³

At one and the same time, Scripture is not revelation, but it is not detached from revelation. The personal event of revelation pivots from the vertical axis of God to creation to the horizontal axis of Scripture through the apostles by the power of the Holy Spirit. To expand on this, we can draw on two historical precedents: Thomas Torrance’s notion of apostolicity and Herman Bavink’s pneumatological account of the relationship between revelation and inspiration.

For Torrance, the apostolic witness participates in the reality of God’s self-revelation in Jesus by the power of the Spirit. For Torrance, the content of revelation is Jesus Christ and the Gospel of Christ (or the ‘Deposit of Faith’) is that which is entrusted to the Church as the apostolic witness is ‘governed and structured’ in accordance with God’s Word spoken and received in Jesus Christ. ³⁴ The apostolic mission, Torrance argues,

is not any revelation or any new interpretation added to it or put upon the objective Revelation in the historical Christ, but the actual unfolding of the Mind of the risen Lord within his Church [. . .] The Apostles thus formed the definite medium in our flesh and blood where the unfolding of the Mind of Christ was met by inspired witness and translated into the language of the flesh, the medium, where, as it were, the Revelation of Christ through the Spirit became earthed in the Church as the Body of Christ, became rooted in humanity. The Apostolate expressly formed and shaped for this purpose is the human end of the incarnational Revelation ³⁵

In other words, for Torrance, the apostles are the ‘hinges’ between revelation per se and the ongoing presence of that revelation to the Church. The truth to which the apostles gave voice was not their own, but Christ’s. Moreover, it is through the apostolic witness, that the self-revelation of God through Jesus Christ continues to be present to the Church. In other words, the apostolic witness to revelation becomes the mode of God’s revelation as it bears the Word of God. In this, Torrance’s understanding of the apostolicity of the Scriptures parallels Barth’s notion of the Word of God in threefold form, where God’s personal revelation in Jesus is the essence of the propositional forms of the Word of God in Scripture and revelation. ³⁶ However, for Torrance, the vicarious humanity of Jesus is substantially related to this, for it is the ‘Mind of the risen Lord’ that is unfolded to the Church. The human knowledge of God is, in other words, a Christological reality which the apostolic witness in Scripture shares in. This needs to be understood in relation to Torrance’s broader ecclesiology, which is characterised by a realist account of the Church as the body of Christ, participating with Jesus as one person with him. ³⁷ For Torrance, the very essence of the Church is Jesus and in all it says and does the Church does not get in the way of Christ because Christ has made it his own.

The importance of setting Scripture in relation to its ecclesial setting as the body of Christ is demonstrated by what Torrance considers the besetting problem of the western Church. Torrance traces to Tertullian a tendency of separating the witness of the Church from God’s self-revelation in Christ and establishing it as a parallel authority. A propositional ‘compendium of doctrines formulated in definitive statements which were regarded as themselves identical with the truths they were meant to express’. ³⁸ The result, Torrance argues, is that the personal revelation of God fell into the background and its mode of presence to the Church was isolated from its proper source and distilled as a propositional body of knowledge authoritative and sufficient all of its self. ³⁹ The Evangelical Church was not immune from the separation, where, in its commitment to the Reformed emphasis on the centrality of the Scripture, its living connection to God’s personal action in revealing himself became compromised ‘through a rationalist doctrine of inspiration [the Scriptures] were isolated as “containing” in themselves in their written form supreme divine authority’. ⁴⁰ Once again, Torrance’s position runs in parallel to Barth’s, for whom the Word of God must not be mistaken for the sum of the propositions in the Bible. It is just such a movement of thought that allows humankind to domesticate and act upon “revelation”. Instead, Barth argues, Scripture is that through which the personal revelation of God confronts us through the medium of human speech. ⁴¹

Certainly, an understanding of inspiration which does not separate Scripture from Christ as an authority parallel to but never intersecting with Christ, is required. Torrance himself never attempted a systematic study of this theme. However, a possible way to approach this problem may be outlined by giving attention to Herman Bavinck’s idea of inspiration. Bavinck quite unequivocally asserts that ‘Divine inspiration is above all God speaking to us by the mouth of prophets and apostles, so that their word is the word of God’. ⁴² Even with this full-throated affirmation of Scripture as the word of God, Bavinck still carefully differentiated between Scripture and revelation, arguing that ‘the right view is one in which Scripture is neither equated with revelation nor detached form it and placed outside of it’. ⁴³ Scripture, so far as Bavinck is concerned ‘keeps pace with revelation’, by which he means that the personal revelation of God in Christ ‘is fully described for us in Scripture’. ⁴⁴ Clearly, Bavinck bears parallels with Torrance in that both are conscious to avoid exactly the sort of separation of Scripture from its dimension of depth, which is the personal revelation of God.

Bavinck’s pneumatologically sophisticated construction of inspiration is the reason he is able to distinguish between Scripture and revelation and continue to assert (with any meaning) that Scripture is the word of God. Distinguishing between ‘mechanical’ and an ‘organic’ notions of inspiration, Bavinck is able to recognize the humanity of the biblical text (i.e., the Bible is not written by divine dictation whereby the apostles are like a musical instrument in the hands of God), while also locating Scripture within the category of revelation as the Holy Spirit enabled the apostolic witness to be the vehicle of God’s personal self-revelation in Christ continues to confront us through the propositional description of it. Bavinck’s discussion is established upon the foundation of a robust doctrine of creation, which recognises that ‘God confers on the world a being of its own, which, though not independent, is distinct his’, whereby God ‘treats human beings, not as blocks of wood, but as intelligent moral beings’. ⁴⁵ Upon this foundation, Bavinck is able to establish that the witness of the apostles is dependent upon divine enabling but yet their witness retains their own distinctive human voice, character and concerns: ‘It is God who speaks through them; at the same time it is they themselves who speak and write’. ⁴⁶ Moreover, Bavinck’s particular construction is built on firm pneumatological foundations. For Bavinck, the Son accomplishes the work of revelation while the Spirit is the agent of inspiration. While Bavinck may veer slightly too close to establishing the work of the Son and Spirit into separate dispensations, he does so for the good reason of keeping a careful distinction between revelation and inspiration. The inspiration of the Spirit is that which enables the apostles to point away from themselves to Jesus Christ. In this, Bavink is established on robust patristic foundations regarding the work of the Spirit.

If we are illumined by divine power and fix our eyes on the beauty of the image of the invisible God, and through the image we are led up to the indescribable beauty of its source, it is because we have been inseparably joined to the Spirit of knowledge. He gives those who live the vision of the truth the power which enables them to see the image, and this power is the Spirit. ⁴⁷

In a similar way, Yves Congar has written that the Spirit is ‘the person without a face’. ⁴⁸ It is by the inspiration of the Spirit, that the apostles testimony participates in the truth of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. In other words, by the inspiration of the Spirit, the apostolic witness is revelation in propositional mode of being that remains with the Church: ‘Hence for the church of all ages, Scripture is the revelation, i.e., the only instrument by which the revelation of God in Christ can be known. Accordingly, in inspiration the revelation is concluded, gets its permanent form, and reaches its end point. ⁴⁹ However, even then Bavinck does not allow Scripture as the propositional form of revelation (Scripture) to stand as a possession of the Church. Instead, by what he describes as the ‘illumination’ of the Spirit, ⁵⁰ the testimony of Scripture is received by the believer as revelation. As McGowan helpfully comments, this means that ‘Scripture is not an end product, owned and controlled by the Church, but rather an instrument of God, who first brought it to completion and continues to use it as part of his self-revelation’. ⁵¹

We can now return to the questions Brown posed the evangelical tradition which wishes to see the Bible as authoritative and divinely inspired. Certainly, this view is compromised if by it we mean that revelation only exists in propositional form. However, if we adopt Bavinck’s ‘organic’ view in which the inspiration of the Spirit does ‘not spurn anything human to serve as an organ of the divine’, ⁵² then we do not need to be overly cautious or defensive when it comes to the actuality of human error concerning the biblical text. This allows us to affirm the suggestion of McGowan that rather than speaking of biblical inerrancy, we should speak of the infallibility of the Bible. ⁵³ The meaning of infallible at work here is not so much “incapable of making errors”, but rather “never failing”, or “always effective”. It is not about the quality of the biblical text as a text but about the efficacious way in which Scripture always accomplishes its purpose owing to the unity of the work of the Son and the Spirit in God’s self-revelation. Considered in the light of a personalist account of revelation which accommodates the propositional as a mode of revelation, Brown’s closing statement is correct but for all the wrong reasons! Yes, ‘the doctrine of divine inspiration needs to be grounded in the reality of the Bible’s form’, ⁵⁴ but the Bible’s form is not to be thought of in the shallows of ink on paper, but in the depths of the person of Jesus Christ, who is the revelation of God both in its objective and subjective elements, the Truth which Scripture indwells by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.