Sermon Tone Analysis

Models of Revelation

• Model 1: Revelation as Doctrine (God as Teacher)

• Model 2: Revelation as History (God as Actor)

• Model 3: Revelation as Inner Experience (God as Guest)

• Model 4: Revelation as Dialectical Encounter (God as Judge)

• Model 5: Revelation as New Awareness (God as Poet)

Model 1 focuses on divine revelation as the propositions contained within Scripture.

Model 2 focused on divine revelation as God’s might acts in history.

The Bible witnesses to these acts, but it is not revelation itself.

It is a witness to and record of revelation.

It is an interpretation of the human author recording the revelation.

The author always leaves part of himself in the record.

Model 3 focuses on revelation as an immediate (often mystical) experience.

More than Christ’s “external Word”, the indwelling Christ is the highest authority.

Calvinists and Lutherans stand most resolutely against such enthusiasm.

Model 4 focuses on revelation as an event of personal encounter.

Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, and Emil Brunner are its biggest proponents.

God could never be known as an object by way of inference from nature or history, by propositional teaching, or by direct perception of a mystical kind.

Utterly transcendent, God encounters the human subject when it pleases him by means of a word in which faith recognizes him to be present.

Model 5 is similar to 3 except that it focuses more on revelation as “an expression of consciousness or shift of perspective when people join in the movements of secular history.

God reveals from within, not from without.

[modern liberalism - gay Christianity, bible is antiquated, their revelation is not our revelation]

What are some examples of models of revelation we are dealing with now that introduce problems into Christian thought?

Toward a Biblical Doctrine of Revelation

None of these models, by itself, can account for the diversity of actual occurrences of revelation in Scripture.

Revelation Depends on Divine Initiative

Louis Berkhof reminds us, “It should be observed that in theology it [revelation] never denotes a mere passive, perhaps unconscious, becoming manifest, but always a conscious, voluntary, and intentional deed of God, by which he reveals or communicates divine truth.”

In other words, human beings do not discover God; God reveals himself.

God is never the revealed object without being the revealing subject.

-

Isa.

Isa

One weakness in all of the theories proposed above is the tendency to reduce God’s communication to revealing.

However, God’s speech does not merely interpret history; it creates it.

Revelation is not gnosis or enlightenment: a way of salvation by discovering God’s hidden essence or will.

It is never an end in itself, whether as supernatural information, existential encounter, or as inner experience and heightened awareness.

God reveals himself only inasmuch and insofar as he deems necessary for our invocation of him for our salvation and life

Revelation Serves Redemption

One weakness in all of the theories proposed above is the tendency to reduce God’s communication to revealing.

However, God’s speech does not merely interpret history; it creates it.

Revelation is not gnosis or enlightenment: a way of salvation by discovering God’s hidden essence or will.

It is never an end in itself, whether as supernatural information, existential encounter, or as inner experience and heightened awareness.

God reveals himself only inasmuch and insofar as he deems necessary for our invocation of him for our salvation and life

Propositions without Propositionalism

Knowledge of God is not just knowing a bunch of propositions about God.

Knowledge of God is personal knowledge.

It is knowledge of a person, a divine person.

Revelation and Mediation: A Way with Words

In short, for the Reformers, revelation is never as lofty as univocal knowledge nor as inadequate as equivocal knowledge, and this accommodated revelation is given directly in Scripture.

To put it crudely, God gets the job done.

He displays his power in weakness and his wisdom in what Greeks consider folly.

God is capable of revealing himself, his will and works, and his redemptive plans through creaturely mediation.

The creatures themselves are not worthy, but God sanctifies them for his loving and sovereign purposes.

The Word of God

Col

In this way, God ensures that there is a normative canon (or constitution) on the basis of which contemporary preaching continues to be a medium of Christ’s saving activity in the world.

Since I treat the topic of preaching as a means of grace under ecclesiology, I will focus here on general revelation and, in the following chapter, on Scripture.

Before considering the scope of revelation, it is important to distinguish the two parts of the Word of God.

The Word of God as Law and Gospel

Rom.

3:19-22

But the gospel did not so supplant the entire law as to bring forward a different way of salvation.

Rather, it confirmed and satisfied whatever the law had promised, and gave substance to the shadows.

When Christ says, “The Law and the Prophets were until John” [Luke 16:16; cf.

Matt.

11:13], he does not subject the patriarchs to the curse that the slaves of the law cannot escape.

He means: they had been trained in rudiments only, thus remaining far beneath the height of the gospel teaching.

Christ is came to fulfill the law, not to abolish it.

He came to demonstrate the veracity of the law.

The law kills.

How does life then get imparted by keeping the law?

Only one way!

Christ’s keeping of the law earns for us positive righteousness by grace through faith in his name only.

The law’s imperatives tell us what must be done; the gospel’s indicatives tell us what God has done.

There is still law in the covenant of grace.

However, it is no longer able to condemn believers, but directs them in lives of gratitude for God’s mercy in Christ.

God’s Revelation in Creation: General Revelation

Rom.

1:18

In Western theology and philosophy, we may discern two broad approaches to general revelation, approaches that may be defined in terms of a recurring struggle over the relation of reason and revelation, nature and grace, logic and faith.

Roman Catholic theology, on one hand, even when admirably defending the coinherence of faith and reason, typically assumes an underlying ontological dualism between nature and grace that provokes this problem in the first place.

Roman Catholic theology teaches that grace elevates nature, orienting it to the supernatural, away from the lower self (the body and its passions).

Grace is a substance that is added (infused) to nature in order to direct the aim of its gaze upward from material things to spiritual reality.

For Lutheran and Reformed theologies, on the other hand, there is no such thing as a gift of grace superadded to nature (donum superadditum); creation p 141 itself is a gift (donum concreatum).

Grace, however, is a particular kind of gift: God’s merciful favor toward sinners.

The Reformers challenged the idea that there was some inherent tendency toward sin in God’s creation.

Grace is therefore not given to already good creatures in order to elevate them beyond nature, but to sinners in order to redeem and renew their nature so that it may be “created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph 4:24).