A “Pain in the Brain”: Is the Bible Divine Revelation? [Firebrand Big Read]
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A few weeks ago I posted something on Twitter to the effect that Billy Abraham did not believe that the Bible itself was divine revelation, but rather bears witness to divine revelation. Some reacted to this news with surprise, and understandably so. It is simply standard evangelical practice to think of the Bible as special divine revelation.
In hopes of providing a bit of clarity on these matters, I’ll drill down into the concepts of biblical inspiration and divine revelation. I’ll do so by looking at the work of two highly respected evangelical Methodists, Billy Abraham and I. Howard Marshall. I’ll then provide a brief evaluation of some of the key differences between them.
Billy on the Bible
Billy Abraham (1947-2021) was revered by many in the world of evangelical Methodism. He was a scholar and churchman of the highest caliber. Yet his doctrine of Scripture will strike many in this same world as odd and perhaps objectionable. His major differences from many evangelical Christians on the matter of Scripture are twofold, and they will give you what he used to call a “pain in the brain.” First, he made a distinction between Scripture and divine revelation. Second, his notion of divine inspiration is largely determined by analogy with human inspiration.
Plenary Verbal Inspiration is a No-Go
In Abraham’s first book, The Divine Inspiration of Holy Scripture (Oxford, 1981), he came out swinging. Unlike much of what he wrote in his career, his argument in this book is not aimed at theological liberalism, but at evangelicalism. He argues that the “standard evangelical orthodoxy,” plenary verbal inspiration (or verbal inerrancy), is inadequate. In other words, the claim that God has determined each and every word of Scripture–even if we confine ourselves to the original manuscripts–simply doesn’t work. It accounts insufficiently for discrepancies in the texts and historical research that may contradict biblical accounts. We cannot in all cases harmonize biblical accounts with one another or with the best historical work available to us. Here’s another way of summarizing his critique: using the Bible as an epistemological cudgel to fend off challenges from all other fields of inquiry is intellectually irresponsible. He thus sets out to provide a workable alternative.
Dealing with the Bible We Have, Not the Bible We Don’t Have
Abraham identifies plenary verbal inspiration as a deductive approach to understanding Scripture. In other words, it is an approach that begins with a theory of Scripture and then attempts to understand all of Scripture through that lens. If there are parts of Scripture that don’t fit the theory, we have to get out the intellectual shoehorn to make them fit. An inductive approach, he argues, is more intellectually responsible. To develop an inductive theory of Scripture means that we base our theory on the Bible’s contents. We read the Bible and come to understand what inspiration means by reading it. Stated briefly, a deductive approach begins with a theory, while an inductive approach begins with the text.
Three Categories of Divine Revelation
Abraham accepts the common distinction between general and special divine revelation. General revelation involves what we can perceive about God by observing the world around us. Special revelation involves more specific self-disclosure by God. For Abraham, special revelation consists of three components. “There are the acts of God in the history of Israel, especially his delivery of the Hebrew slaves from bondage in Egypt. Then there are the speech-acts of God in which he reveals his saving intentions and purposes to chosen prophets and apostles. Finally there are his unique and climactic acts in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth” (Divine Inspiration, 66). This point is crucial for his argument. These three categories of God’s self-disclosure, and not the Bible itself, constitute special divine revelation.
Divine Inspiration and Human Inspiration
This is where inspiration comes into play. Through these revelatory acts, personal dealings with people and groups, and other actions, God inspired people to write and collect the works that make up the Bible.
Abraham conceives of inspiration along the lines of human inspiration. He highlights two particular qualities of human inspiration that also apply to divine inspiration. First, inspiration is polymorphous. Second, inspiration depends not only upon the inspirer, but also the inspired.
What does it mean for inspiration to be polymorphous? It means that one does not simply “inspire” as an act in itself, but one inspires by carrying out other actions. To understand this point more clearly, consider another polymorphous act: teaching. One carries out the act of teaching by engaging in other acts, such as lecturing, mediating discussions, assigning readings, and grading papers. Likewise, God inspires by speaking through individuals, carrying out saving works among his people, orchestrating events to further his purposes, and other means. Inspiration is an action that takes place through other actions.
Inspiration is not simply a one-sided transaction, though. It depends upon the receptiveness and abilities of the one who is inspired. Think of a teacher who inspires her students. The students of course will vary in terms of their abilities, temperaments, interests, and other qualities. They will receive the teacher’s actions in different ways and degrees. One particularly bright and enthusiastic student might receive the inspiring work of the teacher in life-changing ways and do great things for years to come. Another student may receive very little inspiration from the teacher. Perhaps he has a grudge against her. Perhaps he simply doesn’t relate to her communication style. Whether the inspiring agent is a teacher or God, inspiration will take place in greater or lesser degrees based upon the qualities of the person who has been inspired.
Abraham does note one way in which human and divine forms of inspiration differ from one another. Humans are imperfect creatures, whereas God is omniscient and infallible. Thus from the divine inspiration of Scripture we can expect a generally truthful account. There is no such guarantee with people.
Note the distinction here: God revealed himself through Israel, prophets and apostles, and Jesus Christ. God inspired others to write down accounts that mediate this revelation to later generations. Inspiration and revelation are separate but related categories.
Inspiration is Ongoing
Abraham also holds that inspiration is an ongoing act. God has continued to inspire men and women across the centuries. “By exposure to his saving and revelatory acts in the past, by radical openness to the work of the Holy Spirit, and by diligent, sincere, and regular use of the classical means of grace, God will inspire us in the present to proclaim the Gospel to live out its demands in the world, and think out its implications for our understanding of the issues and problems of our day and generation” (Divine Inspiration, 72).
The notion of ongoing inspiration is at the heart of Abraham’s signature contribution to Christian theology, Canonical Theism. God continued to inspire the church across the ages–in councils, the development of doctrine, the emergence of great teachers, the development of liturgy, and in other ways. These aspects of the canonical heritage in turn become means by which God inspires the church to do his will in loving obedience.
Within this schema, Scripture’s primary function is soteriological. Put simply, it is a means of grace by which God leads us into salvation. The Holy Spirit works through Scripture to make us wise unto salvation and lead us ever more fully into a sanctified life.
Getting Philosophical
When reading Abraham, one must bear in mind that he was by training a philosopher. Epistemology–the branch of philosophy dealing with how we know things–was a great intellectual passion of his. It only makes sense, then, that his writing about Scripture would focus on epistemology. In what ways is Scripture a source of knowledge? What kind of knowledge can we hope to receive from Scripture?
Verbal inerrancy, he argues, is a flawed attempt to make Scripture an epistemic criterion. Put more simply, Scripture becomes the standard by which we judge truth or falsity on all matters it touches upon. For example, in cases in which the Gospels relate what seems to be the same story in two slightly different ways, proponents of verbal inerrancy must conclude that these are actually accounts of two separate events. Otherwise, one would have to admit errors in the text, and then one would have to abandon this theory of inspiration.
Along the same lines, questions related to the existence of dinosaurs or the age of the earth become problematic. The Bible gives us one timeline. Science provides overwhelming evidence for another. How do we decide between these? Proponents of verbal inerrancy would be compelled to argue that we must believe the Bible and disregard the science. This is not, however, intellectually responsible. We know that science teaches us facts about the world around us, even if what we know scientifically is at times subject to revision or refinement. Science is a generally reliable (though not infallible) field of knowledge. While we need not disregard the witness of Scripture, we can bring it into dialogue with science.
It’s important to keep in mind that, for Abraham, divine revelation is always true, and Scripture mediates divine revelation to us. Yet not all of Scripture is divine revelation, Therefore Scripture itself cannot be the final test of truthfulness.
To sum up: Scripture’s primary function is soteriological, not epistemological. Its primary function is to lead us into salvation, not to adjudicate truth claims on all matters upon which it touches.
Do you have that pain in the brain yet?
Marshall Matters
Another luminary among Methodist evangelicals was I. Howard Marshall (1934-2015). Although he writes about the nature and function of Scripture in a number of texts, his book Biblical Inspiration (Eerdmans, 1983) takes on these matters directly. He offers a gentle critique of Abraham in two areas: the question of the Bible as divine revelation and the nature of inspiration.
The Bible and History
Like Abraham, Marshall comes at the matter of inspiration inductively. He takes a “grammatico-historical” approach to the Bible–one that takes seriously the best historical and linguistic work available to us in order to understand the biblical witness. He insists that Christians have nothing to fear from such an approach.
Importantly, he also rejects the kind of methodological atheism that has characterized the historical-critical method. In other words, he believes Christians are well within their rights to take seriously accounts of divine speaking, miracles, and other forms of divine agency as acts in history. In this sense, his perspective lines up with the ideas Abraham articulates in his second book, Divine Revelation and the Limits of Historical Criticism (Oxford, 1982). Both scholars reject the claims of Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923), who insisted that we can only understand the past by virtue of our present experience, and that only “natural” events can occur.
Yes, the Bible is a Form of Divine Revelation
Like Abraham, Marshall rejects the idea that all of the Bible constitutes divine speaking. In other words, he rejects verbal inerrancy. He holds that we do see examples of divine speaking in the Bible in prophetic utterances. Yet not all the Bible came to the biblical writers in the same manner that the words of the prophets came to them. God has inspired the biblical writers in different ways to communicate those truths to us that we need to know in order to be saved.
By contrast with Abraham, however, Marshall does view the Bible as a form of divine revelation. For many Christians the Bible is the primary means by which God communicates with them. It is not simply a record of other people’s encounters with God. Rather, it teaches us how these encounters can model for us our own encounters with God. What happened in their lives can happen in ours. God is revealed to us in these encounters. Moreover, the Bible both describes revelatory events and interprets them so that we can understand their revelatory nature. That interpretation is itself a kind of revelation. Finally, if we “deprive God of the opportunity to speak to his creatures, using words that they can understand,” we “reduce him to a subpersonal level, something less than the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Logically, it would also involve the conclusion that we cannot pray to him and address him in speech as well” (Biblical Inspiration, 14-15).
A “God-breathed” Bible
Another area in which Marshall disagrees with Abraham has to do with the use of the term “inspired.” The problem, he argues, is that Abraham “rightly appeals to the meaning of the biblical word ‘inspired’, but … begins from the English usage of the concept rather than from the Greek word and its usage” (Biblical Inspiration, 40). Put differently, Abraham does not begin with the Greek term theopneustos–literally, “God-breathed.” The common English use of “inspire,” as when a teacher inspires her students, does not capture the fullness of meaning in the statement that God breathed into the whole of Scripture.
Following J. I. Packer Marshall adopts a view of “concursive action” regarding the inspiration of the Bible. This is the idea that both human beings and God were involved in every aspect of the formation of the Bible, from oral traditions to written accounts to canonization. God and humans worked side by side throughout the entire process. God has worked in and through people providentially to guide the formation of the canon throughout its entire development.
The Bible as the Word of God
While he rejects verbal inerrancy, Marshall believes that all the Bible is the Word of God. He writes:
It is analogous to our speaking about the presence of God.
There is a sense in which God is omnipresent; he is everywhere, and nobody can escape from his presence (Ps. 139:7-12). But people also talk about occasions when God was especially near to them or when God was not with them, and both of these ways of speaking are found in the Bible (Matt. 18:20; Judg. 16:20). In the same kind of way, when we speak of the words of the prophets as the Word of God, we mean that in these cases God spoke in a direct manner to and through the prophets; but if we want to say that the other parts of the Bible (such as the prophets’ prayers addressed to God or the mistaken words of evil men) are the Word of God, then clearly we are using the term in a broader kind of way, similar to that in which we talk more broadly of the omnipresence of God in comparison with particular experiences of his presence (Biblical Inspiration, 22).
The Bible as Infallible
According to Marshall, to understand biblical inspiration, we must understand what the Bible is supposed to do. Based upon 2 Tim 3:15-16, he argues that the primary function of Scripture is to lead us into salvation and the associated life. In fulfilling this purpose, he holds, Scripture is entirely reliable. Put differently, Scripture is infallible.
Note the distinction here between inerrancy and infallibility. Inerrancy means that Scripture must be factually correct on every matter it touches upon. There can be no discrepancies in Scripture, and both science and history must give way to its accounts whenever there is disagreement between them. Infallibility holds that the purpose of Scripture is to lead us into salvation and the associated life, and it is utterly reliable in so doing. The nature of Scripture, then, is derived from its function. In this sense, I see no disagreement between Abraham and Marshall, though I am not aware of Abraham ever having applied the word “infallible” to the Bible. If he avoided this word, it is probably because he felt it would create too many intellectual problems related to the Bible as a source of knowledge.
Beyond the Bible
Also like Abraham, Marshall is interested in God’s guidance of the church beyond the canon of Scripture. Some evangelicals will take issue with the development of doctrine beyond the Bible, but the simple fact of the matter is that such development has taken place. If we affirm the classical doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, we also affirm the development of doctrine. The claim that there is one God who exists in three persons eternally as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is rooted in Scripture, but it is not clearly set forth in Scripture. It took the church time to arrive at this truth. Likewise, the claim that Christ is truly divine and truly human, possessing both a divine nature and a human nature, is coherent with the biblical witness, but it took the church a few centuries to arrive at this formulation.
Marshall has no problem with such notions of doctrinal development. In fact, he has a book on this topic consisting of three lectures plus responses called Beyond the Bible: Moving from Scripture to Theology (Baker Academic, 2012). As he puts it, “The Closing of the canon is not incompatible with the nonclosing of the interpretation of the canon” (Beyond the Bible, 54, italics original). To state it another way, he holds that “the closing of the canon did not bring the process of doctrinal development to an end” (54). While there is a fixed canon of Scripture, the interpretation of that canon is ongoing, and it is this interpretive process that generates Christian doctrine.
The Bible, Revelation, and Truth
Both of these scholars have left invaluable theological legacies. We will continue to learn from them for generations to come. Clearly their agreement far outpaces their disagreement, but we are nevertheless left with the questions of whether or not Scripture constitutes a divine revelation and the relationship between inspiration and revelation.
Is the Bible Revelation? Abraham vs. Marshall
On this particular point, I think Marshall has the edge. Scripture not only bears witness to revelation. It is itself a kind of revelation. Yes, it bears witness to God’s self-revelation through Israel, the prophets and apostles, and Jesus Christ. It also interprets these events for us in such a way that we can understand their soteriological significance–their significance for our salvation and the attendant life. That interpretive work is itself a kind of divine self-disclosure. It teaches us who God is and what he has done.
It does so, moreover, by relating to us a grand story of God’s creating and saving work. The Bible has a kind of narrative arc. It begins with creation and moves quickly to the fall. It relates Israel’s struggle with God, her vacillation between faithfulness and rebellion. God, however, sends a savior, Jesus Christ, to heal our alienation from God. He gives us new life and leads us into life eternal. Finally, we read that God will make all things new, that the salvation that has come to us in Jesus Christ will extend to a new heaven and a new earth. Creation, fall, redemption, new creation: that is the biblical narrative. And other parts of the Bible, such as the psalms, proverbs, and letters, help us to interpret that narrative and develop a more fulsome account of God’s saving work. The story itself and its attendant commentary constitute a kind of divine revelation. It is not entirely propositional revelation, but narrative revelation.
I think–and I’m still working this out–that Marshall would agree with Abraham that we should not think of the Bible as an epistemic criterion–a criterion of truth. The Bible teaches us true things, but it does not settle contested claims among those who do not already accept its reliability. The Bible is not a shared public standard the way, say, simple mathematical calculations are. If you think there are eight apples on the table and I think there are nine, we can settle that disagreement by counting. If I believe that Jesus is the incarnation of the one true God and a Buddhist disagrees with me, it’s much harder to resolve this debate. A simple appeal to Scripture will not help because the Buddhist does not recognize its truth-bearing quality in the way that I do.
Crossing the Threshold
A constructive way forward is to adopt Abraham’s notion of revelation as a threshold concept. When we cross a threshold, we enter into a new thought-world, one with new assumptions, connections, and necessary conclusions. As he puts it, “Once the term 'revelation’ is deployed, it is simply and totally applicable; and once revelation is accepted, one enters a whole new world where everything is liable to be seen in a whole new light” (Crossing the Threshold of Divine Revelation, 85-6). Crossing the threshold means that we “enter a whole new field of vision that stretches miles and miles from every angle” (86). When we come to understand reality in this new way, the Bible takes on a different significance. It cannot function as a criterion of truth among parties that do not recognize its authority, but it can help us to resolve difficult theological and moral questions among those who have crossed the threshold.
There will unquestionably be disagreements among Christians regarding the interpretation of Scripture, even among those who have entered the new world made available through divine revelation. The Bible consists of narrative, poetry, wisdom literature, apocalyptic visions, and other kinds of material that lend themselves to a breadth of interpretation. There are statements of propositional revelation in Scripture (e.g., “Jesus is Lord”), but not all of Scripture consists of propositional statements. It is still not possible, then, to think of the whole of Scripture as an epistemic criterion, but it is a truth-bearing document that teaches us about our salvation and the attendant life.
I believe we should think of Scripture as a form of divine communication meant to lead us into salvation. It is a truth-bearing document, utterly reliable in all matters related to its God-given purpose. It is not inerrant, but it is infallible (by Marshall’s definition). It is the word of God, and truly to receive its life-giving power we must cross the threshold of divine revelation.
Wesleyans need a comprehensive vision of scripture. Abraham and Marshall have taken us a long way toward the development of one. There is still considerable work to be done in this area, but we have ample material in this area from which to work. And yes, all of this is going to give us a “pain in the brain.”
David F. Watson is Academic Dean and Professor of New Testament at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. He serves as Lead Editor of Firebrand.