The Bible and Revelation: Another View

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David Watson’s recent essay on the Bible and divine revelation (“A Pain in the Brain: Is the Bible Divine Revelation?”) is an interesting call for Wesleyans to think longer and harder and better about divine revelation and the Bible. He introduces readers to two proposals of recent provenance: one comes from a Methodist biblical scholar (I. Howard Marshall), and the other comes from a Methodist philosopher and theologian (William J. “Billy” Abraham). Watson concludes that Wesleyans “need a comprehensive vision of scripture,” and he thinks that “Abraham and Marshall have taken us a long way toward the development of one.”

I fully agree with Watson that we need an adequate doctrine of revelation, one with a good account of the Bible. I further agree with him when he says that “we should think of Scripture as a form of divine communication meant to lead us to salvation,” and further still that the Bible is “a truth-bearing document” and is “utterly reliable in all matters related to its God-given purpose.” Like him, I too am grateful for the work of Abraham and Marshall where that work is helpful. But I do not think that we need to adopt either Abraham’s somewhat more radical or Marshall’s rather more modest proposal. There is a third option, one that is deeply rooted in the Christian tradition and widely held in global Christianity today. Indeed, the roots are so deep and the breadth so vast that it safely can be called the “catholic” view.

What am I talking about? Here is a summary: “the books of both the Old and New Testaments in their entirety, with all their parts, are sacred and canonical because written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God as their author and have been handed on as such to the Church herself… [and] since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully, and without error all that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings” (Dei Verbum; Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, 1965). Put succinctly, this statement affirms the following:

(A) The Bible in its entirety is written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and has God as its principal author (as well, of course, as human authors);
(B) the Bible teaches that truth which God wanted to communicate in written form;
(C) the claims that the Bible makes as true are utterly reliable and absolutely trustworthy (thus “faithfully” and “without error”).

Of course this particular summary of the catholic view is not only “catholic” but indeed Roman Catholic. It comes from the Second Vatican Council, but it was hardly a new invention at that point. To the contrary, it is woven into the fabric of catholic faith. Thus the First Vatican Council affirms that the scriptures were “written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit,” have “God as their author,” and therefore “contain revelation without error.” And detailed historical scholarship supports the conclusion that these elements are affirmed throughout much of the Christian tradition; for example, Richard A. Muller has documented the affirmations of Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure, Albert Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, Hervaeus Natalis, Henry of Ghent, Peter Aureole, and John Duns Scotus (Post Reformation Reformed Dogmatics Vol. Two: Holy Scripture). Going back even further we see John Chrysostom, for example, speaking of the “unerring truth of Scripture” (“Homilies on St. John,” LXVIII in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers 14:252).

But what I am calling the “catholic” view is not uniquely Roman Catholic. To the contrary, these core affirmations are part and parcel of Reformed and Lutheran confessionalism and scholasticism. Moreover, these basic convictions are held throughout global evangelicalism. Consider the summary given in the Lausanne Covenant: “We affirm the divine inspiration, truthfulness and authority of both Old and New Testament Scriptures in their entirety as the only written word of God, without error in all that it affirms…” And – importantly for our theological identity – these convictions are deeply embedded in historic Wesleyan theology.

Consider a few examples of traditional Wesleyan theology on the doctrine of revelation (references can be found in Thomas H. McCall, “Wesleyan Theology and the Authority of Scripture,” in The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures, 2016, 173-180). Richard Watson rejects a dictation account of inspiration but nonetheless insists upon plenary inspiration, and he insists that the Bible is an “infallible authority.” Thomas Ralston defends an account of inspiration that is both plenary and verbal, and he says that the Bible is “really God’s writing – God’s book – God’s word.” Scripture is thus “infallible,” for “what the Bible says, God says; what the Bible declares to be true, is true…” Similarly, Samuel Wakefield rejects mechanical dictation but says that the human authors were “moved, directed, and assisted by the Holy Spirit,” and he concludes that the truth claims of the Bible are thus “infallibly preserved from error.” Miner Raymond agrees: “what the Bible says God says.” William Burt Pope also distances himself from theories of mechanical dictation, and he is careful to observe that the Bible should not be read as if it were a textbook of modern science. But he also insists that the Bible not only does not but indeed “cannot contain anything untrue.” Instead it is “infallible.” Randolph Sinks Foster argues at length that the Bible is a “divinely inspired book.” As such it is a “revelation from God,” and it is to be gratefully received as the “final authority.” He works hard to clarify his view: it is not merely the claim that “the Bible is in the main true” but rather the claim that it is wholly true and trustworthy and “therefore of supreme, universal, and perpetual authority.” Such statements are representative of much that is in the mainstream of Methodist theology prior to the twentieth century. These statements are not the product of “fundamentalism,” for they predate the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy. They are not plausibly the result of a “Calvinist leavening” of Wesleyan theology, for in many cases the defenders of this classical, catholic account are also the most energetic in their polemics against Reformed theology. Nor is this adherence to this account unique to them; to the contrary, these Methodist theologians are part of a long tradition that stretches back through the Reformation to medieval and patristic theology.

I understand that there are concerns and objections related to the catholic account (for further discussion, see my back-and-forth with Billy Abraham: Thomas H. McCall, “Wesleyan Theology and the Authority of Scripture,” pp. 171-194; William J. Abraham, “Smoky the Cow Horse and Wesleyan Understanding of Scripture,” Wesleyan Theological Journal, 7-25; Thomas H. McCall, “A Wild Night at the Rodeo: An Engagement with William J. Abraham on Historic Wesleyan Theologies of Scripture,” Wesleyan Theological Journal, 103-118; William J. Abraham, “Dopey the Donkey and a Rusty Shotgun: A Reply to McCall,” Wesleyan Theological Journal,  175-184). I know that parts of this classical, catholic position have been closely associated with one side of the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy and have been closely linked to doctrines that many Wesleyans find problematic and even intolerable (e.g., young-earth creationism and dispensationalism), and of course I am aware of the criticism that “contradictions” within the Bible make the catholic view untenable. But it is not as if proponents of the catholic account are committed to “wooden” readings that leave them vulnerable to concerns about contradictions. To the contrary, they are engaged in serious and sophisticated work on these issues; for a (very) recent Roman Catholic reflection, see this essay by James Dominic Rooney. For examples of recent work by evangelical Protestants, see Michael Licona’s Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? What We Can Learn from Ancient Biography (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Craig Keener’s, Christobiography: Memory, History, and the Reliability of the Gospels (Eerdmans, 2019).

Nor is it true that commitment to the catholic position somehow requires one to adopt a timeline that produces a conflict with what mainstream science tells us about the existence of dinosaurs or the age of the earth. My own experience informs my perspective here. For several years I was the director of a large-scale interdisciplinary research project on the doctrine of creation (see more about it here). This project, funded by very generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation and Templeton Religion Trust, included specialists in biology, genomics, physics, astronomy, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, biblical studies, history, and theology. It is safe to say that most of the participants were committed to catholic or classical understandings of the Bible, but such a commitment did not hinder them from serious engagement with modern science. Nor did it demand a uniformity of belief about the age of the earth or evolution (see, e.g., the “Symposium on Theistic Evolution” in Philosophia Christi [2020]) with the lead essay by Michael J. Murray and John Ross Churchill entitled “Mere Theistic Evolution” and including responses by William Lane Craig, Stephen C. Meyer, and me). The project did, on the other hand, yield an impressive set of serious publications (e.g., Daniel W. Houck’s Aquinas, Original Sin, and the Challenge of Evolution [Cambridge University Press, 2022]) that wrestled with the difficult challenges and exciting developments at the intersection of science and theology.

If we are going to embrace a Wesleyanism that is truly global, then we should not allow our reactions to various movements of twentieth century Western (and distinctly American) fundamentalism to push us to a rejection of the catholic convictions held by so many brothers and sisters in the Global South and expressed in such statements as the Lausanne Covenant. And if we want a Wesleyanism that is truly orthodox in a historic sense, then we have ample reason to affirm the catholic account. We truly need a “comprehensive vision of Scripture.” We just don’t need to invent one. 

Thomas H. McCall holds the Timothy C. and Julie M. Tennent Chair in Theology at Asbury Theological Seminary and is a member of Firebrand’s editorial board.