Embracing the Fullness of Revelation

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One of the courses I teach is a doctoral seminar about what it means to be human society. In this seminar we imagine conversations between people of different cultures and religions. We look for intersections and differences. And we look for ways that different thinkers may illuminate one another and expand our understanding.

David Watson has given us an excellent opportunity to do that in a conversation about the authority of Scripture with his excellent short account of the understanding of the authority of scripture found among United Methodist traditionalists. https://davidfwatson.me/2019/01/28/on-the-authority-of-scripture/

What might be enlightening is to put David Watson in conversation with Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther, also theologians interested in both tradition and authority

In David Watson‘s understanding "The central revelation of our faith is the incarnate Word of God, Jesus Christ. And that central revelation is disclosed to us through two additional sources of revelation: first Scripture and second tradition." He goes so far as to say that Methodists are not sola scriptura, but prima scriptura, Christians.

But let’s bring another voice into the room. Thomas Aquinas wrestled with the question of authority in the church and where it is to be found. For Aquinas there is another revelation of God‘s nature, purpose, and will, and that is nature. Aquinas, like the apostle Paul understands that nature as God’s creation under God‘s providential guidance reveals to us God‘s nature purpose and will. This revelation is one that Watson appears to neglect, perhaps because it isn’t specifically Christian.

Natural revelation

While Aquinas would seem to enlarge Watson’s understanding of revelation, the concept of natural revelation raises the problem of its relation to scripture and tradition. For Watson tradition guides us in the interpretation of Scripture, a fairly straightforward idea. But what of nature? Is it just an independent source of information about God, or is it a guide to the interpretation of scripture as well?

Actually it is both. As an independent source of information about God natural revelation helps us to properly interpret scripture, much like tradition. If what we learn from a reasoned study of nature contradicts what scripture seems to say then we may have misinterpreted scripture. So if nature teaches us that the world was not created in either the time frame or sequence described in Genesis chapter 1 then we must reinterpret Genesis 1 not as a description of nature, but as a metaphorical description of God’s nature as One who creates order out of chaos. The specifics of the order don’t matter as much as the orderliness - and that is something that natural revelation affirms.

Understood this way nature tells us when scripture is not speaking of nature per se but is speaking of God‘s nature. It helps resolve the issue of genre and intent in scripture. Nature tells us when it is inappropriate to interpret scripture literally when it speaks about nature, since nature (a universally available revelation) reveals itself directly to human reason (equally universal) but is incidental to the God’s self-revelation in Scripture.

Watson doesn’t take up these ideas, but he is clear that he isn’t a literalist, and in the end he limits scripture to being a "reliable guide to Christian faith and life” that “discloses the grand narrative of salvation.” His interest is in how the teaching of scripture is binding on human life rather than being descriptive of nature. Because his position is unknown in church tradition before the rise of scientific interpretations of nature constrained the breadth of a credible interpretation of its teaching we may regard it as fully modern.

But this begs the question of just how far our interpretations of natural revelation can constrain our interpretations of scripture. Is it possible natural revelation interrogates traditional understandings of scripture that speak to how Christians should live?

Grand narrative of salvation

While scripture may not bind us by its descriptions of the natural world, the events it describes in the grand narrative of salvation take place within the natural world, and thus come into potential conflict with the constraints placed on the natural world by the reasoned observation of nature. What are we to make, for example, of miracles; events that seem to break the natural order for a moral purpose?

One approach is to note that because miracles are by definition one-off events their veracity cannot be tested by an appeal to nature as we observe it. The fact that God sometimes disrupts the order God created in no way makes God (or nature) capricious so long as God simultaneously reveals the reason for that disruption. Because they have a single creator there is no reason that the laws of moral justice should not supersede the the laws of nature, and indeed be required to do so in a world of free creatures.

Still, ascribing moral purpose to natural events has the potential for of turning all natural events into moral lessons, which is almost always a moral disaster. That is why claimed miracles beyond scripture must be held in suspicion.

Far more difficult than miracles is when a rational understanding of human nature within God's natural order contradicts the scriptural revelation of human nature within the “grand narrative of salvation." Specifically we have a problem when the traditional interpretation of Scripture says that human nature is made up of two sexes with two corresponding genders against our observation of the natural world which shows that neither sex nor gender are purely binary. Does our observation of nature shows that our traditional interpretation of scripture is wrong? Yes. It shows that we must understand those assertions of a binary sex/gender human nature are misinterpretations of the meaning of scripture. The alternative is to assume that our interpretation of Scripture is correct and the complexity we are observing is unnatural, outside of God’s intended order, and thus to be ascribed to sin.

This choice has the same problem as ascribing moral purposes to natural events. It quickly becomes the moral disaster of making God responsible for allowing terrible moral burdens and the condemnation of society to fall on a small and apparently random group of humans. Paul’s description of the human situation in Romans 1 is a wonderful narrative of the general path of human degradation (within the grand narrative of salvation) when God is lost from human vision. But when the Christian tradition reifies out of it the very specific condemnation of LGBTQ persons as the especial targets of God’s wrath it indulges in a hypocrisy Paul’s other writings suggest he would reject.

Reasoned interpretation of nature

To be consistent we should extend into the realm of human nature our preference for a reasoned interpretation of natural revelation over a traditional interpretation of scripture. But it isn’t in the least difficult to see why traditionalists find this hard to swallow. The claims of the reasoned interpretation of nature, science for short, to fully comprehend reality have constantly expanded over the last 300 years. They have moved from something like the status of tradition aiding in the interpretation of scripture as the primary revelation of God to the exclusion of revelation as anything more than the revelation of the inner states of its human authors.

And even if we don’t go that far, the rise of the social sciences, and in particular the affiliation of biological science with sociology and psychology threaten to completely usurp the role of scripture in describing the human person as a moral subject living under divine law.

Yet I don’t think this is really a threat, and indeed scientific descriptions of humanity, like those of the rest of the natural world, actually help us better interpret scripture. They help us identify what God is actually revealing in the primary revelation of scripture - which is precisely and only the grand narrative of salvation.

The ecumenical councils were enormously wise in their formulations of the creeds that articulate the traditional understanding of that grand narrative. These creeds are the distillation of the scriptural story of salvation, a story in which only three aspects of human nature are germane: humans were created in the image God, humans have fallen under the power of sin, and humans are redeemed by Jesus Christ. Sex and gender, so complexified by modern science, are simply ignored by this tradition. As an aspect of human nature they are not critical to the story of salvation nor to our theology of redemption. Concepts like “male” and “female” have no role to play in God's plan of salvation - something the apostle Paul clearly affirms.

Put another way, natural revelation, affirmed by tradition, shows us that we are as misguided in making binary sex and gender differences central to Christian understandings of scripture as we are in trying to make the times and orders of the creation of the earth central to Christian understandings of scripture. What science shows and the creeds by their silence affirm is that sex and gender are beside the point theologically.

But to return David Watson’s account of the authority of scripture. It seems lacking in that he ignores natural revelation – something clearly affirmed in scripture. And I fear it is also a mistake to ascribe authority to tradition beyond the ecumenical councils. Despite acknowledging Wesley's suspicion of the tradition after Chalcedon he speaks of the tradition of the church “down through the ages.” He thus extends tradition to include not only the traditional culture of which the early church was a part, but all those subsequent cultures. This may be necessary since traditionalists need the backing of later tradition to justify changes in the traditional understanding of scripture such as accepting the ordination of women.

I’ll close in noting that Luther seems to have seen the danger inherit in asserting that this ongoing tradition is also revelation. In his own time he could see that the claims of tradition were distorting the interpretation of the Bible because they had expanded to embrace every cultural perversion from the first century onward. This is why sola scripture was so important. Neither tradition nor natural revelation, interpreted with finite and flawed human reason, can be allowed to play so large a role in shaping our faith that God’s grand narrative of salvation is distorted into mere law or diminished to mere natural evolution.

In our time it is ironic that science is increasingly aware of the boundaries of its claims to know, while Christian traditionalists seem almost unbounded in the claims that they put forward for tradition as a revelation of God’s order, particularly with regard to human nature. As Luther rightly feared, they effectively create a church on the basis of the primacy of culturally shaped traditions rather than scripture, while losing sight altogether of nature as a revelation of God in which we learn what it means to be human.

Dr. Robert Hunt serves as Director of Global Theological Education, Professor of Christian Mission and Interreligious Relations, and Director, Center for Evangelism and Missional Church Studies at Perkins School of Theology. This post is republished with permission from his blog, Culture and Christian Encounters.