The Written Revelation

If you ask a religious scholar what a revelation means in religion, he would most likely say something like:

“A revelation is when a higher power communicates to a mortal (most likely human) through a vision, dream, trance, miracle, inspiration, stream of consciousness, meditation, prayer, reading a “holy book”, or maybe even simply a natural object or action that relates something much more meaningful to the observer.”

The Christian would agree with this academic definition, although reluctantly. Any devote follower of any worldview hates to hear their experiences and beliefs expressed so coldly, but let’s not fight that frivolous battle. This is the study of how the God of the Bible reveals Himself to man. This is for the Christian and non-Christian alike. Through this little series, the Christian will find better understanding of his beliefs, and the non-Christian will hopefully find answers to questions about Christianity and its followers.

The first and most authoritative way God reveals Himself to man is through the Scriptures. Christians should rely on the Scriptures more than experience, worship, or even prayer. It is the basis for every belief. It is how we know who Jesus is and what He has done. This why it is important to start with the primary revelation of God to man because we sift every other revelation through the Scriptures to judge all experiences and actions according to what we know as truth. Scripture is not just stories; it is propositional and up for scrutiny. The Koran is above scrutiny, but the Bible is open to all who wish to challenge it, and it has yet to lose this 1500-year fight.

When a Christian says the Scriptures are God’s revelation to man they usually rely on the a verse in 2 Timothy to support this proposition: “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God. . .” (NKJV 2 Tim. 3:16a) This means that God has given the ideas and propositions to the men writing the Scriptures; these men did not make these ideas up but they were given to them by God. Now obviously you would think Paul here is speaking of the Old Testament and not the New Testament for this very writing is part of the New Testament and surely he did not consider his little letter to Timothy to be Scripture. However, this objection holds little ground when we look at another letter that Paul wrote to the Corinthians. A simple phrase sheds a lot of light on this matter: “Now concerning virgins: I have no commandment from the Lord; yet I give judgment as one whom the Lord in His mercy has made trustworthy.” (NKJV 1 Cor. 7:25) Here we have Paul saying that this time around he does not have a commandment from the Lord or he does not have anything on this matter that Lord has inspired him to write about. This simple clarification gives us the understanding that Paul was aware of God’s inspiration in his very writing. So to say that this verse excludes the New Testament is not coherent with other parts of Scripture.

The inspiration of the Scriptures is a hotly debated topic. This is not the place to go into every objection, but I will bring up a couple. With these couple of basic answers to objections on the inspiration of the Scriptures, you will see evidence outside of the Bible that gives reason to believe 2 Timothy 3:16. For it is merely circular reasoning to say that the Bible is God’s revelation to man because the Bible says so. This reasoning is only valid when outside reasoning and evidence can support it, or if the Bible itself is found blameless. Hopefully this will not make you think that I am denying faith for reason, but merely showing how Divine inspiration is experientially and empirically seen and verified.

One popular objection to the Bible is the exclusivity of some verses. Some verses are the only ones that say certain important things. The Gospels especially have many stories and sayings of Jesus that are not repeated. This is not much of an objection however. David Fischer said in his book “Historian’s Fallacies” that to prove the nonexistence of something you cannot bank on the fact that there is no supporting evidence; you must give an affirmative proof or evidence that it cannot or did not exist. Silence is not a proof of anything for so many obvious reasons. So to base that a certain verse is put in there for the author’s own reasons on no supporting evidence is merely assumption. Be very clear that I am not talking about the interpretation of the verse or story (most theologians will cross-reference verses for accurate and coherent interpretations), but whether or not the very existence of the verse can be legitimized as true and accurate, and not some invention of the author.

Another objection to Scriptures and their inspiration is the assembly of the canon in face with so many gospels and books to be chosen. The general rule that was used for the assembly of the canon of Scripture was aposticity. Aposticity is the property of a book as being written by an Apostle. With the Apostle’s were the Apostle’s doctrine (Acts 2:42) which was the doctrine they learned from Jesus directly. The fact that over twelve people learned this directly from Jesus gives a much greater buffer from inaccuracy than if Jesus had one follower. What we find is the only four gospels actually written by four of the original twelve share remarkable coherency. I do not have time to go into individual contradictions that come up and how these contradictions are dissolved by closer examination of the language, semantics, contexts, etc. For more on that read Blomberg or Bruce. Aposticity also dictates that the book must have been written within a hundred years of Jesus’ life. This gives even less possibility for error. In the Jesus’ time, he was called a rabbi and he used many rabbinic methods of teachings such as parables and so on. It is by most scholars understanding that Jesus and his disciples, being Jews, focused on accurate remembrance of teachings by way of the Oral Tradition. Most scholars say that the Oral Tradition in Jesus’ time preserved the teachings by four generations before the story started to deviate from the original. This gives plenty room for aposticity to be an accurate measure of Jesus’ true teachings. Furthermore, the New Testament has nine different writers who all wrote the same doctrine within the first hundred years after Jesus’ death; many of whom were his direct students under strict Jewish Oral tradition. We do not go through this so that we can make it look like that the Scriptures were divinely inspired; we do this that we can distinguish between false teachings and true teachings. We find, not surprisingly, that the gospels and books written later that the first century A.D. begin to be incoherent, and the Apostle’s were the purest vessels to use so as not to begin to corrupt what had been written. Christianity needed a strong foundation before it could stand so it needed its inspiration and guidance of God in the very first accounts and books, not the ones 200 years down the line.

This discussion can go on for much longer but this gives a starting point to understanding the written revelation God gave to us through the Scriptures. I am no expert in New Testament scholarship so to get a better understanding you should read Blomberg or Bruce. But this written revelation is vital for a Christian. It is the sifter and guide to all that is pronounced by people. It is God’s very word to man and is the first or primary source for God’s word to man. From here on out we begin with more experiential and existential ways God reveals Himself to man, but all of them are based in Scripture.