Propositional revelation

Mark Thompson's posts are so long that vague thinkers would think that they are woolly, not recognizing that if the same thing were taken and written down in a book, people would be sitting there going Zap! Pow! Wham! Ugh! Ya got me!

So in the interests of preserving just one of those moments, I present to you:

Another way of approaching this is to insist that a simple equation of revelation and presence or self-manifestation (an equation often found in contemporary theology) is a little too slick. The biblical view of revelation certainly has at its core God's self-revelation. God makes himself known. He doesn't just give us truth about himself from a distance. He gives himself. But powerfully reassuring and savingly effective as God's presence and activity among us is, it is not necessarily —in and of itself — revelatory.

This is presumably why God does not leave this presence and activity unexplained. Ahead of Jesus' incarnation, death and resurrection, God provided the categories to understand it all through the prophetic utterances of the Old Testament (including God's own explanation of what was happening at the time of the Exodus and the divinely inspired poetic prophecy of the Isaianic servant songs).

In the time of his earthly ministry Jesus' own words accompanied his works, providing an authoritative explanation of what he had been doing and why. Finally, the commissioned witnesses of the resurrection, moved by the Spirit as they were, provided God's own viewpoint on the events of Nazareth and Calvary. There is considerable warrant for concluding that in fact it is this verbal accompaniment of God's presence and action in Christ that constitutes the revelation. God did not stand mute before us during the earthly life and death and resurrection of Jesus. He himself expounds the truth about himself and his purposes to which these things are pointing.

Jesus is our redeemer and Lord, but he is also our teacher.

I inserted three paragraph breaks because, as a vague and woolly thinker myself, the 90% chocolate that Mark is offering here was too much for one bite.

Sola Scriptura

It's a slogan that means 'Bible alone', and when a bunch of people in the sixteenth century wanted to attack Roman Catholicism and everything it stood for, this was one of the slogans they seized on to make their meaning clear.

[Quick switch into police tense, with thanks to Matt for pointing it out]

So you've got your Bible, and it's the sole authority in the life of the Christian, and it's saying that the sole (which means only) way to get right with God is to trust solely in Christ alone.

Then allegedly these Roman Catholic cardinals and popes run up, and attempt to bash the victim over the head with a hessian bag containing a number of heavy traditions. Then, according to witnesses, they're there demanding money from the victim and suddenly they're threatening him that if he doesn't pay up that he's going to get sent to purgatory.

So the victim, according to the witnesses, is telling them to leave in fairly strong language, and apparently they've taken the man, tied him to a stake and they're pouring fluid from a tin can onto him. Anyway he's screaming for help and these other previous victims of the Roman church run up, they're beating off these cardinals and they're telling the feller that you can just ignore these traditions. Because it's the Bible alone that a man's got to trust, and when he does trust the Bible, Bob's his uncle and God's his Father and it doesn't even matter if he gets burned at the stake, the Roman church can't do him any harm, because he's been saved by Christ alone, through grace alone, through faith alone.

Then they're running off shouting 'Soli Deo Gloria', having set the man free, and these cardinals and popes are running around screaming blue murder.

So we've arrived at the scene a bit late and we're keen to talk to anyone who has information about a man wearing a white pointy hat with a cross on it, and carrying a shepherd's crook. We've got a couple of witnesses telling us he's of Middle Eastern or Mediterranean appearance, and speaks with an Italian accent.

All of which is to say that 'Sola Scriptura' is an attack on false human traditions, and it's perverse, not to mention inverse, to take a blunt instrument like this and use it as an opportunity to defend the use of Bible commentaries and the study of church history. Not unlike using a blunderbuss in an attempt to take out a thimble sized target at 450 metres. The wrong thimble-sized target, when the target the blunderbuss was intended for is standing next to you wearing a white pointy hat and speaking with an Italian accent.