A. That revelation, as a making known, is necessarily internal and subjective—either a mode of intelligence, or a quickening of man's cognitive powers—and hence can furnish no objective facts such as constitute the proper material for science.
Morell, Philos. Religion, 128–131, 143—“The Bible cannot in strict accuracy of language be called a revelation, since a revelation always implies an actual process of intelligence in a living mind.” F. W. Newman, Phases of Faith, 152—“Of our moral and spiritual God we know nothing without—everything within.” Theodore Parker: “Verbal revelation can never communicate a simple idea like that of God, Justice, Love, Religion”; see review of Parker in Bib. Sac., 18:24–27. James Martineau, Seat of Authority in Religion: “As many minds as there are that know God at first hand, so many revealing acts there have been, and as many as know him at second hand are strangers to revelation”; so, assuming external revelation to be impossible, Martineau subjects all the proofs of such revelation to unfair destructive criticism. Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:185—“As all revelation is originally an inner living experience, the springing up of religious truth in the heart, no external event can belong in itself to revelation, no matter whether it be naturally or supernaturally brought about.”Professor George M. Forbes: “Nothing can be revealed to us which we do not grasp with our reason. It follows that, so far as reason acts normally, it is a part of revelation.”Ritchie, Darwin and Hegel, 30—“The revelation of God is the growth of the idea of God.”
In reply to this objection, urged mainly by idealists in philosophy, (a) We grant that revelation, to be effective, must be the means of inducing a new mode of intelligence, or in other words, must be understood. We grant that this understanding of divine things is impossible without a quickening of man's cognitive powers. We grant, moreover, that revelation, when originally imparted, was often internal and subjective.
Matheson, Moments on the Mount, 51–53, on Gal. 1:16—“to reveal his Son in me”: “The revelation on the way to Damascus would not have enlightened Paul, had it been merely a vision to his eye. Nothing can be revealed to us which has not been revealed in us. The eye does not see the beauty of the landscape, nor the ear hear the beauty of music. So flesh and blood do not reveal Christ to us. Without the teaching of the Spirit, the external facts will be only like the letters of a book to a child that cannot read.” We may say with Channing: “I am more sure that my rational nature is from God, than that any book is the expression of his will.”
(b) But we deny that external revelation is therefore useless or impossible. Even if religious ideas sprang wholly from within, an external revelation might stir up the dormant powers of the mind. Religious ideas, however, do not spring wholly from within. External revelation can impart them. Man can reveal himself to man by external communications, and, if God has equal power with man, God can reveal himself to man in like manner.
Rogers, in his Eclipse of Faith, asks pointedly: “If Messrs. Morell and Newman can teach by a book, cannot God do the same?” Lotze, Microcosmos, 2:660 (book 9, chap. 4), speaks of revelation as “either contained in some divine act of historic occurrence, or continually repeated in men's hearts.” But in fact there is no alternative here; the strength of the Christian creed is that God's revelation is both external and internal; see Gore, in Lux Mundi, 338. Rainy, in Critical Review, 1:1–21, well says that Martineau unwarrantably isolates the witness of God to the individual soul. The inward needs to be combined with the outward, in order to make sure that it is not a vagary of the imagination. We need to distinguish God's revelations from our own fancies. Hence, before giving the internal, God commonly gives us the external, as a standard by which to try our impressions. We are finite and sinful, and we need authority. The external revelation commends itself as authoritative to the heart which recognizes its own spiritual needs. External authority evokes the inward witness and gives added clearness to it, but only historical revelation furnishes indubitable proof that God is love, and gives us assurance that our longings after God are not in vain.
(c) Hence God's revelation may be, and, as we shall hereafter see, it is, in great part, an external revelation in works and words. The universe is a revelation of God; God's works in nature precede God's words in history. We claim, moreover, that, in many cases where truth was originally communicated internally, the same Spirit who communicated it has brought about an external record of it, so that the internal revelation might be handed down to others than those who first received it.
We must not limit revelation to the Scriptures. The eternal Word antedated the written word, and through the eternal Word God is made known in nature and in history. Internal revelation is preceded by, and conditioned upon, external revelation. In point of time earth comes before man, and sensation before perception. Action best expresses character, and historic revelation is more by deeds than by words. Dorner, Hist. Prot. Theol., 1:231–264—“The Word is not in the Scriptures alone. The whole creation reveals the Word. In nature God shows his power; in incarnation his grace and truth. Scripture testifies of these, but Scripture is not the essential Word. The Scripture is truly apprehended and appropriated when in it and through it we see the living and present Christ. It does not bind men to itself alone, but it points them to the Christ of whom it testifies. Christ is the authority. In the Scriptures he points us to himself and demands our faith in him. This faith, once begotten, leads us to new appropriation of Scripture, but also to new criticism of Scripture. We find Christ more and more in Scripture, and yet we judge Scripture more and more by the standard which we find in Christ.”
Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics, 71–82: “There is but one authority—Christ. His Spirit works in many ways, but chiefly in two: first, the inspiration of the Scriptures, and, secondly, the leading of the church into the truth. The latter is not to be isolated or separated from the former. Scripture is law to the Christian consciousness, and Christian consciousness in time becomes law to the Scripture—interpreting, criticizing, verifying it. The word and the spirit answer to each other. Scripture and faith are coördinate. Protestantism has exaggerated the first; Romanism the second. Martineau fails to grasp the coördination of Scripture and faith.”
(d) With this external record we shall also see that there is given under proper conditions a special influence of God's Spirit, so to quicken our cognitive powers that the external record reproduces in our minds the ideas with which the minds of the writers were at first divinely filled.
We may illustrate the need of internal revelation from Egyptology, which is impossible so long as the external revelation in the hieroglyphics is uninterpreted; from the ticking of the clock in a dark room, where only the lit candle enables us to tell the time; from the landscape spread out around the Rigi in Switzerland, invisible until the first rays of the sun touch the snowy mountain peaks. External revelation (φανέρωσις, Rom. 1:19, 20) must be supplemented by internal revelation (ἀποκάλυψις, 1 Cor. 2:10, 12). Christ is the organ of external, the Holy Spirit the organ of internal, revelation. In Christ (2 Cor. 1:20) are “the yea” and “the Amen”—the objective certainty and the subjective certitude, the reality and the realization.
Objective certainty must become subjective certitude in order to be a scientific theology. Before conversion we have the first, the external truth of Christ; only at conversion and after conversion do we have the second, “Christ formed in us” (Gal. 4:19). We have objective revelation at Sinai (Ex. 20:22); subjective revelation in Elisha's knowledge of Gehazi (2 K. 5:26). James Russell Lowell, Winter Evening Hymn to my Fire: “Therefore with thee I love to read Our brave old poets: at thy touch how stirs Life in the withered words! how swift recede Time's shadows! and how glows again Through its dead mass the incandescent verse, As when upon the anvil of the brain It glittering lay, cyclopically wrought By the fast throbbing hammers of the poet's thought!”
(e)