Ministerial Reflections

The Rev. Jeffrey D. Lang, minister at the First Presbyterian Church of Glendale, Ohio

The Christian’s fundamental claim is that God has spoken to human beings. Further, what God has disclosed has been comprehended, understood, written down, and believed. That is the heart of what propositional revelation means: Scripture does not merely point toward God in some oblique fashion, or only record subjective human experiences of him. In today’s parlance, we might say the Bible isn’t about vibes. Rather, Scripture communicates true statements from God about himself, the world, and us. Those true statements are propositions.

Carl. F.H. Henry explained it this way, “For evangelical orthodoxy, if God’s revelational disclosure to chosen prophets and apostles is to be considered meaningful and true, it must be given not merely in isolated concepts capable of diverse meanings but in sentences or propositions. A proposition – that is, a subject, predicate, and connecting verb (or ‘copula’) – constitute the minimal logical unit of intelligible communication. The Old Testament prophetic formula ‘Thus saith the Lord’ characteristically introduced propositionally disclosed truth. Jesus Christ employed the distinctive formula ‘But I say unto you’ to introduce logically-formed sentences which he represented as the veritable word or doctrine of God.” (Philip W. Comfort, ed., The Origin of the Bible, p. 18).

Some theologians prefer to say that revelation is personal rather than propositional. They assert that God reveals himself, not information. That distinction may sound pious or intellectually sophisticated, but it collapses under a more considered examination. For instance, a man writes letters or emails to his wife while he is deployed overseas to a far away country. No one would suggest his letters are merely or only information rather than a personal encounter with his wife. On the other hand, no one would reduce the letters to the personal or emotive and say they contain no real informative content. The issue is not ‘either-or’ but ‘both-and.’ The wife learns that her husband loves and misses her, and will be home for the holidays. The communications are personal precisely and exactly because they say something, and something in particular. If you take away the sentences; if you remove the propositions, the statements, you do not get a deeper intimacy; instead you have only silence.

And there we have the answer to the objection that belief in propositional revelation reduces faith to intellectual assent, rather than relational trust. It is both. Relational trust can rest on the firm foundation that the one who has spoken has spoken a sure and certain word. 

Scripture works in just the same way. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” is a sentence with content. It is a proposition. So is “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.” There is another proposition. The Apostle Paul did not treat the gospel as an ineffable feeling, an emotion that could not be put into words, or a personal relationship indescribable to and undecipherable by others. Instead, Paul treated the gospel as a message that could be received, believed, defended, and, so far as that goes, distorted by its enemies. Over and against the idea that the words of the Bible are unimportant, Jesus himself argued from the grammar of a text of Scripture, basing his argument on so small a matter as the tense of a verb (Matthew 22:32).

Having said this much, a caveat. None of this reduces Scripture to a bare list of propositions. The Bible is a library of writings in varied genres. The Bible contains, among other genres, poetry, history, lament, song, story, proverb, and apocalyptic. But every discrete genre still communicates a particular meaning. The Bible in its various writings conveys meaningful content. For instance, an apostle’s letter to a first-century congregation can communicate timeless truths about the nature of love.

The practical importance for Christians, and for everyone, is significant. If God has not spoken in words, then every claim anyone makes about God is finally a guess, or a human projection (à la Feuerbach) onto the empty and indifferent universe. In that case, the loudest or most insistent voice in the room wins, regardless of whether what it declares is actually true. If God has spoken, then we have something to stand on, an epistemic foundation, that is not ourselves. Only a word from outside the human condition and experience can correct and guide us toward our best selves and a better tomorrow. It is that word that informs how we might glorify God and enjoy him forever.