Wisdom from Down Under

Being a devotee of Francis Schaeffer, for whom the "propositional truth" of the scriptures was the cornerstone of all knowledge, I've always bristled at the contention, quite common these days among emergents and post-conservatives, that propositional truth is a false hope of the enlightenment. Always struck me as odd - isn't the statement "propositional truth is false" itself a proposition?

Many - I think most are well meaning - will say that revelation is not found in propositional statements about God, but in God's saving acts in history, that it is the Acts that are revelatory and not the verbal descriptions of them.

So I was tickled, when googling a different topic, to find this article by Evangelical Anglican Canon D.B. Knox, who I don't know much about, save that he was Principal of Moore Theological College, Sydney, Australia, from 1959-1985. The article is titled "PROPOSITIONAL REVELATION, THE ONLY REVELATION".



He states the issue quite well:

"that revelation is not given to us by God in the form of truths couched in words, or propositions, but that all the revelation that God has given has come to us primarily as acts and events. Thus, Dr. Leonard Hodgson wrote:

“The ‘Word of God’ is not a proposition or a series of propositions prescribing what we are to believe or think. It is a series of divine acts, when they are reflected on by the mind as it seeks to grasp their significance. The revelation of God is given in deeds; the doctrines of the faith are formulated by reflection on the significance of those deeds.”

This is an old notion, but one that fits quite well with one of the central tenets of the Postmodern view, that language does not correspond to reality, but is only a series of symbols that refer to other symbols that in the end refer to subjective experiences of whatever might exist in reality. Most who adopt all or part of these kinds of views subscribe to the notion that belief in propositional truth is a byproduct of the enlightenment, the false rationalistic quest for water-tight, objective definitions of all things, a notion which elevated science to the level of religion, removed mystery and the supernatural from the common thought of most in the last few centuries and demystified all of creation making all things mere mechanics and logic.

Canon Knox will have none of this sort of thinking and never even discusses the enlightenment in his rebuttal. His source is simply the biblical record itself and some fairly straightforward common sense.

He begins by noting that if it is true that revelation is only in the acts of God in history and not in verbal propositions, then we run into a problem in Genesis 1.

"...the opening verse of the Bible: 'In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth', reveals one of the most fundamental facts in our knowledge of God and ourselves; and insofar as this verse is revelational (and it is profoundly so), it is because it is in the form of a proposition. No-one was present when the act of creation took place, to perceive it.
So the "act" of creation cannot be revelatory, because we can know nothing about it apart from the verbal descriptions of it in the text of Genesis.

"The act in itself revealed nothing to us. Our knowledge that God is creator is a revealed truth, and this revelation is exclusively propositional."

Knox goes on to refer to many other acts of God which cannot be understood or even known apart from the words which describe them. How can such acts be revelatory unless and until the words and grammar and syntax communicate that the event even occurred?

He speaks of other examples, such as the various events of the Old Testament history of Israel which have meaning because they are described and interpreted in the Old Testament whereas the events of other nations have no such significance for the Faith. So the notion that the events are revelatory but the descriptions are not fails to account for the obvious.

Knox points out, correctly I think, the danger of such a view.

"If the words of the Bible are made merely witnesses to the revelation of God, the unique position of the authority of the Bible is undermined and it becomes merely one witness no more infallible than the witness of the Church and the witness of the human spirit and reason to the acts of God in experience. The dichotomy between event and the interpretation of the event, with the singling out of the former as the important element, or indeed as the sole element making up the revelation, leads, as might be expected, to the ignoring of the interpretation given in the Bible in favour of any interpretation which commends itself to the reader."

It seems to me as well, that by saying that the event is revelatory but the description of it is not is to essentially make the idea of hermeneutics an impossibility. We are asked to believe that the event, which we cannot experience and cannot recreate, which we have no knowledge of apart from descriptions in human language, is revelatory, but the description of it, which we can interact with directly and specifically, is not. The meaning of the event at that point is up for grabs. As such, to call it "revelatory" is gibberish. At that point, study of the Bible for clues to the nature of God and his will for His creation is futile.

Knox puts the finishing touch on the argument by saying that the propostional interpretation of the event was not a mere recollection of man, but the interpretation given by God himself through verbal inspiration - the longstanding position of most Christians in history:

"For an event to be revelational, it must be interpreted by God Himself. This, and not merely some human reflection on the occurrence, is the real differentiating factor. God interprets through His Word, given in the form of propositions and statements about that event. Thus, for the prophets, the word of the Lord was not the event but the interpretation of the event which had been given them by the Spirit. The same is true of that supreme event, the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. There would have been no revelation in Christ’s ministry were it not for the interpretative statements of our Lord and His apostles. it is the proposition then that is the revelation, not the act itself."

Aside from Propostions, we would know nothing at all about any of the events of the New Testament, and for that matter, we would not be having this discussion. It is not that the event is not historical or real or in a way, revelatory. It is that we cannot conceive of the event or reflect on its meaning apart from propositions. To deny propositional truth is to deny meaning itself.

One of the first gifts to the human race was speech, Adam named the animals and God communicated to him in words. The idea of God speaking to humanity in human language is present from the very first chapters of the written scriptures. To say that propositional revelation is some invention of the influence of the enlightenment on fundamentalism is obvious nonsense. I am not surprised such ideas gain influence in academia.