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8. Scripture and Divine Revelation
- Baylor University Press
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117 8 Scripture and Divine Revelation William J. Abraham Treating scripture straightforwardly as divine revelation represents a vision of scripture and a vision of divine revelation that should long ago have been consigned to the ash bin of history.1 The conventional move to identify scripture as divine revelation causes untold pastoral and ecumenical problems: it corrupts our understanding of scripture as we actually have it in the church; it involves a network of conceptual errors with respect to revelation, inspiration, and other related concepts; and it inhibits the development of good work in the epistemology of theology. The problems run so deep in Wesley and the Wesleyan tradition that the best one can offer is that of the voice of one crying in the wilderness. There are indeed extremely important insights buried in Wesley and the tradition he spawned, but it is far from easy to separate the wheat from the chaff. In this paper I shall seek to do precisely this en route to delineating a positive account of the relation between divine revelation and scripture. Begin with these two simple observations. Scripture in and of itself is a deflationary concept; it means simply “writings.” “Revelation ” is a rich epistemic concept. It signifies that something hidden has now been made known. If we identify scripture with divine revelation, we have immediately moved to a theological vision of scripture that places it firmly in the field of epistemology. We have moved to think of scripture as a criterion of truth in theology. This move has a long 118 ✧ William J. Abraham pedigree, reaching right back into the Jewish tradition.2 Wesley stood firmly in this tradition, as a wealth of primary and secondary sources make clear. There is no need to repeat the evidence here; it will suffice to provide a meaty summary.3 “Revelation” is a beautiful epistemic concept. As noted, it means that something hidden has been disclosed. Applied to scripture Wesley spelled this out initially in terms of a story of divine speaking, divine dictation, divine inspiration, divine illumination, and divine authorship. These action predicates captured the truth about the origination of the Bible. Constituted as “canon,” the Bible is both the source and norm of Christian theology. Given his account of the divine action involved in the origination of scripture, it is not in the least surprising that he considered scripture inerrant and infallible. Yet the subject matter of scripture is circumscribed by it is soteriological aims. To speak of scripture as divine revelation was to claim that God disclosed his plan of salvation for the world in a book. Even then, it was to be interpreted literally, except when reading the text this way rendered it absurd: its central message of salvation was clear; unclear passages were to be interpreted by parallel passages and the “analogy of faith,” that is, the sense of scripture as a whole. In the interpretation of scripture, one consulted reason, Christian experience, the tradition of the first three centuries, and materials from the Church of England. However, these are privileged not epistemically but hermeneutically. They are normative for interpretation of scripture; they are not normative as an independent source and norm of truth in theology. Even though Wesley developed a fascinating vision of perception of the divine along the lines of the spiritual senses tradition, the appeal to perception had itself to be validated by an appeal to scripture. It would be anachronistic to think of Wesley as a classical foundationalist, given that this term was invented in the late twentieth century to deal with earlier texts in another context ; however, his vision of the epistemology of theology is one that is riddled with epistemic anxiety and that seeks out a foundation for theology that will be infallible and inerrant. There is no quick fix for this aberrant and spiritually debilitating network of commitments. To be sure, Wesley found a personal security and a spiritual self-confidence in his preaching that is admirable and attractive. So too did the initial generations of theologians after him who valiantly sought to develop full-scale schemes of Methodist [3.81.221.121] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:22 GMT) Scripture and Divine Revelation ✧ 119 dogmatics.4 However, the security enjoyed, as deeply psychological as it was, was an illusion, and it is no surprise that by the late nineteenth century the best Methodist theologians were fooled into reaching for alternative sources of epistemic security that proved equally ephemeral over time. If...