GOD AND BIBLICAL
LANGUAGE:
TRANSCENDENCE AND
IMMANENCE
John M. Frame
This article was originally published in John W. Montgomery, ed., God’s Inerrant Word (Minneapolis, Bethany Fellowship, 1974). Used by permission of Bethany House, a division of Baker Publishing Group, copyright 2005. All rights to this material are reserved. Materials are not to be distributed to other web locations for retrieval, published in other media, or mirrored at other sites without written permission from Baker Publishing Group. http://bakerbooks.com, http://www.BakerPublishingGroup.com.
One of the most persuasive
and frequent contemporary objections to the orthodox view of biblical authority
goes like this: the Bible cannot be the word of God because no human language
can be the word of God. On this view,
not only the Bible, but human language in
general is an unfit vehicle-unfit to convey infallibly a message from God
to man.
This objection takes various
forms, three of which I shall discuss:
1. Some linguists and philosophers of language have suggested that
language is never completely true – that the undeniable discrepancy which
always exists between symbol and reality (the word “desk” is not a desk, for
instance) injects falsehood into every utterance. This contention is sometimes buttressed by
the further assertion that all language is metaphorical, figurative – and thus
can never convey the “literal” truth.
There is, however, something odd about any view which attributes
falsehood to all language. For one
thing, the assertion that “all sentences are false” is self-refuting if taken
literally; and if we don't take it literally, what does it mean? Perhaps the real point is that language never
conveys the “whole truth” – that it
never conveys the truth with absolute precision or absolute
comprehensiveness. But consider: (a)
Some sentences are, in one sense, perfectly precise and comprehensive. Take “
More might be said about
this first form of the objection we are discussing – its reliance upon the
discredited referential theory of meaning, its strangely generalized concept of
“metaphor,” its dubious presuppositions about the origin and development of
language, its ultimate theological roots.
These topics, however, have been adequately discussed elsewhere,[1] and my own
interests and aptitudes demand that I press on immediately to other aspects of
the problem. The following discussion
will raise some basic issues which I trust will shed further light on this
first area of concern.
2. If the first form of our objection was raised primarily by
linguists, philosophers of language and their entourage, the second form
(though similarly focused on language) arises out of broader epistemological
and metaphysical concerns. In the 1920s
and 30s, the philosophy of logical positivism attempted to divide all
philosophically important language into three categories: (a) tautologies (“A
book is a book,” “Either it is raining or it is not raining”), (b)
contradictions (“It is raining and it is not raining.” “The table is square and
it is not square”), and (c) assertions of empirical fact (“There is a bird on
the roof,” “The President has put price controls on beef”). Tautologies, on this view, were said to be
true purely by virtue of the meanings of the terms, and contradictions false on
the same account. Empirical assertions
could be either true or false, and their truth or falsity was said to be
ascertainable by something like the methods of natural science. When someone claims to state a fact, but upon
examination it turns out that this “fact” cannot be verified or falsified by
such methods, then, said the positivists, this utterance is not a statement of
fact at all; it is not an “empirical assertion”; it is neither true nor
false. Such an unverifiable utterance
may have a use as poetry, expression of feeling or the like, but it does not
state any fact about the world; it is (to use the positivists' technical term)
“cognitively meaningless,” it does not measure up to the “verification
criterion of meaning.” On such grounds, the positivists dismissed metaphysical
statements (“Mind is the absolute coming to self-consciousness”) and
theological statements (“God is love”) as cognitively meaningless. Ethical statements (“Stealing is wrong”) also
were seen, not as statements of fact, but as expressions of attitude, commands,
or some other non-informative type of language.[2]
As a general theory of
meaningfulness, logical positivism was too crude to last very long. Disputes quickly arose over what methods of
verification were to be tolerated, how conclusive the verification or
falsification must be and other matters too technical to discuss here. Many felt that the whole project was to some
extent a rationalization of prejudice – not an objective analysis of what
constitutes “meaningfulness,” but an attempt to get rid of language distasteful
to various philosophers by constructing a “principle” arbitrarily designed for
that purpose.[3]
No thinker of any
consequence today subscribes to the “verification principle” as a general
criterion of meaningfulness. One aspect
of the positivists I concern, however, is very much with us. Although we do not buy the whole logical positivist
theory, many of us are quite impressed with the basic notion that a fact ought to make a difference.
This concern is vividly presented in the oft-quoted parable of
Antony Flew:
Once upon a time two
explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle.
In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, 'Some gardener must tend
this plot.' So they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. 'But perhaps he is an invisible gardener.' So
they set up a barbed-wire fence. They
electrify it. They patrol with
bloodhounds. (For they remember how H. G. Wells's The Invisible Man could be both smelt and touched though he could
not be seen.) But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a
shock. No movements of the wire ever
betray an invisible climber. The
bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still
the Believer is not convinced. 'But
there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible to electric shocks, a
gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to
look after the garden which he loves.' At last the Sceptic despairs, 'But what
remains of your original assertion? Just
how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener
differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?'[4]
If there is no difference between “invisible gardener”
and “no gardener,” then surely the dispute between Believer and Sceptic is not
about facts. If there is no difference,
then talk of an “invisible gardener” may be a useful way of expressing an
attitude toward the world, but it cannot make any empirical assertion about the
world. Flew is not asking the Believer
to verify his view in some quasi-scientific way (although one suspects that is
what would make him most happy); he is simply asking him to state what difference his belief makes.
As we might suspect, Flew
thinks that much language about God makes “no difference.” Believers say that “God is love” even though
the world is full of cruelty and hatred.
How does such a God differ from a devil, or from no God at all? And if “God is love” makes no difference, how
can it be a fact? How can it be, as the positivists liked to say, “cognitively
meaningful”?
Flew does not suggest that
all religious language succumbs to this difficulty, or even that all language
about God is in jeopardy. He seems to be
thinking mainly of what “often” happens in the thought of “sophisticated
religious people.”[5] Still, his knife cuts deep. Can any Christian believer offer a straightforward
answer to Flew's concluding question, “What would have to occur or to have
occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or of the existence
of, God?”[6] Our first impulse is to say with the apostle
Paul, “If Christ hath not been raised, then is our preaching vain, and your
faith is also vain.”[7] The Resurrection shows that God does make a
difference! Disprove the Resurrection,
and you disprove God. The Resurrection
(but of course not only the Resurrection!) demonstrates the great difference
between God and no-God. But push the
argument back another step: What would have to occur or to have occurred to
constitute for you a disproof of the Resurrection? Do we have a clear idea of how the
Resurrection may be falsified? Paul
appeals to witnesses,[8] but the
witnesses are dead. What if a collection
of manuscripts were unearthed containing refutations of the Christian message
by first century Palestinian Jews? And
what if these manuscripts contained elaborate critiques of the Pauline claim in
I Cor. 15, critiques backed up with massive documentation, interviews with
alleged witnesses, etc. And then: what
if the twenty-five most important New Testament scholars claimed on the basis
of this discovery that belief in the physical Resurrection of Christ was
untenable!? Would that be sufficient to
destroy our faith in the Resurrection?
It would be hard to imagine any stronger sort of “falsification” for any
event of past history. And I don't doubt
that many would be swayed by it. But
many would not be. I for one would
entertain all sorts of questions about the biases of these documents and those
of the scholars who interpreted them. I
would want to check out the whole question myself before conceding the point of
doctrine. And what if I did check it out
and found no way of refuting the anti-Resurrection position? Would that constitute a disproof? Not for me, and I think not for very many
professing Christians. We all know how
abstruse scholarly argument can be; there are so many things that can go
wrong! In such a situation, it is not
difficult to say “Well, I can't prove the scholars wrong, but they may be wrong
nonetheless.” And if the love of Christ has become precious to me, and if I
have been strongly convinced that the Bible is his word, I am more likely to
believe what he says in I Cor. 15 than to believe what a lot of scholars say on
the basis of extra-biblical evidence.
Could we ever be persuaded
that the Resurrection was a hoax?
Perhaps; but such a change would be more than a change in opinion; it
would be a loss of faith. In terms of
Scripture, such a change would be a yielding to temptation. For our God calls us to believe his Word even
when the evidence appears against it!
Sarah shall bear a son, even though she is ninety and her husband is a
hundred![9] God is just, even though righteous Job must
suffer! The heroes of the faith believed
the Word of God without the
corroboration of other evidence: they walked by faith, not by sight.[10] As long as we remain faithful, God's Word
takes precedence over other evidence.
Flew's objection, therefore,
is not to be lightly dismissed. There is
a sense in which, not only the language of “sophisticated religious people” but
even the language of simple Christian believers, fails to measure up to his
challenge. God-language resists falsification. It is difficult to say what would refute a
faith-assertion; for faith requires us to resist all temptation to doubt,
within the faith-language, no terms can be specified for renouncing the faith-assertions;
for faith excludes, prohibits, such
renouncement.
Does this, then, mean that
the Resurrection “makes no difference”?
We hope not! We certainly want to
say that it does make a
difference. Yet we find it difficult to
say what would refute our belief in the Resurrection. We find it difficult to conceive of any state
of affairs in which we would abandon our belief. We find it difficult to say what the
Resurrection rules out. And thus we find
it difficult to state what difference
it makes!
Perhaps, then, talk of the Resurrection does not really concern any
empirical fact. Perhaps all God-talk is
cognitively meaningless. And perhaps,
then, God cannot be spoken of at all in human language. And if that is true, all talk of Scripture as
the Word of God is clearly nonsense.
This, then, is the second
form of the objection which I stated at the beginning of the paper, the second
way in which human language is said to be disqualified as a medium of divine
speech. Let us briefly examine the third
form of the objection before presenting our response:
3. The third form of our objection is more distinctively
theological. Karl Barth, for example,
suggests on theological grounds that human language is unfit to convey truth
about God:
The pictures in which we
view God, the thoughts in which we think Him, the words with which we can
define Him, are in themselves unfitted to this object and thus inappropriate to
express and affirm' the knowledge of Him.[11]
The Bible, further is not
itself and in itself God's past revelation, but by becoming God's Word it
attests God's past revelation and is God's past revelation in the form of
attestation.... Attestation is, therefore, the service of this something else,
in which the witness answers for the truth of this something else.[12]
This sort of point, which is
very common in twentieth-century theology, is essentially a religious appeal to
the divine transcendence. God is the
Lord, the creator, the redeemer. To him
belong all praise and glory. How can any
human language ever be “fitted” to the conveyance of his word? Surely human language, like everything human
and finite, can only be a servant, confessing its own unfitness, its own
inadequacy. The Bible cannot be
revelation; it can only serve revelation.
To claim anything more for human language, for the Bible, is to dishonor
God, to elevate something finite and human to divine status. To claim anything more is to think of
revelation “in abstraction from” God himself and from Jesus Christ.[13] It is not just a mistake; it is an impiety.
At the same time, Barth does
insist that the words of revelation have an importance:
Thus God reveals Himself in
propositions by means of language, and human language at that, to the effect
that from time to time such and such a word, spoken by the prophets and
apostles and proclaimed in the Church, becomes His Word. Thus the personality of the Word of God is
not to be played off against its verbal character and spirituality....
The personification of the
concept of the Word of God ... does not signify any lessening of its verbal
character.[14]
The words are still unfit;
they are not themselves revelation; they are not necessarily true themselves,
but they witness to the truth of “something else.” Nevertheless the words are
important, because from time to time God may use them to communicate with
man. Even when they are false, they are
God's instruments. God uses them,
however, not as true propositional representations of his message, but as the
instruments for an encounter that no human language is fit to describe.
Barth, therefore, like Flew,
argues that God cannot be truly spoken of in human language. Here, it would seem, the resemblance between
Barth and Flew ceases; for Barth argues “from above,” Flew “from below.” Barth
argues that God is too great for language; Flew argues that language cannot
speak meaningfully of God. But are the
two positions really that far apart?
Thomas McPherson suggests that an alliance is possible between the
logical positivist philosophers and theologians like Rudolph Otto (McPherson
might also have cited Karl Barth in this connection) who stress the
transcendence of God over language:
Perhaps positivistic
philosophy has done a service to religion.
By showing, in their own way, the absurdity of what theologians try to
utter, positivists have helped to suggest that religion belongs to the sphere
of the unutterable. And this may be
true. And it is what Otto, too, in his way,
wanted to point out. Positivists may be
the enemies of theology, but the friends of religion.[15]
Enemies of some theology! –
not of Otto's theology, nor of Barth's, nor of Buber's (to which McPherson
refers in a footnote), nor (I would judge) of the broad tradition of
dialectical and existential theologies of the twentieth century. In positivism and in these modern theologies,
God belongs to the sphere of the unutterable, and human language (when
“cognitively meaningful”) belongs to the sphere of the humanly verifiable. Let us then consider the Flew problem and the
Barth problem as one.
RESPONSE
Religious language is “odd”
in a great number of ways. Not only does
it tend to resist falsification, as Flew has pointed out; it also tends to
claim certainty for itself, as opposed to mere possibility or probability.[16] It also tends to be connected with moral
predicates – as if disbelief in it were a sin, rather than a mere mistake.[17] It is frequently spoken with great passion;
with Kierkegaard we tend to be suspicious of allegedly religious language which
seems detached or uncommitted.
On the other hand, religious
language is in some respects very “ordinary,” very similar to other
language. It is not a technical,
academic language like that of physics or philosophy; it is the language of
ordinary people. It is not restricted to
some limited and distinctive compartment of human life; rather it enters into
all human activities and concerns. We
pray for the healing of a loved one, for help in a business crisis; we seek to
“eat and drink to the glory of God.”[18] I We believe that our faith “makes a
difference” in the real world, that God can enter into all the affairs of our
life and make his presence felt. In this
respect, the “action of God in history” is like the action of anyone in
history. God can change things, can make
them different. And what he does does
not occur unless he chooses to do it.
God makes a difference, and in that sense he is verifiable – much as the existence of any person is verifiable (or
so, at least, it appears to the simple believer!). Few religious people would claim that their
faith is a blind leap in the dark. They
have “reasons for faith.” These reasons may be the technical theistic arguments
of the philosophers, or simply the childlike appeal to experience, “He lives
within my heart.” One who really believes (as opposed to one who merely drifts
along in a religious tradition) believes for a reason, because he thinks God
has somehow made his presence felt, because God now makes a difference – to him!
Religious language, then, is
“odd” and it is “ordinary.” If an analysis of religious language is to be
adequate, it must take both features into account, not just one of them. Flew and Barth do not reflect very much upon
the “ordinariness” of religious language.
They seem to imply that it is a sort of delusion, for it makes a claim
to verifiability which cannot on analysis be sustained, or because it betrays a
spirit of human pride, because it brings God down to man's level. For Barth at least, we gather that the
“ordinariness” of religious language is a mark of its humanity, a mark of its unfitness
to convey the word of God. There is,
however, another interpretation of the data – one which does not write off the
“ordinariness” of religious language as a delusion, one which accounts both for
the verifiability of religious statements and for their tendency to resist
verification, one which illumines the ways in which Scripture itself speaks of
God.
Religious language is
language of basic conviction. It is the
language by which we state, invoke, honor, advocate (and otherwise “bring to
bear”) those things of which we are most certain, those things which are most
important to us, those things which we will cling to even though we must lose
all else. Not all language of “basic
conviction” is religious in the usual sense.
Many people who consider themselves irreligious have “basic convictions”
of some sort. If fact, it may well be
disputed whether anyone can avoid having some basic conviction – whether it be
a faith in reason, in material success, in a philosophical absolute, or in a
god. But all language which is religious
in the usual sense is language of basic conviction.
Someone may object that for
many people their religion is not their most basic commitment. A man may mumble through the church liturgy
every Sunday while devoting his existence almost exclusively to acquiring
political power. For him, surely, the
liturgy does not express his “basic commitment.” True; but that is because
there is something wrong! A man like
this we call a hypocrite; for the liturgy is intended to express basic conviction and our fanatical politician
utters the words deceitfully. He does
not really “believe in God, the father almighty” in the sense of biblical
faith, though he says he does. His real
faith is in something else. The man is a
liar. But his lying use of the language
does not change the meaning of it, which is to confess true faith in God.
All
of us have basic convictions, unless possibly we are just confused. Positivists
do too – and Barthians! And insofar as we try to be consistent, we try to bring
all of life and thought into accord with that basic conviction.[19] Nothing inconsistent with that conviction is
to be tolerated. An inconsistency of that sort amounts to a divided loyalty, a
confusion of life-direction. Most of us,
at least, try to avoid such confusion.
The conviction becomes the paradigm of reality, of truth and of right,
to which all other examples of reality, truth and right must measure up. As such, it is the cornerstone of our metaphysics,
epistemology and ethics. It is not, be
it noted, the only factor in the development of a system of thought. Two people may have virtually identical
“basic commitments” while differing greatly in their systems of thought. The two will both try to develop systems
according with their common presupposition, but because of differences in
experience, ability, secondary commitments and the like, they may seek such
consistency in opposite directions. But
though the “basic commitment” is not the only factor in the development of
thought (and life), it is (by definition) the most important factor.
We have suggested that
religious language is a subdivision of “basic-commitment language.” The next
point is that basic commitment language in general displays the same kinds of
“oddness” and :ordinariness: that we have noted in religious language. We state our basic commitments as
certainties, not merely as possibilities or probabilities, because our basic
commitments are the things of which we are most sure, the paradigms of
certainty against which all other certainties are measured. Basic commitments are paradigms, too, of righteousness; challenges to those
commitments invariably seem to us unjust because such challenges if successful
will deny our whole reason for living.
And basic-commitment language is (almost tautologically) the language of
commitment, not of detached
objectivity. And to these “oddnesses” we
must add the oddness of resistance to falsification.
Take a man whose basic
commitment in life is the earning of money.
To him, the legitimacy of that goal is a certainty, beyond all question.
When that goal conflicts with other goals, the basic goal must
prevail. Questions and doubts, indeed,
may enter his mind; but these questions and doubts are much like religious
temptations. Insofar as he takes them
seriously, he compromises his commitment; he becomes to that extent
double-minded, unstable. He faces then a
crisis wherein he is challenged to change his basic commitment. Under such pressure he may do so. But then the new commitment will demand the
same kind of loyalty as the old one.
Challenges must be
resisted. Evidence against the
legitimacy of the commitment must be somehow either ignored, suppressed, or
accounted for in a way that leaves the commitment intact. “Are people starving in
Let us rephrase Flew's
question as it might be addressed to the mammon-worshipper: What would have to
occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the primacy of
money-making? What would have to happen
to cause him to abandon his faith? Well,
one simply cannot say in advance! Committed
as he is, he devoutly hopes that nothing will
bring about such a change. He not only
hopes, he knows (or so he thinks) –
because he interprets all reality so as to accord with that commitment. Some event, indeed (we can't say what), may
cause him to change – if he yields to the temptation of regarding that event
from a non-mammon perspective. He
changes them because he has already compromised; it is like a change in
religious faith.
The basic-commitment
language is “odd” indeed; but it is also “ordinary.” It is not something
strange or esoteric; we use it all the time.
It enters into every area of life, simply because it is so basic, so
important. It is important because it
“makes a difference” – more difference than anything else. Without it nothing would make sense. All of experience, then, “verifies” the
validity of the commitment. We can
“prove” our commitment true in any number of ways. The evidence is there.
But how can a commitment be
verifiable and nonverifiable at the same time?
How can it present proof, and at the same time resist falsification by
contrary evidence? The resolution of
this paradox gets us to the heart of the matter. Think of a philosopher who is committed to
establishing all truth by the evidence of his senses. Sense-experience is his criterion of
truth. What evidence would disprove that
criterion? In one sense none; for if
sense-experience is truly his criterion, then all objections to the criterion
will have to be verified through sense-experience. They will have to be tested by the criterion
they oppose. “Disproof,” as with other
basic commitments, will come only when there is something like a crisis of
faith. At the same time, all evidence
proves the criterion. The philosopher
will argue very learnedly to establish his conviction. He will refute contrary claims, he will
produce carefully constructed arguments.
The arguments, of course,
will be “circular.” Arguments for the sense-criterion must be verified by the
sense-criterion itself. The philosopher must
argue for sense-experience by appealing to sense-experience. What choice does he have? If he appeals to something else as his final
authority, he is simply being inconsistent.
But this is the case with any “basic commitment.” When we are arguing on
behalf of an absolute authority, then our final appeal must be to that
authority and no other. A proof of the
primacy of reason must appeal to reason; a proof of the necessity of logic must
appeal to logic; a proof of the primacy of mammon must itself be part of an
attempt to earn more money; and a proof of the existence of God must appeal in the final analysis to God.
Such arguments are circular;
but they are also arguments A “proof”' of, say, the primacy of reason, can be
highly persuasive and logically sound even though, at one level, circular. The circularity is rarely blatant; it lurks
in the background. One never says
“Reason is true because reason says it is.” One says instead, “Reason is true
because one must presuppose it even to deny it.” The second argument is just as
circular as the first. Both presuppose
the validity of reason. But in the
second argument the presupposition is implicit rather than explicit. And the second one is highly persuasive! The irrationalist cannot help but note that
he is (in many cases) presenting his irrationalism in a highly rational
way. He is trying to be more rational
than the rationalists-a contradictory way to be! He must decide either to be a more consistent
irrationalist (but note the paradox of that!) or to abandon his
irrationalism. Of course he might
renounce consistency altogether, thus renouncing the presupposition of the
argument. But the argument shows him
vividly how hard it is to live
without rationality. The argument is
circular, but it draws some important facts to his attention. The argument is persuasive though circular
because down deep in our hearts we know that we cannot live without reason.[20]
Some circular arguments are
persuasive to us, others not. Those
circular arguments which verify the most basic commitments of our lives are by
definition the most persuasive to us. And because we believe those commitments
true, we believe that those arguments ought to be persuasive to others
too. A Christian theist, while conceding
that the argument for God's existence is circular, nevertheless will claim that
the argument is sound and persuasive.
For he devoutly believes that his position is true, and he believes that
it can be recognized clearly as such. He
believes that God made men to think in terms of this circularity, rather than in terms of some competing
circularity.[21]
Basic-commitment language,
therefore, is both “odd” and “ordinary”; it resists falsification, it refuses
to be judged by some antithetical commitment; yet it accepts the responsibility
to verify itself. It accepts the
responsibility of displaying whatever rationality and consistency it may claim.
What is
Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. A man was there, pulling weeds, applying fertilizer, trimming branches. The man turned to the explorers and introduced himself as the royal gardener. One explorer shook his hand and exchanged pleasantries. The other ignored the gardener and turned away: “There can be no gardener in this part of the jungle,” he said; “this must be some trick. Someone is trying to discredit our previous findings.” They pitch camp. Every day the gardener arrives, tends the plot. Soon the plot is bursting with perfectly arranged blooms. “He's only doing it because we're here-to fool us into thinking this is a royal garden.” The gardener takes them to a royal palace, introduces the explorers to a score of officials who verify the gardener's status. Then the sceptic tries a last resort: “Our senses are deceiving us. There is no gardener, no blooms, no palace, no officials. It's still a hoax!” Finally the believer despairs: “But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does this mirage, as you call it, differ from a real gardener?”
A garden indeed! How convenient that we should be talking
about gardens – for that is where the Bible's own story begins. Adam and Eve lived in a garden, and they knew
the divine Gardener. He talked to them,
worked with them, lived with them; until one day Eve – and Adam! – denied that
he was there. Irrational it was, for sin
is at its root irrational. And Scripture
tells us that ever since that day sinners have been guilty of the same
irrationality. God is verifiable,
knowable, “clearly seen” in his works;[24] but men still
– “irrationally” because sinfully – deny him.
To the Christian, the denials lapse into cognitive meaninglessness – an
attempt to evade God by using atheistic language to describe a patently
theistic world.
From a “neutral” point of
view, both Flew and the Christian are in the same boat. Both have beliefs which are “odd” and
“ordinary”; resistant to falsification, yet verifiable on their own terms. But of course there is no “neutral” point of
view. You are either for God or against
Him. You must place yourself in one
circle or the other. Logically, both systems face the difficulties
of circularity. But one is true and the
other is false. And if man is made to know
such things, then you can tell the difference.20
You know you can!20
Our response to Flew, in
short, is that (1) He has only told half the story: religious language does
resist falsification, as he says; but it also often claims to be verifiable in
terms of its own presuppositions. (2) These epistemological peculiarities
attach to all “basic-commitment language,” not just to religious or Christian
language – and thus they attach to unbelieving language as well. Therefore, these considerations may not be
urged as a criticism of Christianity.
They are simply descriptive of the human epistemological condition. (3)
Scripture pictures the unbeliever as
the truly ridiculous figure, who ignores patent evidence and makes mockery of
reason, on whose basis no knowledge is possible. To the Christian, the unbelieving circle is,
or ought to be, absurd: something like “Truth is a giant onion; therefore truth
is a giant onion.”
Flew, therefore, does not
succeed in showing religious language to be “cognitively meaningless”; and
therefore he fails to show that human language cannot speak of God. But what of the third form of our
objection? What of Karl Barth? Should we simply leave him behind?
Let us go back to the
“oddness” and “ordinariness” of religious language, and Christian language in
particular. The oddness of Christian
language derives from the transcendence of God, and the ordinariness of it
derives from God's immanence. Christian
language is odd because it is the language of basic commitment; and the
transcendence of God's Lordship demands that our commitment be basic. This language is odd because it expresses our
most ultimate presuppositions; and these presuppositions are the demands which
God makes upon us – nothing less. It is
odd because it attempts to convey God's demands – his demands for all of
life. It will not be “falsified” by some
secular philosophical criterion, because God will not be judged by such a
criterion. “Let God be true, though
every man a liar.”[25] God's own word, the paradigm of all Christian
language, is therefore supremely odd.
Christian language is
“ordinary,” verifiable, because God is not only the transcendent Lord; he is
also “with us,” close to us. These two
attributes do not conflict with one another.
God is close to us because he
is Lord. He is Lord, and thus free to
make his power felt everywhere we go. He
is Lord, and thus able to reveal himself clearly to us, distinguishing himself
from all mere creatures. He is Lord, and
therefore the most central fact of our experience, the least avoidable, the
most verifiable.
And because God's own word
is supremely odd, it is supremely ordinary.
Because it is supremely authoritative, it is supremely verifiable. Because it furnishes the ultimate presuppositions
of thought, it furnishes the ultimate truths of thought.
Barth's argument essentially
reverses this picture (derived from Scripture) of God's transcendence and
immanence. To Barth, God's transcendence
implies that he cannot be clearly revealed to men, clearly represented by human
words and concepts. This view of God's
transcendence contradicts the view of God's immanence which we presented. Similarly, Barth has a view of God's
immanence which contradicts the view of transcendence which we presented. To Barth, the immanence of God implies that
words of merely human authority, words which are fallible, may from time to
time “become” the word of God. Thus the
only authority we have, in the final analysis, is a fallible one. The only “word of God” we have is a fallible
human word. God does not make
authoritative demands which require unconditional belief; he does not determine
the presuppositions of our thought; he does not resist all falsification –
rather he endorses falsehood and sanctifies it.
Well, who is right? Does God's transcendence include or exclude
an authoritative verbal revelation of himself to men? Note that this question must be faced
squarely. It is not enough to say that
revelation must be seen in the context of God's transcendence; for that
transcendence has been understood in different ways, and one must therefore
defend his particular view of it. One
does not get into the heart of the matter by saying that one view sees
revelation “in abstraction from” God's lordship; for the two sides do not agree
on the nature of this lordship or the relation that revelation is supposed to
sustain to that lordship.
Both views claim Scriptural
support. Barth can appeal to the basic
creator-creature relationship as presented in Scripture: man is a creature; his
ultimate trust must rest solely in God.
To put ultimate confidence in something finite is idolatry. Human words are finite. Therefore to put ultimate confidence in
Scripture is idolatry. And in a fallen
world, such confidence is all the more foolish; for human words are sinful as
well as finite. Sinful speech can never
perfectly honor God. The Gospel
precisely requires us to disown any
claim to perfection, to confess the inadequacy
of all human works, to cast all our hope on the mercy of God. How can we put ultimate trust in human words
and in God's mercy at the same time?
Barth's view can be stated
very persuasively as long as it focuses on the general facts of creation and
redemption. Scripture does condemn
idolatry; it does condemn reliance on merely human means of salvation. But when this view turns specifically to the
concept of revelation, its unbiblical character becomes obvious. For Scripture itself never deduces from God's
transcendence the inadequacy and fallibility of all verbal revelation. Quite to the contrary: in Scripture, verbal
revelation is to be obeyed without question, because of the divine
transcendence:
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our
God is one Lord: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and
with all thy soul, and with all thy might.
And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thy heart;
and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them
when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou
liest down, and when thou risest up.... Ye shall diligently keep the
commandments of the Lord your God, and his testimonies, and his statutes, which
he hath commanded thee.[26]
One who serves God as lord
will obey his verbal revelation without question. One who loves Christ as Lord will keep his
commandments.[27] God's lordship, transcendence, demands
unconditional belief in and obedience to the words of revelation; it never
relativizes or softens the authority of these words. But how can that be? Is Scripture itself guilty of idolizing human
words? The answer is simply that
Scripture does not regard verbal revelation as merely human words. Verbal revelation, according to Scripture, is
the Word of God, as well as the word
of man. As with the incarnate Christ,
verbal revelation has divine qualities as well as human qualities. Most particularly, it is divine as to its authority.
To obey God's word is to obey Him;
to disobey God's word is to disobey Him.
Unconditional obedience to verbal revelation is not idolatry of human
words; it is simply a recognition of the divinity of God's own words. It is the deference which we owe to God as
our creator and redeemer.
Dishonoring the divine is
just as sinful as idolizing the creature.
The two are inseparable. To
disobey God is to obey something less than God.
When we turn from God's words, we idolize human words. If Scripture is right, if verbal revelation
does have divine authority, then it is Barth's view which encourages
idolatry. For Barth's view would turn us
away from proper deference to God's words, and would have us instead make a
“basic commitment” to the truth of some other words – our own, perhaps, or
those of scientists, or those of theologians.
These considerations do not
prove that Scripture is the word of God.
They do show, however, that the biblical doctrine of divine
transcendence does not compromise the authority of verbal revelation. One may, indeed, prefer Barth's concept of
transcendence to the biblical one; but such a view may not be paraded and
displayed as the authentic Christian position.
We conclude, then, that the
“objection” before us is unsound in all of its three forms. Human language may convey the infallible word
of God, because God is lord – even of human language!
NOTES