Telford Workdue September 22, 2003
Gabriel Fackre, The Doctrine of Revelation (Eerdmans, 1997), introduction and prologue.
Introduction. Newbigin’s contention throughout Proper Confidence is that Christian knowledge rightfully presupposes the fact of the incarnation and atonement of the Son. Fackre’s thesis confirms Newbigin’s: the great theological controversies of the ancient, medieval, Reformation, modern, and postmodern eras all go to the question of how God has revealed himself (1). If we get this question wrong, we will hardly be able to get the rest of theology right.
And what an assortment of questions and answers we already have! “Authority … inward light, reason, self-evidencing Scripture, or the combination of the four, or some of them, or in what proportion?” asks Mark Pattison, reviewing a few centuries of debates. In this list some of you will recognize echoes of the so-called “Wesleyan Quadrilateral” of Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience.The WQ is an alternative to a Calvinist trilateral that preceded it. These are old issues about old categories.
Q: What would Newbigin think of that quadrilateral?
If you answered my question well, you have already begunto appreciate Fackre’s task. Fackre sets out both to understand why these categoriesare so persistent, and to heal the divisions and dichotomies we have imposed on revelation by misconstruing its categories.
Fackre says that construing and relating them right cannot simply mean arranging them in combinations, hierarchies, and proportions. The integrity of the doctrine of revelation lies in the coherence of the Christian narrative. The Christian story has room for something like each of these aspects of revelation.
Fackre is drawing on the postliberal “narrative theology” movement of the mid-twentieth century, which made this point obvious after modernity had obscured it for centuries.Fackre previews the postliberal themes his project will reinforce: the Bible’s power to offer us a new world in which we learn who God is and what God has been up to, the centrality of Jesus Christ as the story’s interpretive key, the place of Israel, the role of the Christian community in telling and understanding the story, the necessary rejection of wider cultural premises as proper frameworks for understanding the story or our storytelling practices, and the eclectic use of extrabiblical experience (that is, a use disciplined only by the biblical story itself) (5). Happy? I am!
Ironically, striking out like this seems diametrically opposed to conventional approaches like the modern Wesleyan and Calvinist multilaterals, but we will find ourselves circling back to familiar categories. Fackre informs his readers that in his project “Scripture will play a magisterial role, the church’s tradition and conversation a ministerial one, with general human experience as catalytic and contextual” (13). Q: Are that description and the two graphics that follow it helpful?
Fackre morphs Avery Dulles’ influential typology of Models of Revelation (doctrine, history, inner experience, dialectical presence, and new awareness) into a narrative of “phases of revelation in the story of reconciliation”: preservation (experience and awareness), action (history and presence), inspiration (doctrine), and illumination (presence), and maps these onto a traditional Reformed sequence of general revelation, special revelation, and reception (16-18).Isn’t that … helpful? This is one of those introductions you should read again after we finish the book, because it will take the rest of the book to make sense of it. Don’t despair.
Prologue.In this brief chapter, full of technical terms and figures from twentieth century Trinitarian theology, Fackre shows us that a tour of the doctrine of revelation presupposes a thorough appreciation of the doctrine of God. While this surely comes as a frustration to some readers who want to know where to start learning, I hope our class can recognize that we are on familiar territory. The author of revelation is the object of revelation; revelation’s story is God’s story. The story that reveals God to be Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is itself the work of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. That is all the detail we need for now; the rest will come in the telling.