In the primal state and through the history of salvation, God’s Word created different channels and masks as mediums of law and grace. God reveals to his creatures the actions he will take through a given created medium. In so doing, he bids humans to flee by faith from his masks of wrath to his masks of grace. In Eden, God established the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil through his word of command and promise. Here, the new humans found his judgment, hiddenness, and wrath (Gen. 2:17). By contrast, God attached his promise of grace to the Tree of Life and all the other trees in the garden (Gen. 2:16).
Later in the history of salvation, God designated Mt. Sinai as the location of judgment. From Sinai, God spoke forth his law and barred his people from ascending the mountain lest they be destroyed by his wrath (Exod. 19-20). Nevertheless, God established first the Tabernacle and then the Temple as the places where Israel could receive the grace of atonement and participate in divine holiness (Lev. 16-17).
Finally, in the era of the New Testament, Jesus designated the Temple and its old law as a place of divine judgment that would soon be destroyed (Mk. 13, Mt. 24, Lk 21). Now, his own cross is the new site of grace and atonement. On Easter Sunday, the women fled from the empty tomb, which seemed merely a place of death. Yet the atonement given via the cross and justification given via the tomb became the font of grace. The angels instructed the women to tell the disciples what they had experienced. This is significant, because the apostles’ Word and Sacrament ministry became the medium of the presence of the risen Jesus (Mt. 18:20, 28:20).
Therefore, the event of revelation is always a unity of God’s auditory and visible words. Together, these disclose God’s action and presence. It is possible to infer God’s action and presence without an auditory word through deductive or inductive reasoning. This ability gave rise to natural theology. Nevertheless, without an auditory word, the identity, meaning, and purpose of God’s action cannot be fully known.
Indeed, even human agents must explain why they perform a particular work for others to understand their intentions. As theologian Kevin Vanhoozer correctly observes: “Only speech disambiguates behavior. Only God’s word disambiguates God’s deed.”1 Going further, Luther notes, God never speaks forth a bare word, but always attaches his auditory word to some physical and visible word:
God . . . sets before us no word or commandment without including with it something material and outward, and proffering it to us. To Abraham he gave the word including with it his son Isaac [Gen. 15:4ff]. To Saul he gave the word including with it the slaying of the Amalakites [I Sam. 15:2 f]. And so on. You find no word of God in the entire Scripture in which something material and outward is not contained and presented. If we followed the fanatical spirits, we have to say that all these material, outward things were of no avail and simply nothing.2
Hence, the boundary between special revelation and natural revelation blurs to the extent that all reality is a revelation of the Triune God. That is to say, all creatures we encounter are God’s addresses to humanity. We live enveloped by God’s address via his visible and auditory words.
There nevertheless remains a distinction between general and special revelation in that without God’s supernatural action, God’s auditory words remain hidden from us. Sin makes humans deaf to God’s auditory words. Therefore, without special revelation in the post-lapsarian world, humans are only able to faintly discern God’s will through his visible creation (i.e., natural theology).
- Kevin Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 213. In light of Barth-Brunner debate, Reinhold Niebuhr makes a similar point. See Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Son, 1964), 2:62-67. ↩︎
- That These Words of Christ “This is My Body,” Etc. Still Stand Firm Against the Fanatics (1527); LW 37:135-136 ↩︎
From the draft manuscript for Lutheran Dogmatics: The Evangelical-Catholic Faith for an Age of Contested Truth (Lexham Press).
Cover image: Joshua Martin, “How Genesis addresses some of our deepest questions,” The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, September 1, 2022, accessed June 19, 2024, https://erlc.com/research/how-genesis-addresses-some-of-our-deepest-questions/.