May 3, 2011

Emil Brunner defined revelation as presence. He expanded on this theme in his work Truth as Encounter to describe it as “God’s self-giving.”1 More than information is communicated during the encounter. God’s personal presence is transmitted during the actual event. The goal of this revelation is the establishment of a personal relationship with God. This revelation is both objectively locative, in that it occurs in space and time, and subjectively personal, in that its content is the person of God rather than doctrines concerning God. Since God Himself is expressed in the revelatory act, any propositional form of revelation reduces God to an object rather than a person, or to use Brunner’s word, a subject.

For one who accepts an evangelical perspective of revelation, the major weakness in Brunner’s theological argument is his view of revelation. He totally rejected the verbal inspiration theory as outmoded and archaic.2 He wrote:

The error is not so much that its advocates do not see and concede the inaccuracies and human fallibility of the holy Book— that is the argument of the Enlightenment, which is indeed right, but does not touch the central point. The error is that through this (aprioristic) Bible faith, faith has been transformed into something fundamentally different from what the Bible itself means by pistis and emuna. The result of our reflections is thus as follows: Aprioristic Bible faith is not Biblical but stems from precisely the Jewish legalistic thought which was transcended by justifying faith.3

For Brunner the Word of God becomes revelation when Christ is revealed as Lord to the individual’s heart. The Bible is a witness of this revelation but is not revelation in the same sense: “The Word which has been formulated in human speech is now only revelation in an indirect sense; it is revelation as witness to Him.”4 Brunner thought that equating the Word of God, with the words of the Scripture, and the revelation of God with the revealed doctrines about God were mistakes which had been commonly made by previous theologians. “It is a ‘word’ inspired by the Spirit of God; yet at the same time it is a human message; its ‘human character’ means that it is coloured by the frailty and imperfection of all that is human.”5 Hence, Brunner readily accepted all forms of biblical criticism. He accepted the spurious theories that assume the Scriptures are not inerrant as a matter of fact that any educated person should accept totally. Concerning the Bible he wrote:

It is full of errors, contradictions, and misleading views of various circumstances relating to man, nature, and history. It contains many contradictions in its report of the life of Jesus; it is over-grown with legend, even in the New Testament.6

According to Brunner the verbal inspiration theory7 did major damage to the Church and was the major mistake of the Reformation. The Reformers were unable to shake themselves sufficiently loose from papal authority and set the Bible up as an infallible “paper pope.”8 Like others who espouse the neo-orthodox position, Brunner, held a low view of Scripture. His position was untenable, however, in that he attempted to hold on to the authority of Scripture without accepting its inspiration. In the final analysis “one must either abandon the reformer’s view of the Bible or stand with them to build a theology on the Bible, accepted as a reliable and trustworthy revelation of divine truth.”9Brunner disagreed with Barth publicly and heatedly over the subject of general revelation.10 Unlike Barth, Brunner held the view that in spite of human sin, man can see God in His creation. God is calling to man from this creation because, within man, there is an idea of God.

Brunner’s Epistemology

Evangelicals must not misappropriate Brunner’s refusal to accept the verbal inspiration of Scripture as a mandate to refuse to read any more from this gifted thinker. Brunner’s theology accomplished great strides in tearing down the liberal predispositions that dominated theology during the beginning of the twentieth century. Brunner was raised in a familial environment that had suffered from and reacted against the predominant liberal views of the nineteenth century.11 This prepared him to reject much of the liberal thought; however, he was very much a product of his time. Brunner saw himself from an early age as searching for “a scientifically satisfying formulation of . . . faith.”12

He was unable to escape fully all influences of liberalism, although he began in a direction that would indicate he was attempting to arrive upon a different set of predispositions:

Since the Renaissance, however, at first in the minds of the more daring spirits and then increasingly in wider and wider circles, a new mentality has gradually emerged: that of complete preoccupation with the things of this world, and an immanental philosophy. . . . Whatever cannot be proved scientifically is either not quite true or not quite certain. All that lies beyond the perception of the senses and the conclusions of logic, all that cannot be proved and verified experimentally, is ‘subjunctive,’ ‘hypothetical,’ or improbable and incredible.13

Brunner also taught that God could be known only through a subjective, personal encounter—the I-Thou relationship.14 In this communion God does not reveal Himself in truths or propositions but in His Person.15 Man, “I”, therefore, can only find meaning in relation to the “Thou.” All of civilization and culture is in the pursuit of the “Thou.” “Man always has God or an idol.”16 When man has this divine encounter with God, the “Thou,” the revelation experienced is personal and supercedes dogma, church, tradition, and Scripture. It is from this plateau of encounter that all of Brunner’s theology must be understood.

End Notes

1. Emil, Brunner, Truth as Encounter. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1964), 100.

2. Emil, Brunner, Revelation and Reason: The Christian Doctrine of Faith and Knowledge. trans. Olive Wyon, (Philadelphia The Westminister Press., 1946), 8-9. The church has always erred in its attempt to make the doctrines iron clad and infallible, early she erred against the Gnostic’s and the reformers erred against the sects. Early Christianity “created for herself an instrument of differentiation, which she could use in a legalistic way; this instrument was the concept of the divinely inspired, and therefore ‘infallible’, doctrine.” (8) . . . “Henceforth the Bible ranked as the source of the revealed doctrine, the God-given textbook of true theology: it is ‘Holy’ Scripture because it contains the divinely revealed doctrine. And the revelation itself is simply the infallible doctrine, divinely ‘given’ in the Bible , and clearly stated and formulated in the system of Christian dogma.” (9) The effect of this view of revelation most clearly is evident in its impact upon the concept of faith. “. . . revelation become doctrine and faith become doctrinal belief. A ‘believer’ is now no longer, as in the New Testament, a person who has been claimed and transformed by Jesus Christ, but a person who accepts what the Church offers him as divinely revealed doctrine” (9) “. . . once the Bible was regarded as the source of divinely revealed doctrinal truth— and thus everything depends upon the process of revelation as the transference of the infallible divine truth to the human system of doctrine— then of [necessity] this character of infallibility had to be transferred to the Holy Scriptures. Thus there arose the standard doctrine of the Bible, the doctrine of the verbal inspiration of the Holy Scriptures.”(9)

3. Emil Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of God: Dogmatics. vol. 3 trans. Olive Wyon. (London: Lutterworth Press., 1949), 190. Also see Note “The True Non-Aprioristic Bible Faith: Reflections on the Formulation of a New Doctrine of Scripture,” 244-250.

4. Emil Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of God: Dogmatics.vol. 1 trans. Olive Wyon. (London: Lutterworth Press., 1949), 27.

5. Ibid,. 34.

6. Paul K. Jewett, Emil Brunner’s Concept of Revelation. (London: James Clarke and Co. Ltd., 1954), 118.

7. This is the theory of inspiration accepted by most Southern Baptists. During the height of the debate within the SBC an ad-hoc Peace Committee met and concluded that: 1. Adam and Eve were literal people. 2. The Biblical Books were written by those credited in the text. 3. The miracles recorded in scripture really occurred. 4. The historical events recorded in the Scriptures really happened. Fisher Humphreys, “The Disagreement about the Bible,” (classroom lecture notes, Christian Theology, Pt. 1, 11 October 1990).

8. Jewett, Emil Brunner’s Concept of Revelation, 128.

9. Paul K. Jewett, Emil Brunner: An Introduction to the Man and His Thought. (Chicago: Inter-Varsity Press., 1961), 39. “Brunner in his best moments realizes this. Therefore his criticism of liberalism is lethal, though his commitment to the teaching of Scripture is not so uncompromising as one could wish.”

10. Emil Brunner, Natural Theology: Comprising “Nature and Grace.” trans. Peter Fraenkel, (London: The Centenary Press., 1946)

11. Brunner, “A Spiritual Autobiography,” 238-39. “As a Protestant theologian I am gratefully aware of the immense impact which Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531) has made on the life of my people. The reformed tradition was the spiritual climate in which I grew up. My father was a primary school teacher whose outlook and style of life had been formed by a great Christian educator who had fought for the rights of private Christian schools at a time of extreme rationalism in politics and higher education, which around the middle of the 19th century was prevailing in central and western Europe. My mother was the daughter of a Reformed minister who had become a victim of the same movement because he kept faith with the Bible and the Creed of our ancestors at the time when rationalism had invaded the church in the form of a militant liberal theology. The prayers of my parents as well as the Bible stories which my mother told me, holding me on her lap . . . are the basis of my Christianity and of my theology as well.”

12. Brunner, “Intellectual Autobiography of Emil Brunner,” 5.

13. Brunner, Revelation and Reason, 5.

14. Brunner, “Intellectual Autobiography of Emil Brunner,” 11. “I came to the conclusion that the root of the whole problem was the question of anthropology. Every political and social system grows out of a particular concept of man. . . my thinking was stimulated by Max Weber and, above all, in the sphere of philosophy, by Ferdinand Ebner and Martin Buber. Here I saw the rationalistic thought-scheme of object and subject overcome by understanding the human person as basically related to the divine Thou and by distinction between the I-Thou world and the I-it world.” (11) Brunner does not accept everything Buber advances wholesalely, he does have differences, particularly with Buber’s views of Faith. See Emil Brunner. “Excurus: Martin Buber’s Teaching on the Apostles’ Misunderstanding of Faith,” in The Christian Doctrine of God: Dogmatics. Translated by David Cairns, Philadelphia (The Westminster Press., Vol. 3, 1962), 159-162.

15. Enns, The Moody Handbook of Theology, 564.

16. Emil Brunner, Man in Revolt: A Christian Anthropology. trans. Olive Wyon, (Philadelphia The Westminster Press., 1947), 25.