Natural Revelation
We know God through His work. Just like you can learn some things about Rembrandt from His paintings or Davinci from his Statues, you can learn about God from what He’s done and made.
When we talk about knowing God through General revelation, I find it helpful talk in three categories: Creation, Conscience, and Reason.
Creation
The heavens declare the glory of God, Psalm 19:1
Or, its more explicit in Romans 1:20
God’s invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made…
And in speaking of God’s kindness, we have Acts 14:17,
Yet God did not leave himself without witness, for he did good by giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness.
So creation teaches us about God. We know about His glory, power, divinity, and kindness simply by observing the things he’s made. To quote Calvin again, this world is the theater of God’s glory.
Conscience
God created us as moral beings. We all believe in right and wrong, good and evil. Maybe we debate where to draw the line between them, but we all agree there should be a line – and that’s what is relevant here.
Romans 2 speaks of those without God’s law still believe in some sort of cosmic law.
For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them.
Romans 2:14–15
Sometimes they are excused in righteousness, sometimes they are condemned by their conscience. But the law has been implanted on their hearts. God made them with a sense of reality.
I think this explains the religious reflex in Humanity. Many of my older sources explicitly say that there’s never been a culture on earth that didn’t have some sort of religious institution. They were religious people. Of course, modern sources can’t say that – though I’d argue everyone is still religious, it’s just the outplay that’s changed.
But the point stands, we all have some sense of the divine. And we act accordingly. We understand sin, we understand justice. That’s the foundation of formal religion.
Really, that’s the foundation of informal religion too, like cancel culture. Certain things are unacceptable and must be dealt with accordingly. You have sinned in your words or actions, and now you are condemned and judged for it. The penalty is silence, cancellation. Right? Religion hasn’t gone away, it’s just put on a new dress.
Again, maybe the lines get drawn in the wrong places, but you can’t escape conscience. It’s part of General Revelation.
That there exists in the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, some sense of deity we hold to be beyond dispute, since God Himself, to prevent any man from pretending ignorance, has endued all men with some idea of his Godhead, the memory of which he constantly renews and occasionally enlarges, that all to a man, being aware that there is a God, and that he is their maker, may be condemned by their own conscience when they neither worship him nor consecrate their lives to his service…. Even idolatry is ample evidence of this fact.[1]
Reason
God speaks in creation, He speaks in conscience, and He speaks in Reason. I should say Cognition to make this alliterated. But Reason is clearer.
And what I’m getting at here is there are rational arguments for belief in God and knowing God. Arguments that you don’t need a Bible for, or even formal religion for. You just need to engage the brain the Lord gave you.
Our buddy Tommy Aquinas added his mind to guys like Plato and Aristotle (who weren’t even Christians) to become famous for this. But we can argue for the reality of the existence of God based on logic, things like the first cause.
First Cause: Everything that is, is the effect of something else. This room was built by someone. A tree comes from a seed. A seed comes from another tree, and on and on back. You were made by your parents. And yet, we inevitably come to the question of beginnings. Something had to start this chain of events. Something had to knock over the first domino. What was that? It was god – the first cause – Aristotle, I believe, would call him the the unmoved mover.
Or, we can talk about gradations. We have things that are good and things that are better. This is true of acts, abilities, even cups of coffee. But how do we differentiate between a good cup of coffee and a better cup of coffee? Well, the better cup is more similar to “best” cup than the “good” cup is.
To have the existence of “Better” necessitates that you have some concept of “the Best” (Thank you Plato, and your forms)
To say there is something hot and something hotter, means that the hotter thing is more like the hottest thing. Aquinas would say that fire, the hottest thing, has to exists, because we know it’s derivatives, things like “hotter.” Granted – we know fire isn’t the hottest thing in existence, but his bad science in an illustration doesn’t undermine his point.[2]
And to have categories truest, most noble, best, and uttermost being imply god must exist. There must be some divine standard of these things. Gradations prove God.
We could even continue with arguments from morality, beauty, proportion, complexity. Historically, there have been at least 2-dozen published arguments for God based on general revelation from Anselm and Augustine and Descartes and Kant and Lewis and Pascal and Plantinga. God gave us reason so that we could know Him.[3]
It’s not for a lack of argument that God isn’t known. So what is the problem?
Sin, Suppression, and Obstructed Seats
But even though God speaks clearly though general revelation – through creation and conscience and reason, we still have a problem – and that is we don’t clearly perceive God through general revelation.[4]
Using Calvin’s analogy, that this world is the theater of God’s glory, then we’re all stuck in the cheap seats with obstructed views. You’re trying to look down on the stage, but there’s a column in your way.
Sin doesn’t allow us to perceive God accurately through general revelation.
First, because creation itself is cursed by sin, you see that in Genesis 3, or in Romans 8 where Paul talks about it being subjected to futility and waiting for its liberation (18-25). Creation fails at its job, to an extent.
And more than that, mankind is cursed by sin. Though we should see God plainly in creation (Romans 1:21), our eyes have been darkened. 2 Corinthians 4:4 says Satan has actually blinded our eyes. And this is why, there’s an urgency in evangelism – we tell people about God, not the stars. We must be declaring His glory because sinful man can’t hear the heavens already proclaiming it.
And a third problem, more than that, is that using the best of creaturely wisdom and reason, even – hypothetically - apart from sin, those arguments from nature and conscience and reasons will never get us to the reality of who God is.
Seeing a clock, you can reason back to a clockmaker.[5] But you don’t know anything about Him. We can’t reason our way to the One True Living God of Scripture, but just some generic sense of deity - an Aristotelian unmoved mover, who is a long way off from the Lord Jesus Christ. We can know some things about Rembrandt through his paintings, but we can never know the man himself.
General Revelation isn’t enough if we’re going to know God. It’s not worthless – it’s just not going to get us all the way across the finish line. It’s still a good doctrine to talk about because it really does have helpful implications. I’ll close with a few:[6]
We can have a common ground with unbelievers because they see the same things we do.
We can find real knowledge, even of divine truth, outside of the Bible. The Bible doesn’t contain all the knowledge in the world.
And it breaks down that “Faith vs Science” divide. God made both scripture and creation to point to Him, so we should expect harmony and mutual reinforcement between the two (Of course, with a consideration of the effects of sin).
But, back to the question at hand. If we can’t know God in any relational, saving sense through General Revelation, then what’s the solution to knowing Him? It’s the topic of next week’s post – special revelation.
[1] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Beveridge, Henry (Peabody, Mass: Hendrickson Publishers, 2008), sec. 1.3.1, p9.
[2] Peter Kreeft and Thomas, A Summa of the Summa: The Essential Philosophical Passages of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica; Edited and Explained for Beginners (San Francisco: Ignatius Pr, 1990), 69.
[3] Kreeft and Thomas, 62–64.
[4] Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology, 2nd ed (Grand Rapids, Mich: Baker Book House, 1998), 195.
[5] Gerald Lewis Bray, God Is Love: A Biblical and Systematic Theology (Wheaton, Ill: Crossway, 2012), 29–30.
[6] Erickson, Christian Theology, 198–99.