In 1934, Emil Brunner wrote an article titled “Nature and Grace,” to which his former teacher and mentor, Karl Barth, responded with an article titled “No!”1 Barth believed humanity to be so corrupted by the Fall that no revelation of God existed outside of the Christian revelation of God.2 Thus began one of the great debates of modern theology between general and special revelation.
In this article, I seek to present a balanced approach to the topic of general revelation. My purpose is threefold: (1) to explore the biblical evidence for general revelation; (2) to understand the limitations of general revelation and the need for special revelation; and (3) to discover the purpose of general revelation. The primary biblical focus will be on the figure of Melchizedek and the apostle Paul’s references to the revelation of God in nature in the Epistle to the Romans. The method will be based on the biblical text and the thinking of exegetes, theologians, and missiologists surrounding the issue of general revelation. The hope is that a fair and balanced approach to this topic can be achieved through an exploration of this material.
The Melchizedek factor
Melchizedek is perhaps an enigmatic figure in the Bible, but an important one. He has much to tell us. In Genesis 14:18–20, Abram receives a blessing from King Melchizedek.3 After the blessing, Abram pays a tithe to this king of Salem, who is called a “priest of God Most High.” Psalm 110, clearly a Messianic psalm, provides a very high place to Melchizedek. 4 Verse 4 states that the Messiah will be a “ ‘priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.’ ” According to the author of Hebrews, Melchizedek is “without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but resembling the Son of God, he remains a priest forever” (7:3). Drawing from this verse, Don Richardson calls Melchizedek the “archetype of general revelation”—the kind of revelation that is “just there.”5
Richardson goes one step further, referring to general revelation as the Melchizedek factor. Millard Erickson defines general revelation as “God’s self-manifestation through nature, history, and the inner being of the human person.”6 This factor is already present and working even before God’s special revelation appears. Richardson refers to special revelation as the Abraham factor, because God revealed Himself to Abraham in a specific time and place. Erickson defines special revelation as “God’s manifestation of himself to particular persons at definitive times and places, enabling those persons to enter into a redemptive relationship with him.”7
So, when Psalm 110 and Hebrews refer to Christ as a “priest forever in the order of Melchizedek,” they make Christ the Lord of general revelation.8 Richardson’s apt interpretation of John 1:9 makes this clear: “The true light [Christ] that gives light to every man [through general revelation] was coming into the world [i.e., to shine upon men in a new way—special revelation].” 9 So, in this interpretation of the person of Melchizedek, general revelation takes on a new and important meaning. If Jesus is, in fact, a priest in the order of the “archetype of general revelation [Melchizedek],” then He must speak, move, and act through general revelation.
General revelation in Romans
Romans 1:19, 20 and 2:14, 15a, reveals a troubling problem for the Christian: how much can be known of God outside of His special revelation? As was noted earlier, Karl Barth argued that a human being could know nothing outside of God’s self-revelation. However, if one adheres to Barth’s rejection of general revelation, one must deal with these two passages in Romans. The apostle Paul states that what can be known about God is plain because “God has shown it to them [humanity],” but he goes on to state that through His creation, the natural order of things, His “eternal power and divine nature” is made known. The context of this verse includes the wrath of God against humankind. One of the results of this wrath is God giving humanity over to their “degrading passions,” resulting in a perversion of God-given natural relations between men and women (1:26, 27).
In his New International Biblical Commentary, James Edwards makes an interesting clarification. He emphasizes the phrase “suppress the truth” (1:8). Through the lens of this verse, one can see that the problem is not a matter of reason, but of will: “The problem is not lack of knowledge, but failure to acknowledge God and render proper worship and obedience.”10 God is revealing Himself to humanity. They are not ignorant of truth, but rather willfully suppress the truth. This comprises an important clarification.
However, the question remains, how is it that humanity remains without excuse even outside of the special revelation of Jesus Christ? The apostle Paul seems to suggest that the Gentiles, those outside of Israel, could know God outside of God’s special revelation. So, what does it mean to know God outside of Jesus Christ? Again Edwards makes an important point. The Greek word for “known” actually connotes knowledge of something by experience rather than knowledge about something. This means that humanity is “without excuse” because they have experienced God in nature and in themselves and have willfully rejected Him. Humanity’s problem is a broken will.
This clarification is interesting, especially in light of Romans 2:14, 15a. Again, this is not a matter of knowledge about something, but a matter of obedience, or of the will. “Where Paul speaks of the law written on Gentile hearts, he argues that even people without religious instruction are responsible moral agents.”11 All was not lost in the Fall. Humanity has maintained an innate moral sense. John Calvin called this the sensus divinitatis—a sense of the divine that points the human being to God. Jonathan Edwards “wrote of an innate, prereflective awareness of God, a natural inclination that prejudices the soul to believe in God.”12 For Edwards, nature is full of evidence of God “in ourselves, in our own bodies and souls, and in everything about us wherever we turn our eye, whether to heaven, or to earth, the air, or the seas.”13
In the passages in Romans under discussion, Paul can be speaking of nothing else besides general revelation. The evidence is clear. God is at work in His creation, even outside of special revelation. If one questions the revelation of God in nature, they only need to read Psalm 19 to receive the answer: “The heavens are telling the glory of God; . . . / In the heavens he has set a tent for the sun, / which comes out like a bridegroom from his wedding canopy” (vv. 1a, 4b, 5a). Furthermore, the image of God in humans has remained in some form after the Fall. Romans 2:14–16 cannot be denied on this point. So, it would seem that there is no doubt that God reveals Himself in a general way through nature and through humanity. The question remains: what are the limitations of this revelation?
The limitations of general revelation
Jesus said, “ ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me’ ” (John 14:6). Thus Jesus claims that salvation is through Him. The Cross and Resurrection are exclusive. Men and women have struggled with this claim for Christian exclusivism for years. Enlightenment thinkers attempted to dismantle Christianity based on this exclusivity. For example, Kant argued that Christianity “dispenses with the most important mark of truth, namely, a rightful claim to universality, when it bases itself upon a revealed faith.”14 In other words, Christianity is not true because of its exclusive special revelation in the person of Jesus Christ. In response to this claim, one might want to immediately point to a biblical character like Melchizedek and say, “Look, there is an example of a man saved outside of God’s exclusive special revelation.” However, this idea can in no way be sustained in the text. The Bible is clear: salvation comes through Jesus Christ. So what do we do with the challenge of religious pluralism?
Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen makes an important contribution here. In his book, An Introduction to the Theology of Religions, he elucidates the desire of God that all of humanity be saved. He quotes 1 Timothy 2:4, which affirms that God “desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” He terms this the “optimism of salvation.” However, as is clear in John 14:6, salvation does not exist outside of Jesus Christ. So, the theological formula is as follows: “universality (salvation of the world) is reached by way of particularity (salvation through the mediation of Jesus Christ).”15
Thus, general revelation works up to a point. Both Calvin and Edwards agreed that general revelation only points to “God the Creator, not God the Redeemer.” In other words, nature shows the moral demands of God, but it does not show “how sinners can be restored to that God after they have failed to meet those demands.”16 Only God’s revelation in the person of Jesus Christ answers the question of how we can be restored to God. Christ is our redeeming God. He is the answer to a general revelation that is so incomplete.
The purpose of general revelation
But how can both optimism and exclusivity be true in terms of salvation? The answer lies in the purpose of general revelation. Amidst the plurality of religions today, there exist two extremes: (1) emphasizing the optimism of salvation to the point that the exclusivity of Jesus Christ is lost, and (2) emphasizing the exclusivity of Christ to the point that all other religions are seen to have absolutely no value.17 Neither of these extremes is correct. Again, we do not want to fall too far on one side of the debate as Barth did in his complete denial of general revelation. Instead, the answer lies somewhere in the middle.
If Jesus Christ is Lord of both general and special revelation, then the two must coexist and cooperate with one another. General revelation is not in opposition to special revelation. Instead, general revelation serves a preparatory purpose—the introduction to special revelation. It prepares the hearer to receive the gospel of Jesus Christ. In his enlightening discussion of Abraham and mission, Arthur Glasser calls those people who know God only through general revelation “Melchizedek people.” Looking at Abraham’s response to Melchizedek, he draws some poignant conclusions for evangelists and missionaries today: “When the people of God are in mission, they need to be alert to the possibility of encountering ‘Melchizedek people’ . . . people like Melchizedek may worship the same God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, though they may never have heard the name of Jesus Christ.”18 It is this type of attitude that the missionaries, pastors, and evangelists of today need to hold. God is already at work when they arrive to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ.
When the apostle Paul preached on Mars’ Hill (Acts 17), he did not discount that God was already at work. Using information from a third century work entitled The Lives of Eminent Philosophers by a Greek philosopher named Diogenes Laertius, Richardson constructed a history of how the altar inscribed “To an unknown god,” appeared in Athens six centuries before Christ. When a plague struck Athens, the people there discovered that their gods did not respond to their sacrifices. Then a man named Epimenides arrived in Athens and offered three reasons as to why an altar to an unknown god should be constructed: (1) there is still another god concerned in the matter of this plague, whose name is unknown, and therefore not represented by any idol; (2) this god is great enough and good enough to do something about the plague; and (3) if this is true, then this god is also great enough and good enough to “smile upon us in our ignorance—if we acknowledge our ignorance and call upon him!” After the altar was constructed, the plague ceased and all people in Athens praised this “unknown God.”19
The God who is at work in His creation and in the hearts of people is the same God who sent His Son to die on a cross and resurrected Him from the dead for the salvation of all people. This Paul preached to the crowd in Athens. He emphasized that God is already at work, calling the Athenians “ ‘extremely religious’ ” (v. 22) and commending their altar to an unknown god (v. 23). General revelation served its purpose in Athens and prepared the way for Paul’s preaching on Mars’ Hill. Missionaries and evangelists today need to heed to the call of the “Melchizedek people” or they may miss out on an opportunity to win people to salvation in Jesus Christ.
Conclusion: The priesthood of general revelation
Did Melchizedek come to know God through general or special revelation? Any attempt to arrive at a decisive answer to this question will end up only in frustration. That is not the point of the character of Melchizedek, nor the point of this paper. Melchizedek is, as Richardson makes clear, an “archetype of general revelation.” Unfortunately, no way exists to determine how Melchizedek came to know God and why Abram received a blessing from him and paid him a tithe. This demonstrates an instance where what is known must be emphasized as opposed to the troubling questions that surround such a figure.
Besides being the king of Salem, Melchizedek represented a special priesthood after which Christ’s priesthood was established. This priesthood is the “priesthood of general revelation”; the priesthood of the God who was, is, and will continue to work in and through His creation. It is the priesthood that beckons missionaries and evangelists to see the preparation that God has laid for their ministry and proclamation of the gospel. Informed Christians of today must learn to embrace the “God at work” in all of creation. Only then can they truly begin to reach people with the gospel of Jesus Christ, the only means by which anyone is saved.
1. See Peter Fraenkel, Natural Theology: Comprising “Nature
and Grace” by Professor Dr. Emil Brunner and the Reply
“No!” by Dr. Karl Barth (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock
Publishers, 2002).
2. For a more in-depth discussion, see Christoph Schwobel’s
article on Barth’s theology entitled “Theology” in The
Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, ed. John Webster
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), especially
32, 33.
3. Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture passages in this
article are from the New Revised Standard Version.
4. It is quoted by New Testament authors in Matthew 22:44;
Mark 12:36; Luke 20:42, 43; Acts 2:34; Hebrews 1:13; 5:6;
7:17 and 21.
5. Don Richardson, Eternity in their Hearts (Ventura, CA: Regal
Books, 1981), 10.
6. Millard Erickson, Christian Theology, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids,
MI: Baker Books, 1998), 178.
7. Ibid., 201.
8. He is already clearly the Lord of special revelation.
9. Richardson’s interpretation is in the brackets. He uses the
New International Version.
10. James Edwards, New International Biblical Commentary:
Romans (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, Inc., 1992),
47.
11. Ibid., 70.
12. Gerald McDermott, Can Evangelicals Learn From World
Religions? (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 51.
13. Jonathan Edwards, “Man’s Natural Blindness in Religion”
in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, ed. Edward Hickman
(Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1974), 2:252. I am greatly
indebted to McDermott for directing me to this quotation.
14. Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone
(New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960), 100.
15. Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, An Introduction to the Theology of
Religions (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 26.
16. McDermott, 51.
17. See Kärkkäinen, 27.
18. Arthur Glasser, Announcing the Kingdom (Grand Rapids,
MI: Baker Academic, 2003), 63.
19. Richardson, 14–20.
