IS PROPOSITIONAL REVELATION ESSENTIAL TO EVANGELICAL SPIRITUAL FORMATION? gordon r. lewis*

As a result of revealed truth, there is not only analogical knowledge of God, but also some univocal (nonfigurative) knowledge of God. Hence a critical realism is possible. God’s image bearers can know some things as God knows them by common and special grace via the content of general and special revelation.  --Gordon R. Lewis

The following quote is from a paper published in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society. Gordon R. Lewis rightly points out that modern Evangelicals who try to synthesize postmodernism with revelation as history, neo-orthodoxy, and propositional revelation are in essence selling out the Bible:

Evangelicals earlier considered liberals to be “rationalists,” because they accepted and rejected the truth of biblical passages based on the assumptions of their autonomous reason. Now postmodernists call evangelicals “rationalists” because they affirm biblical propositions to be true. That makes Jesus Christ “a rationalist” in his view of the OT. Orthodox and evangelical believers have been “rationalists” in this sense for 2,000 years. Classical Christianity has affirmed its belief that the Bible’s indicative sentences conveyed true information about the real world and its real Creator.  (Page 281).

To affirm propositional revelation is not to claim omniscience. But some knowledge of reality is possible, since the eternal Word of God made the world and men and women in his image to rule it. Believers in propositional revelation need not assume with Immanuel Kant and his countless followers that the categories of God’s thought and of creation are totally different from those of the human mind. Neither are his principles of reasoning totally different than those of his image bearers’ logic. The Creator made and renews human minds to think his revealed thoughts after him (Col 3:10).  (Page 285).

 As a result of revealed truth, there is not only analogical knowledge of God, but also some univocal (nonfigurative) knowledge of God. Hence a critical realism is possible. God’s image bearers can know some things as God knows them by common and special grace via the content of general and special revelation. (Page 286).

  -- Gordon R. Lewis

I'm wondering if Bruce Demarest and Gordon R. Lewis have been influenced by Carl F. H. Henry and Gordon H. Clark's theology of propositional revelation?  If so, then this is a good thing since it would appear that Westminster California and Westminster Philadelphia have both gone over to a syncretism of neo-orthodoxy, revelation as history/God's acts in history, postmodernism, and narrative theology with propositional revelation and conservative Evangelical grammatical/historical methods of exegesis.  A good example of that is Mike Horton's new systematic theology in which he attempts to integrate the liberal theological methods with conservative Reformed views, an attempt which ultimately fails.  Mixing liberalism with faith always ends up in disaster.  (See:  A Critical Review:  Pilgrims on the Way).  Is it not odd that so-called Reformed theologians in the line of Cornelius Van Til call those who advocate propositional revelation "rationalists"?

I did at one time own a copy of Lewis' three volume Integrative Theology.  Although it has been awhile since I read that series, I highly recommend it to those who advocate the theology of Gordon H. Clark and Carl F. H. Henry.  Lewis was himself a trained philosophy and he more often than not agrees with the propositional revelation view advocated by David Broughton Knox, Gordon H. Clark, Carl F. H. Henry and other Evangelical and Reformed theologians of recent times.

Click here to read the paper by Dr. Gordon R. Lewis:  IS PROPOSITIONAL REVELATION ESSENTIAL TO EVANGELICAL SPIRITUAL FORMATION? gordon r. lewis