It was a great delight to read The Revelation of God. The book is helpfully written from the perspective of theological education and training for ministry.
The individual Christian might ask, “What difference do these ideas make to me?” While someone in pastoral leadership might ask, “What difference do these ideas make to the people I work with?”
However, Peter Jensen’s perspective is that of the theological educator asking, “What will be the effect of these ideas over the next three or four generations of Christians?”
Peter writes not so much as the physician trying to make an apt diagnosis of an individual, but as an expert epidemiologist in the business of nurturing long-term public health and of perceiving major epidemics on the horizon. This too, of course, is a pastoral activity!
This book may not appeal to those with a short-term view who will lack the patience required for investing in the long-term health of the church. However for those with a longer-term concern about how we receive the revelation of God, it is invaluable.
As the title suggests, the topic of the book is the revelation of God, and the shape of the book includes the following areas: the gospel as revelation, and as the knowledge of God; the gospel as a pattern of revelation; and the place of human experience and religious experience.
The author then turns to Scripture, its authority, nature, and how to read it; and ends with a study of Word and Spirit, with an investigation of contemporary Revelation.
One of the great strengths of the book is that Peter Jensen argues his case without distraction. He interacts and debates with a number of writers from Voltaire and Hume, to Colin Gunton, Brevard Childs, George Lindbeck, Nicholas Wolterstorff, John Hick and Susan Gillingham. But he is never distracted from his main purpose, which is to show how the gospel of Jesus Christ is the revelation of God.
One reason why I will recommend this book to others is because of the useful development of the theme of experience (the great topic of our day), and especially chapters 5 and 6 on Revelation and human experience, and the gospel and religious experience; and chapter 11 on contemporary Revelation.
Another strength is the continual theme of the God who speaks, of the gospel as the Word of God. There is a particularly subtle and nuanced discussion throughout the book on the relationship between the gospel and Bible as the Words of God, and Jesus as the Word of God. I found this immensely fruitful.
If anything, I would have sharpened this issue. I would have been more vigorous in pointing out the dangers of the view that we can have direct experience of Jesus as the Word of God without knowing the gospel as the Words of God.
It seems to me that the end result of three or four generations of these ideas will not be Christianity, but mystical Unitarianism. This is because it takes great subtly of religious experience to distinguish between experiences of God the Father, the Son and the Spirit.
For most of us, there is nothing more particular than a general experience of God which we describe more precisely as a convention of piety. Experience without the Bible would not have produced the doctrine of the Trinity, as Peter Jensen points out. This demonstrates the old idea that ‘the works of the Trinity directed towards those outside the Trinity are indivisible’. So over a few generations, the direct experience of Jesus Christ without the teaching of the Bible must end up in the kind of mystical Unitarianism which we see around us. Peter could have argued this with more force!
In this book the Bible is described in terms of authority, unity, infallibility, and inerrancy, and these are very helpful discussions. But as James Barr has pointed out, if we ask the question, “What does the Bible say about the word of God?” The answer is that its main claim is that of power.
It is the word of God that will not fall to the ground, or return void, but will accomplish God’s purpose. It has the power of a seed, generative, or regenerative power. It has the power to make us wise for salvation, and to equip us for every good work. The words of God, as the gospel, are the power of God for salvation (this connects with Kevin Vanhoozer’s notion of the Bible as God’s powerful speech-act). Perhaps we could express the truth in terms of ‘authoritative power’, or ‘powerful authority’. Certainly dynamic language is required to express the biblical description of ‘the words of God’.
However, these comments just show how immensely stimulating I found the book. A great teacher must have written it! Thank you, Peter Jensen.
