3 Ways in which the Bible reveals God Maurice Wiles

1: Revelation in Words “If the Bible is said to be God’s uniquely authoritative word to men, it is not unnatural to understand such a claim as implying that all the statements of the Bible are true statements, guaranteed free from error and conveying divine truth to man.”

1: Revelation in Words BUT “at the factual level any such claim is false”: the Bible does in fact contain errors and contradictions. AND in fact many major Christian theologians argued that this is not what the Bible is.

2: Revelation in Events “The Bible is spoken of as the book of the acts of God. To stress that God’s revelation is in the events which the Bible records matches a very important strand of thought within the Bible itself, which points back to past saving acts of God as the place where his power and his grace have been made known.”

2: Revelation in Events BUT the only way we know the acts is in the way the Biblical words present them - the distinction between words and acts in the Bible is false. AND how would we decide which of all the acts described in the Bible are ones that reveal God, and which ones don’t?

3: Revelation in Christ “The essential location of God’s revelatory words and acts is the person of Christ. Other events have their lesser revelatory character by virtue of their relationship to him. The authority of the Bible is derivative from the authority of Christ and is constituted by the Bible’s witness to him.”

3: Revelation in Christ BUT in that case some of the writings about Christ which aren’t in the Bible are surely more important than the parts of the Bible which are only distantly related to Christ? AND SO this doesn’t leave us with a clear distinction between Biblical and non-Biblical texts: it seems that many non- Biblical texts reveal God, while some Biblical ones don’t.