Book Review: General Revelation by G.C. Berkouwer

I came to G.C. Berkouwer’s Studies in Dogmatics: General Revelation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1955) with a bit of an agenda. I have said in my own philosophy of education that God’s general revelation is the fodder of education. Put another way, all that stuff we learn and teach our kids — math and literature and science and history and the arts — are subsumed under the heading we call general revelation. Yet there was something is this idea that I didn’t feel I had quite worked out. It is perhaps easier to envision how the knowledge we gain of the physical world could fall under the heading of general revelation, but what of literature and the arts which are mediated through the minds of men, even unredeemed men? How do we justify studying these things?

I had really liked Berkouwer’s work on the image of God in man so I was hopeful that his General Revelation would help me clarify my own thinking. I am not sure it has done so, but there were also a number of places that gave me some insight into how we might think about education.

General Revelation is a long and very meaty book. Berkouwer spends a great deal of time discussing various approaches to the issue at hand and arguing for or against them. A lot of that discussion is not really relevant to my purposes. To briefly sum up Berkouwer’s own take on general revelation I would say:

• Christians have tended to fall off the horse one way or another when it comes to general revelation. There are those who want to deny its existence altogether and there are those who make so much of it that special revelation becomes all but unnecessary.

• General revelation is not natural theology. It does not, as in Roman Catholic theology, rely on the human reason and our ability to know God through creation.

• Rather, general revelation is revelation. That is, it is an act of God in which He reveals. Revelation is a light that comes from God and shines on men whether they are able to perceive it or not. And men, apart from the work of the Spirit, cannot see it. Revelation has not changed but our ability to perceive it was damaged by the Fall. God did not withdraw His revelation post-Fall; it was men who hid themselves from God.  It is not that nature leads us to Christ but that salvation in Christ leads us to be able to see God in nature again.

• Before the Fall, God’s work and His word were intimately connected. They were never meant to be severed, but in the Fall they were. So now too when God’s word is not heard, His working is not understood. The tendency to confine God’s revelation to nature led to an association between general revelation and the natural sciences which in turn led to a dichotomy between scientific and religious knowledge. And, along with it, an opposition between general and special revelation. But, Berkouwer argues, God’s work and His word were originally united. His works are defined by his word so they are not so distinct as we may think.

• We must be careful not to too closely identify general revelation with nature and nature alone. One temptation is to tend toward a pantheism in which God is present in creation simply because it is. But revelation is always an act of God. It is a deliberate revealing. It is not merely that the creation reflects the Creator in a passive way.

• Nor is general revelation confined to nature. Calvin distinguishes three categories: nature, history, and man. Nature, the created world, is God’s work. History is the story of God’s acting. And man as created in the image of God also is a means by which God reveals Himself.

With this last point we begin to get at some of the implications for education. There can be a temptation when we think of education as general revelation to put nature on a pedestal, thinking that it comes most directly from God and therefore is of most value in teaching us. Berkouwer dispels this myth. History as God’s work is revelation. Man, as one created in the image of God, is if anything even more a means of revelation. Berkouwer speaks of man as a mirror of God. In this he gives us a justification for our study of the humanities.

If we are to learn from our fellow men, we must ask: which men? One question I have wrestled with is how much non-Christians can truly know and how much we can learn from them. Berkouwer does not address the educational aspect directly, but he does argue that apart from God, man can only know humanly. “Men,” he says, “may examine and analyze many aspects of human life but in their synthesis they will not get further than a sum total of what they discovered in the different realms of human life” (p. 221). They are limited in their understanding.

Yet the world we live in as a part of western culture is one which is thoroughly steeped in Christianity. It may not seem so when so many around us are just incredibly biblically illiterate and when the most educated seem to despise faith, but the roots of our culture are Christian and the ideas upon which it is founded, and upon which our academic study is based, are Christian ideas. It is Christian because it believes in God as an orderly Creator, which assumes a logical world, one that we as humans can study and make sense of. Christianity gave us science. “The Western-European world, for instance, cannot be conceived of apart from the Gospel and it strongly influences anthropologic thought” (p. 226). It is easy to say that non-Christians can never get to the Truth (capital “T”), but living where and when we do, we cannot know what men entirely devoid of Christianity would understand because even the most pagan modern scholars still rest on the people and ideas which came before them, many of whom were devoutly Christian.

Berkouwer’s purpose in General Revelation is not to discuss education but there are some good insights we can gain from his work. Because of the density of this book, I am not sure that I would recommend it if your purpose is to think about education but if you are looking for a good discussion of views of general revelation from a reformed standpoint, Berkouwer is well worth the time.