One of the risks of writing as an amateur or dilettante is that you run the risk of saying something that seems to you like a sparklingly original insight but in fact is territory that has been well-covered by specialists. On the other hand, there is a gratification in discovering an idea you’ve grasped your way toward confirmed by an expert.
It was with such a mix of sentiments that I recently read John Baillie’s The Idea of Revelation in Recent Thought. Baillie was a Scottish theologian of the mid-20th century who, along with his brother Donald, modeled a kind of generous orthodoxy that was liberal without being reductionist, and wrote with clarity and literary flair (as opposed to the Teutonic obscurity of some of the continental theologians they were in conversation with). In reading this book I see the ideas I tried to set out here anticipated with much greater clarity and theological power than I could’ve ever managed!
In The Idea of Revelation Baillie surveys the then current thinking on revelation, entering into dialogue with Barth, Brunner, Bultmann, Tillich, William Temple and other theological giants of the age. These thinkers unanimously reject the idea that revelation consists primarily in giving us propositional truth and the corresponding notion of the verbal inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible. Rather, Baillie argues, the subject of revelation is nothing less than God himself, in a personal encounter with humanity. Revelation is not God revealing cetain information to us (e.g. about the age of the earth, the number of people killed in a particular battle, the dimensions of Noah’s Ark…), but an act of Divine self-disclosure:
In the Bible the word [revelation] is always used in its proper and exalted sense. Not only is revelation always “the revelation of a mystery which was kept secret for long ages but is now disclosed,”* but the mystery thus disclosed is nothing less than God’s own will and purpose. According to the Bible, what is revealed to us is not a body of information concerning things of which we might otherwise be ignorant. If it is information at all, it is information concerning the nature and mind and purpose of God–this and nothing else. (p. 28)
This Divine self-disclosure is mediated primarily in God’s “mighty acts” which make up salvation history. These events are what reveal God’s character, his saving will and his purposes:
…all revelation is given, not in the form of directly communicated knowledge, but through events occurring in the historical experience of mankind, events which are apprehended by faith as the “mighty acts” of God, and which therefore engender in the mind of man such reflective knowledge of God as it is given him to possess. It is clear that this represents a very radical departure from the traditional ecclesiastical formulation which identified revelation with the written word of Scripture and gave to the action of God in history the revelational status only of being among the things concerning which Scripture informed us. (p. 62)
But Baillie points out that events require interpretation:
We must, however, think very carefully what we mean when we say that revelation is given in the form of events or historical happenings. For it is not as if all who experience these events and happenings find in them a revelation of God. … It will be noticed that Dr. [William] Temple speaks of God as guiding, not only the process of events, but also the minds of men in interpreting these events so as to appreciate their revelatory character. … The concept of inspiration is thus the necessary counterpart of the conception of revelation, but its meaning and scope have often been misconceived through its being applied primarily to the prophetic and apostolic witness, and withal their written witness, to the revelation, rather than to that illumination of the prophetic and apostolic mind which is an integral part of the revelation to which such witness was borne. (pp. 64-66)
Next I want to discuss in more detail Baillie’s ideas about the role of the Bible specifically as the witness to revelatory events and the record of the prophetic and apostolic interpretation of those events.
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*Romans 16:25-26
A Thinking Reed 
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