Category Archives: On C.S. Lewis

General Revelation: An Indispensable Christian Category!

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A faithful use of the imagination by Christians must begin with recognizing and upholding the historic theological distinction between two types of God’s revelation: special and general.

Many Christians today seem to recognize only one type, special, (which they often don’t realize even has a name) and only one exemplar of that type: the Bible. Negatively, nothing can be true that contradicts something found in the Bible, and positively, the Bible has something definite to say about pretty much everything with which human beings might have to deal.

Yet this is actually a reduction of the category revelation which is not supported even by the Bible. The Bible, in fact, though the only example of special revelation, itself teaches us pretty clearly about the other type, general revelation.

The classical passages from Scripture that outline the existence and operation of general revelation are two:

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.

Psalm 19:1-4

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

Romans 1:18-20

The reader will note that these biblical descriptions of general revelation are themselves pretty general. Insofar as the words of the Bible itself go, we aren’t told exactly what are the contents of this mode of revelation to all mankind. We are only told a description of the contents, namely: “the glory of God,” “knowledge,” “what may be known about God,” and “God’s invisible qualities.” In the Romans passage, the last of these items does break down into the dual category “his eternal power and divine nature,” but even so, no further elaboration comes. 

The clincher, it seems, is the precise way in which Paul tells us that people know these things and so are without excuse: His invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature, are all “understood from what has been made.” It is by observing with our senses the created world and pondering with our minds what we observe in the created world that Paul says clearly show all human beings everywhere and at all times certain general truths about God. No special revelation (like the Bible) is needed for this general knowledge about God, and this is exactly why all human beings everywhere and at all times have no excuses for denying God.

As it turns out, the substantial difference between the nature, content, and mode of reception of these two types of revelation is crucial for the proper use of the human imagination. Arguments from special revelation must marshal specific texts of Scripture to support their points, after which the complex process of textual interpretation begins. By contrast, arguments about the implications of general revelation must take place on the grounds of setting forth observable features of the created world and then drawing from them philosophical and theological inferences.

Of course the question begs to be asked: What might these inferences be? 

The Apostle Paul was not, of course, writing in an intellectual vacuum. For several centuries Greek philosophers had gradually articulated a broad and deep systematic understanding of the created world as rationally ordered and governed. Some of them even came to call this rational principle the Logos – which certainly ought to interest us since the first chapter of John’s Gospel articulates the incarnation of Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity, in terms of “The Word (logos) became flesh and dwelt among us.”

Though none of the Greek schools of thought came to full knowledge of the truth, the broad outlines of a metaphysic and epistemology that was at least not simply inconsistent with special revelation existed, and it is clear that Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, appealed to these things in many of his theological arguments. 

Not merely in Romans 1 do we see this appeal, but in Romans 2 also (“the law written on their hearts”) and in the justly famous Areopagus sermon of Acts 17, in which Paul deals directly with several ideological descendants of Socrates, the Stoics and Epicureans. In this latter passage, indeed, we find Paul noting, quite interestingly, that the philosophers, not having special revelation, nevertheless didn’t get everything wrong, and that is why God rightly now calls them to repentance and belief in Christ.

The Knowable Truths of General Revelation

Later generations of Christians (Late Antiquity through the Middle Ages) developed these premises and implications further, refining propositional expressions of the specific contents of general revelation. For the sake of space, I will only refer to one such later Christian treatment, that of John Calvin at the time of the Reformation. 

In his Commentary on Romans, Calvin explains the contents of what all men know about God from observing and thinking about the things that have been made with these headings:

  1. Eternity – God, having no beginning or end, is the uncaused maker of all things
  2. Power – God at all times actively upholds all of existence
  3. Wisdom – God providentially arranges and governs the world
  4. Goodness – Nothing outside God constrains Him to create or preserve the world
  5. Truth – God is immutable and unchangeable; therefore truth doesn’t change
  6. Righteousness – God punishes the guilty and defends the innocent
  7. Mercy – God, who is slow to anger, bears with the perversity of fallen men

Given a list like this, we may certainly say that the contents of general revelation are not at all vague, let alone difficult to understand. Obviously, each one  to be “unpacked” and exposited in much detail – a task which has already been done for us by numerous Christian authors of the past (necessitating that we will take the time to read those authors.)

We may certainly say, also, that all people everywhere at all times have this knowledge, whether they have ever encountered a Bible or a Christian – and also no matter how vehemently they may deny having any knowledge of God. And again, it is their actual possession of this very substantial and clearly seen knowledge about God that renders them “without excuse.”

All of this really should be uncontroversial for the biblically literate and reasonably historically informed Christian. The knowable phenomenon of general revelation, inclusive of at least the above list of clearly knowable truths about God’s nature, ought to be just “givens” of our approach to unbelievers. 

When we are asked a reason for the hope that is within us (1 Pet,. 3:15), there is no need for us to play the skeptics’ game, granting them that the basic truth about God is really quite hard to find and there are just so many legitimate reasons why a person might not see it. Let alone is there any reason for us to retreat to subjective appeals to our own private devotional contemplation of the Bible and our own personal spiritual experiences.

The Imagination: Pitfalls and Prospects

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As will often be noted in the materials found here, many Christians harbor great suspicions about the imagination. Their suspicions, expressed in a variety of ways both vulgar and sophisticated, cluster around two of the most important theological truths of our Faith: special revelation and general revelation. These two are covered in their own articles on this site, so referring you to those I here move straight to the topic of the pitfalls and prospects of the imagination for Christians. I begin with a bold assertion:

At its root, an attack on the imagination is an attack on reality.

Now this remark may seem contradictory at first. Aren’t the two items listed, imagination and reality, simply opposites? The real is, well, that which ​is the case​, while the imagination, as its etymology shows, consists of an ​image​. And isn’t an image at its best only an artificial imitation of something real and at its worst an attempt to copy something real which ends in falsification of the real?

What can it mean, then, to assert that an attack on the imagination is an attack on reality?

​I would begin to explain it by making an important distinction: (1) the imagination ​as such​ and (2) the imagination ​​as application​.

The former category picks out the thing itself, our God-given ability to mentally ​image​ things in the world (just as we ourselves most essentially ​image​ God Himself) and think about, manipulate, and communicate those images. It’s difficult to see how this category of imagination could be intrinsically a bad thing, since it’s just part of our created nature itself.

We can no more avoid ​imaging​ things in the world than we can avoid ​thought itself​.

In this sense, then, an attack on the imagination ​as such​ is an attack on the reality that God made and into which He has put us and commanded us to live for Him. This seems an odd thing to say since we so often associate the imagination with fiction, which we (falsely) think means “that which is not true.” Since we are Christians, we think that we must shun whatever is not true. And so many of us are tempted to shun the imagination because we think it stands in opposition to Truth – either the truth found in the pages of the Bible or the truth found in the “pages” of general revelation.

One thinks here of well-meaning Christians who think it their Stoical duty to inform other people’s children that, for Really Reals and In Real-Not-Fake Reality, there just absolutely aren’t any such beings anywhere in all of creation as Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

Alas, such well-meaning Christians have probably never carried out the quite illuminating exercise of taking seriously the title of that book on Mr. Tumnus’ shelf which Lucy saw on her first night in Narnia: ​Is Man A Myth? 

What I mean is just this: one of the chief values of the imagination for Christians is how it enables us to come at our own personal views, which are so comfortable and “obvious” to us, from a vantage point that is so different it makes us aware that we might just be assuming too much, or at least assuming some things that aren’t accurate. ​

What if those among us who vehemently contend that there cannot possibly be any such thing in God’s universe as fauns (either “Because the Bible doesn’t mention them” or “Because weird creatures like that violate the Nature which God gave us to look at so we could know His truth clearly”) found themselves the topic of a learned book in another world questioning whether there could be any such thing as human beings in God’s universe?

Maybe there is no answer to this sort of question. Maybe it will turn out to be a ridiculous question after we’ve examined it thoroughly from every angle we can. But just the activity of asking it exposes as merely an assumption – and quite an overconfident one! – that we already have the answers to any questions about possibilities that could be thought of to be asked.

Which attitude amounts, really, to just simple arrogance. God has not deigned to tell us everything about His creation, nor is He obligated to do so. He has told us just what we need to know to accurately know Him and seek salvation from our sins.

Other inferences we may wish to draw about what can or can’t or does or doesn’t exist somewhere else than our small world at some other time than our own limited lifespan are just that – personal inferences or prejudices that we should never hold with the sort of dogged temerity we would actual Articles of the Faith.

And yet, to try to be fair to the multiple types of Christian detractors of the imagination, surely one can see through their pious zeal for a hyper-literal concept of “Truth” (whether appealing to the Bible or to Nature) to the more general and quite real danger it is trying to recall: the danger of idolatry.

And this brings me to the second part of the distinction above: imagination as ​application​.

It doesn’t take much reflection on Scripture to realize that thanks to sin breaking the world, our God-given and good ability to make images – indeed, our very desire to make images – has itself become fundamentally skewed. What is the Second Commandment, after all?

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God.​

Exodus 20:2

And from there, of course, we must never forget the powerful lesson of Israel’s history which were “written for our instruction” (Rom. 15:4, 1 Cor. 10:11), that a major source of God’s own people departing from His clear instructions was, precisely, ​chasing after images​ that they had set up in idolatrous competition with God – sometimes even culpably confusing those very images with God.

Whether with Aaron (Ex. 32:1-35) or with Jeroboam (1 Kgs. 12), the people confused images made by hands with God Himself. Hezekiah had to destroy the brazen serpent that Moses himself had made, for it, too, had become an object of sinful worship (2 Kgs. 18:4).

But if we need a crowning biblical proof of the great danger that attends the human tendency not just to be interested in images but to actively pursue them in spite of God Himself, the Apostle Paul condemns the whole human race because they had “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles” (Rom. 1:23).

So here is another bold assertion to offset the one with which I began:

The use of the imagination in terms of making non-physical images is an inherently dangerous thing, not to be done without first engaging in serious reflection about the substance of God’s revelation to us in Nature and in Scripture.

Having said that, I still maintain that when we reject the imagination outright, we do so at a terrible price. Wanting rightly to avoid the idolatry-snare to which our fallen capacity for imaging is prone, we must not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Although many among us, operating with a constricted understanding of “truth” as consisting only of ​literal​ statements, are dogmatically convinced that such things as myth and magic are evil and have nothing to do with “true spirituality,” I think we can find and defend a positive vision of the imagination in the Christian’s life.

​In the sense that I want to defend it here, imagination should be seen as a creative reconfiguration of the things we find at hand in God’s world, an activity undertaken first to glorify Him by expressing the creative ability He Himself built into us as His image bearers, and second to explore points of contact we as believers can and do have with unbelievers.

Writing of just this activity, Tolkien explained that “sub-creating” worlds by taking actual things God has made and imagining them in different modes or forms is, contrary to a kneejerk polemic about idolatry, rather to be seen as:

“a tribute to the infinity of His potential variety, one of the ways in which it indeed is exhibited…I am not a metaphysician; but I should have thought it a curious metaphysic—there is not one but many, indeed potentially innumerable ones—that declared the channels known (in such a finite corner as we have any inkling of) to have been used, are the only possible ones, or efficacious, or possibly acceptable to and by Him!

Letters, pp. 188-189

Tolkien’s friend C.S. Lewis wrote similarly of what he did in his Narnia books:

“​[Aslan] is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, ‘What might Christ become like, if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?’

The Letters of C.S. Lewis, pg. 283

Although much more needs to be said on this topic, I will close this article by reiterating – with Tolkien and Lewis at my back! – that attacking imaginative work in any “totalizing” manner, as if the thing itself is wrong rather than just abuses of it, amounts to fighting against the goodness and beauty of the real world that God Himself has made.