In what sense, then, is Christ a revelation of God? Or, in what way does Christ reveal God? Before we proceed to the true doctrine, we will address two false answers.

First, we must deny that Christ is a revelation of God in the sense that by his incarnation he has made himself perceptible to human sensation. He has indeed taken upon himself a human body that is perceptible to human sensation, and his resurrected body now remains perceptible to the senses, but this is not why he is a revelation of God. Even a manifestation or an incarnation of God does not make God as such perceptible to the senses, for God is spirit and not flesh. When we say, "If you want to know what God is like, just look at Jesus," we must not mean that a person can learn about God just by looking at the physical appearance of Jesus, or just by staring at him without thinking about him or listening to him.

As Isaiah writes, "He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him" (Isaiah 53:2). He has a genuine human body, not essentially different from that of any other human body, so that it is impossible to know that Jesus Christ is God, or to learn anything special about God, just by looking at his physical appearance. We must insist on this in order to maintain the true doctrine of the incarnation.

Although Peter have followed and perceived Jesus in the flesh, when he confesses, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God" (Matthew 16:16), Jesus replies, "This was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven" (v. 17). He says in John's Gospel, "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him" (John 6:44) and "This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled him" (v. 65). Although Jesus came to reveal the Father, no one could recognize Jesus unless the Father reveals him. Then, in Luke 10:22, we read, "No one knows who the Son is except the Father, and no one knows who the Father is except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him."

Another problem with the idea that we should "look at" Christ in the physical and empirical sense is that, since he has been raised and seated at the right hand of God, we can no longer perceive his physical body unless he chooses to grant a special appearance. There is no biblical warrant to assume that he does not do this today, but he certainly does not appear to every person whom he converts to the faith. In fact, except for the apostles and a significant number of other disciples, he did not appear to the rest of the early believers, who believed not because they saw Christ, but because they believed the testimony of the disciples about Christ. This same testimony about Christ is recorded for us in Scripture, and it is by believing the Scripture that we become Christians.

Those attempts at showing from the Bible that some kind or degree of an empirical epistemology is compatible with or even necessary to a spiritual knowledge of God and of Christ are based on invalid and distorted interpretations of Scripture. One example comes from 1 John 1:1-3, which says:

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched – this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.

It is impossible to smuggle empiricism into Scripture through this passage. First – but this is not the main reason – as we have mentioned, if a spiritual knowledge of Christ is gained by touching him and seeing him, then those who have not seen him or touched him cannot possess the same kind or amount of knowledge. This is against the entire spirit of the New Testament. The same apostle who penned this passage records Christ as saying, "Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed" (John 20:29; also 1 Peter 1:8-9).

Those who have not seen Christ in the empirical sense are not necessarily at a disadvantage, but how often do theologians, commentators, and preachers suggest that those who perceived Christ with their senses were indeed more blessed! They speak thus because of a pagan and carnal mindset that is driven toward that which is of the flesh and of the senses, rather than that which is of the spirit, or the mind. This crippling moral defect underlies the insistence to include a kind or degree of empiricism in the Christian's epistemology.

Pseudo-presuppositionalism is the most absurd and deceptive of the various proposals. It pretends to uphold revelation as the first principle and necessary precondition of all knowledge, but in reality it subjugates God's word, God's Spirit, and the Bible, under physical sensations. This strange philosophy, revered by many in Reformed circles, is a disguised form of empiricism or irrationalism, a syncretistic epistemology that combines heathen and biblical ideas. In making anti-Christian principles the precondition of Christian revelation, it does the opposite of what it claims to accomplish. Contrary to its pretension, it makes empirical humanity rather than the "ontological Trinity" the presupposition of all knowledge.

From the theological perspective, then, it is a form of idolatry and blasphemy. It would bow to Christ only if he would first bow to Belial. In contrast, we affirm that divine revelation does not depend on human sensation, whether in its inspiration, formation, reception, or propagation. From a philosophical perspective, although it makes a show of confronting the presuppositions of evidentialism, pseudo-presuppositionalism makes human sensation the necessary doorway to divine revelation, so that it is in fact nothing more than evidentialism without evidences. When it comes to defending the faith, it is irrational and impotent. It survives because of its fundamental agreement with and surrender to anti-Christian principles – non-Christians do not oppose their own assumptions – and because of the even more severe irrationalism and impotence of the unbelievers.

Our direct answer to the distortion of 1 John 1:1-4, however, is that it does not permit an interpretation that favors empiricism. John writes that he has seen, heard, and touched (what he has come to know as) the Word of life. He does not say that he has come to recognize Christ as the Word of life because he has seen, heard, and touched him, or that it was necessary for him to have seen, heard, and touched Christ in order for him to recognize Christ as such. What is needed to endorse empiricism is simply absent from the passage.

Of course John has seen, heard, and touched Christ, but as we have already shown from Scripture, he could recognize the Christ only because the Father revealed this to him. The significance of the passage, then, is not an endorsement of any form or degree of empiricism, but the emphasis that Christ indeed walked the earth in a human body (4:1-3), in which he died, and was raised, and made atonement for the forgiveness of sins (1:7, 9). The emphasis is not on the empirical, but on the physical and the historical. Christ's incarnation entails a physical body and historical events, so that he could be seen, heard, and touched, although no knowledge and revelation can come from the sensations. Here John testifies to only what it was that he saw, heard, and touched, and not that he received any knowledge or revelation from the seeing, hearing, and touching.

Second, we must deny that Christ is a revelation of God in the sense that his miracles and actions as such reveal God or make God's characteristics evident or accessible to human observation. The biblical reason is that Scripture never teaches that Christ's miracles and actions in themselves accomplish the purpose of revelation. The logical reason is that it is impossible to validly infer any truth from observation. Moses performed great miracles, but he was not God. Many men have lived holy lives, but they could not claim, "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:9).

Since I have already explained this numerous times in other places, here we will consider only two short illustrations from Scripture.

Hebrews 2:1-4 indicates that "the message" is "confirmed" by "signs, wonders and various miracles." God's revelation is not carried or conveyed by miracles, but merely confirmed by them. In fact, in themselves the miracles cannot even tell people that they serve as confirmation to a message, so that sometimes people have to be told to look to them as confirmation (Matthew 14:4-5; John 10:25, 38, 14:11). In other words, the miracles do not speak for themselves or for the message, but it is the message that speaks for itself and for the miracles, pointing to them as its confirmation.

If miracles can "speak" for themselves, then there would be no need to refer to them as confirmation or even to mention them, for a person would only need to do another miracle to speak for the first miracle if the first fails to communicate the point. It would suffice to simply keep on doing miracles in silence. But the truth is that miracles in themselves cannot "speak" at all. The biblical pattern is that the miracles confirm the message, but it is the message that explains and interprets the miracles. To put this another way, the miracles are meaningful and serve their purpose only because they occur within the context of a message, and are thus properly related to it.

Then, in John 13, Jesus sets an example for the disciples by washing their feet (v. 15, "I have set you an example"), but they did not understand until it was explained to them (v. 7, "You do not realize now what I am doing"). Thus even a deliberate moral example cannot speak for itself. It is not in itself a revelation, but it serves only as a context and occasion for the revelation, which resides in the verbal explanation of the action (v. 12-17).

Moreover, Jesus was readily exposed to the human senses only during his short time on the earth, and even then not every person living at the time saw him. So it is impossible to "look at" the moral example of Jesus in his action, but only in the words that record and interpret his actions. This again indicates that either the revelation was made available to a few people in the past, and it is no longer possible to "look at" him to benefit from the revelation, or the revelation was never necessarily inherent in the actions themselves in the first place.

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