Can someone's dream save them? "Hearing through the word of Christ?" - Romans 10:17

Recently we've been reconsidering many of the things we thought we understood regarding doctrine and faith. We have begun to question certain beliefs, church structures, and practices of the western church. Too often we have discovered unbiblical doctrines and activities. This causes us concern. We have deemed this our “Rethink.”

Our questions include, how did we arrive at our doctrines? Does the Bible really teach what we think it teaches? Why do churches do what they do? What is the biblical basis of church leadership structure? Why do certain traditions get entrenched?

It's easy to be spoon fed the conventional wisdom, but it's an entirely separate thing to search these things out for one's self. In the past we have read the Bible with these unexamined understandings and interpreted what we read through those lenses. We were lazy about our Bible study, assuming that pastors and theologians were telling us the truth, but we rarely checked it out for ourselves.

Therefore, these Rethinks are our attempt to remedy the situation.

We should note that we are not Bible scholars, but we believe that one doesn't need to be in order to understand the Word of God.
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The issue at hand here is reports from the eastern world of Muslims having dreams or visions and converting to Christianity. Many of these conversions seem legitimate, with the new believers bearing fruit, sharing the Gospel, showing genuine change in character and behavior, and having a passion for the Bible.

In ordinary circumstances, Christians would accept such things as evidence of salvation. But the fact that these converts had dreams that precipitated their salvation is an issue, because it violates the accepted method of how a person gets saved.

The Case Against Gospel Dreams

This author makes the claim:

...it becomes deeply problematic when people assert, in contradiction to the revealed Word of God, that they have come to faith through dreams alone, with no prior exposure to the Gospel. 

Romans 10 outlines the process of genuine faith. “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17). This clarifies that faith is not a mystical experience, but a trust in the revealed Word of God. 

In other words, the Gospel must be audibly preached or the Bible must be read unto salvation. The author believes that a mystical experience like Jesus coming to someone in a dream just cannot happen. He claims that such a thing violates the "revealed Word of God." He doesn't tell us how, he just makes the claim.

His belief is rooted in his cessationism, which is the idea that God has ceased doing "supernatural" things, because the completed Bible means these things are no longer necessary. Therefore he rejects out of hand any sort of mystical experience like a dream.

Further, the traditions of the church indicate that a man preaches a sermon from the pulpit, and this preaching of the Word is how someone is saved. By extension, if someone listens to a recording of the Gospel, or if someone preaches the Gospel to the person, or (maybe) if that person reads the Gospel in the Bible, and the result is salvation, then it is a legitimate salvation.

Therefore, dreams and visions lack a crucial component, "hearing" the Gospel preached. 

Hearing is Only Auditory?

Let's quote the verse:

Romans 10:17 “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ”

Let's look at a couple of the words Paul used. First, "word," which is rhéma, a spoken word, made "by the living voice." So the first thing we discover is that Paul was not talking about the "revealed Word of God." 

Also notice that Paul referred to the rhéma of Christ, not the rhéma of preaching the Bible.

Second, the word "hearing" is akoé ,used of inner (spiritual) hearing that goes with receiving faith from God (Ro 10:17), i.e. spiritual hearing (discerning God's voice; see also Gal 3:2,5, Gk text). Thus this kind of hearing is not a function of the auditory process, it is a supernatural hearing.

Let's put it together with an expanded translation of the verse: Faith comes from spiritually discerning Christ's voice, and spiritually discerning Christ's voice comes through what is spoken by the living voice of Christ.

Conclusion

On one hand it is true that the Gospel must be preached, but it is not true that the human-preached Gospel is the only way to come to faith.