 |
| Revelation |
The notion of "revelation" is central to three of the major world religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Through Christianity in particular it has long been an important element in the religious thought of the West, and the present entry will treat it in this context, especially that of Christian theology.
During the twentieth century, but beginning in the nineteenth century, many—especially Protestant—theologians radically revised their conception of revelation. The view that was virtually axiomatic for all schools of thought in the mid-nineteenth century and that still remains the majority position (for it continues both in Roman Catholicism and in sections of conservative Protestantism) may be called the prepositional view of revelation.
The Propositional Concept
In the prepositional view, that which is revealed is a body of religious truths capable of being expressed in propositions. Because a knowledge of these truths is necessary for man's salvation, God has supernaturally made them known. Accordingly, in the words of the Catholic Encyclopedia, "Revelation may be defined as the communication of some truth by God to a rational creature through means which are beyond the ordinary course of nature".
 |
| The Propositional Concept |
The fuller significance of this prepositional understanding of revelation appears when we view it in relation to three other basic theological categories with which it is closely connected.
A particular conception of the nature of revelation involves a particular conception of the nature of faith, as man's response to revelation; of the Bible and its inspiration, as a medium of revelation; and of the character of theological thinking, as thought that proceeds on the basis of revelation.
When revelation is conceived as the divine disclosure of religious truths, faith is necessarily understood as the obedient believing of these truths. Thus faith was defined by the First Vatican Council (1870) as a supernatural virtue whereby "with the inspiration and help of God's grace, we believe that what he has revealed is true, not because its intrinsic truth is seen with the natural light of reason, but because of the authority of God who reveals it" (Enchiridion Symbolorum, edited by H. J. D. Denzinger, 29th ed., Freiburg, Germany, 1952, No. 1789).
 |
| divine authorship |
The Bible finds its place in this system of thought as the book in which divinely imparted truths are written down and thereby made available to all humankind. Indeed, throughout considerable periods of Christian thought the Scriptures have been called the Word of God and have been virtually identified with revelation.
The Bible is accordingly thought of as being ultimately of divine authorship; it has been written by human beings, but in the writing of it, their minds were directed by the Holy Spirit.
Thus, the First Vatican Council said of the Scriptures that "because they were written as a result of the prompting of the Holy Spirit, they have God for their author" (Deum habent auctorem; Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum, No. 1787); and in a similar vein, in the twentieth century, the Protestant evangelist Dr. Billy Graham said, "The Bible is a book written by God through thirty secretaries."
 |
| revealed theology |
The propositional conception of revelation has also been integral to an understanding of the structure of theology that until recently has held unquestioned sway in
Christian thought since it was established by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. This hinges upon the distinction between natural and revealed theology. Natural theology comprises all those truths about God, and about the created universe in its relation to God, that can be arrived at by human reasoning without benefit of divine revelation.
Accordingly, the core of natural theology consists in the traditional philosophical arguments for the existence of God. Revealed theology, on the other hand, comprises those truths about God, and about the created universe in its relation to God, that are not accessible to right reasoning as such and that can be known to men only because God has chosen to reveal them. (For example, it is held that while the existence of a supreme being is a tenet of natural theology, the further fact, stated in the Trinitarian dogma, that this being is "three Persons in one" belongs to revealed theology.)
 |
| theologian works |
These various truths constitute the materials with which the theologian works, his primary task being to bring them together into a systematic body of doctrine.
These conceptions of faith, the Bible, and theology are linked together by the propositional character of revelation, with which they are all concerned. The revelation that is imparted by God, believed by men, published in the holy Scriptures, and systematized in the church's dogmas is a body of theological knowledge.
This propositional conception of revelation began to form soon after the end of the New Testament period; reached its fullest development in medieval scholastic thought; was largely abandoned by the first Reformers in the sixteenth century, particularly Martin Luther, but became reestablished in the Protestant scholasticism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; began to be questioned in the later nineteenth century; and was finally set aside by considerable sections of Protestant thought in the twentieth century.
The HEILSGESCHICHTLICH Conception
 |
| The HEILSGESCHICHTLICH Conception |
The fundamental premise of the propositional view has no place in the nonpropositional conception of revelation that was widely adopted by Christian theologians in the twentieth century. This view maintains that revelation consists not in the promulgation of divinely guaranteed truths but in the performance of self-revealing divine acts within human history.
The locus of revelation is not propositions but events, and its content is not a body of truths about God but "the living God" revealing himself in his actions toward man. The nonpropositional view thus centers upon what has come in recent theology to be known as Heilsgeschichte (salvation history) identified as the medium of revelation.
It is not supposed that God has marked his presence by performing a series of miracles, if "miracle" is taken to mean an event that compels a religious response by eluding all natural explanations. It is not characteristic of those theologians who think of revelation in nonpropositional terms to regard the biblical miracles as constituting theistic proofs.
 |
| natural explanations |
Rather, the Heilsgeschichte is the way in which a certain segment of human history—beginning with the origins of the national life of Israel and ending with the birth of the Christian community as a response to Jesus—was experienced by men of faith and became understood and remembered as the story of God's gracious dealings with his people.
What Christianity (and, confining itself to the Old Testament, Judaism) refer to as the story of salvation is a particular stream of history that was interpreted by prophets and apostles in the light of a profound and consistent ethical monotheism. They saw God at work around them in events that accordingly possessed revelatory significance.
The Heilsgeschichte is thus a portion of history seen "from the inside" by the illumination of a particular religious faith. The publicly observable series of events forming its basis belongs to secular world history and is capable of a variety of political, economic, psychological, and other analyses besides that of theistic faith.
 |
| secular world history |
As a central instance of this capacity of history to be construed both nonreligiously and religiously, Jesus of Nazareth, who has been seen by those outside the Christian community in various ways—for example, as rabbi, prophet, or political revolutionary—is seen by Christian faith as the divine Son incarnate in a human life, seeking to draw men into a new life in relation to God.
Revelation, understood in this way, presupposes faith as its correlate. That God is at work in a certain situation, which accordingly serves a revelatory purpose, is always a judgment of religious faith. The part played by faith is thus integral to the total event of revelation, if we use "revelation" to refer to the completed communication that occurs when God's approach has met with a human response.
In the words of William Temple, whose formulation of this conception of revelation has become classic, "there is event and appreciation; and in the coincidence of these the revelation consists" (Nature, Man and God, p. 314).
 |
| William Temple |
As in the case of its older rival, the fuller significance of what may be called the heilsgeschichtlich conception of revelation can best be indicated by sketching its implications for the understanding of faith, the Bible, and theological thinking.
Clearly, in this view faith is not primarily the believing of revealed propositions, but is rather (in its cognitive aspect) a mode of discernment or interpretation in which men are convinced that they are conscious of God at work in and through certain events of both their personal experiences and world history.
The Bible is not a collection of divine oracles, but a record of the events through which God has revealed himself to a special group, a record that itself functions as a further medium of God's self-revelation beyond that group.
 |
| secular records |
It has not been written at the dictation of the Holy Spirit, but has been composed by many different writers at different points within the period of the thousand years or so that it documents. It is distinguished from secular records of the same sequence of events by the fact that it is written throughout from the standpoint of faith.
The Old Testament is dominated and unified by the Godcentered interpretation of Hebrew history taught by the great prophets, in the light of which the story of the nation came to be understood and celebrated and its chronicles edited.
The New Testament is dominated and unified by the witness of Jesus' first disciples and of the Christian communities that grew up around them to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, whom they had received as the Christ. The faith by which alone the several writers could produce this particular literature constitutes the "inspiration" that has presided over its production.
 |
| Religious doctrines |
Finally, there is no body of divinely authoritative theological propositions. Religious doctrines are not revealed, but represent human—and therefore fallible— attempts to understand the religious significance and implications of the revelatory events depicted in the Scriptures.
Theologians who regard revelation in this manner have generally abandoned the traditional natural theology, with its theistic proofs, and base their doctrines instead upon faith as it responds to the scriptural records.
Some Questions
One of the questions that Christian theologians have repeatedly discussed is whether there is both general and special revelation. Are nature and history as a whole— including the whole religious history of humankind— revelatory of God, as well as the special occasions of the biblical Heilsgeschichte?
 |
| Some Questions |
Many theologians of all communions today hold that God is indeed universally active and that his activity always discloses something of his nature, even though his fullest personal self-revelation has occurred only in the person of Christ.
Another question that has at times been hotly disputed is whether there is an image of God (imago dei) in man that constitutes an innate capacity to respond to divine revelation (Emil Brunner) or whether, on the contrary, human nature is so totally corrupted by the Fall that in revealing himself to men God has to create in them a special capacity for response (Karl Barth).
The main philosophical question that arises concerns the criteria by which revelation claims may be judged. For proposition-centered religious thought the answer is provided by natural theology considered as a preamble to revelation.
 |
| ancient prophecy |
This establishes the existence of God and points, by means of miracles and fulfillments of ancient prophecy, to Christ and the Scriptures as the sources of revealed truth, supplemented in Roman Catholicism by the church as its divinely appointed guardian.
For those theologies, on the other hand, that find God at work in historical events whose significance is discerned only by faith, there can be no proof of revelation. Such theologies arise within a community of faith (whether Jewish or Christian) that lives on the basis of what it believes to be an experience of divine revelation.
It embodies in its life and literature the "memory" of momentous events in which God has opened a new and better life to humankind. The form of apologetic appropriate to this view is one that defends the right of the believer, as a rational being, given the distinctively religious experience out of which his faith has arisen, to trust that experience and to proceed to live upon the basis of it.
 |
| life and literature |
