Models of Revelation
Models of Revelation
Revelation, in common with most theological notions, is a complex concept. The Greek word usually translated as “revelation” (apokalypsis) has the basic meaning of “removing a veil so that something can be seen.” In an attempt to unravel and cast light on the various elements of this idea, theologians have developed several models of revelation. We shall consider four such models, to which others could be added. It must be stressed that these are not mutually exclusive. They can be understood as different aspects or dimensions of a greater whole, each with its own distinct emphasis. The affirmation of one thus does not imply the negation of any one or all three of the remainder.
Revelation as Doctrine
This approach has been characteristic of Catholic neo-scholastic schools and conservative evangelicalism, and, in modified or supplement forms, continues to exercise considerable influence within the Christian tradition. Whereas evangelicals have stressed the role of Scripture in the mediation of revelation, Catholic neo-scholastics have generally given considerably more weight to the role of tradition, and especially the teaching office of the church (the magisterium). The term “the deposit of revelation” or “the deposit of truth,” meaning the accumulated insights of the church over the years, is often employed in such contexts. According to this approach, revelation is to be thought of primarily (although not exclusively) as the disclosure of a set of statements about God, such as “God is loving.”
This understanding of the nature of revelation underlies the dogmatic declarations of the First Vatican Council on the nature of faith, which include the following statement:
Wherefore, by divine and catholic faith all those things are to be believed which are contained in the Word of God as found in Scripture and tradition, and which are proposed by the church as matters to be believed as divinely revealed, whether by her solemn judgment or in her ordinary and universal magisterium.
It is clear that this approach regards revelation as taking the form of doctrinal statements which are set forth by the church, whether in Scripture or unwritten tradition. A propositional approach to divine revelation can be found in the writings of a number of Catholic theologians, most notably Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange (1877–1964). Faith is here understood as assent to revealed truths.
This approach is also taken by some conservative Protestants, who understand revelation as doctrinal information mediated through the Bible, which tends to be treated as a collection of propositional doctrinal statements, which may then be woven together to create the matrix of Christian theology. Such an approach can be found in the six volumes of Carl F. H. Henry's (1913–2003) God, Revelation, and Authority (1976–83), which has had some influence within American conservative evangelical circles. Henry's approach has clearly been influenced by Enlightenment rationalism, which helps explain its emphasis upon propositional revelation. “We mean by ‘propositional revelation' that God supernaturally communicated his revelation to chosen spokesmen in the express form of cognitive truths.” For Henry, revelation is “referential information about the nature of God” which is provided in the Bible.
Other writers within an evangelical tradition have resisted such purely propositional approaches and insisted that revelation is to be understood as the intermingling of divine action and divine words, as found in the writings of the leading evangelical James I. Packer (born 1926). In his Revisioning Evangelical Theology (1993), Stanley J. Grenz (1950–2005) affirmed that divine revelation was about the communication of divine truth. Yet he refused to limit such truth to propositional statements, arguing that more attention ought to be given to the role of narratives and tradition in disclosing the nature and character of God.
This approach is open to criticism on a number of grounds. Its critics suggest that it ignores how an understanding of literary genres informs themeaning of Bible verses, and overstates the role of propositions in the conveyance of truth. It is part of a traditional understanding of revelation, but not its totality. A propositional model of revelation need not exclude other models, in that these can be seen as complementary, rather than mutually exclusive. To assert that revelation involves information about God is not to deny that it can also involve the mediation of the presence of God, or the transformation of human experience. The core Christian idea of God's self-revelation in Jesus Christ invites us to think in terms of being shown what God is like, not simply being told what God is like.
For example, the Cathechism of the Catholic Church affirms the importance of this revelation as the communication of truth about God, while also stressing the distinct idea of personal trust in or commitment to God: “Faith is first of all a personal adherence of man to God. At the same time, and inseparably, it is a free assent to the whole truth that God has revealed.”
A purely cognitive understanding of revelation was criticized by the postliberal theologian George Lindbeck (born 1923) in his Nature of Doctrine (1984; see pp. 79, 132). Lindbeck argues that any attempt to understand revelation solely as “informational propositions or truth claims about objective realities” is to be rejected as intellectualist and literalist, as resting on the mistaken assumption that it is possible to state the objective truth about God definitively, exhaustively, and timelessly in a propositional form. There is an obvious truth in this point. Human language seems incapable of representing God fully.
Nevertheless, not all cognitive theories of doctrine are vulnerable in this respect. It is necessary to make a clear distinction between the view that an exhaustive and unambiguous account of God is transmitted through revelation conceptually by propositions, on the one hand, and the view that there is a genuinely cognitive element to doctrinal statements, on the other. For example, most theologians of the medieval period actually understood revelation as a dynamic concept. As the medieval theologian Alan of Lille (died 1202) pointed out, doctrine was to be seen as a “perception of divine truth, tending toward this truth.” For such theologians, revelation provides a reliable yet incomplete description of reality.
Revelation as Presence
In his influential work Nature, Man, God (1924), the British theologian William Temple (1881–1944) remarked that “what is offered to man's apprehension in any specific revelation is not truth concerning God, but the living God himself.” Related ideas can be found in earlier periods of church history. For example, the recognition that revelation involves a personal presence is stated with particular clarity in John Henry Newman's 1866 hymn “Praise to the Holiest”:
And that a higher gift than grace
Should flesh and blood refine;
God's presence and God's very self
And essence all-divine.
This model of revelation as divine presence came to be especially associated with Protestant theologians of the 1930s and 1940s who were influenced by the dialogical personalism of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber (1878–1965; see pp. 179–80), such as Friedrich Gogarten (1887–1967), Emanuel Hirsch (1888–1972), Emil Brunner (1889–1966), Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–45). If revelation is understood as information about God, God is reduced to an “it”; if God is conceived as a “thou,” revelation must be thought of in terms of a relationship with an individual believer, or presence within that believer.
This approach is found in Brunner's Truth as Encounter (1937), which sets out the idea of revelation as a personal communication of God – that is to say, a communication or impartation of the personal presence of God within the believer. “The Lordship and love of God can be communicated in no other way than by God's self-giving.”
Brunner's point is that God does not merely convey information in the process of revelation. Revelation concerns the conveying of God's personal presence, rather than mere information concerning God. Brunner, basing his ideas upon Martin Buber's analysis of “I–thou” and “I–it” relationships, insists that there is a strongly relational element to revelation. God is experienced as a “thou” rather than an “it,” a person rather than an object. Revelation is teleological, a process directed toward a goal – and that goal is the establishment of a mutual relationship between the revealing God and responding humanity.
Brunner's concept of “truth as encounter” thus conveys the two elements of what he regards as a correct understanding of revelation: it is historical and personal. By the former, Brunner wishes us to understand that truth is not something permanent within the eternal world of ideas which is disclosed or communicated to us in revelation. Brunner is thus critical of any notion of revelation which represents itself as words or propositions about God. These objectify God, in the sense of reducing God to the status of an object, rather than a person. “No speech, no word, is adequate to the mystery of God as a Person.” Revelation cannot be understood purely as the impartation of data about God: “It is never the mere communication of knowledge, but a life-giving and life-renewing fellowship.”
Once more, critics of this model would rightly challenge its claim to be an exclusive account of the nature of revelation. It might be part of the picture; it is most certainly not the complete picture. Can you know somebody without knowing something about that person?
Revelation as Experience
A third influential model centers upon human experience. God is understood to be revealed or made known through the experience of the individual. Many Catholic modernists (see pp. 71–2) emphasized this kind of approach. George Tyrrell (1861–1909), for example, regarded the idea of revelation as information as inadequate. Revelation was not about information but about the transformation of the soul. In an informal lecture given at King's College London in 1909, Tyrell argued that revelation was experiential, rather than cognitive:
That Christ died is a proposition whose meaning is clear to all; that He died for our sins is also apprehensible intellectually for most; but its divine sense is revealed only in the light of inward spiritual experience – of our own divine and religious life. The revelation lies not in the word or statement nor in the intellectual thought that it evokes; but in the interior experience of redemption through Christ which it occasions and by which it is interpreted.
This approach is also associated with German liberal Protestantism in the nineteenth century, especially F. D. E. Schleiermacher (1768–1834) and Albrecht Benjamin Ritschl (1822–89). Schleiermacher's background was that of Moravian Pietism, which placed considerable emphasis upon a personal devotion to Christ and the importance of a personal awareness of conversion. Most forms of eighteenth-century Pietism, including Methodism, placed considerable emphasis upon such notions as “experimental religion” (meaning “a religion grounded in experience”) and a “living faith” (as opposed to a wooden theological orthodoxy). We have already noted the importance of these themes for other Pietist writers, such as John Wesley (1703–91, pp. 45–6).
In 1796, Schleiermacher moved to Berlin to take up his new duties as a hospital chaplain. Within a year of his arrival, he had attached himself to “the Athenaeum,” a group of thinkers and writers who were hostile to the spirit of the Enlightenment. He became involved with leading figures of the Romantic movement, such as Novalis (1772–1801) and Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829). The outcome of this interaction was a theology deeply grounded in the outlook of Romanticism (see p. 237), with a new emphasis upon the role of the individual's religious consciousness and feeling. In his Christian Faith (revised edition, 1830–1), Schleiermacher emphasized that the Christian faith was not primarily conceptual; rather, doctrines were to be seen as second-order expressions of its primary religious truth, which is the experience of redemption. The essence of Christian piety is not some rational or moral principle, but “feeling” (das Gefühl), the immediate self-consciousness. It is this “feeling of absolute dependence” which is the starting point for Christian theology. As Alois E. Biedermann (1819–85) later commented, Schleiermacher's theology may be regarded as a critical exploration of the deep, inner feelings of humanity. The human intellect thus reflects upon human feeling, and by doing so interprets it.
One of the greatest weaknesses of the model can be seen through the criticisms directed against it by Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72), who argued that such “experience” was little more than “experience of the self.” We have already considered this difficulty (pp. 133–4) and noted its importance for experience-based theologies, such as that of Schleiermacher. The approach has also been criticized by postliberal writers such as George Lindbeck, who have argued that any appeal to an unmediated religious experience common to all of humanity is unmerited, in that it is a “false universal.”
Revelation as History
A quite distinct approach, especially associated with the German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928–2014), centers on the theme of “revelation as history” (see p. 244). According to Pannenberg, Christian theology is based upon an analysis of universal and publicly accessible history, rather than the inward subjectivity of personal human existence or a special interpretation of that history. History itself is (or has the capacity to become) revelation. For Pannenberg, revelation is essentially a public and universal historical event which is recognized and interpreted as an “act of God.” Pannenberg's “Dogmatic Theses on the Doctrine of Revelation” (1968) set out this position in seven theses, of which the first five
are of especial interest in relation to this model of revelation:
On this basis, Pannenberg is able to argue for the resurrection of Christ as a central act of divine revelation in history, a point to which we shall return later in our analysis of the resurrection.
Pannenberg's approach to revelation has aroused excitement and criticism in about equal measure. The idea of establishing the gospel on the basis of universal history seemed a daring and creative gesture, allowing theology to reclaim the intellectual high ground that many had thought had long been forfeited to Marxism. In particular, it seemed to bypass the trap laid by Ludwig Feuerbach (see pp. 133–4), who had argued that Schleiermacher's approach to revelation, beginning from human experience, was little more than a theology constructed through the objectification of human feelings. Pannenberg, by his appeal to history, believes that he is able to avoid the line of thought that leads to Feuerbach's impasse by insisting that theologyarises out of history, not out of human feelings of redemption or the presence of God.