Where Words End

Revelation cannot be approached directly. It is mediated all the way down. That is not just because of ‘sin’. Though sin is the manifestation of our alienation from God—an alienation overcome by God’s reconciling operations in salvation—a diastema between Creator and creation still pertains. There is no immediate encounter with the Word of God available to us as such. It is always mediated to us through human words and human acts, stories (biblical and autobiographical) and material practices, the Church and its liturgies, and the cultures we inhabit that shape us. The voice of the Lord comes to us in and through the darknesses and ambivalences of our various unredeemed and yet to be redeemed states. We are addressed, continually addressed, by God’s transformative grace, by his love and mercy, in and through our condition as created. The voice is accommodated to that condition, and can be accommodated because the Word of God is written into creation, coming finally, and intensively, in Jesus Christ. So the voice can be heard: makes itself available to be heard. But the eternal presence of God pro nobis (where the ‘we’ is not just humankind but all God’s creatures, pace Barth), the eternal presence of God-with-us that is the touchstone and content of revelation, bubbles up intrinsically through the obscurities of created and creative experience.

Revelation and The Political

This chapter will explore the varieties of political thought informed by divine revelation as understood in the Christian tradition. It will do so with reference to the metaphysical assumptions of what happens when transcendence meets history, and accordingly divide the inquiry into three archetypes. The first are the monists, for whom transcendence collapses into the temporal. The second are the dialecticians, for whom the uncrossable distinction between heaven and earth results in a struggle between the two. The third are the participationists, for whom the transcendent and the historical can harmoniously cohere through a ‘mediating third’ plane. For each mode, a brief sketch will be given of the writings of exemplary thinkers, and of the promises and pitfalls. In highlighting this variety, the aim of charting this map is to nuance the discussion currently taking place concerning the motivations and modus operandi of religiously informed political actors.

Traditionalism and Revelation

Traditionalism is the doctrine that God revealed himself to our first parents, and this revelation is the source of our knowledge of God: ‘the knowledge’, as London cabbies still call it, was passed on from its original recipients down the generations. Our knowledge of God is thus mediated through tradition; its only direct source is a divine revelation made to our original forebears. Traditionalism thus tends to accentuate that we cannot know God through our own efforts, for instance by philosophical proofs. Transmission from a single original source explains the analogies between religions and mythologies, while the ‘telephone game’, or ‘Chinese whispers’, over the millennia explains the diversities. Invented in the nineteenth century, traditionalism was at once a contribution to theory of religions, a piece of biblical anthropology, and a theory of revelation and its development. Traditionalists have held that without an original, igniting act of divine revelation to our first ancestors, it would be impossible for the human race to become a knowing, speaking creature, to create institutions, and act morally, or to obtain knowledge of God.

Revelation in Heidegger

Martin Heidegger provides positive impetus for fresh thinking on divine revelation. Objections could immediately be raised. While it is contested whether Heidegger observes some sort of ‘methodological atheism’, at the very least he demotes theology—serious thinking based on belief in God—as ‘ontic’ (occasional, region-specific), whereas philosophy enjoys ‘ontological’ status. Heidegger refuses the revealed idea of creation as a distortive axiom for Western thinking that prepares the way for the world’s modern, technological framing. And of course there is Heidegger’s political bias, a concern that has reignited with the publication of his Schwarze Hefte. Nevertheless, this chapter’s primary thesis holds that Heidegger can help to reinvigorate Christian understanding of divine revelation in at least three respects: (1) by centring the theology of revelation on the allied themes of fundamental truth and freedom, (2) by encouraging theologians to continue pursuing renewed interest in apocalyptic, and (3) by bringing to light the revelatory character of inconspicuous, everyday phenomena.

Divine Revelation in Islam

The paramount form of divine revelation (waḥy) in Islam is the Qur’ān. Appropriate investigations show that revelation in Islam is onto-theological, and it is closely tied to the manifold modes of addressing the connection and distinction between the divine essence and its attributes (al-dhāt wa’l-ṣifāt). Such onto-theology is mediated via variegated methods of literal exegesis (tafsīr) and allegorical hermeneutics (ta’wīl) of Scripture, as impacted by the reception and assimilation of inherited narrations about the Prophetic sayings (ḥadīth) and biography (sīra) in relegated traditions, and as these were oriented by various theories and manners of praxis in jurisprudence, theology, mysticism, and philosophy. The approach to the question of revelation is, moreover, set within experiential and situated realms of concrete everydayness, which evoke various emotive dispositions in mood and affective comportments on the part of a Muslim believer (mu’min) in the confessional public expression of faith. This state of affairs is underpinned by a sense in which Islam is pictured as being a unified corpus by its majoritarian orthodoxy, with what this entails in terms of doctrinal leanings, and modes of quotidian social interactions, as guided or dictated by legal and jurisprudential frameworks, which are themselves grounded on differential modes of interpreting Scripture. Revelation is as such a phenomenon that can be grasped through the prism and perspective from within which Scripture is disclosed in terms of accrued doctrinal leanings and sectarian traditions, which historically constituted the diverse aspects of the credal understanding of the Islamic pluralist corpus.

Divine Revelation in West Africa and Central Africa

This chapter examines divine revelation in West Africa and Central Africa, with a historical focus on the relation of biblical beliefs to African traditional religions. It discusses the African independent churches, specifically the Église de Jésus-Christ sur la Terre par le Prophète Simon Kimbangu; Vincent Mulago’s essay in Des prêtres noirs s’interrogent (1956); specific essays from the book Biblical Revelation and African Beliefs (1969); and Engelbert Mveng’s book L’Art d’Afrique noire: liturgie cosmique et langage religieux (1964). The chapter also examines the recent scholarship of the Ghanaian theologian Mercy Oduyoye and the Congolese scholars Oscar Bimwenyi-Kweshi and Kä Mana. Regarding the relationship between divine revelation and African traditional religions, it discusses J. B. Danquah’s book The Akan Doctrine of God (1944), the arguments of the Congolese Egyptologist Mubabinge Bilolo, and the West African scholar Ntumba Museka.

The Outcry and Revelation of the Truth that Sets us Free

From the perspective of liberation theology, God does not reveal himself so that the human being may know something, but rather so that the human being may be more humane. Revelation is an act of liberation, which delivers the truth that is a prisoner of injustice and sin. In this sense, revelation is not a set of right doctrines (a subject-object relationship), but is a pedagogical process in which human beings, in their relationship to other people (a subject–subject relationship), discover that God does not discriminate among people, that in God all persons are equal in their fundamental dignity. This revelation of God in human history begins with the outcry of the poor and the victims of oppressive relationships and goes on in the discernment between God, who hears the outcry of the victims and calls them to liberation, and the idols and idolaters who do not listen to them and do not recognize their humanity.

Revelation and Trinity

The purpose of this chapter is to reflect upon the Trinity’s revelation of the Trinity, since only God can reveal God. It turns first to the scriptural testimony (specifically the Gospels of Matthew and John) and asks whether this testimony warrants Trinitarian faith. It then addresses the problem that if the Gospels warrant Trinitarian faith, how is it that the Church in the fourth century almost rejected the truth of the Trinity? After arguing that the pro-Trinitarian Fathers were correct in their claims about the scriptural testimony, the final section turns to the revelatory power of Scripture and the development of doctrine in the Church, in light of historical-critical exegesis.

Inerrancy

This chapter begins with an attempted definition of the term ‘inerrancy’ before going on to discuss its history and development. This includes a consideration of the origins of fundamentalism as well as noting the influence of B. B. Warfield, A. A. Hodge, and the Princetonian tradition. The chapter then turns to the publication of a volume by Jack Rogers and Donald McKim which sparked the modern debate on inerrancy. In the book, The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible: An Historical Approach, Rogers and McKim opposed the use of the word ‘inerrancy’. Those who opposed Rogers and McKim’s argument gathered in conference and this led to the publication of The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. The debate centred upon whether the word ‘infallibility’ or the word ‘inerrancy’ should be used in defining the nature and authority of Scripture. The chapter goes on to analyse the use of the term ‘inerrancy’, noting first the arguments against its use, followed by the inerrantists’ defence of their position. In conclusion, the chapter argues that those evangelicals who want to use the term ‘inerrancy’ and those who prefer to speak about the ‘trustworthiness’ of the Scripture have a great deal in common and that much of the debate is terminological rather than substantive.

Charismatic Revelations

The notion of ‘charismatic revelations’ is a modern one, reflecting the individualism and theological conflicts arising from the Reformation of the sixteenth century. Charismatic revelations can be found in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Protestant movements such as German Pietism and English Evangelicalism and are notable in twentieth-century Pentecostalism and charismatic renewal. Charles Taylor has described the burden of individualism that came with the break-up of Christendom under the impact of the Reformation and the rise of modern science. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there arose ‘a new Christianity of personal commitment’ (Taylor 2007, 143–144). In German Pietism and English Methodism the stress was upon feeling, emotion, and a living faith, reflecting the logic of Enlightenment ‘subjectification’. The predicament of these believers and their religious individualism was marked by spiritual instability, melancholy, and doubt. This predicament provides the context for understanding the rise of charismatic revelations. Under the burden of growing secularism, religious pluralism, and existential angst and isolation, a host of modern believers found meaning and hope through experiences of direct encounter with God that included his personal speaking addressed to their inmost being.