doctrines handed down from heaven, but a ‘personal correspondence’ or
‘encounter’ between God and humanity: ‘God does not reveal this and that –
he reveals himself by communicating himself.’
The Cambridge Platonists (seventeenth century): a group of theologians,
based
in Cambridge, who argued that God reveals himself inwardly to the
human mind and soul: ‘The spirit in man is the candle of the Lord.’
Avery Dulles (1918– ): an orthodox Roman Catholic theologian who set
out, in his Models of Revelation, five types of Christian revelation: Doctrine
(the teaching of the Church as God’s communication of truth); History (the
events of history as the disclosure of God’s purposes); Inner Experience
(mystical or other inward encounters with God); Dialectical Presence (God
revealed in the relationship between the reader and Scripture); and New
Awareness (where God is revealed in the raised consciousness of the
believer).
H. Richard Niebuhr (1894–1962 ) argued in The Meaning of Revelation
(1941) that God reveals himself in a dimension
between the inner spiritual
experience of God (internal history) and the outward events of world affairs
(external history): ‘External history is the medium in which internal history
exists and comes to life.’ Thus the absolute revelation of God appears within
the contingent and relative processes of human history.
IDEAS
Epiphany: a Greek word meaning a ‘showing’, which is used to describe
a special moment of revelation.
General revelation: rather like ‘natural theology’, this is a term used to
describe the universal revelation of God in the world. This revelation is
accessible to everyone,
of every religion and none, simply by being human
and experiencing the wonder and beauty of the cosmos. Liberal theologians
(see separate entry) tend to emphasise the importance of general revelation as
a way of including all faiths, indeed all humanity,
in the understanding of
God.
The hiddenness of God: the idea that God can only reveal himself by not
revealing himself. We find the concept powerfully expressed in the Old
Testament: as the book of Isaiah says, ‘truly you are a God who hides
himself’ (Isa. 45:25). According to the doctrine of hiddenness,
God must
always remain hidden from our understanding even as he reveals himself,
because we could not possibly comprehend the reality of God.
Kenosis: the idea that God ‘emptied himself’ in order to become human
in Jesus Christ.
Offenbarsein: the concept of ‘revealedness’ used by Karl Barth to
describe the process by which God’s self-revelation becomes apparent to us
through the mediation of the Holy Spirit.
Special revelation refers to the particular revelation of God through
culturally and historically specific people and occasions: for example,
Scriptures, religious teachers and historical events.
Conservative theologians
argue that God has made a special revelation to Christians and that this
revelation is the ultimate and saving truth. (See ‘General revelation’ above.)
BOOKS
Avery Dulles, Models of Revelation (Orbis Books, 1992)
Gerhard Sauter and John Barton (eds.), Revelation and Story (Ashgate,
2000)
Paul Avis (ed.), Divine Revelation (Eerdmans, 1997)