Enough of politics for the nonce.
The idea of revelation is inherent in the Christian faith. It is addressed with amazing specificity in both the Old and New Testaments, but the terms with which it has been discussed have changed over the course of the millenia. For me, the problem of discussing revelation comes down to the mistakes made during the Enlightenment. The first mistake was to make the assumption that the question of God was independent of the specifics of the Christian Church, available to any person whose faculty of reason was intact. This was not necessarily an error at the time; much of Europe could take Christianity as a given, arguing that Judaism and Islam were merely errors on the way to the Truth revealed in Christianity.
The second mistake was to reduce revelation to the category of knowledge, an assent to certain intellectual propositions, rather than a historically and existentially mediated reality within the Church, discussed on its own terms rather than being a general article of understanding available to human beings as a part of human nature.
In both cases, abstracting the question of Divine Revelation from the specificity of its history and its vocabulary as a Christian enterprise took from any understanding of revelation its rootedness as a human enterprise within the context of the Church, and not subject to the same rules of discourse as, say, physics or rhetoric. This is not to isolate the question of revelation from physics; it is only to say the way the Church talks about revelation is different from the way physicists talks about fields of force and such. The role of intelligibility applies; the question is the "how", or the method of reaching an understanding, rather than any attempt to get behind and question the "what".
In this regard, I do believe that the neo-orthodox movement is superior to a certain strain of theological liberalism which divorces theological concerns from their setting in Christian communities of faith. On the other hand, for all their moaning and gnashing of teeth over the failures of the Enlightenment, the neo-orthodox accepted the notion that revelation is essentially something that happens to our intellectual faculties. We grasp revelation through our understanding, rather than confront revelation in our lives. There is a role for the intellect in sorting it all out, but the first movement is a living encounter, often within the the historically contiguous body of the Church, that shapes not so much the way we think, but the way we live. Theological reflection on revelation, it seems to me, must recognize its own limitation and its dependence upon lived experiences rather than submit that revelation is a mental or an intellectual activity that happens when we assent to the Truth claims of certain accounts of the actions of God. The latter are primary, and only so as interpreted through a framework in which those words are actually meaningful - the Church.
Having said all that, the question is still begged - what is revelation, what is its referent, and what is its goal. To the extent that an event or series of events becomes revelatory for an individual, or a group, it seems to me that by adopting the vocabulary of the Christian Church, we are not locked in to meanings set in stone thousands of years ago, but given the opportunity to see the new life offered to these words through our own experience of faith. These are issues to be fleshed out more fully at another time, but I just wanted to set forth, here, what I believe is central as a starting point for understanding the question of revelation.
Virtual Tin Cup
