The Offense of Divine RevelationWilliam J. Abraham

In the fall of 1985 I attended my first facultyretreat as a member of the faculty at Perkins School of Theology. One of the presentations tackled the topic of peer evaluation of scholarshipand was given by Schubert Ogden, a colleague in systematic theology. Ogden in his inimitable manner argued the case for the old adage, “Publish or perish.” At one point in his stylish and rigorous remarks he paused, left behind his writtenscript, and said: “Let me make myself perfectly clear about the importance of publishing. If Jesuswere to apply for a tenured position at Perkins he would not get it; and he would be the first to acknowledge that he should not get it!” There was shimmer of intellectual delight across the room that was suddenly broken by a quiet remark from Victor Furnish, a colleague in New Testament studies. “I did not think that Schubert knew that much about the historical Jesus.” My own thoughts by way of reply were rather different. I wanted tosay, “If you are raised from the dead and exalted at the Right Hand of God on High, the last thing onyour mind would be getting a tenured position at Perkins School of Theology.” However, as this was my first faculty retreat, I decided to leave thingsas they were and revel in the splendid banter between distinguished colleagues.

We can understand why Jesus would not get tenure in the modern university. The conventions of scholarship insist on publications, hence Ogden

is right. Jesus never wrote a book, so there is nothing to submit in this category. Switch, however, to Paul, and the case becomes more interesting. Paul has a remarkable list of publications, however we demarcate them. His work has become the site of a mountain of literature produced by generations of scholars. So prima facie there should be no barrier to tenure and the life of a scholar. Paul would get tenure.

Yet we hesitate. First, Paul’s work is now canonical scripture, and that opens a Pandora’s boxof questions. What is scripture? What is canon? How do canon and scripture relate to the world of mundane scholarship? Does Paul fit qua scripture or qua canon within the academy? Do Paul’s writings, given their privileged position within the Christian tradition, create difficulties not sharedby other texts? Do the conventions of the academy require that scripture or canon be deconstructed and decanonized and reconstructed and reworked to make them fit a very different world from their place in the life of faith?

Second, suppose we look at some of Paul’s self-descriptions. Take one of the most striking from aletter that all agree is authentic.

I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel – not that there is another gospel, but there are some who are confusing you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ. But evenif we or an angel from heaven should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to what we proclaimed to you, let that one be accursed! As we have said before, so now I

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repeat, if anyone proclaims to you a gospel contrary towhat you have received, let that one be accursed! Am Inow seeking human approval, or God’s approval? Or am Itrying to please people? If I were still pleasing people, I would not be a servant of Christ. For I wantyou to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel thatwas proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.1

This is an extraordinary passage. What is striking in the present context is the abruptness of the language and the complete absence of standard academic civility and convention. There is no reference to the degrees earned, to the dissertations completed, to the books written, to the intellectual breakthroughs made, to the original insights articulated, and the like. Thereis no survey of pertinent literature, no appeal to carefully constructed premises and relevant logicalconnections, no reference to publicly available evidence, no refutation of competing positions, andno rebuttal of pertinent objections. Somehow, we have to take Paul’s word for it. We have a straight appeal to authority delivered in tones andterms that are intolerant and even abusive.

I leave aside the first set of questions, that is, questions about the significance of canon for our understanding of scripture. They would requirea whole series of lectures to do them justice. However, I want to pursue the issues raised by thisclaim of Paul in such a way as to highlight one 1 Galatians 1 6-12

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crucial component in a healthy evangelical theologyfor today. What is at stake, I shall propose, is the appeal to a robust conception of divine revelation and the way it functions as a threshold concept. 2 In pursuing this line of thought, I want to ferret out and articulate an insight that lies at the base of the evangelical commitment to scripture, even though the way that insight has been deployed is fraught with all sorts of temptations and even mistakes.3

I am, of course, using Paul as a foil and a platform at this point; I leave it to others to track the issue in exegesis and the history of theology. What interests me is the logic or grammar of revelation as we see it played out here.Paul rejects any appeal to conventional human warrants. The gospel he expounds is not derived from human sources or origins; it is received 2 One can imagine three radically different ways of handling the difficult phenomena, like the curt appeal to authority, here representedby Paul. First, one might set aside Paul’s stance as purely incidental to the Christian tradition, perhaps a lapse that should be tolerated as best we can or excoriated where appropriate. Second, one might argue that Paul’s stance is important but erroneous, seeking to show where he has gone wrong. Third, one might unpack the potentially deep objectionsto Paul’s stance, get beneath the logic of his position, and seek to show that the important insights buried in Paul’s rather stringent disposition can meet head-on the objections that naturally arise. This essay represents a variation on the third option.3 The perennial problem is the tendency to run revelation, scripture, and canon together as one entity. The tendency runs deep in modern evangelicalism, but it is by no means confined to evangelicals. One finds it also in the recent writings of Richard Swinburne, Keith Ward, and David Brown. See Richard Swinburne, Revelation: From Metpahor to Analogy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992); Keith Ward, Religion and Revelation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994); David Brown, Tradition and Imagination, Revelation and Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) and Discipleship and Imagination, Christian Tradition and Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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through a revelation of Jesus Christ. The claim isclearly epistemological; it relates to the warrantsfor believing the gospel and accepting the implications that lie on the other side of belief. Let’s look below the surface and see what we can find.

One way into our journey is by way of contrast.The primary category at stake is that of a prophet or an apostle, rather than that of a scholar or a genius. We know how to delineate the latter two designations. A scholar is a trained expert who has been initiated into a field of learning with its own canons of discourse, modes of thought, patterns of explanation and evidence, and the like.We can readily identify the academic pedigree, the list of publications, and the subjects mastered. Agenius is a couple of notches above this. The term“genius” picks out a thinker of extraordinary ability, insight, and originality, like Andrew Wiles who solved Fermat’s fourth theorem or Albert Einstein who put together a truly original theory of relativity.4

A prophet or apostle occupies a radically different intellectual space.5 The prophet may, of4 It is interesting that a genius need not be the bearer of truth; we can readily identify a person as a genius without committing ourselves to the truth of what they have proposed. For example, we can readily identify Plato or Marx or Freud as exhibiting genius without being Platonists, Freudians, or Marxists. 5 A classical treatment of this topic remains in Soren Kierkegaard, Without Authority (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 93-107. Kierkegaard completely misses the crucial question of how prophets are to be identified and how one might argue for or against such claims, buthis discussion, aside from its wittiness, is full of creative and

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course, be a brilliant thinker or writer; consider what has been left behind in the traditions stemming, say, from Jeremiah or Ezekiel. We can certainly say this of Paul too. His writings are extraordinary in their intellectual power, construction, and content. However, this is not the critical factor one meets in a prophet. What sets a prophet apart is epistemology. The criticalappeal is to divine encounter and divine speaking. The prophet is a recipient and mediator of divine revelation.6 A sharp distinction is usually drawn between the ordinary word of the prophet and the word of God, or, rather, between the ordinary discourse of the prophet and the special word of the prophet whose content is either identical with or derived from the word of God. The relevant background narrative is not one of educational attainment but one of spiritual pilgrimage in whichthe agent is confronted and called by God to speak in God’s name.7

What also sets the prophet apart is a complex network of psychological states and dispositions. I would not make these in any way constitutive of the life of a prophet, but they are characteristic.Thus, on the one hand, the prophet is often found

fruitful comment.6 It would be tempting to think in the wake of this that commitment to truth is constitutive of the concept of the prophet. Given that divine revelation is an epistemically positive process of belief producing mechanism like memory, it might look as if a prophet must speak the truth. However, if this were the case, we could not speak of false prophets. It would take us too far afield to unravel the tangled issuesthat emerge at this point.7 The classical biblical passages that alert one to this are I Samuel 3,Isaiah 6, and Jeremiah 1.

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in a state of fear and trembling. Have they reallybeen called of God? Have they really heard what God is saying? Mixed with this there is often a sense of burden and awesome responsibility. Have they really delivered what God has said to them? Have they been faithful? Have they resisted the temptation to cut the message to suit the hearers? On the other hand, there is amazing tenacity and confidence. The prophet will stand up to anyone, like Nathan to David. They can be stern and resolute like John the Baptist in the gospels or like Paul here in his correspondence with the Galatians.

These features are not lost when the message ofthe prophet is mediated through scripture. There is not, of course, a simple collapse or reduction of divine revelation to scripture. On the contrarythere is a complex process of reception, interpretation, reflection, imagination, and response that forms over time and that requires theilluminating work of the historian if it is to be understood in later generations. However, there issufficient transfer of tone, mode of thought, and disposition from the original to the traditions of preservation to evoke the same kind of acceptance or rejection. The offense of divine revelation, for example, meets us starkly in the letter to the Galatians today no less than it must have to some that heard it initially in the first century.

If truth be told, the contemporary academy doesnot find the appeal to divine revelation at all attractive. Outside theology, and often within

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theology itself, the appeal to revelation is simplynot permissible. Here is how Austin Farrer captures the issue as applied to philosophy.

There is nothing superficially less attractive to a philosophical mind than the notion of a revealed truth.For philosophy is reasonable examination, and must resist the claim of any doctrine to exempt itself from criticism. And revealed truth is commonly said to be accepted on the mere authority of its revealer; not on any empirical evidence for it, nor on any logical self-evidence contained in it.8

More to the point, consider the interpretation of the prophets as constituted by what we might call cognitive magic, as that interpretation is developed by Eric Voegelin.

… the prophet indulged in magic, or at least believed in magic. That would not have been surprising because in the history of Israel it had been the function of prophets, for instance, to guide the hand of the king in shooting a bow against the enemy as a magical operation that would result in victory. What happened in the case of Isaiah would have been in what modern psychology, by Nietzsche or Freud, would be called a sublimation of the more primitive physical magic. … Iconsulted about the matter especially with Gerhard von Rad in Heidelberg, who was horrified at the idea that agrandiose spiritual prophet like Isaiah should be a magician. I was so impressed by his attitude that I made a concession. I did not use the term magic for the practice advised by Isaiah but coined a new term tocharacterize the peculiar sublimated magic belief in transfiguration of reality through an act of faith. And this kind of faith I call metastatic faith – the belief

8 Austin Farrer, “Revelation,” in Basil Mitchell, ed., Faith and Logic (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1957), 84.

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in a metastasis of reality through an act of faith. I am not so sure that today I would make this concession,because this kind of faith is indeed magic, though one has to distinguish this “sublimated” variety from a more primitive magical operation. If one would really draw a hard line of difference between magic and metastatic faith, I am afraid the one factor they have in common – the attempt to produce a desired result by means outside the cause-effect relation in nature – would be smudged.9

In the wake of this kind of analysis, it shouldcome as no surprise that those periods of history that took revelation seriously should continue to be dismissed as the dark ages. One can shelve the medieval period without even waving a hand at the underlying appeal to divine revelation. A splendidedition of the general picture is laid out by ColinMcGinn in his short history of western thought, a history that can be construed along the lines of a four-act play.10 In Act I, there is the period of our hunter-gatherer ancestors who may have “entertained some primitive religious ideas, a heavy dose of animism, an abundance of superstition.” In Act II, “the first reflective Greeks come along, no doubt assisted by the Egyptians and others.” In time the ancient Greeks got in their stride and “almost miraculously these thinkers inaugurated the scientific age, formulating the questions that were to preoccupy 9 Eric Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1989), 68-69. Emphasis as in original. For Voegelin’s moremeasured account of the issues see his Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1956). The material from the autobiographical reflections is more interesting here because he states his position in a very abrupt and plain manner. 10 Colin McGinn, The Elusive Flame (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 209-211.

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thinkers to this day.” In Act III, there “followedthe dark medieval period, in which the insights of the Greeks were all but forgotten. Science and philosophy languished. Rational knowledge of nature was set back.” And then, finally, in Act IV, there arises the miraculous outburst of the Renaissance, when the founders of the modern scientific world-view appeared. Over time, “the scientific method triumphed: observation combined with systematic theoretical construction became theway to discover what the world is all about.”11 What makes McGinn’s position so interesting is thathe nowhere complains that scholars in the medieval period might have appealed to mystery. Indeed his own philosophy of mind is laced with the claim thatthe human mind has such inherent limitations that the mind-body problem is strictly insoluble; it is a mystery beyond our cognitive capacities to unravel. In fact he describes the central positionhe is defending as that of “naturalized mysterianism”.12 What is significant here is that McGinn simply dismisses the medieval world without any attempt to identify or formally reject its interest in divine revelation. No refutation is necessary; it is as if we know in our bones that the epistemological issues below the surface are not worth pursuing.

11 Similar historiographical dramas can be found in the writings of Ernst Troeltsch and Peter Gay. Troeltsch provides a fine summary in “Historiography,” in Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1914), iv, 729-53. Gay’s position is laid out in his two volume work The Enlightenment, An Interpretation (London: Wildwook House, 1973). McGinn is very chastened about the future prospects for the success of science in the search for explanations of the mind.12 McGinn, 89.

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The crucial components of the aversion to revelation can be located in at least four areas.13

First, the appeal to divine revelation is thought to be subjective and arbitrary. It summonsup a contact between the divine and the human that cannot be substantiated. The best we can hope for is the strong conviction that God has spoken; but this is entirely inward and personal. Hence the appeal to divine revelation destroys the life of the mind in its public manifestations and responsibilities. While claiming a skyhook to the divine, it provides only access to the mental worldof its advocates.

Second, the appeal to revelation is believed tobe radically divisive. Its proponents set it aboveeverything else, above reason, experience, intuition, testimony, imagination, and the like. They sit within the circle of faith and, of necessity, press for the outworking of divine revelation across the board in morality, culture, politics, and theology. Hence the appeal to revelation is naturally disruptive of the social order. It breeds fanaticism, and fanaticism, in turn, is the mother of abuse and violence. Hence revelation destroys inclusivism and pluralism, fostering instead a dangerous brew of exclusion andinquisition.13 I leave for now a fifth issue beyond the four I enumerate that focuses on the apparent incorrigibility of claims to divine revelation, accompanied by an apparent stubbornness and tenacity in commitment to divine revelation. Space does not permit my tackling this very interesting issue.

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Third, the appeal to divine revelation is thought to cut off reflection and reasoning. The answer is somehow delivered on a plate, the alternatives are shut down, and the life of the mind is suffocated and contracted. Revelation is an unfortunate laborsaving device that stops us thinking for ourselves and makes us slaves of authority.

Fourth, the appeal to divine revelation is often seen as a disguised and illegitimate bid for authority and power. It is a costume designed to establish its proponents in a privileged hierarchy and a weapon invented to intimidate and silence critics and challengers. As such, rather than accepted with trust, it should be received with suspicion and demythologized expeditiously.

How might we respond to these worries about theappeal to divine revelation? This is not the placeto solve all the problems that are now on the table, but if we are to make progress we need to goback to crucial and fundamental features of the idea of revelation and work matters through afresh.

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Let me begin with the concept of revelation.14 Revelation is an incredibly rich and complex concept. The core meaning is that of disclosure; something formerly hidden is now manifest. In revelation, as George Mavrodes has recently suggested, we have the following schema: m revealsa to n by means of k.15 M represents the revealer or the agent of revelation; a represents the content of revelation; n represents the recipient of revelation; k represents the mode or means of revelation. The permutations on this schema are clearly manifold.16 Restricting the agent of revelation to God, the content can be the nature and purposes of God or the hidden depths of the human condition. The mode can be either by word ordeed in all their variety; the recipients can be anindividual, a community, or the whole known world. In the Christian tradition revelation can be general, that is, in creation and conscience; it can be special, that is, in the history of Israel; and it can be extra-special, that is in Jesus Christ. It can be internal in our hearts or external in human history. It is intimately

14 While I speak here of the concept of revelation, I leave unresolved how to distinguish between formal features of the concept of revelation and material features of the claims to revelation we find within the Christian tradition. Working through this distinction is a delicate matter that requires a lot more attention than I can give it here. The study of revelation across, for example, the great traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam would be of enormous help in this terrain. It would also be interesting to look at Mormonism.15 George Mavrodes, Revelation in Religious Belief (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 88. This book remains one of the most incisiveand illuminating discussions of revelation in the recent past.16 Mavrodes draws an extremely helpful distinction between revelation asmanifestation and revelation as communication. See op.cit., 75-79.

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related to the Bible and to the church; it is related to but different from divine inspiration.17

For our purposes the really pertinent point is that revelation is a pivotal epistemological concept.18 It belongs in that family of terms generally listed as reason, experience, intuition, conscience, testimony, and the like. Thus it serves as a warrant for other claims. It operates as a foundation, or ground, or reason, or basis, for central theological claims about God.19 The really critical point, however, is this: revelation

17 I have argued this case in The Divine Inspiration of Holy Scripture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). 18 This is one reason why it is conceptually confused to look for a “biblical” conception of revelation. There is no biblical conception ofrevelation any more than there is a biblical conception of other crucialepistemic concepts. Indeed, to identify relevant material on revelationin scripture already presupposes that one is working with a concept of revelation brought to the text, for otherwise one would not know where or how to locate material on divine revelation in scripture. Bultmann very well brings out this point. Noting that the issue is not simply linguistic or philological, he writes: “… we have already presupposed that the New Testament speaks of something such as we ourselves mean when we speak of “revelation.” Because of this our question is evidently guided by a certain understanding of the concept of revelation.” See Rudolf Bultmann, “The Concept of Revelation in the NewTestament, in Existence and Faith (New York: Meridian, 1966), 58. Of, course, one’s thinking about revelation can and should be informed by scripture, but this is another matter entirely. Moreover, note that “Bible”, “scripture”, and “canon” are not epistemological concepts. These are better seen as notions that belong in the realm of soteriology; they are best seen as complex means of grace whose proper home is the church.19 I deliberately leave aside at this point the whole contested debate about foundationalism and its fortunes within and without contemporary theology. I suspect that moving too quickly into that topic may prove more confusing than illuminating, although there are extremely interesting connections between foundationalism and various theological proposals.

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is what we might call a threshold concept.20 To be sure, in the case of, say, reason or experience, one relies on these on these immediately and directly; revelation like testimony and conscience is a much more contested epistemic category.21 However, once the term revelation is deployed, it is simply and totally applicable; and once revelation is accepted, one enters a whole New World where everything is liable to be seen in a whole new light.22

The idea of a threshold is, of course, spatial or geographical. I am using it here metaphorically. Consider two examples where we naturally speak of crossing a threshold. Close to where I was born there is a mountain called Topped Mountain. It is located in the center of County Fermanagh, not far from the lakeside district around Enniskillen. Climbing Topped Mountain is a relatively easy affair. One can take a car up through the winding back roads to within twenty 20 There are other ways to unpack the image of a threshold than the one I shall deploy shortly. For a helpful discussion of how this notion wasused in the seventeenth and eighteenth century see M. Jamie Ferreira, Skepticism and Reasonable Doubt, The British Naturalist Tradition in Wilkins, Hume, Reid, and Newman (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 23-26, 187-9, 228-30. Wilkins is especially interesting. 21 Here Locke’s insistence that it is right and proper to raise questions about the actual possession of divine revelation are on target. Thus it is one thing to call into question the content of a revelation, given that it is divine; it is another matter entirely to question whether someone really has a divine revelation. We need not accept Locke’s strictures on the content of reason to see the force of his crucial point. See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 704. 22 Compare the attribution of legal guilt. Once applied, it is applied simply and totally; moreover, once applied, it opens up a whole new realm of reality depending on the particularities of the case.

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walking minutes of the summit. As one ascends the back of the mountain, all one can see are some scattered fields, a delightful lake not much biggerthan a pond, and a few lonely farmhouses. Then suddenly one reaches the top, and crossing over thethreshold of the summit, there is an exquisite panoramic view of the whole countryside, a view that circles the full three hundred and sixty degrees of the compass. To cross that threshold is to enter a whole new field of vision that stretches miles and miles in the distance from every angle. My second analogy makes the same point. Consider crossing the threshold of a house.From the outside, there is much to be seen externally; but far more remains totally hidden from sight. Step inside across the threshold and awhole network of rooms, staircases, closets, basement, and kitchen, is available. One has crossed into another world. In both cases one may or may not step across the threshold; however, the step across that threshold is singular and absolute; and once across, there is a new awarenessof phenomena previously hidden from view.

Revelation, I propose, is like that. Unlike reason, experience, intuition, and the like, that simply happen naturally, we may or may not enter into revelation. To be sure, the original recipients of revelation, say, the prophets, may have had little or no choice in being the recipients of divine revelation.23 However, whether23 I leave unresolved whether revelation is an achievement verb or not. My inclination in the past has been to say that revelation is indeed an achievement verb, so that we would refuse to designate an experience or

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they accept it, whether they explore it, whether they transmit it, these are matters for decision and action. Once revelation is recognized, then the threshold has been crossed. Once one acknowledges the revelation, then everything may have to be rethought and redescribed in the light of what has been found. Moreover, the same basic pattern applies when the revelation becomes a mediated revelation in scripture and the church. Then, at this point too, once revelation is recognized, a threshold has been crossed. And again, once one acknowledges the revelation, then one enters a whole New World that requires extensive unpacking and intense reflection.24

Let me mention four features of the situation.25

phenomena as revelation unless the recipient of the revelation recognized and acknowledge that there had been revelation. In any case,we need to distinguish logically between the reception of revelation, the recognition of a revelation, the acknowledgement of a revelation, and the response to a revelation. 24 I am well aware of the possible echoes this may evoke of Karl Barth’sfamous essay, “The Strange New World of the Bible,” in The Word of God and the Word of Man (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1928). Such echoes are entirely accidental. Much as I admire Barth’s fascinating essay, I wantto take the whole discussion in a radically different direction than that envisaged by Barth.25 What follows is in no way comprehensive. For instance, I say nothingabout what is at stake in loss of faith in a revelation; this can be as dramatic as acceptance of a putative divine revelation. Sometimes, it can also be experienced as profoundly liberating. The phenomenology of experience is rich and complex, fraught with important epistemic suggestions. Moreover, there are interesting spiritual temptations thatcome with the territory. Because, for example, of the temptation to transfer the properties of the divine revelation to that of the recipient, we have become naturally wary of the role of claims to divinerevelation in the cultural, social, and political arena.

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First, crossing over the threshold is often a matter of dramatic conversion. It is characteristically a profoundly self-involving experience that requires ample space, spiritual direction, and great patience, if it is to be appropriated.

Second, insofar as the divine revelation involves propositional content, then that content has to be received as knowledge.26 It cannot be treated as mere human opinion. Coming from God, the content is received as genuine knowledge. Hence it invariably generates a significant intellectual boldness that can easily be misread asarrogance.

Third, the response by necessity cannot be limited in its depth. It calls for a response of total and faithful allegiance, even to the point ofdeath. Revelation naturally evokes a response of loyalty, trust, and persistence that must endure trial and testing.

Fourth, when one crosses over into the world ofdivine revelation, then revelation will necessarilyilluminate every aspect of one’s existence, even though one does not know in advance where and how this illumination will make a difference. 27 So

26 Divine revelation need not directly involve propositional content; insome cases of divine manifestation, the proper response may be total silence before the mystery and complexity of the divine.27 It is sometimes thought that having propositional content precludes further exploration. Bultmannn captures the issue nicely. “God the mysterious and hidden must at the same time be the God who is revealed. Not, of course, in a revelation that could be grasped in words and

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much so that divine revelation may have a loop-backeffect leading to a reconceiving of the cognitive capacities that brought one to divine revelation inthe first place;28 and it will have a knock-on effect on how we see things around us, above us, within us, and before us.29

All of this is visible in the life of Paul. Revelation led to a dramatic conversion to Christ; it produced an astonishing boldness in mission, proclamation, and teaching; it evoked a persistent and tenacious commitment; and it led him to rethinkhis theological world-view in new and unexpected ways. It is small wonder that he needed a lengthy sabbatical to come to terms with the gospel; and itis no surprise that he was prepared to face imprisonment and martyrdom rather than abandon it. A lot of people really did think that he had lost his mind; many still do. Crossing the threshold ofpropositions, that would be limited to formula and book and to space andtime; but rather in a revelation that continually opens up new heights and depths and thus leads through darkness, from clarity to clarity.” See Rudolf Bultmann, “Concerning the Hidden and the Revealed God,” in Existence and Faith, 30. On this analysis my first point might be thought to be incompatible with my fourth. However, Bultmann is mistaken to think that grasping a revelation in words and propositions is incompatible with a revelation opening up new heights and depths. Theseare not at all mutually exclusive.28 Descartes noted this perceptively in an oblique manner in the way he appeals to the veracity of God to secure the reliability of his senses. This is often thought to be viciously circular; a more careful reading will rescue Descartes from this charge. For a splendid discussion of the relevant sources and issues see George Dicker, Descartes: An Analytical andHistorical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 119-41.29 A very interesting question is how material from divine revelation enters into our ways of construing experience of God and other religiousexperiences. I favor the kind of interactive model proposed by CarolineFranks Davis in The Evidential Force of Religious Experience (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 145-155.

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divine revelation is a massive cognitive and spiritual revolution.30

With this in mind, we can briefly respond to the standard sources of aversion to divine revelation. Let me work backwards through the fourproblems I enumerated above.

Rather than a bid for power and authority, the proclamation of divine revelation is a marvelous gift to be shared with enthusiasm and flair. Its acceptance should evoke a spirit of service and humility of the kind long visible in the lives of the saints of the church.31 Indeed without appropriate love and humility the presentation of divine revelation will be hollow and inappropriate.

Rather than narrowing our options and suffocating the mind, divine revelation opens up a whole New World that calls for the straining of every intellectual nerve and muscle in order to fathom the treasures made available. Thus the careful and imaginative study of the canonical heritage of the church, the primary means of the mediation of revelation across the centuries, 30 This is one reason why issues related to salvation and the Christian life have fascinated evangelicals; they have wanted to explore the full ramifications of life inside the world of revelation. It is also a reason why evangelicals have characteristically been interested in evangelism. The importance of the wing of evangelicalism that has focused on this dimension of the tradition is well brought out by Gary Dorrien, The Remaking of Evangelical Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox , 1998).31 This surely provides one reason why the church developed a canon or list of saints; the community identified over time paradigmatic responses that would signal appropriate reception. Virtually every tradition, including the evangelical tradition, does this informally.

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becomes a joyful necessity.32 Moreover, the articulation of the riches of divine revelation across space and time becomes an enduring intellectual challenge.33

Rather than a source of division and bigotry, divine revelation can be the occasion for uniting Jew and Gentile in the service of God in the world.To be sure, there are deep issues here that cannot be resolved in this essay, but we can recall that Paul got in trouble precisely because he insisted that divine revelation called for an enlargement ofthe borders of Israel rather than for a narrow policy of exclusion. In our current cultural and political situation, it is imperative that we make room for claims to divine revelation, rather than settle for a network of narrow set of secularist ortheological boundaries.34

32 Note here that rather than phrase the issue in the conventional termsof scripture and tradition, I want to redescribe the relevant media as the complex phenomena that are identified as the canon of scripture, thecanon of truth, the canon of saints, canonical iconography, canonical liturgies, and the like. It is crucial that we not repeat the mistake of simply reducing these phenomena to divine revelation, as has happenedagain and again in the treatment of the canon of scripture. David Brownwould appear to have fallen into this trap in his magnificently erudite and fascinating Tradition and Imagination. The stream of evangelicalism thatlooks on scripture as a means of grace is much closer to the mark on howto proceed at this point. 33 Hence the need for the constant renewal of systematic theology in every generation. How this is to be done is much too big a topic to be pursued here.34 The emergence of “postmodernism” has created space for a rich varietyof voices in the current theological situation. However, particularist claims invariably evoke profound epistemological debate and discussion. Simply positing a shift from modernity to postmodernity will not take care of the normative questions at stake. There are very tangled historical and constructive issues that have to be worked through from top to bottom. Moreover, it is naïve to think that evangelicals will be

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Rather than an occasion for retreat to a mere confessional circle of faith, divine revelation calls for sophisticated public discussion that tackles rival claims to possession with sensitivityand thoroughness.35 Proponents of different and even contrasting traditions of divine revelation have much to think through together rather than apart. Moreover, rather than restricting our epistemological endeavors and confining ourselves to the method of authority, revelation calls for a deepening of our epistemological reflection.36 We are by no means confined to the standard range of epistemic options but challenged to provide the conceptual horizons that will permit the full rangeof questions that fragile human agents pursue within and without the arena of religion.37

readily welcomed to the postmodernist table; it is precisely their hearty commitment to divine revelation that will rightly evoke profound suspicion. We can expect, however, that, with the increasing political sophistication of the evangelical tradition, some evangelicals will rhetorically exploit the situation cleverly.35 It can be illuminating to go off the beaten track at this point and explore more recent claims to divine revelation that come from unfamiliar places. An especially interesting case from the nineteenth century can be found in Jonathan Spence, God’s Chinese Son, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (New York: Flamingo, 1997). 36 By the method of authority I have in mind the position contrasted with the method of tenacity, the a priori method, and the scientific method by Charles S. Pierce. Charles S. Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” in Charles S. Peirce: The Essential Writings, ed. Edward C. Moore (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 128-131. Although Peirce does not take this position, I think it likely that many have treated the appeal to revelation as a form of the method of authority. At the very least, andPeirce comes close to making this point, the method of authority has long been associated with certain kinds of theology that did make much of the appeal to divine revelation. 37 Much of the best contemporary work in the epistemology of theology that operates within the analytical tradition of philosophy ignores the issue of divine revelation. The general tendency in the work of, say,

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What is needed is appropriate humility in the face of divine grace, imaginative and rigorous thinking in the wake of divine disclosure, supportive and collegial research in the midst of profound and contested differences, and deeper and richer epistemological inquiry in response to the complexity and subtlety of our intellectual commitments. In exploring the full contours of revelation in the past serious mistakes have been made. Facile solutions on the relation between revelation and history and on the relation between revelation and science have been offered and found wanting. The way to deal with these is to revisit the terrain, find out what went wrong, and go back to our intellectual labors. Evangelicals, in particular, need to ferret out the illuminating mistakes they have made, identify the critical issues that currently deserve attention, and move on without fear or defensiveness.

In doing this they should take heart from Paul.Paul was no philosopher, but he tacitly possessed the kind of intellectual acuity that is the mark offresh and original thinkers. We can see why he wasso adamant in his writings when we unpack the kind of logic that lies beneath the surface in the appeal to revelation. We may not have to be as tough as Paul was with the ancient Celts in

Alston, Plantinga, Wolterstorff, and their disciples, is to develop a generic account of rationality, justification, warrant, knowledge, and the like, and then simply apply this to the Christian tradition. The conversation tends to go one way from philosophy to theology. I envisage a much more dialectical conversation where the theologian is more of an engaged partner than a mere listener.

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Galatia. He was fighting for the existence of the gospel and the church, seeking to bring the church into line with divine revelation as a radically inclusive body of Jews and Gentiles. We live in a much more complex universe of discourse and discussion. Evangelicals will stand with Paul in his commitment to divine revelation, bearing whatever offense, scandal, or stigma such commitment may evoke. More positively in followingthe logic of divine revelation, they might apply tothemselves the suggestions of Charles Sanders Peirce.

The genius of a man’s logical method should be loved and reverenced as his bride, whom he has chosen from all the world. He need not condemn the others; onthe contrary, he may honor them deeply, and in so doinghe honors her the more. But she is the one he has chosen, and he knows that he was right in making that choice. And having made it, he will work and fight forher, and will not complain that there are blows to take, hoping that there may be as many and as hard to give, and will strive to be the worthy knight of her from the blaze of whose splendors he draws his inspiration and courage.38

Such work calls for delicate intellectual negotiation in our contemporary situation, for we rightly honor a distinction if not separation between state and church, and between academy and church. However, we do not cease to be Christians,as we live as citizens in the modern state or as scholars in the modern academy. Whoever we are, we bring our particular identities and our various 38 Charles S. Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” in Charles S. Peirce: The Essential Writings, 136-7.

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intellectual treasures with us when we show up. Incrossing the threshold of divine revelation and in exploring the New World thereby graciously made available, Christian theologians can both be themselves and make a vital contribution to the life of the mind in our day and generation.

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