When Krishna, an avatar of Vishnu, reveals himself to Arjuna in his divine form – as Vishnu in his cosmic godhead – Arjuna is overwhelmed with awe and prostrates himself.1 Such high-relief epiphanic revelations occur in the Torah when God reveals himself to Moses and in other religious traditions. At times revelations may be heard but have no visual aspect or be communicated without physical hearing. Revelations are often of God or a god, or manifested by an angel through which God speaks. These and other types of revelations are phenomenally experienced in theistic traditions. However, religious revelations are not limited to the theistic religious traditions.
The definition of revelation that we will use is: a communication or message, or a disclosure or awareness, whose source is phenomenally received as the divine or religious reality or the transcendent. Phenomenally – as they are experienced – revelations are epiphanic. In some manner God or the divine or religious reality or the transcendent is experienced in communication with, or as disclosed to, the one who comes to have the revelation.
The notion of revelation is well represented in the Abrahamic theistic traditions. Moses received God’s commandments from God at Sinai. The deliverances of the prophets who come after Moses are prefaced or followed by “Thus says the Lord” or “Thus said the Lord.” The articles of Christian faith relating to the Trinity and the Incarnation are taken to be revealed. In the theistic traditions in a strong strain of these traditions scripture is regarded as the revealed word of God: the Torah and Tanakh in Judaism, the Christian Bible in Christianity, the Qur’an in Islam. John Baillie observes that the “simple identification of divine revelation with Holy Scripture was carried forward into the churches of the Reformation, becoming no less characteristic of Protestantism than of the Counter-Reformation.”2 Baillie affirms the identification of revelation and scripture in the Protestant and Catholic traditions of Christianity, but it holds as well for the other two Abrahamic traditions. Theistic revelations may be dramatically epiphanic, as when God speaks to Moses out of the burning bush (Ex. 3.2–6) or later in the wilderness when God gives Moses his commandments and ordinances (Ex. 24.15–18), or they may be more quietly epiphanic, as when individual believers receive in quietude God’s guidance or experience the presence of God.
Though the idea of revelation is more congenial to the theistic traditions where God provides revelations of himself or of his commandments, or of a new dispensation, revelations can occur or be obtained in nontheistic traditions as well (traditions that do not regard God as the ultimate religious reality). In the Buddhist tradition the historical Buddha, Siddharta Gautama, in attaining enlightenment comes to see the Four Noble Truths. They are, we may say, revealed to him. In the Buddhist tradition, however, the Buddha comes to their realization through his own meditative effort, as opposed to their being given to him by a divine source. Yet they are truths about the deepest religious reality in relation to human existence, and in this way reflect a source in religious reality.
In the Mahābhārata, of which the Bhagavad-Gita is a part, Vishnu reveals himself in his godhead to Arjuna. Also in the Hindu tradition the Vedas have a cosmic and divine source, although within the broader Hindu tradition the source of the revelation of the Vedas may be God (the Nyāya school) or not.
Revelation can be foundational to religious traditions, as the Vedas are to Hinduism and as the revelations given to Moses are to Judaism, but also revelations may serve other roles in a religious tradition, such as providing guidance to religious adherents. Though the scripture of a religious tradition may be accepted as revealed, a tradition can also countenance revelation given to individuals well after the establishment of its sacred book. Individuals receiving such revelations may not be highly placed in their religion’s clerical hierarchy or be clerics at all. They may be ordinary religious persons. The range of revelations experienced by individuals includes revealed truths, visions, a given awareness of hidden faults, guidance, and a granted awareness of a relationship to religious reality.
Yet even in theistic traditions not all divine action is revelatory. In theistic traditions the religious may experience and thank God for various manifestations of divine action that do not come under the rubric of revelation. One instance is a change in our hearts wrought by God, an opening of our hearts to others. Another is God opening our eyes to our faults or to his glory in his creation. If God opens our eyes to his glory, then his glory is revealed, but our eyes being opened is not a revelation, though it may be received as an act of God, a miracle.
Divine revelations are usefully distinguished from quotidian insights, which are sometimes called “revelations.” The “revelation” of how to fix that stubborn leak in the plumbing is a flash of insight for which God may be thanked but which has no distinct religious content. Phenomenally such nonreligious insights, depending on their significance, may or may not be felt by the religious to be divinely revealed.
Whether or not a mundane insight is received by a religious person as a divine revelation, for the theistically religious, or many, all that they receive in life – their sustenance, their awakening and their returning in the evening – are the gifts of God, for which God is to be thanked. And these, if God’s presence is felt in them, may be received as revelatory, as it may be received as a divine revelation that these are gifts of God.
In this book we will consider the place of revelation in different religious traditions and the internal understanding of divine revelation in these traditions. Though our focus will be on the three major Western theistic traditions, in which revelation is foundational, we will also examine revelation in nontheistic traditions and the multiple ways of understanding revelation in these traditions. We will also heed the different forms of revelation. These range from the ancient time-shrouded revelations that reside at the origins of religious traditions and provide their doxastic structures to the personal revelations received by individual believers, often contemporary religious believers.
Other concerns to be treated in this book include the way that Christian theologians have understood revelation and different philosophical and religious views of revelation, positive and negative. We will also give attention to the relationship between faith and revelation and to a category of revelation that we will call “pervasive revelation.”
In the next chapter, and in Chaps. 3 and 4, we will examine the place of revelation in the religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam respectively. In Chap. 5 the place of revelation in other traditions, including two nontheistic traditions, will be considered. Chapter 6 will bring us to various ways the religious category of revelation can be elaborated, as when religious councils are taken to be guided by the Holy Spirit. In Chap. 7 we will discuss the revelatory experience and deliverances of the oracle at Delphi, revelatory dreams, the revelatory experiences of Native Americans in their “spirit quests,” and the participatory revelations of Haitian Vodouists. The subject of Chap. 8 is the perspectives of theologians on revelation; among those that will be discussed are the perspective of the thirteenth-century theologian and philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas and that of the twentieth-century theologian John Macquarrie. In Chap. 9 different fundamental views of revelations will be considered; the three types of views to be examined are tradition-grounded views, “embracive” views, which expand the boundaries of the category of religious revelation as it is traditionally understood, and ontological views of revelation, which address the issue of the source of revelation. In Chap. 10 it will be argued that reflection on the nature of faith in and faith in God indicates that a reevaluation of the religious importance of foundational revelations in theistic traditions is in order and that “abiding” or “praxis ” relationships to God or religious reality in theistic and nontheistic religious traditions can exist independently of beliefs-that about God or religious reality. Chapter 11 has as its subject a form of revelation that may be called “pervasive revelation” in that it may occur in the experience of individuals in all the domains of their lives, the experience of the presence of God being a theistic paradigm, although pervasive revelation is not exclusively theistic.
Footnotes
1
Bhagavad-Gita, Chap. 11. Several translations.
2
John Baillie, The Idea of Revelation in Recent Thought (New York: ...