Religious Revelation [1 ed.] 9783030538712, 9783030538729

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
1: Introduction
2: Revelation in Judaism
3: Revelation in Christianity
4: Revelation in Islam
5: Revelation in Other Traditions
6: Elaborations of Revelation
7: Oracles, Dreams, and Other Revelatory Experiences
8: Theologians on Revelation
9: Views of Revelation
10: Faith and Revelation
11: Pervasive Revelation
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

PALGRAVE FRONTIERS IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

Religious Revelation James Kellenberger

Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion

Series Editors Yujin Nagasawa Department of Philosophy University of Birmingham Birmingham, UK Erik J. Wielenberg Department of Philosophy DePauw University Greencastle, IN, USA

Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion is a long overdue series which will provide a unique platform for the advancement of research in this area. Each book in the series aims to progress a debate in the philosophy of religion by (i) offering a novel argument to establish a strikingly original thesis, or (ii) approaching an ongoing dispute from a radically new point of view. Each title in the series contributes to this aim by utilising recent developments in empirical sciences or cutting-edge research in foundational areas of philosophy (such as metaphysics, epistemology and ethics). More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14700

James Kellenberger

Religious Revelation

James Kellenberger Department of Philosophy California State University, Northridge Northridge, CA, USA

ISSN 2634-6176     ISSN 2634-6184 (electronic) Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion ISBN 978-3-030-53871-2    ISBN 978-3-030-53872-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53872-9 All quotations from the Bible are from the Revised Standard Version, unless otherwise indicated. Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: WanRu Chen / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Mariana

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer of the manuscript for helpful comments, to Brendan George for his editorial advice, to Lauriane Piette for her editorial support, and to Vanipriya Manohar for seeing the book through production.

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Contents

1 Introduction 1 2 Revelation in Judaism 7 3 Revelation in Christianity17 4 Revelation in Islam25 5 Revelation in Other Traditions29 6 Elaborations of Revelation33 7 Oracles, Dreams, and Other Revelatory Experiences37 8 Theologians on Revelation43 9 Views of Revelation53

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10 Faith and Revelation61 11 Pervasive Revelation69 Bibliography81 Index85

1 Introduction

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.  Bhagavad-Gita, Chap. 11. Several translations.

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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  John Baillie, The Idea of Revelation in Recent Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), p. 31. 2

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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.

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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

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“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.

2 Revelation in Judaism

Moses, who received from God the ten commandments and by tradition a total of 613 commandments, positive and negative mitzvot, is regarded as the founder of Judaism, and the Five Books of Moses, the Torah, contains its foundational revelation as it was given to Moses. The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh corresponds to the Christian Old Testament, although it is differently organized. Like the Old Testament it begins with the Five Books of Moses, Genesis through Deuteronomy, known in the Jewish tradition as the Torah, the Law. The next part of the Tanakh, however, in contradistinction to the Christian Old Testament, is Nevi’im (the Prophets), which includes Joshua, Judges, I and 2 Samuel, I and 2 Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the “twelve minor prophets,” Hosea to Malachi, but not Moses. At the end of the book of Deuteronomy we are told, “[a]nd there has not arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face” (Deut. 34. 10). The prophetic revelations and actions of Moses the pre-eminent prophet of Judaism, are recounted in the Torah, not in Nevi’im. The Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the rest of the Christian Old Testament are in Kethuvim (the Writings), the third and final part of the Tanakh. The major prophets  – Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel – have their own books in Nevi’im, as do the twelve © The Author(s) 2021 J. Kellenberger, Religious Revelation, Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53872-9_2

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minor prophets, but not all the prophets of Nevi’im have their own books. One prophet who does not is the early prophet Nathan, whose prophecy is recounted in the Second Book of Samuel. Nathan, who is a prophet in the court of King David, brings the word of the Lord to David. David had desired Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, and had told his general, Joab, to place “Uriah in the forefront of the hardest fighting, and then draw back from him, that he may be struck down and die” (2 Sam. 11.15). This was done. Uriah was killed, and David took Bathsheba as his wife. The prophet Nathan then comes to David and tells him a parable. In Nathan’s parable a rich man who has “many flocks and herds” takes the one ewe lamb of a poor man – an ewe lamb that is like a daughter to him and dear to his family – and prepares it for his guest, rather than prepare one of his own flock. David is outraged against the rich man and says that he deserves to die. Nathan says to David, “You are the man.” He continues: Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you out of the hand of Saul, and I gave you your master’s house, and your master’s wives into your bosom, and gave you the house of Israel and of Judah; and if this were too little, I would add to you as much more. Why have you despised the word of the Lord, to do what is evil in his sight?’ (2 Sam.12.7–9)

David repents and confesses, “I have sinned against the Lord” (2 Sam. 12.13).

As God spoke to Moses, so he speaks to the prophets that follow Moses, and they like Nathan often preface or mark their deliverances from God with “Thus says the Lord” or “Thus said the Lord” or a cognate phrase. Isaiah regularly uses such a refrain, for all or nearly all of the book of Isaiah consists of God’s words delivered to the prophet. In a prophecy against Babylon we have:      “I will rise up against them,” says the Lord of hosts, “and will cut off Babylon name and remnant, offspring and posterity, says the Lord. And I will make it a possession of the hedgehog, and pools of water, and I will sweep it with the broom of destruction, says the Lord of hosts” (Is. 14.22–23).

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And against Damascus: Behold, Damascus will cease to be     a city, and will become a heap of ruins . . . Says the Lord of hosts (Is. 17.1 and 3).

Isaiah also delivers God’s pronouncements against Moab (Chap. 15) and Egypt (Chap. 19). Regarding the people of Ariel or Jerusalem there is this: And the Lord said: Because this people draw near with     their mouth and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me, and their fear of me is a command     ment of men learned by rote, therefore, behold, I will again      do marvelous things with this people, wonderful and marvelous, and the wisdom of their wise men      shall perish . . . (Is. 29. 13–14).

However, thus says the Lord, who redeemed Abraham concerning the house of Jacob: “Jacob shall no longer be ashamed, no more shall his face grow pale. For when he sees his children, the work of his hand in his might, they will sanctify my name . . .” (Is. 29. 22–23).

And

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Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned (Is. 40.1).

And regarding the people of Israel (or Jacob): Thus said God, the Lord, who created the heavens and stretched them out . . .: I am the Lord, I have called you     in righteousness. . . I have given you as a covenant to     the people, a light to the nations. . . .” (Is. 42.5–6).

On questioning God, the Lord, through Isaiah, is rhetorical. The Lord says: “Woe to him who strives with his     Maker, an earthen vessel with the potter! Does the clay say to him who fashions      it, ‘What are you making’?” (Is. 45.9).

On proper worship and observance we find this: What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?     says the Lord; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of he-goats . . . . (Is. 1.11)

And

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Thus says the Lord: Keep justice, and do righteousness, for soon my salvation will come, and my deliverance be revealed . . . . (Is. 56.1).

In more than one place the Lord speaks of his majesty and power: Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer,      Who formed you from the womb: “I am the Lord, who made all things, who stretched out the heavens alone, who spread out the earth . . . .” (Is. 44.24).

Isaiah is one of the three major prophets of Nevi’im. The other two, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, are later than Isaiah. Isaiah’s prophetic life dates from the Assyian invasion (eighth century BCE), while Jeremiah and Ezekiel were active in the time of the Babylonia Captivity (sixth century BCE). Like Isaiah, the prophet Jeremiah communicates God’s displeasure at the turning of the people of Israel from the way of the Lord: Thus says the Lord: “What wrong did your fathers find in me that they went far from me, and went after worthlessness, and became worthless?” (Jer. 2.5)

Jeremiah delivers God’s instruction: Thus said the Lord: “Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, let not the mighty man glory in his might, let not the rich man glory in his riches, but let him who glories glory in this, that he understands and knows me . . . .” (Jer. 9. 23–24).

The “word came to Jeremiah from the Lord”: Take a scroll and write on it all the words that I have spoken to you against Israel and Judah and all the nations, from the

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day I spoke to you, from the days of Josiah until today. It may be that the house of Judah will hear all the evil I intend to do to them, so that every one may turn from his evil way, and that I may forgive their iniquity and their sin. (Jer. 36. 1–3)

Ezekiel’s prophetic pronouncements say more about this theme: “Behold, all souls are mine, the soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sins shall die.      “If a man is righteous and does what is lawful and right . . . [if he] walks in my statutes and is careful to observe my ordinances – he is righteous, he shall surely live, says the Lord God” (Ezek. 18.4–5 and 9).

And I will judge you, O house of Israel, everyone according to his ways, says the Lord God. Repent and turn from all your transgressions, lest iniquity be your ruin. Cast away from you all the transgressions which you have committed against me, and get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit! (Ezek. 18.30–31).

Sometimes in the Tanakh when God reveals his word there is an encounter with God in which there is an exchange, a dialogue, and in some instances the dialogue has the character of contention. Abraham, whose story is recounted in the Torah, in the book of Genesis, stands before God and contends with him regarding God’s intended destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham argues that if there are only fifty – or forty or ten – just persons in the city of Sodom it would be unjust to destroy the city, destroying the innocent with the guilty. God hears Abraham and departs from Abraham without destroying the city (although later he does rain down destruction on Sodom and Gomorrah) (Gen. 18.23–33 and 19.24). Abraham is not recognized as a prophet in Nevi’im. Jonah, who is recognized as a minor prophet also contends with God. The word of the Lord comes to Jonah and he is instructed to proclaim God’s judgment upon Nineveh. Jonah seeks to flee, but God thwarts his effort, and the

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word of the Lord comes to Jonah a second time. This time he goes to Nineveh and predicts its destruction in forty days. But the people of Nineveh fast and put on sackcloth, and God renounces his intended destruction. Jonah is displeased and angry that God did not carry out his intention. He complains to God that he wishes to die. God replies by asking if he does well to be angry. Jonah’s contention with God comes to naught, except that Jonah is taught a lesson by God about what merits pity (the book of Jonah). Moses receives the word of the Lord many times and sometimes speaks to the Lord. In more than one instance he contends with God. When God in the wilderness becomes angry with the people of Israel and resolves to destroy them Moses implores God to turn from his anger. He argues to God that if he destroys his people the Egyptians will say that he delivered them only to destroy them, and he reminds God of his promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that their descendants would be as numerous as the stars of heaven. Here too God relents and renounces the punishment he had intended (Ex. 32.9–14). Sometimes God reveals visions to his prophets. Isaiah beholds the Lord on a throne surrounded by seraphs (Is. 6.1–2), and Ezekiel has visions of God in which he sees four figures, each with four faces and four wings, above whom there is an expanse, and above the expanse a throne with a human-like figure on it surrounded by radiance (Ezek. 1.2–28). Though within the revelations given to the prophets of Nevi’im there may be dialogue and visions, most prominent in Nevi’im are the deliverances of God’s word, communicating his prophecies for the future, his anger and disappointment, his expectations and promises, and reminders of his majesty, while at the center of the Torah’s significance are the commandments given by God to Moses. The revelations given to Moses at Sinai are the foundational bedrock of Judaism, and the prophets of Nevi’im are honored in the Jewish tradition. Revelation in the Jewish tradition, however, is not limited to biblical revelation. It is not limited to prophetic pronouncements offered under the rubric “Thus says the Lord” or to received visions. In Judaism it can take contemporary forms. Rabbi Elliot N. Dorff writes:

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The most direct way in which revelation continues to occur is through study. In fact, according to the [Jewish] tradition, each time a Jew studies The Torah or its rabbinic commentaries and expansions, God is revealed anew.1

According to the Rabbis of the Talmud, Dorff observes, [n]o longer . . . did God’s revelation take the forms common in the Bible, of visions, voices, and signs; that ceased shortly after the destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C.E. Instead Jews were to look for God in the Torah, the product of the original public revelation at Sinai.2

For centuries after the destruction of the First Temple and the exile to Babylon sections of the Torah were recited in temple services. Today, as Dorff observes, sections of he Torah are read in temple services throughout the week. These readings are communal and heard with “reverence and deference.” They are not like reading the Torah for study. They are a “reenactment of Sinai,” says Dorff, and “God gives the Torah anew each time it is read publicly in the synagogue.”3 The communal reading and study of the Torah bring with them a renewed revelation of the Torah. However, that revelation for Dorff and the Jewish tradition is more than of God’s law and commandments. It is also a confirmation of the covenant between God and the people of Israel.4 The fundamental revelation in the Jewish tradition is the Torah, and in another place Rabbi Dorff raises an issue. On the one hand the revelation at Sinai was given all at once and is fixed, but on the other hand the law revealed to Moses needs to be interpreted in each generation. In the Jewish tradition there is both the teaching that all interpretations and elaborations are implicit already in the original revelation and the teaching that God “shows Himself ” little by little, which allows that there  Elliot N.  Dorff, Knowing God: Jewish Journeys to the Unknowable (Northvale NJ and London: Jason Aronson, 1992), p. 114 (emphasis deleted). 2  Dorff, Knowing God, p. 114. 3  Dorff, Knowing God, pp. 117, 120–21 (emphasis deleted). 4  Dorff, Knowing God, p. 123. 1

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are new incremental revelations in succeeding generations. “How is it possible,” Dorff asks, “that everything was revealed at Sinai and yet new things are revealed each day?”5 These seemingly conflicting threads of understanding in fact go together, Dorff argues. That they do is not unique to Mosaic law but has analogues in reading and interpreting literature and in reading and interpreting the US Constitution. A literary work is given and set in its text, but different people, or the same person at different times, can find new meaning in it. Similarly the Constitution exists as a text, but the Supreme Court interprets that text, developing its meaning. Sometimes it revises or reverses earlier interpretations. Yet its renderings are grounded in the Constitution and its principles.6 The US judicial analogy is perhaps closer, for in the Jewish tradition there are judges who interpret the law. In their case, though, they may enact takkanot (revisions), which are a change in the meaning and content of the law, but these “nevertheless are part of the Jewish law because they are enacted by its only authorized representatives throughout the generations to our day.” “In this sense,” Dorff says, “every later development in Jewish Law . . . was already revealed to Moses at Sinai because it comes from a judge ultimately authorized by the Torah.”7 Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis offers further reflection on the place and character of revelation in the Jewish tradition, which he comes to through a consideration of the interconnections between conscience, covenant, and commandment. Though, as Schulweis observes, there is no Hebrew word for conscience in the Bible, the Tanakh, the notion of conscience is not alien to the Jewish tradition and “the voice of conscience is rooted in the moral covenant between God and Israel.”8 Conscience in the Jewish tradition is the “inner voice” of the covenant between God and the people of Israel. The biblical figures “who dare to confront God” and protest  Elliot N. Dorff, For the Love of God and People: A Philosophy of Jewish Law (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication society, 2007), pp. 199–201. 6  Dorff, For the Love of God and People, pp. 201–202. 7  Dorff, For the Love of God and People, p. 202 (Dorff’s emphasis). Dorff cites Deuteronomy 17 as the relevant passage in the Torah that authorizes judges. 8  Harold M. Schulweis, For Those Who Can’t Believe: Overcoming the Obstacles to Faith (New York: HarperCollins, 1960), p. 86. 5

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against injustice “draw legitimacy from the divine source of conscience.”9 When Abraham contends with God about God’s intended destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and argues that it would be unjust to kill the innocent he appeals to God’s justice. The implication of this religious role of conscience for revelation are traced by Schulweis: “Revelation is not a one-way directive from above or a human projection from below.” It is a dialogue, “an ongoing process of listening and interpreting, of receiving and giving” within a “reciprocal covenant,” and “[a]wareness of having entered the covenant makes it impossible to separate the divine and human element in the encounter of revelation.”10 In the Jewish tradition revelation is significantly of the law given at Sinai, interpreted anew in succeeding generations. More than law and command, in Judaism revelation is also of the covenant established by God with the people of Israel. For Rabbi Dorff revelation of God occurs for individual Jews when they study the Torah or its commentaries, or the Torah is read in temple services. For Rabbi Schulweis revelation is not a one-way directive from above when the religious conscience of individual Jews becomes involved, but a dialogue between the divine and the human. It remains, however, that revelation and the tradition of revelation in Judaism is grounded in the prophets of the Nevi’im and ultimately in the revelation of the Torah.

 Schulweis, For Those Who Can’t Believe, pp. 86–87.  Schulweis, For Those Who Can’t Believe, p. 87.

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3 Revelation in Christianity

As revelation informs the foundational story of Judaism so it informs the story of Christianity. The Christian narrative begins with an event that precedes the birth of Jesus, the Christ. In the Gospel according to Luke the angel Gabriel, sent by God, announced to a virgin, Mary, that she will have a son to be named Jesus. The angel reveals to Mary that though she has no husband the “Holy spirit will come upon” her and “the power of the Most High will overshadow” her, and that “therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God” (Lk. 1.26–35). When Jesus is born in Bethlehem an angel of the Lord appears to shepherds in the fields near Bethlehem and tells them that “a Savior, who is Christ the Lord” has been born; they go into Bethlehem, find the babe in a manger, and tell Mary and Joseph what the angel has revealed to them (Lk. 2.9–18). In another account of the birth of Jesus, in the Gospel according to Matthew, “wise men from the East” who have seen Jesus’ star in the East come to Bethlehem to worship the one “who is born king of the Jews” (Mt. 2.1–2). They go first to Jerusalem, and King Herod directs them to Bethlehem, telling them to bring him word when they have found the child that he “too may come and worship him,” although Herod, concerned about his own kingship, has other intentions. Perhaps © The Author(s) 2021 J. Kellenberger, Religious Revelation, Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53872-9_3

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the wise men or magi had no divine revelation leading them from the East but only read the stars. Yet when they leave Bethlehem they are “warned in a dream not to return to Herod” – perhaps by an angel of the Lord, as Joseph is told by an angel in a dream to take Mary and the child to Egypt (Mt. 2.2–13). Later, when Jesus is mature and in his ministry he asks his disciples who people say he is. They tell him that some say that he is John the Baptist, some that he is Elijah, and others that he is Jeremiah or one of the prophets. “But who do you say that I am?” Jesus asks. To this Peter replies that he is “the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus says to Peter that he is blessed, for “flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven” (Mt. 16.13–17). Jesus’ teachings also are revelations. The Christian commandments to love God and to love one’s neighbors echo the teachings of the Torah. In Deuteronomy there is the commandment that “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deut. 6.5). And in Leviticus there is the commandment that “you shall love your neighbor as yourself ” and the “stranger who sojourns with you . . . you shall love as yourself ” (Lev. 19.18 and 34). For Christians Jesus’ teachings that we should love God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our mind, and love our neighbors as ourselves (Mt. 22.37 and 39) come anew as revelations from God in the Person of the Son of God. Jesus is seen as a prophet and teacher by his contemporaries and is regarded as a prophet by Islam. He does not, however, make prophetic pronouncements introduced by “Thus says the Lord.” In the Christian tradition Jesus’ pronouncements are those of the Son of God and hence revelatory, and he is in his very presence as the Son of God a revelation. Because the Tanakh as the Old Testament is also in the Christian tradition the divine revelations given to Moses and the other prophets, including God’s revelations of himself, are also in the Christian tradition. But revelations in the Christian tradition are not limited to biblical events any more than they are in the Jewish tradition. In the Christian tradition experiences of a revelation of God are not given exclusively to priests, saints, and martyrs. A perhaps widespread Christian revelatory experience of God is finding him in the midst of those in need or in the glories

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of nature. Such experiences, in contrast with some prophetic biblical experiences of God, may often be low-key and quietly received. Another type of revelatory experience of God within the Christian tradition consists of experiences appropriately termed “mystical.” The life of St. Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) was richly adorned with such experiences. In her writings she describes a range of such revelations that came to her unbidden. Many are sensory, visual and pictorial (or “imaginary” as St. Teresa calls them because they present images and come through the faculty of the imagination). One day when she is at prayer “the Lord was pleased to reveal to me nothing but His hands, the beauty of which was so great as to be indescribable” and a few days later, she says, he revealed his “Divine face.”1 These are visions of Christ. At another time, she tells us in her Life “when I was at Mass, I saw a complete representation of this most sacred Humanity, just as in a picture of His resurrection body, in very great beauty and majesty . . . .”2 Not all of her sensory visions are of Christ, but often they are. She recounts another sensory revelation of Christ in which “I saw the most sacred Humanity in far greater glory than I had ever seen before. I saw a most clear and wonderful representation of it in the bosom of the Father.”3 St. Teresa also had nonsensory visions of Christ (called “intellectual” because they are communicated to the “intellect” without sensory content). At a festival of St. Peter when she is at prayer she became conscious of Christ at her side. At first she says that she “saw Christ at her side,” but then she says, “to put it better, I was conscious of Him, for neither with the eyes of the body nor with those of the soul did I see anything.” Yet she feels very clearly that “He was at my right hand.”4 In another class of mystical revelatory experiences that Teresa describes she experiences union with God. In the Interior Castle she recounts her experience of Spiritual Marriage. This “secret union,” she says, “takes place in the deepest centre of the soul, which must be where God Himself  St. Teresa, Life, Chap. 28, in The Complete Works of St. Teresa of Jesus, trans. and ed. E. Allison Peers (London: Sheed and Ward, 1972), vol. 1, p. 178. 2  St. Teresa, Life, Chap. 28, in The Complete Works of St. Teresa of Jesus, vol. 1, p. 179. 3  St. Teresa, Life, Chap. 38, in The Complete Works of St. Teresa of Jesus, vol. 1, p. 273. 4  St. Teresa, Life, Chap. 27, in The Complete Works of St. Teresa of Jesus, vol. 1, p. 170. 1

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dwells . . . .” “The Lord appears in the centre of the soul, not through an imaginary, but through an intellectual vision . . . .” The Spiritual Marriage, however, is not a transitory experience. “For He has been pleased to unite Himself with His creature in such a way that they have become like two who cannot be separated from one another.”5 Other Christian revelatory visions of the divine have been received by those who occupy a humble status in society, the poor and children. The mother of Jesus is Mary and especially in the Catholic tradition she is given a special place. Marian visions have appeared to several Catholic believers in past centuries. In 1531 near Mexico City Juan Diego had a vision of a woman in robes surrounded by light. She is the Virgin Mary, she tells Juan Diego, and she would come to be called the Virgin of Guadalupe. Bernadette Soubirous in Lourdes, France experienced eighteen visions of the Virgin Mary in the nineteenth century, her first vision occurring when she was fourteen. In the early twentieth century three children had visions of the Virgin Mary at Fatima, Portugal. These three instances of Marian visions have gained notoriety, but there have been many others in places as diverse as Medjugorje, Croatia and Conyers, Georgia in the US.6 In a well-established tradition within Christianity the central doctrines and dogmas of Christianity, like the whole of Christian scripture, have been taken to be revealed. The doctrine of the Trinity – that God is triune – and the doctrine of the incarnation – that Jesus is God incarnate – are religious truths in propositional form believed to be revealed to be true. The understanding of divine revelation as revealing truths is time-­ honored in the Christian tradition and goes back at least to the Middle Ages. Nevertheless it is not the only Christian view of revelation’s nature and content. Also within the Christian tradition there is an understanding of revelation according to which God reveals Himself, as opposed to propositions about Himself. The American philosopher of religion George Mavrodes (1926–2019) observed that “it is not uncommon now  St. Teresa, Interior Castle, Seventh Mansions, Chap. 2, in The Complete Works of St. Teresa of Jesus, trans. and ed. E. Allison Peers (London: Sheed and Ward, 1972), vol. 2, pp. 334–35. 6  Willard G. Oxtoby, “The Christian Tradition,” in World Religions: Western Traditions, 2nd ed., ed. Willard G. Oxtoby (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 257. 5

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to read that modern theologians favor the view that in revelation God reveals Himself, while earlier theologians are said generally to favor the view that God revealed a set of truths, propositions, or doctrines.”7 John Baillie (1866–1960) in his The Idea of Revelation in Recent Thought discusses the theological movement toward an understanding of revelation that in it God reveals Himself. Writing in the middle of the twentieth century, Baillie makes the observation that [t]he present wide acceptance in this country [the United Kingdom] of the view that revelation is not merely from Subject to subject, but also of Subject to subject, and that what God reveals to us is Himself and not merely a body of propositions about Himself, owes much to the teaching of Archbishop William Temple . . . .8

Father Herbert Kelly (a priest in the Church of England), who influenced William Temple, remarked that what comes to “man’s apprehension” in a revelation “is not truth concerning God but the living God Himself.” He continues: “There is no such thing as revealed truth. There are truths of revelation; but they are not themselves directly revealed.”9 And Baillie cites an earlier contributor to this idea, Wilhelm Herrmann, who in 1887 claimed that “God is the content of revelation. All revelation is the selfrevelation of God.”10 An implication of this understanding of revelation, traced by Baillie, is that “the propositions which the Bible contains, and likewise the propositions contained in the Church’s creeds and dogmatic definitions and theological system are all attempts, on however different levels, on the part of those who have received this revelation [of God Himself ] to express something of what it portends.”11 In a related vein Autin Farrer  George I.  Mavrodes, Revelation in Religious Belief (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), p. 91. 8  John Baillie, The Idea of Revelation in Recent Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), pp. 32–33 (Baillie’s emphasis), William Temple (1881–1944) became the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1942. 9  Quoted by Baillie, The Idea of Revelation in Recent Thought, p. 33. 10  Quoted by Baillie, The Idea of Revelation in Recent Thought, pp. 33–34 (Herrmann’s emphasis). 11  Baillie, The Idea of Revelation in Recent Thought, p. 34. 7

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stated: “We now recognize that the propositions on the Scripture page express the response of human witnesses to divine events, not a miraculous divine dictation.”12 Always for Farrer “the primary revelation is Jesus Christ Himself ”; he was struck by Jesus’ sayings being expressed in “images,” such as the Kingdom of God and the Son of Man. It is through such images, not propositions, Farrer suggests, that supernatural truth is revealed. Baillie, however, objects to such an effort to give precedence to “images.” He avers that it is difficult to know why we should think images are “directly the medium of revelation” in any way that propositions are not. In the letters of Paul the two are mingled together. Further, as God Himself is distinct from propositions about God so God Himself is distinct from images that point to God, and if revelation is of God Himself propositions and images are equally outside the content of revelation.13 It should be noted, though, that those advancing the understanding of revelation as revelation of God Himself do not contend that there are no revealed Christian truths, but rather that they are not “directly” revealed and that revelation does not consist “merely” of propositions. This qualification notwithstanding when Baillie recounts his own experience of revelation it is a revelation of God Himself. His “knowledge of God,” he recalls, first came to him as “an awareness that I was ‘not my own’ but one under authority.” This awareness did not arrive via a “voice from the skies.” It came from “the spiritual climate of the home into which I was born,” a part of “a wider community . . . under the same single authority,” an authority “closely bound up with” and emanating “from a certain story,” that “of Abraham and Isaac, of Moses and David, of God’s covenant with the Israelites,” culminating “in the coming of Jesus Christ.” It was, Baillie writes, through the “media” of “my boyhood’s home, the Christian community of which it formed a part, and the ‘old, old story’ from which that community drew its life, that God first revealed

 Austin Farrer, The Glass of Vision (London: Dacre Press, 1948). Quoted by Baillie, The Idea of Revelation in Recent Thought, p. 36. 13  Baillie, The Idea of Revelation in Recent Thought, p. 37–39. 12

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Himself to me,” and “it is not only that God used these media but that in using them He actually did reveal Himself to my soul.”14 In the Christian tradition, as in the Jewish tradition, then, contemporary religious revelatory experiences may be had by individual believers. In the Jewish tradition study of the Torah and commentaries are significant for such experiences. In the Christian tradition prayer can be important for them. William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience quotes from accounts of religious experience that cite prayer. In one a woman says of her prayer experience that it was “almost like talking with God and hearing his answer”; in another a man says, “I talk to him as a companion in prayer and praise,” and he delights in “our communion.”15 The experiences of prayer by these individuals are in the context of perhaps extraordinary religious experience, which in one case James calls “mystical or semi-mystical.” However, the felt sense of encounter with God in prayer is available more commonly. Also in the Christian tradition unanticipated moments of wonder may be occasions when the presence of God is felt to be revealed, and as Baillie’s recollection of how God revealed Himself to him illustrates, a background of a religious environment can be important as that through which God is revealed. It is to be further noted that within strands of both the Jewish and Christian traditions revelation has two elements: a divine provenance and a human reception. Rabbi Schulweis, as we have seen, finds within revelation when conscience speaks to and confronts God, a receiving and a giving in dialogue. In the Christian tradition in a strand of theological reflection and an associated religious sensibility revelation not only in contexts of confrontation but generally involves the two elements of God’s giving or disclosing and human reception. Farrer sees the revealed religious propositions of scripture as expressing “human witness to divine events.” Baillie, who is very much aware of the two elements in  John Baillie, Our Knowledge of God (New York: Scribners, 1939), pp. 182–84 (Baillie’s emphasis).  William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Modern Library, 1902), pp. 69 and 70. 14 15

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revelation, says that “the distinction must be kept clearly in mind between the divine and the human elements in the process.” In what is given by God “there can be no imperfection,” while in the human reception “there is always imperfection.” Not that the two elements are easily distinguished for Baillie, for they may to a great extent be “inextricably . . . intermingled in the result.”16

 Baillie, The Idea of Revelation in Recent Thought, p. 34.

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4 Revelation in Islam

Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, is an Abrahamic religion. All three religious traditions name Abraham in their scriptures and provide him with a prominent place as a patriarch in their stories. In the biblical story of Abraham in Genesis in both the Jewish and Christian Bibles God instructs and blesses Abraham. In the Qur’an we are told that Abraham was “obedient to God” and “true in faith” and moreover that God “chose him and guided him/To a Straight Way” (Qur’an 16.120–121).1 Abraham as one true in faith, who “bowed his will to God” and showed submission to God (the meaning of islam in Arabic), is regarded as a Muslim before Muhammad (Qur’an 3.67). Islam, the youngest of the three Abrahamic monotheisms, was founded by Muhammad, who lived in the sixth and seventh centuries of the Common Era. In the Qur’an many prophets are recognized, including Abraham and Moses, and John the Baptist and Jesus, who is acknowledged as a prophet with a message from God but not as the Son of God. Muhammad, however, is the final Prophet, the Seal of the

 Unless otherwise indicated all Qur’anic quotations are from The Holy Qur’an, 9th ed., trans. Abdullah Yusuf Ali (New Deli: Kitab Bhavan, 2013). 1

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Prophets, and though Jews and Christians are “People of the Book” Islam finally is the one true religion (Qur’an 3.19). The revelations that constitute the 114 suras of the Qur’an were given to Muhammad in the early seventh century. For twenty-two years, in Mecca and Medina, Muhammad received the revelation of the Qur’an through the angel Gabriel (Qur’an 2.97). Gabriel in the Jewish Bible or Tanakh appeared to Daniel (Dan. 9.20–27), and Gabriel in the Christian tradition announced to Mary that she, a virgin, would bear a son to be called Jesus (Lk. 1.31). In the scriptures of the three Abrahamic traditions the angel Gabriel is a messenger through which God delivers revelations. The suras of the Qur’an are interspersed with verses that begin with “Say” or “Say ye” followed by what is to be said or proclaimed. To take two examples, the 136th verse of the second sura reads: Say ye: “We believe In God, and the revelation Given to us, and to Abraham, Ismā‘il, Isaac, Jacob, And the Tribes, and that given To Moses and Jesus . . . .”

And the 59th verse of Sura 10 begins: Say: “See ye what things God hath sent down to you For sustenance?”

The Qur’an, even when this explicit instruction is absent, is revelatory of God’s commandments, expectations, intentions, and warnings, as well as of God’s nature. God’s expectations and ordinances regarding alms for the poor are made clear (as in Qur’an 9.60), almsgiving being one of the five pillars of Islam. The Qur’an specifies what is forbidden as food (Qur’an 5.4). Allah or God is the one God, and God’s condemnation of polytheism and idol-worship is made manifest in the Qur’an (Qur’an 4. 116–117 and 21.51–54).

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Part of the Qur’an’s revelation is that there is to be a Day of Judgment, when “every soul” will be “paid what it earned” (Qur’an 2.281). Those who reject God will suffer the blazing penalty of Hell (Qur’an 67.6–7), while the righteous will enjoy Gardens in “nearness to their Lord” (Qur’an 3.15 and 69. 19–31). Yet in the revelation given to Muhammad Allah or God is forgiving and merciful to anyone who does evil or “wrongs his own soul” if God’s forgiveness is sought (Qur’an 4.110). In the first sura of the Qur’an God is praised as “Most Gracious, Most Merciful.” Each sura of the Qur’an begins with “In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful” (in the Yusuf Ali translation) or “in the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful” (in another translation). God’s mercy and forgiveness are prominent in the Qur’an, but also God is exalted in power and wise (Qur’an 2.209), knows what is secret and hidden and all things (Qur’an 2.33 and 227), is the Creator of all things (Qur’an 6.102), and is free of all wants (Qur’an 4.31). As there were mystical revelations in Christianity and in Judaism in the Kabbalah, after the biblical period, so there were mystical revelations in the Islamic tradition following the twenty-year period in which Muhammad received the Qur’an. The mystics of Islam were Sūfīs, who aspired to absorption in God and the passing away of self (fanā). The attainment of these states in themselves may be distinguished from revelation, but in their realization there can be elements of revelation. The Sūfī Abū Hāmad al-Ghazālī (1058–1111) in describing absorption said this:      This absorption at first will be like a flash of lightning, lasting but a short time, but then it becomes habitual and a means to enabling the Soul to ascend to the world above, where pure and essential Reality is manifested to it, and it takes upon itself the impress of the invisible World and the Divine Majesty is revealed to it . . . and at the last it looks upon God face to face.2

 Margaret Smith, Readings from the Mystics of Islam (London: Luzac & Company, 1972), p. 70.

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He also said this:      All that we behold and perceive by our senses bears undeniable witness to the existence of God and His power and His knowledge and the rest of His attributes, whether these things be manifested or hidden, the stone and the clod, the plants and the trees, the living creatures, the heavens and the earth and the stars, the dry land and the ocean, the fire and the air, substance and accident, and indeed we ourselves are the chief witness to Him.3

Here al-Ghazālī expresses the sense that all that we perceive in the world reveals the existence of God to us, an idea not so distant from that of St. Paul when he said, “Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made” (Rom. 1.20).4 The Sūfī mystic Ibn al-Fārid (c.1181–1235) found Allah or God to be revealed in the beautiful: “Though he be hidden from me, yet by each of my members He is seen, in every lovely thing, that is fair and gives joy to the heart.”5 Al-Ghazālī spoke of unity with God, a unity without multiplicity.6 Muhyī al-Dīn Ibn al-‘Arabī (1165–1240) spoke of knowing that “you and God are one and the same.”7 Similarly Husayn B. Mansūr al-Hallāj (858–922) spoke of coming to a place where he is alone with God and “I am He Whom I love and He Whom I love is I.”8 Rābi‘a al-‘Adawiyya (713–801), an earlier Sūfī mystic than the others mentioned, perceived the fear of Hell and the Hope of Paradise to be “veils” or hindrances to the true vision of God, and, she said, “[m]y peace is in solitude, but my Beloved is always with me.”9 For Rābi‘a the reality of God and God’s love was a constant revelation.  Smith, Readings from the Mystics of Islam, pp. 59–60.  Neither al-Ghazālī nor St. Paul is offering an argument –teleological or otherwise  – for God’s existence. Each is affirming that what is revealed has been revealed by God in all that is perceived. 5  Smith, Readings from the Mystics of Islam, p. 95. 6  Smith, Readings from the Mystics of Islam, p. 70. 7  Smith, Readings from the Mystics of Islam, p. 101. 8  Smith, Readings from the Mystics of Islam, p. 37. 9  Smith, Readings from the Mystics of Islam, p. 12. 3 4

5 Revelation in Other Traditions

In the three Abrahamic traditions of the West revelations are given by God, directly as when God gives Moses his commandments, or indirectly as when Gabriel, a messenger of God, announces to Mary that she will give birth to a son to be called Jesus or as when Gabriel delivers the Qur’an to Muhammad. In these traditions foundational revelations are received in a form that may be written upon tablets or appear in scriptures. Revelations can be prophetically voiced: the prophets of the Tanakh proclaimed to the people of Israel what God would say to his people. Such revelations are explicit disclosures, but disclosures of religious reality need not have a theistic provenance, they need not be disclosed by God or his intermediary. In the Buddhist tradition, particularly in Vajrayana Buddhism, there are numerous deities with various functions, such as guardianship and protection from evil forces. Though meditation on them may be helpful in the journey to enlightenment, they are not sources of revelation, as God or God’s angel is in Western traditions. Nevertheless, as we observed in Chap. 1, there is a place for revelation in nontheistic Buddhism in the enlightenment experience of the historical Buddha. Gautama Buddha in attaining enlightenment came to see the nature of human existence in © The Author(s) 2021 J. Kellenberger, Religious Revelation, Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53872-9_5

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relation to religious reality. He came to see the working of the law of karma and the Four Noble Truths.1 The Four Noble Truths that the Buddha came to see through meditation are: One, that suffering is inevitable for living beings. Two, that the source of suffering is desire or craving. Three, that cessation of suffering would be possible if      desires ceased, and Four, that the way to overcome desire and banish suffering     is the Eightfold Path.2

Beyond this revelation attained by the historical Buddha, as we will see in a later chapter there is a place in Buddhism for the recognition of revelatory experience available to ordinary Buddhists. There is a place for revelation in the Hindu tradition as well, although, because that tradition is complex with both devotional (essentially theistic) and nontheistic strains the source of revelation is variously understood. In the Hindu tradition there is a distinction between sruti and smrti. Sruti texts are “heard” and regarded as revealed. Smrti texts are “remembered” and regarded as humanly composed, though inspired. The Vedas are sruti or revealed. The great epics, the Rāmāyana and the Mahābhārata, composed around 500 BCE, centuries later than the origin of the Vedas, are smrti.3 Though the Vedas are generally accepted in the Hindu tradition as revealed, this is not to say that there is general agreement on the source of their revelation. For one school, the Nyāya school of epistemology and logic, God is the source. For other schools, including the Mīmāmsā and Vedānta schools the source of the Vedas is beyond human authorship; it is cosmic or divine, but not God or a supreme being. For both Hindu ways of understanding revelation the Vedas hold eternal truths humanly  Roy C. Amore and Julia Ching, “The Buddhist Tradition,” in World Religions:Eastern Traditions, 2nd ed., ed. Willard G. Oxtoby (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 209. 2  Amore and Ching, “The Buddhist Tradition,” pp. 213–214. The eight areas of the Eightfold Path are right view (or understanding), right thought, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right meditation (Amore and Ching, p. 214). 3  Vasudha Narayanan, “The Hindu Tradition,” in World Religions: Eastern Traditions, p. 32. 1

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“seen” but not humanly composed, though only for orthodox Hindus following the Nyāya school is their cosmic source God.4 In Advaita Vedānta, Arvind Sharma observes, there is no “revealer” of revelation; it is not given by God.5 God is not the author or source of the Vedas’ revelation but is involved in the communication of its revelation as its “transmitter” or “promulgator.”6 While in Catholic Christianity the proper response to revelation is faith understood as assent to the propositional truths delivered by revelation, in Advaita Vedānta for which also revelation is propositional, the proper response is jnāna or knowledge.7 The Christian revelation to which Catholic faith or assent is directed is foundational, as the revelation of the Vedas is foundational to Hinduism. Not all religious revelation is foundational but limiting our present focus to foundational revelation we should appreciate that not all revelations in this category are ancient. In the early nineteenth century in the tradition of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormonism, Joseph Smith (1805–44), the founder of Mormonism, was visited by an angel. The angel was not Gabriel but Moroni, and he revealed to Smith buried golden plates. These plates, which were inscribed in “reformed Egyptian,” Smith translated into the Book of Mormon, a holy book of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Though, as its name indicates it is a denomination of Christianity, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has its own ancillary and foundational scripture in the Book of Mormon (and other texts). The Book of Mormon includes the teaching that before Columbus there were migrations to the New World and after his crucifixion Christ visited the western hemisphere to institute a new church.8 Another comparatively recent instance of a revelation that is foundational to a religion is found in the origin of Sikhism. Sikhism is older than Mormonism but was founded in the modern era in the sixteenth  Narayanan, “The Hindu Tradition,” pp. 22–23.  Arvind Sharma, The Philosophy of Religion and Advaita Vedānta: A Comparative Study in Religion and Reason (University Park PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), p. 53. 6  Sharma, The Philosophy of Religion and Advaita Vedānta, p. 57. 7  Sharma, The Philosophy of Religion and Advaita Vedānta, p. 55. 8  Willard G. Oxtoby, “The Christian Tradition,” in World Religions: Western Traditions, 2nd ed., ed. Willard G. Oxtoby (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 302–303. 4 5

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century. Nanak (1469–1539), the founder of Sikhism, was born in Punjab in northern India. In the Sikh tradition when Nanak was thirty he had a revelatory vision in which God gives him a cup of nectar and assigns him the mission to teach the practice of devotion. Nanak does so in a way that transcends the ritualistic practices of Hinduism and Islam, and he proclaims: “There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim.” Nanak traverses India and travels to Muslin centers beyond India, including Baghdad and Mecca, before settling in a community in Punjab 55 miles north of present-day Amritsar, at the age of fifty. There for 20 years he instructed followers in the ways of meditation and devotion.9 Today Sikhism, like Mormonism, has millions of followers.

 Willard G. Oxtoby, “The Sikh Tradition,” in World Religions: Western Traditions, pp. 129–30.

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6 Elaborations of Revelation

A commentary on the Bible might relate different parts of the Bible to one another or describe the historical setting in which different books were composed, but any such commentary on the face of it is distinct from the Bible itself or parts of the Bible. An elaboration of biblical revelation is different. In the Jewish tradition Talmudic interpretations or elaborations of the Torah are seen as unfolding what is implicit in the original revelation given to Moses and are revelatory in their own right. Such an understanding may also be brought to Christian elaborations of the Bible or Islamic elaborations or interpretive commentaries on the Qur’an. In this way the original revelation of a religious scripture, or the original way of understanding it, may change. Its meaning may become refocused to have an application to contemporary events and concerns. This may be seen as a revelatory drawing out and making explicit what is in the original revelation or alternatively as a new revelation. In either case the new way of understanding the original revelation is regarded as continuous with it. Also revelations can be cancelled or revised, as Supreme Court decisions can be overridden or reversed by future decisions. At the end of the © The Author(s) 2021 J. Kellenberger, Religious Revelation, Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53872-9_6

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nineteenth century the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints reversed its teaching on polygamy (which in Mormon practice had been polygyny: having more than one wife at the same time). The reversal, the leader of the Church, Wilford Woodruff (1807–1898), said had been revealed to him. In the first book of Samuel, Samuel goes to King Saul and tells him the word of the Lord is to “Smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass” (1 Sam. 15.3). Saul attacks and defeats the Amalekites. He “utterly destroy[s] all the people with the edge of the sword.” But he spares Agag, the king of the Amalekites, and he does not kill “the best of the sheep and of the oxen and of the fattlings, and the lambs, and all that was good” (1 Sam. 15.9). (There is no mention of Saul’s sparing women and children.) In the first book of Samuel God is displeased that Saul did not follow his instructions precisely, and the word of the Lord comes to Samuel that God repents that he made Saul king (1 Sam. 15.10). Saul tries to make amends by hacking Agag to death, but it is too late. David is chosen by God (1 Sam. 16.12–13). It is a part of the revelation given to Samuel that Saul is to destroy the Amalekites, men and women, children and infants, and the livestock of the Amalekites. Today such a fierce command hardly seems compatible with God’s mercy and love. Today very few nations or political entities would follow such a rule of war. It would be rejected on both moral and religious grounds. It would be rejected in both the Jewish and Christian traditions on the basis of a widely received new understanding of God’s commandments, more in accord with a humane understanding of the treatment of others required both in a war setting and more generally. Revelations, sought or unsought, can come to individual believers in religious traditions, giving them guidance and direction. In the Bible God or his angel may warn or direct individuals in dreams, as Joseph is told by an angel in a dream to take Mary and Jesus to Egypt (Mt. 2.13). But revelation in the form of felt guidance need not come through a dream. Its avenue can be a vivified sense of how one should proceed in, say, a perplexing moral situation. In the Christian tradition such guidance is understood as given by the Holy spirit. As an elaboration of such revelatory guidance those participating in church councils may hope for

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and believe they are given guidance by the Holy Spirit. In the election of a new pope, as the cardinals retreat to the place of their conclave they recite the Latin hymn Veni, Sancte Spiritus (Come, Holy Spirit). In the Catholic tradition there is the doctrine of papal infallibility, which in effect postulates the revelatory guidance of God when the pope speaks ex cathedra. Papal infallibility was officially proclaimed by the First Vatican Council, although an acceptance of the substance of the doctrine goes back to Counter-Reformation thinking. A leitmotif harking back to well before the Reformation is that church councils and convocations are given guidance by the Holy Spirit. This idea augments and is in tension with, the doctrine of papal infallibility. In the fifteenth century a council of the Catholic Church was held in Constance in present-day Germany. The Council of Constance (1414–1418) addressed the issue of the Western Schism and other matters, successfully resolving the issue of the schism. (The Western Schism lasted from 1378 to 1417, during which time there were two and even three rival popes.) In its 1425 decree the Council of Constance declared “that it is lawfully assembled in the Holy Spirit, that it constitutes a General Council, and that therefore it has its authority immediately from Christ,”1 At the Council of Constance, Natacha-Ingrid Tinteroff observes in her essay on councils and the Holy Spirit, Jean Gerson in a sermon “noted that the spirit unifies, shapes and enlivens the council,” and Dietrich Kolde in another sermon “asserted that, if the gifts of the Holy Spirit are given to each individual, then they are given for the benefit of all.”2 These perceptions of the role and presence of the Holy Spirit in the Council of Constance resonate with concilliarism, a movement that took place in the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages “based on a theory according to which the church’s final authority lay not with the popes, but with the full body of the faithful,” a view that saw the expression of

 Documents of the Christian Church, ed. Henry Bettenson (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1943), p. 192. 2  Natacha-Ingrid Tinteroff, “The Councils and the Holy Spirit: Liturgical Perspectives,” in The Church, the Councils, and Reform: The Legacy of the Fifteenth Century, ed. Gerald Christianson, Christopher M. Bellitto, and Thomas M. Izbicki (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008), pp. 147 and 151 [electronic resource]. 1

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the will of the church in general councils.3 However, in its proclamation of papal infallibility in 1870 the First Vatican Council gave superiority to papal authority. We may regard the elaborations of revelation in the doctrines of papal infallibility and conciliar guidance as theological, or theologically inspired, as they may be. If they are, however, this would not show or tend to show that the provenance of papal pronouncements or of conciliar decisions is ultimately other than divine revelation.

 Tinteroff, “The Councils and the Holy Spirit,” p. 141 n.7. In the Catholic tradition ecumenical councils, when approved by the Pope, are infallible. By contrast, in the Protestant tradition The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646) explicitly recognized that “synods or councils. . . may err, and many have erred.” The Creeds of the Churches, ed. John H. Leith (Richmond VA: John Knox Press, 1973), p. 228. 3

7 Oracles, Dreams, and Other Revelatory Experiences

The prophets of the Bible – of Nevi’im in the Jewish tradition and of the Old Testament in the Christian tradition – were oracles in that they spoke for and communicated the words of the divine – God. Oracles, speaking as the medium of the divine and providing revelations of what was to come, are found in other traditions as well. Perhaps the most familiar oracle is the oracle at Delphi, the Pythia. She was the oracle of the Greek god Apollo, whose temple was at Delphi. Many, including kings and others highly placed, came to the oracle for advice and predictions of the future. When Socrates’ friend Chaerephon asked the oracle if anyone was wiser than Socrates, she replied that no one was wiser.1 Socrates, who had the sense that he had “no claim to wisdom great or small,” tested the oracle’s pronouncement by holding conversations with those reputed to be wise (presumably on such issues as the nature of piety, knowledge, and courage). He discovered that they were not wise and reflected that he was wiser than they were at least to the extent that he knew what he did not know.2 Above the entrance to Apollo’s temple was the inscription “Know  Plato, Apology 21a, trans. Hugh Tredennick, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 7. 2  Plato, Apology 21b–d, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, pp. 7–8. 1

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thyself,” perhaps a saying of the Pythia. Socrates refers to “Know thyself ” and “Nothing too much” as inscriptions at Delphi that were the “fruits” of wisdom dedicated to Apollo.3 For 1000 years, between the sixth century BCE and the third century CE, the oracle of Apollo provided the god’s answers to questions and his predictions. It may be that the Pythia issued her pronouncements while in a trance. Certain fumes arose from a chasm, above which she sat when she prophesied. Recently those analyzing gases trapped in a previously undiscovered fault have determined that the vapors inhaled by the Pythia contained ethylene, a substance that has been used as an anesthetic and which, it has been observed “can induce a trance.”4 If the Pythia was affected by ethylene and in a trance, this would not in itself entail that the ultimate source of her prophecies was other than Apollo. If Apollo could use a human medium for his revelations, he could use a human medium in a trance. In fact in some religious traditions the use of psychoactive substances to facilitate revelatory experiences is recognized. One example of this is the use of peyote in the Native American Church, a pan-Native American church established in North America. The peyote cactus is the natural source of mescalin and when ingested in the proper way by worshippers in the Native American Church they may experience a revelation, often in the form of a vision, usually of God, Jesus, or “some other spirit.” In this revelatory experience they may be comforted or guided, or reproved for evil thoughts and actions, as opposed to being given revelations of the future.5 In the Hebrew and Christian Bibles revelations are sometimes given in dreams. Earlier we noted how an angel in a dream warned Joseph to flee to Egypt with Mary and Jesus (Mt. 2.13). In a later dream after Herod had died the Lord revealed to Joseph that it was safe to return to the land of Israel, and in another dream Joseph is warned to go to the district that is Galilee (Mt. 2.19–20 and 22). In the book of Genesis in the Torah of  Plato, Protagoras 343a–b, trans. W.  K.C.  Guthrie, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, p.  336. Socrates names seven wise men – Thales of Miletus, Pittacus of Mytilene, Bias of Priene, Solon of Athens, Cleobulus of Lindus, Myson of Chen, and Chilon of Sparta – who met together and “dedicated the first fruits of their wisdom to Apollo,” namely “Know thyself ” and “Nothing too much.” 4  Morina Dabattista, “The Oracle at Delphi,” Calliope, Oct., 2004, p. 7. 5  J. S. Slotkin, The Peyote Religion (New York: Farrer, Straus and Giroux, 1975), p. 75. 3

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the Jewish tradition and the Old Testament of the Christian tradition in a dream God through an angel tells Jacob to leave the employ of Leban, his father-in-law, and return to the land of his birth (Gen. 31.11–13). Jacob and his wives, Leah and Rachel, and his sons along with Jacob’s cattle and livestock depart, but Leban and his kinsmen pursue Jacob. However, God comes to Leban in a dream and warns him as to how he should treat Jacob when he overtakes him (Gen. 31.24). And there are other biblical examples of God appearing in a dream and speaking, as when God comes to Solomon in a dream (1 Kings 3.5). Independently of religion dreams may be felt as ominous or having some kind of portent. But for many in the mainstream religious traditions in today’s world – although perhaps not for all  – dreams are not often felt to be divine revelations. As we saw in Chap. 2, Rabbi Elliot Dorff observes that God’s revelations after 585 BCE and the destruction of the First Temple took a form different from biblical prophecy. Studying the Torah and commentaries and reading the Torah in temple became new forms and sources of revelation. No longer were visions, voices, or dreams accepted as the source of revelation in the Jewish tradition – at least for most. In a story from the Talmud (B. Bava Mezia 59b), which Dorff considers in For the Love of God and People, the Rabbis of the Sanhedrin or high court in the first century of the Common Era address the issue of the ritual purity of a certain oven.6 In the Talmudic story Rabbi Eliezer maintains that the oven is ritually pure, while the rest say it is impure. Rabbi Eliezer says that Heaven will prove his case, and a voice from Heaven endorses his view and his understanding of the law. But the others are unmoved. Rabbi Joseph observes that God’s commandments  – the Torah  – “is not in heaven” (Deut 30.12). That is, its interpretation is a matter of discourse and rabbinic reasoning; it is not to be settled by a voice from Heaven. The deeper issue is the proper determination of Jewish law. Dorff’s point is in part to acknowledge that at that time, and even today, in the Jewish community there is a division of opinion about the place of claims to  Elliot N. Dorff, For the Love of God and People: A Philosophy of Jewish Law (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2007), pp. 207–208, n. 3. I have added some details to Dorff’s presentation of the story. 6

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revelation through visions, voices, or dreams. Dorff goes on to present the case of Rabbi Joseph Karo (1488–1575), the author of “perhaps the most authoritative code of Jewish law,” who cited “dreams and visions . . . as the reason he rules in a particular way” on Jewish law. But, Dorff concludes, “[s]till, the mainstream tradition as interpreted by rabbis and practiced by most Jews did not confer authority on revelations [from visions, voices, or dreams] after the biblical period, and even a Jewish legal figure as important as Rabbi Joseph Karo gains his authority from his legal reasoning, not from his revelations.”7 While in mainstream Christianity, as in what Dorff calls the “mainstream tradition” of Judaism, visions, voices, and dreams, may not contemporaneously be regarded by most of the religious as vehicles of divine revelation, it should be borne in mind that in the sixteenth century – the same century in which Rabbi Joseph Karo lived most of his life  – St. Teresa of Ávila regularly had revelatory visions. Even later, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as we saw in Chap. 3, revelatory Marian visions were received by believers. If we turn to other religious traditions revelatory visions are even more prominent. We have already mentioned the Native American Church as an example of a religion that uses a vision-inducing psychoactive substance to facilitate revelations. In the Native American tradition itself as it exists without an admixture of Christianity visions play a significant religious role personally and culturally. Traditionally in Native American tribes it was expected that boys, and in some tribes girls also, would undertake a “vision quest.” Ceremonially guided the young person, usually a boy at the age of puberty, would fast in preparation for the reception of the sought-after vision. If attained the vision would take the form of a journey into a spirit realm. In it there are spirit beings that act as guardians and guides and there may be symbolic animal beings. An understanding of the revelatory significance of the vision given to young Native Americans is aided by the counsel of elders of the tribe. Generally the vision attained by Native Americans at a young age remains with them throughout their lives as a touchstone of spiritual meaning. Vision quests occurred and still occur in various Native American tribes. They  Dorff, For the Love of God and People, p. 208, n. 3.

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are individual quests but guided by ceremony, with communal meaning and given communal support. Though traditionally undertaken by young Native Americans, older tribal members may also fast and seek a vision during times of felt spiritual need.8 Not only visions but other revelatory experiences may play a significant and central role in some religious traditions. In the Vodou (or Voodoo) tradition of Haiti Vodouists – who may also be Christians – are taken over, possessed, by a loa. The loa (a god or spirit) “rides” the subject of the possession, and the subject enters a trance-state. In a possible contrast to the trances of the Pythia, the “ridden” subject loses all consciousness of what she or he says or does. In Vodou possession it is not the subject but the loa who speaks and acts. If the loa has a message for the subject, as the loa might, others in the gathering at the humfo, or Vodou religious center, have to tell the subject later. These possessions are epiphanic in that a god or spirit is phenomenally present. Also they are revelatory in that the god or spirit reveals himself or herself to all those who witness the possession, and retrospectively revelatory to the subject when she or he returns to consciousness and is told of the loa’s words and actions.9 Dreams, visions and prophetic communications of what God says may no longer be a viable source of revelations in mainstream Judaism and Christianity. And possession never was. This does not mean that these avenues for revelations are not open in other religious traditions.

 Tink Tinker, “Vision Quest.” Available, 2019, via encyclopedia.com/environment/encyclopedias-­ almanacs-­transcripts-and-maps/vision-quest 9  Alfred Métraus explores Haitian Vodou possession in his Voodoo in Haiti, trans. Hugo Charteris (New York: Schocken Books, 1972). 8

8 Theologians on Revelation

As we have seen, revelation in some form is found in the various major religious traditions of the world. Though the revelation of the Vedas is foundational in Hinduism, in the Western monotheisms revelation tends to have both a foundational and creedal position. In the three Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam there are foundational revelations that shape the belief structures, devotion, and practice of these traditions. In the Christian tradition the category of revelation has been of theological concern for centuries. Revelation in an early Christian conception consists of revealed truths about God and his interaction with his creation, which are to be accepted in belief as revealed. These truths are religious propositions that express doctrines or dogmas. Faith is understood as the acceptance in belief of these propositions on the basis of God’s revelation. This seminal understanding of faith and revelation was captured by St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) in his Summa Theologica:

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faith [in its “formal aspect” – that “whereby it is known” or its basis] does not assent to anything, except because it is revealed by God. Hence faith bases itself on the divine Truth as on its means.1

For Aquinas faith is assent, and what is assented to has been revealed by God as religious truth. Ultimately for Aquinas the object of faith “as regards the thing itself ” is God, but on the part of the believer, since “the mode proper to human intellect is to know the truth by composition and division,” the object of faith “is something complex, such as a proposition.” Aquinas is clear that the objects of faith “on the part of the believer” are propositions.2 For Aquinas faith is acceptance of, or assent to, religious propositional truths based on the revelation that God has given. The objects of faith are propositions that relate to God, such as the article of faith “God is triune” or such “preambles” as “God exists” and “God is one.” Faith for Aquinas is opposed to scientia or “scientific knowledge” (not scientific in the modern empirical sense, but systematically gained by reasoning from self-evident principles or principles evident to the senses). Aquinas held that the “preambles” to faith, such as that God exists and that God is one could be proven, and for those who followed the proof a preamble would not be for them a matter of faith but of scientia, while for others it would remain a matter of faith. However, the articles of faith, such as the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the Incarnation, are not answerable to reason and are matters of faith for all.3 Aquinas’ thinking is fully in accord with the Christian creedal tradition, for which liturgical affirmations of faith take the form of a recitation of a creed, such as the Nicene Creed. The idea that faith is assent to propositional truths has endured in Christianity, particularly in Catholicism. In the nineteenth century Cardinal Newman (1801–90) wrote An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. In this work Newman follows the tradition that faith is propositional assent, but he distinguishes  St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, q. 1, a. 1, in Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, ed. Anton C. Pegis, vol. 2 (New York: Random House, 1945), p. 1056. 2  St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, q, 1, a. 2, in Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 2, p. 1057. 3  St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, q. 2, a. 2 and Summa Theologica, I, q. 11, a. 3, in Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1, pp.  20–21 and 88–90; St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, q, 1, a. 5, in Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 2, pp. 1061–1062. 1

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between two kinds of assent to the propositions of religious doctrine: real and notional assent. He writes: To give a real assent to it [a dogma of faith] is an act of religion; to give a notional, is a theological act.4

In a real assent a dogma “is discerned, rested in, and appropriated as a reality by the religious imagination.” In a notional assent a dogma “is held as a truth by the theological intellect.”5 In a real assent the “religious imagination” appropriates what is assented to “as a reality” through “images” of religious objects that can be vividly apprehended in experience independently of “the written records of Revelation . . . Knowledge of Scripture [and] the teaching of the Catholic Church,” but, Newman says, “it is obvious how great an addition in fulness and exactness is made to our mental image of the Divine Personality and Attributes, by the light of Christianity.”6 For Newman assent can only be to a proposition, and this holds for both real and notional assent. Moreover, the doctrinal proposition assented to in a real assent and in a notional assent (such as “There is one God”) are “one and the same proposition” held in different ways.7 The mode or manner of a real assent makes it a religious assent. Newman’s concern in the Grammar of Assent is the assent of belief, and he offers a qualification of his account. What he means by belief, he says, is “not precisely faith” because faith has as its ground revelation (as Aquinas maintained).8 But Newman does not stray from the view of faith as assent, for on Newman’s account faith requires assent because it requires the assent of belief. The idea that revelation is of religious truths, and faith is a propositional assent to the truth of what is revealed, as we have observed, is congenial to the recitation of creeds and church liturgy. The propositional construction of revelation makes revelation easy to articulate. It  John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, 6th ed. (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), p. 77 [electronic resource]. An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent was originally published in 1870. 5  Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, p. 77. 6  Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, p. 92. 7  Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, p. 93. 8  Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, p. 78. 4

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also makes it comparatively easy for both those opposed to religion and thinkers sympathetic to religion to evaluate and offer analyses of revelation. The philosopher of religion George Mavrodes, who was sympathetic to religion and was religious, explores three models of revelation in his book Revelation in Religious Belief: the manifestation model (God manifests his mercy), the communication model (God announces his commandments), and the causation model(God either implants a belief in a person or endows a person with the cognitive means of coming to that belief ). As his book’s title indicates, Mavrodes is interested in revelation’s import for religious belief, more specifically in its significance for the truth of what is religiously believed. Truth in the sense important for Mavrodes is possessed by propositions, the object of belief or knowledge when one believes that or knows that such and such is true. He is working within the context of Christianity and the religious beliefs that he has in mind are primarily the beliefs that there is a God, beliefs about God, and doctrinal matters. Not coincidentally he understands revelation as propositional or as importantly yielding a proposition revealed to be true.9 Other religious thinkers of the twentieth century were less committed to a propositional view of revelation. Mavrodes himself was aware that “modern theologians” were turning from the propositional view of revelation held by earlier theologians. We have already, in Chap. 3, noted John Baillie’s discussion of an understanding of revelation as nonpropositional or as not only propositional, according to which revelation is not primarily of truths about God but of “God Himself.” We noted his account of his own revelatory experience in which God “did reveal Himself to my soul.” Baillie was far from alone in seeing revelation as something other than the deliverance of a set of religious propositions. In addition to those mentioned by Baillie another modern theologian who turned from a propositional view of revelation was John Macquarrie (1919–2007). Macquarrie, a British theologian, makes the observation that “it would seem that almost anything in the world can be an occasion for revelation.”10 He distinguishes between “classic” or “primordial” revelation and  George Mavrodes, Revelation in Religious Belief (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988).  John Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology, 2nd ed. (New York: Scribners, 1977), p. 7.

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“subsequent” revelation. The classic or primordial revelation of a religious tradition is “a definitive disclosive experience of the holy granted to the founder or founders of the community.” In the “subsequent experience” of the community “the primordial revelation keeps coming alive, so to speak, in the ongoing life of the community.”11 The “almost anything” that can occasion revelation would seem to apply best to subsequent revelations, given Macquarrie’s dichotomy, and would apply, presumably, to the possible experience of any believer. In Macquarrie’s understanding – and here he may be referring to both classical and subsequent revelation – “the person who receives the revelation sees and hears no more than any other person in the situation might see or hear.” No further being is perceived. Rather the person who receives the revelation “sees the same things in a different way.” She or he sees an “an extra dimension” in the situation that is perceived. The person receiving the revelation, while not perceiving another being, “becomes aware of the being that is present and manifests in, with, and through these particular beings.”12 Macquarrie describes as a “popular misconception” the idea that revelation’s “content consists of a body of ready-made statements giving us information about matters inaccessible to our ordinary ways of knowing.”13 (Aquinas would have accepted this idea of revelation as it relates to the articles of faith, though not as it relates to the preambles.) In any event Macquarrie sees the propositional view of revelation as an “error.” and, he says, “[c]orresponding to this idea of revelation is an idea of faith as assent to revealed statements.” Contrary to this idea of faith, he affirms that “faith is not primarily assent to propositions, but an existential attitude of acceptance and commitment.”14 Going counter to the trend that John Baillie identified in both Protestantism and the Counter-Reformation, Macquarrie says that “[s]cripture is not itself revelation,” though “in conjunction with a present experience of the holy in the community of faith, the scriptures come  Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology, pp. 8 and 90.  Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology, p. 89 (Macquarrie’s emphasis). 13  Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology, p. 104. 14  Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology, p. 104. 11 12

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alive . . . and renew for us the disclosure of the holy, which was the content of the primordial revelation.”15 He could not be clearer, however that neither the disclosure of primordial revelation nor the renewal of subsequent revelation takes the form of a set of propositions. Langton Gilkey (1919–2004) was an American Protestant theologian who understood revelation, or “general revelation,” broadly and for whom revelation relates to “ultimacy” – the ultimate concerns and questions of human existence. While as a Christian theologian he was committed to the Christian revelation, he understood that there are also “secular” forms of revelation. He writes: “Revelation,” as we use that word in the context of this secular prolegomenon [his Naming the Whirlwind: The Renewal of GodLanguage] is that definite mode of experience in which a particular answer to . . . ultimate questions that arise in relation to all secular life manifests itself, is received, and so “known.” We are thus giving a “secular” ground in ordinary experience for the theological conception of revelation . . . .      Revelation so defined is universal in human experience.16

Gilkey continues: Correspondingly, symbolic answers, latent in all human awareness although received always in a particular natural, social, and historical context, are universally symbolized and thematized in the omnipresent religious life of man – and rationalized in other, more “secular” communities into the bases of man’s many philosophical visions.17

For Gilkey, in “general revelation . . . the universal presence – or sense of absence  – of the unconditioned and the sacred enters into human  Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology, p. 9  Langton Gilkey, Naming the Whirlwind: The Renewal of God-Language (Indianapolis IN and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), pp. 426–427. 17  Gilkey, Naming the Whirlwind, p. 427 (Gilkey’s emphasis). For Gilkey symbols are significant words or forms, religious or otherwise, that relate to “felt experience” and gain their meaning as they “thematize some significant area of common, ordinary experience” (271–272). “Everywhere,” Gilkey says in accord with his view of the universality of revelation, “men have symbolized the meaningfulness of the given” (427). 15 16

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awareness.” However it always does so in a particular form of experience, peculiar to a religious or secular community, that results in definite answers to the ultimate questions of existence. Thus, for Gilkey, “[g]eneral revelation is always and in each case special revelation.”18 In this way general revelation, always manifested in some form of special revelation, for Gilkey is universal, although the symbols central to one special revelation can be very different from those central to another, as is the case with secular special revelations and the Christian revelation. A naturalistic, rationalistic, or positivistic philosopher quite naturally makes ultimate the symbolic forms, the criteria of truth, and the values of the scientific and democratic communities in which that thinker spiritually exists. In the same way, most Christian theologians appeal to the symbolic forms, criteria, and values of their own Christian tradition. In each form of thought, personal experience of clarification and release, apprehended within some communal tradition and its forms – what we have chosen to call a “revelation” of the ultimate ground of reality and coherence – makes possible our thinking and thus sets for each of us those definite principles of reality, truth, and value in terms of which we answer the fundamental questions of our common life.19

There is a difference in understood provenance between secular special revelations and the Christian and other religious special revelations. No religious tradition, Gilkey observes, understands itself as having invented or discovered “its fundamental symbols,” those of its revelation. Rather they are accepted as “given.”20 Certainly the Western monotheistic traditions regard their foundational revelations as given by God. Gilkey is clear that “[f ]or Christians, this category of special revelation [that is, its special revelation], providing particular, unique, and normative form to what is known in general revelation, is of course essential.”21 At the same time, though, he is clear that, under his analysis, the Christian special  Gilkey, Naming the Whirlwind, pp. 427–428.  Gilkey, Naming the Whirlwind, pp. 437–438. 20  Gilkey, Naming the Whirlwind, p. 446. 21  Gilkey, Naming the Whirlwind, p. 453. 18 19

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revelation shares much with secular special revelations in structure and function. For Gilkey implicitly and by implication revelation is not essentially propositional. His understanding of revelation does not require its content to be propositional. Revelation is experienced in terms of experience-­ related symbols and provides answers to ultimate questions of life. It need not be, and for secular forms is not, religious. It provides answers to “fundamental questions of our common life” not as a proposition answers a question, Gilkey’s analysis allows, but as an enabling sense of direction answers the question of how to proceed. Both religious revelation and secular revelation can provide answers to life’s fundamental questions in a nonpropositional way given Gilkey’s way of understanding revelation, but from the perspective of this book’s concerns it is especially significant that religious revelation can do so. Another modern theologian was John Hick (1922–2012). Hick, who wrote and published in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, was both a theologian and a philosopher of religion, publishing on the one hand A Christian Theology of Religions and on the other An Interpretation of Religion. The former contains discussions of the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, and the latter is an extended development of Hick’s pluralism, a philosophical theory – or hypothesis, to use Hick’s term – that offers an overview of the relationship the world’s major religions have to religious reality and to each other. Hick’s thinking, though, was not bifurcated but unified. Though multifacedted, embracing a number of issues in Christian theology and covering a range of religious traditions from Hinduism and Buddhism to Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, his approach and views had both theological and philosophical dimensions. Hick in his Interpretation does not focus on revelation in the Christian or any one religious tradition. Rather he discusses how religious reality – the Real – is experienced differently in different traditions, how the Real is “experienced-as” differently in the various traditions. But in at least one place he does speak of the “universal revelatory activity” of “ the ultimate divine reality,” or the Real as he came to call it, which is “differently

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perceived and responded to within the different cultural ways of being human.”22 In his pluralistic thinking Hick distinguishes between the Real an sich, the Real in-itself, and the Real as experienced and thought (experienced­as). Hick draws upon and adapts the philosophical thought of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) for his category of the Real an sich.23 The Real an sich is beyond human conception and not amenable to attributions, although the Real as phenomenally experienced in revelation and as conceived and thought of in the various major religious traditions of the world (as experienced-­as) is experienced in terms of human concepts (such as good, merciful, compassionate).24 As Hick was aware, the idea that God or the ultimate religious reality is beyond human conception is represented in a strain of more than one religious tradition. In the apophatic mysticism of Dionysius in the Christian tradition God is beyond words and concepts.25 In the Hindu tradition in the Advaita Vedāntist teaching of Śankara (eighth century) no human words or concepts can be applied to Brahman, the ultimate reality.26 Yet for Hick, though the Real an sich cannot be experienced as it is in itself, it is experienced in the various traditions of the world. In theistic traditions it is experienced-as God, as a persona, as the God of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam or as Vishnu or another god in the Hindu tradition; and in nontheistic traditions it is experienced-as an Absolute, as an impersona, as Brahman or nirvāna or another Absolute.27 For Hick these different perceptions of the Real come under the “universal revelatory  John Hick, “In Defense of Religious Pluralism,” in Problems of Religious Pluralism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), p.  97. Hick concedes that the term “revelation” is “much more at home within the theistic [than within] the non-theistic traditions.” 23  John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent, 2nd ed. (New Haven CT and London: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 236 and 241–243. 24  Hick, An Interpretation of Religion, pp. 245–246. 25  Dionysius, The Divine Names, Chap. 1. 588C, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York and Hahwah NJ: Paulist Press, 1987), p. 50, and Mystical Theology, Chap. 1, 2, 1000A-B, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, p. 136. The fifth or sixth century author who took the name “Dionysius” in apparent reference to Dionysius the Areopagite (Acts 17. 34) is sometimes called “Pseudo-Dionysius.” 26  Arvind Sharma, The Philosophy of Religion and Advaita Vedānta: A Comparative Study of Religion and Reason (University Park PA: The Pennsylvania State University press, 1995), pp. 92–96. 27  Hick, An Interpretation of Religion, p. 245.

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activity” of the ultimate divine reality of which he speaks. Revelation in these forms may be propositional, reflecting the different conceptions of God or of a nontheistic Absolute, the different religious doctrines, and the different normative teachings that characterize the diverse major religious traditions of the world. So Hick’s view allows. Also, though, for Hick’s view, God himself may be experienced (experienced-as) in a revelatory experience (as for Baillie); or Brahman or nirvāna or another nonpersonal religious Absolute may be experienced (experienced-as), as opposed to a propositional revelation. Thus, for Hick, the “ultimate divine reality” does reveal itself to human beings, just not directly as it is in itself. Extending Hick’s categories, to the extent that the Real an sich is revealed beyond the masks of its personae and impersonae, this dimension of its revelation, being beyond conception, would not be propositional. However, this dimension would not register in human experience for Hick. For him the religious revelations received in the various traditions of the world are always culturally conditioned and conditioned by the religious concepts of the tradition. A theme of this chapter has been a tension in the Christian tradition between seeing revelation as propositional and seeing it as nonpropositional, as it would be if of God himself. Summing up that theme, in a main current of recent Protestant and nonCatholic theology there has been an emphasis upon or at least an acknowledgment or allowance of revelation in a nonpropositional form, which correlates, one must assume, with the revelatory experience of many nonCatholics and, remembering the Marian revelatory visions noted in Chap. 3, of Catholics too. At the same time the various traditions of the world that give a foundational place to revelation – both theistic and nontheistic – retain at their root a recognition of propositional revelation.

9 Views of Revelation

There are many views of revelation. Indeed, there are many types of views of revelation. In the previous chapter we examined several theological views of revelation. On one theological view revelation is of truths propositional in form; on another theological view revelation is not of truths about God but in revelatory experience God reveals himself. In the Hindu tradition there are two views of revelation: the view of the Nyāya school is that revelation is given by God, while the Advaita Vedātist view is that revelation, though cosmic, is not given by God. If we view revelation as divided into sorts or forms according to its phenomenal medium, we will regard revelation as a complex phenomenon with such forms as voices heard or intellectually received, dreams, and visions. If we view revelation as divided into sorts according to content, we will see revelation as having such different forms as commandments given by God, divine remonstration, and divine guidance given by the Holy Spirit to peoples, councils, and individuals. If we view revelation as what is foundational to religious traditions, we will or may see it as inspiring the scriptures or holy books of religious traditions. Such an institutional view of revelation, as we may call it, allows but contrasts with a view of revelation as what may be given to individuals when they © The Author(s) 2021 J. Kellenberger, Religious Revelation, Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53872-9_9

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are given individual guidance or come into the presence of God or the presence of religious reality differently conceived. All these types of views of revelation are tradition-grounded in that they address traditional forms of revelation as they are found in the various religious traditions of the world. Also there are what we might term embracive views of revelation, views that widen the concept of revelation and allow it to embrace experiences other than traditionally recognized revelations. Under this category there are both religious and philosophical embracive views. A religious embracisve view is offered by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834). Schleiermacher asked “What is revelation?” His answer was: Every original and new communication of the Unknown to man is a revelation, as, for example, every such moment of conscious insight as I have just referred to. Every intuition and original feeling proceeds from revelation.1

Later he modified his definition of revelation slightly while retaining its essential germ: it becomes difficult to avoid a widened application of the idea [of revelation] to the effect that every original idea which arises in the soul, whether for an action or for a work of art, and which can neither be understood as an imitation nor be satisfactorily explained by means of external stimuli and preceding mental state, may be regarded as revelation.2

Schleiermacher is more circumspect in his second definition of revelation, written thirty years after his first, but both definitions allow as revelatory many if not all “original ideas” and “insights.” In short Schleiermacher’s embracive view of revelation conflates religious revelation with what are popularly called “revelations” – quotidian insights, as  Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, trans. John Oman (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), p. 89. On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers was originally published in 1799. 2  Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith. Quoted by Langton Gilkey, Naming the Whirlwind, p. 427, n. 6. The Christian Faith was originally published in 1830. 1

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I called them in Chap. 1, which may be about such mundane matters as how to fix a leak in the plumbing. Such quotidian insights have no religious content or context and, though the religious may thank God for them, are often attended by no religious feelings. Langton Gilkey saw a connection between his own view of revelation and Schleiermacher’s, but for Gilkey, even when revelations are secular, they address the “fundamental questions” of life as opposed to mundane concerns and in this way have a connection to a religious dimension. George Berkeley (1685–1753) provides us with a philosophical embracive view of revelation. Embracive views extend the boundary of the concept of revelation to include what is not traditionally seen as divine revelation, as Schleiermacher extended the concept to mundane original ideas and insights. Berkeley similarly extends the concept, although he does so implicitly. Berkeley, who was a bishop in the Anglican Church of Ireland, was alive to the religious implications of his philosophical writings. Though he explicitly states the implications of his philosophy for the existence of God he leaves the implications for revelation implicit. Implicit though they are they are nevertheless far reaching, including a far greater swath of human experience than Schleiermacher’s explicit remarks on revelation. Bishop Berkeley argued against materialism – the view that matter as an extended substance exists independently of perception – and for an epistemological idealism – the view that all the real things that are perceived are “ideas.” In his A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge and his Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous Berkeley undertakes to disprove materialism and prove his idealism. He argued that all we ever see or in any way perceive by the senses are ideas. We never perceive matter. Thus, Berkeley maintained, there is no evidence for the existence of matter, and, he argued, the very notion is contradictory. As all that is perceived are ideas, and ideas by definition are in a mind so that matter cannot be where they originate, it must be that they originate in a mind. They do not originate in human minds, for humans passively receive sensory ideas (what they see, feel, hear, taste, and smell). Accordingly Berkeley concluded that “there is a Mind which affects me

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every moment with all the sensory impressions I perceive.”3 And that Mind is God. God not only exhibits to humans all that they perceive but provides in his wisdom and goodness the order and variety of their perceptions. Berkeley saw materialism as encouraging atheism because it postulated a substance outside the mind of God with causal powers, thus detracting from the power and omnipresence of God. He saw his idealism as proving the “being of a God and the incorruptibility of the soul.”4 It proves the first because for his idealism the existence of the perceived world requires the constant action of God and the second because souls or minds, being immaterial, are not subject to the deterioration associated with matter. So, for Berkeley, his epistemological idealism provides significant support for “religion” and belief in God. The God whose existence he believes he has proven is the traditional God of Christianity, a wise and benevolent all-powerful Creator. Our concern is not to critique Berkeley’s reasoning but to note the implications for religious revelation carried by his idealism. Although Berkeley does not explicitly say so, his God is also a God who provides to each and every human being moment by moment a steady stream of revelations, allowing that what God imparts to (the mind of ) a human being is a revelation. For Berkeley divine revelation is ubiquitous and indistinguishable from the uninterrupted sensory input of our conscious lives, a sensory input often received without a scintilla of religious feeling. Contrasting with both tradition-grounded and embracive views of revelation are ontological views of revelation. Ontological views of revelation address its ontological status (the status of its being or reality) and its epistemological status (its status regarding perception and knowledge). There are three distinct ontological views of revelation.

 George Berkeley, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (London, 1713), Second Dialogue, p. 79 (emphasis deleted, and I have modernized eighteenth century capitalization and typography) [electronic resource]. The original publication date of Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous is 1713. Berkeley’s A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, which contains reasoning parallel to that in Three Dialogues in a nondialogue presentation, was originally published in 1710. 4  Berkeley, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, Third Dialogue, p. 155. 3

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First, the view that revelation has a solely divine source, a source in religious reality, is divinely given, or, in nontheistic traditions, attained by meditation, and is caused by a unique and sufficient cause that makes it inerrant. Second, the view that revelation is purely subjective, with only a psychological or neurological source. Third, the view that revelation is produced by an interaction of the divine and human subjectivity. As they stand the First, Second, and Third views are mutually exclusive. But if the First view is modified to be the simple affirmation of a divine source of revelation, the Second view is modified to be the claim that revelation has a psychological or neurological mediate cause, and the Third view is left unmodified in affirming an interaction of the divine and human subjectivity, then they are not mutually exclusive and all can be true together. With these modifications the inerrancy claim drops out of the First view. The unmodified First view, if accepted by each of the world’s various religious traditions, leads each to reject the revelation claims of the others. If a religious tradition has a doctrine that it regards as revealed which contradicts the revealed doctrine of another tradition, then on the face of it not both can be true (as the revealed doctrine of the Trinity contradicts the revealed doctrines of Judaism and Islam). If each religious tradition has revealed doctrines that contradict the revealed doctrines of every other tradition, then all the religious traditions of the world are logically incompatible with one another. This state of affairs in conjunction with the unmodified First view leads to the claim of religious exclusivism, which put one way is that “my religious tradition is the one true religion and the alleged revelations of the other traditions that contradict those of my tradition are false and not genuine revelations.” The modified First view on the other hand escapes this implication, for, while it claims an ultimate source for revelation, all religious revelation, it does not assert inerrancy. It allows that some or even all revelations, though they are revelations, may to some degree be in error. Although the possibility that their received and possibly foundational revelations are in error would not be readily accepted by religious traditions, the possibility of error in what is revealed is allowed by religious thinkers who accept the Third

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view, which by its recognition of a human element in revelation accounts for revelatory error. The modified Second view, unlike the unmodified Second view, does not deny an ultimate divine source for revelation. It affirms only a psychological or neurological mediate source or cause, which allows that the divine is the ultimate source. The modified Second view recognizes that when persons receive revelations there may be changes in their brain activity and allows that this activity may be neurologically identified. It allows that without such changed brain activity human beings may not receive revelations. To prove that the Second view in its unmodified form is true, one would have to show that the divine – God or religious reality – is not the cause of this brain activity. It is not sufficient to show that there is changed brain activity (or other physiological changes with psychological effects) correlated with religious revelatory experiences: such correlations are not denied by the modified Second view. Neurological researchers who have investigated the activity of the human brain during episodes of religious experience and found that certain changes in brain activity correlate with religious experience recognize that their findings do not exclude an ultimate divine source for religious experience.5 The Third view posits a human contribution to revelations. In one elaboration of the Third view the subjectivity of the one receiving the revelation, perhaps formed by his or her culture or religious tradition, affects what is experienced as revealed, as the condition of one’s hearing can affect what one hears. The subjective reception of revelation provides an interpretation of what is revealed, but it is an interpretive element that is integral to and inseparable from the revelatory experience and without which there would be no humanly received revelations. Several religious thinkers have aligned themselves with the Third view. Rabbi Harold Schulweis does, at least regarding instances of revelation that involve contention (as noted in Chap. 2). John Baillie does in his recognition of both human and divine elements in revelation (noted in Chap. 3). And  Patrick McNamara, The Neuroscience of Religious Experience (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 11. A fuller discussion of McNamara’s neurological research is in my Religious Epiphanies Across Traditions and Cultures (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 246–249. 5

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John Hick does in his exposition of religious pluralism (discussed in Chap. 8). The interaction of human subjectivity and the divine postulated by the third view may be understood in more than one way. For Rabbi Schulweis the interaction is a dialogue, a give and take, as when Abraham contends with God (Gen. 18.23–33). For John Baillie the two elements are inextricably intermingled in all revelation and what is given by God – the divine element – has no imperfection, but the reception of what is given – the human element – always admits of imperfection. With imperfection in receiving divine revelation the possibility of error is introduced. John Hick early on was in essential agreement with Baillie on the dual character of revelation and the mode of the two elements’ interaction.6 Later, when he developed his religious pluralism, Hick provided a different understanding of the interaction of the divine and the human. In Hick’s religious pluralism the Real an sich, religious reality in itself, is never directly experienced as it is in itself, but always experienced and thought of by human beings through the religious concepts of their respective religious traditions, such as Christianity and Buddhism. In this way, not human imperfection, but human conceptualization became the human contribution to revelation. As the Real in-itself is never directly experienced but always “experienced-as” through a tradition’s concepts of religious reality, no religious tradition, for Hick, has a revelation of the nature of the Real as it is in itself. Each, however, is true to it own experience of the Real. In this sense no religious traditions is in error about its received revelation. It would seem, though, that Hick’s pluralism allows entry to the question: Could the received revelation of one tradition be closer to the nature of the Real an sich than others? Could the received revelations of theistic traditions be closer to the nature of the Real an sich than the received or obtained revelations of nontheistic traditions, or vice versa? Hick’s pluralism seems to allow an affirmative answer to these questions and thus, in  In Faith and Knowledge Hick endorses an understanding of revelation as a conjunction of God’s activity and human experience, quoting William Temple, and cites Baillie’s The Idea of Revelation in Recent Thought (on how Protestant theology has turned from a propositional view of revelation). John Hick, Faith and Knowledge 2nd ed. (Ithaca NY and New  York: Cornell University Press, 1966), p. 28 and p. 30, n. 39. 6

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this way, allow for error in revelation. Hick himself allowed that in a post-mortem “eschatological scenario” it is “logically possible” that it will be made clear that religious reality is theistic or nonthesitic, and even that a specific set of dogmas, such as those of Mormonism or Theravāda Buddhism, “correspond precisely with reality,” although he thought it more likely that in a process of post-mortem development “many of the ideas embedded within each of the religious traditions will become variously modified or marginalised or superseded.”7 That there is a human reception of revelation can hardly be denied. The unmodified Second view clearly would not deny human activity in revelation, but also the unmodified First view need not deny a degree of human participation in receiving a revelation. The Third view says more than this: it postulates an interaction of the divine and human in revelation, an interaction with its human contribution. It is to be noted, however, that the unglossed Third view as well as its three elaborations here recounted all recognize a divine contribution and source of revelation.

 John Hick, “In Defense of Religious Pluralism,” in Problems of Religious Pluralism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), p. 100. 7

10 Faith and Revelation

This book is informed by a general appreciation of the importance of revelation for religion. In this chapter, however, we will present a reason for religious traditions, particularly theistic traditions, to downgrade the importance of their foundational revelations, which in theistic traditions are revelations of God’s nature and actions. Our focus will be on the Abrahamic monotheisitic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, although we will also have occasion to bring nontheistic traditions into the ambit of our discussion. For believers in these monotheistic traditions religious faith is essential to their religiousness. Martin Luther (1483–1546) proclaimed justification by faith alone, sola fide, although he recognized works as flowing from faith. In the Catholic tradition faith infused with loving works stands opposed to Luther’s “by faith alone.” Yet in both the Protestant denominations and Catholicism faith in God is crucial for God’s justification. But moreover for both Protestant and Catholic Christianity and for Judaism and Islam faith defines a relationship to God. The faith that defines a believer’s relationship to God is faith in God or belief in God, as opposed to beliefs-that relating to God, including the belief that God exists and other propositional beliefs-that about God. © The Author(s) 2021 J. Kellenberger, Religious Revelation, Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53872-9_10

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John Calvin (1509–64), in his way, noted this distinction as the distinction between “two kinds of faith,” In one kind, he said, one “believes that God exists and regards as true history that which [one] is told of Christ.” In the other kind we “believe, not only that God and Christ exist, but also believe in God and Christ,” putting “all our hope and trust in one God and Christ.” The first kind, for Calvin, is “of no importance.”1 Calvin, to be sure, recognized that some beliefs-that about God and Christ are religiously important. In his commentary on the Apostles’ Creed, which is in the same chapter of the Institutes as his distinction between two kinds of faith and follows close upon it, Calvin says, “we believe that this one [Christ] is truly Jesus” and “[w]e believe also that he is Christ, that is anointed with all the graces of the Holy Spirit.” And “we believe that on the third day he arose from the dead” and “[w]e also believe in the Communion of the Saints, that is, that in the Catholic Church there is a mutual communication and participation of all goods by all the elect” and “[w]e believe in the resurrection of the flesh, that it shall come to pass that all the bodies of men shall be raised at the same time from corruption to incorruption, from mortality to immortality.”2 Calvin, in short, affirms as religiously important all the religious beliefs-­ that, or doctrinal beliefs, that are entailed by the Apostles’ Creed. These beliefs, for Calvin, are not among the beliefs-that which he discounts as “of no importance.” Calvin is hardly alone in the Christian tradition in recognizing as religiously important various doctrinal beliefs, propositional in form, that are crucial for the Christian teaching. The distinction between, on the one hand, faith in God or belief in God, and, on the other hand, beliefs-that relating to God does not imply that no propositional beliefs-that have religious importance within religious traditions. However, it remains that within the Christian tradition, and within Judaism and Islam, it is faith or belief in God that creates a faith relationship to God. In these Abrahamic traditions the relationship to God that faith in God brings a believer to is a relationship of faith defined by trust in God. Believers may have other religiously affective attitudes  John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion–1536, Chap. 2, in John Calvin: Selections from His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (n.p.: Scholars Press, 1975), p. 274. 2  Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion–1536, Chap. 2, in John Calvin: Selections from His Writings, pp. 290, 292, 302, and 303–304. 1

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toward God besides trust, including awe and love, which also define important relationships to God. But the relationship to God of faith and trust is fundamental, and is entered by believers through their faith in God. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim believers believe there to be and have faith in the same God, the God of Abraham. The three traditions share a core concept of God: creator of all that is, good, all-powerful, merciful, steadfast in his love, wise, awe inspiring, everlasting, and eternal. Beyond this shared core, however, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have different filled-out concepts of God, each tradition taking its enlarged conception of God to be revealed. It is included in the filled-out concept of God in the Jewish tradition that God gave the final law to Moses. In the filled-­ out concept of Christianity Jesus is Christ, the Son of God, and is the fulfilment of the law, and God is triune or Trinitarian. For Islam’s filled-­ out concept God made Muhammad the seal of the prophets, the final messenger, with God’s final message. Not only are the filled-out concepts different in the three traditions, on the face of it they are incompatible. If Moses was given the final law, then Christ is not the fulfilment of the law and Muhammad was not given God’s final message. If Christ is the fulfilment of the law, then Moses was not given the final law and Muhammad was not given God’s final message. If Muhammad was given God’s final message, then Moses was not given God’s final law and Christ is not the fulfilment of the law. And if God is triune, then God is not one in the sense Judaism and Islam understand God to be one. So, if each tradition insists that its filled-out concept of God is true and applies to God, as each does, how can it be that each believes in, has faith in, the same God? They can and do by virtue of the logic, the internal grammar of faith-in, or put more traditionally, by virtue of the nature of faith-in. Religious faith is distinguishable from faith in persons, but in important ways relevant to the present discussion they share certain features of the logic or nature of faith-in. Accordingly we can display the relevant features of the nature of faith-in by considering an example of different individuals having faith in the same person.3 Say that a young  Faith-in, as faith in God and faith in a person, is synonymous with belief in God or in a person (when belief in God is not simply belief that there is a God). In other contexts belief-in has a different meaning or application, as in believing in having a good lawn or believing in earning your own way. In such contexts the objects of belief-in is not a person or God, and what is affirmed is a 3

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woman and a young man who are cousins have faith in a distant aunt (each believes that she cares for her/him and trusts that she would somehow help if she/he were in need). Neither has met the aunt, and the faith of each flows mainly from family stories about their aunt and how she has helped in the past. In fact not a lot is known about her. Her nephew believes her to be middle-aged, immensely wealthy, and to live somewhere in Europe, while her niece believes her to be quite elderly, of moderate means but well connected to those with wealth, and to reside in a South American country. The first point to be noted is that both the niece and nephew have faith in the same person, their aunt, and they do so even though they have different and mutually exclusive conceptions of her. They both believe her to be benevolent, understanding, and able to help, but beyond that, in the biographical details of the way they conceive of her, they have different and incompatible beliefs about her. Perhaps one of them has a better grounded set of biographical beliefs about the aunt, but this would not mean that only she/he has faith in the aunt. The second point to be noted is that the faith in their aunt of the niece and nephew is not affected by the truth or falsity of their biographical beliefs about her. Let us say that the beliefs about her aunt held by the niece are accurate: she is elderly, has only moderate means, and lives in South America. This would mean that the nephew’s conception of his aunt is wrong. But it would not mean that he does not have faith in her. And, furthermore, if the two competing conceptions of the niece and nephew are both wrong (the aunt lives in Canada), that does not mean that they do not have faith in their aunt. Their faith is not contingent on their having an accurate conception of their aunt. To be sure, they must believe their aunt is good (and so will be benevolent), has the power to help, and has the wisdom or understanding to know how to help. These beliefs about their aunt are internal to their faith in their aunt and its trust in her, as opposed to their biographical beliefs about her, their conceptions of her. matter of policy or personal action. Our concern in this chapter is with the nature of faith-in as it applies to a person or to God and by extension with belief in a person or in God, when belief in God is synonymous with faith in God, and not merely the belief that there is a God.

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Religious faith in God may be significantly different from faith in persons in various ways – in, say, depth of commitment and attendant feelings. Religious faith is after all religious. Yet the basic concept of faith-in is the same. In its essence in both applications faith-in is trust-in, and the same two points we have noted in relation to faith in a person, or their analogues, apply to faith in God. Believers in different theistic traditions can have faith in the same God though they have different and even incompatible filled-out concepts of God. Second, believers can have faith in God though their filled-out concepts of God may be false. The truth of a believer’s filled-out concept of God is irrelevant to the viability or “truth” of a believer’s faith in God. Of course to have faith in God, religious believers must believe in God’s goodness, power, and wisdom (that God is benevolent, has the power to help, and understanding of how to help), but these beliefs are internal to their faith in God, in contradistinction to their filled out concepts of God. Belief in God’s goodness, belief in his power, and belief in his wisdom are internal to and so necessary for faith in God, trust in God, in that if any one of these is lost (as may happen if a believer succumbs to the problem of evil and comes to think that an all-good, all-powerful God would not allow an evil that has befallen him/her to occur, or allow the many evils of the world to occur), the believer will ipso fact lose his/her trust in God. By contrast, if a believer in an Abrahamic tradition comes to reject an element of the filled-out concept of God in her/his religious tradition – if a Christian, for instance, comes to reject a belief in the triune nature of God or a Jew comes to think there are moral insights not contained in the law given to Moses – while such a rejection of received belief might mean that the believer has departed from the complement of required beliefs of the believer’s tradition, it would not necessarily lead to a loss of trust in God. Such a departure from a full belief in the filled-out concept of God of one’s tradition, it should be noted, would not amount to a denial of the core concept of God shared by the Abrahamic traditions. The idea that one can have a faith relationship to God through faith in God without accepting in belief the true filled-out concept of God fits ill with the religious proclivity to see an affirmation of faith in a recitation of a creed. Creeds consist of or entail doctrinal statements, and when an affirmation of faith takes the form of an expression of belief in doctrinal

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statements faith becomes faith-that or belief-that religious propositions are true, as opposed to faith in God. More than one religious thinker has thought that creedal allegiance was distinct from the center of religious depth. Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) captured this perception in his retelling of the folktale of the three hermits. In Tolstoy’s retold story the three hermits are holy men who live alone on an island in the sea north of Russia. They are woefully ignorant of the doctrine of the Trinity; their prayer is: “Three are ye, three are we, have mercy upon us.” Yet in Tolstoy’s story they are blessed with miraculous powers. The holiness of their lives is religiously decisive; their doctrinal errors are irrelevant.4 That a faith relationship to God does not require having only true beliefs about God follows from the logic of faith in its general concept. It is not a peculiarity of religious faith. Moreover this tolerance applies to other religious relationships to God that believers may enter and which complement a faith relationship. It applies to awe-defined and love-­ defined relationships to God. For they are similar to a faith relationship in their relevant features. A relationship of awe (or awe and reverence: fear of God) internally requires a belief or sense of God’s awe-inspiring majesty, and a relationship of love of God, when responsive to God’s love, internally requires a belief or sense of God’s love, as it is expressed in images of a loving Father or a loving Mother, as for Julian of Norwich.5 But again neither of these relationships requires holding only true beliefs-­ that about God. Faith relationships to God, and awe-defined and love-defined relationships to God, are not defined by beliefs about God as they are found in theistic traditions’ filled-out concepts of God. Except for internally required beliefs about God they are independent of beliefs about God’s nature or actions. Another class of relationships to God or religious reality even more free of religious beliefs-that is instantiated in both theistic and nontheistic religious traditions. Relationships of this sort, which may  Leo Tolstoy, “The Three Hermits,” in Twenty-Three Tales, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude (London: Oxford University Press, 1906), pp. 193–201. Tolstoy’s story was originally published in 1886. 5  Julian of Norwich, Showings (Long text), Chap. 59, in Julian of Norwich: Showings, trans. Edmund Colledge, O. S. A. and James Walsh, S. J. (New York, Ramsey, and Toronto Paulist Press, 1978), pp. 295–297. 4

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be called “abiding relationships” or “praxis relationships,” are defined by practice. A Christian example is abiding in love. In John’s first letter he says, “he who abides in love abides in God,” and this love is for “one another” as well as for God (1 Jn. 4.12 and 16). Another example, shared by the Jewish and Christian traditions, is “walk[ing] humbly with . . . God” in justice and kindness (Mic. 6.8). In the Buddhist tradition one may enter a praxis relationship to nirvāna through compassion for all sentient beings.6 How does all this relate to revelation? All the relationships to God or religious reality that we have discussed are available to the religious independently of their belief that all the religious propositions or doctrines taken to be revealed in their traditions are true. In the religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam their filled-out concepts of God are taken as revealed and are or may be presented as scriptural. Faith in these traditions may take the form of belief-that or faith-that God has the attributes or nature given to him in a tradition’s filled-out concept (such as that he is triune or led the people of Israel out of Egypt), but also it may take the form of faith in God, trust in God. Faith in God, which in theistic traditions forms a faith relationship to God, is not dependent upon having a, or the, correct concept of God. One’s beliefs about God, his nature and his actions, can be wrong and yet one can have faith in God. In this way the existence of a faith relationship for the many believers in theistic traditions, and in the Abrahamic traditions in particular, does not require the truth of their respective tradition’s filled-out concepts of God. Belief in the truth of the propositions of a tradition’s filled-out concept of God, though they may be regarded as received in a foundational revelation, is not a necessary fulcrum for believers in those traditions having faith in God. And this can be recognized by religious believers in one theistic tradition as they contemplate the faith of the believers in other theistic traditions. So too for the other entered relationships to God that we have noted: awe-defined and love-defined relationships. So too for the praxis relationships to God or to religious reality nontheistically  I have discussed the logic of faith relationships and abiding/praxis relationships in connection with different concerns in several previous publication, most recently in Religious Epiphanies Across Traditions and Cultures, pp. 263–270. 6

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conceived. Our reflections in this chapter do not constitute a refutation or dismissal of any religious tradition’s foundational revelation, but they do provide a somewhat revised perspective on the religious importance of those revelations, and they do provide a reason for adjusting downward that importance.

11 Pervasive Revelation

Religious revelation may take any of several forms ranging from the seminal and foundational revelations that traditions look to and honor to the personal revelations received by individuals in which they are given guidance or comfort or, in theistic traditions, come to a sense of God’s presence. Revelation in one form or another may be universal. More than one of the religious writers we have cited see revelation as universal. For Langton Gilkey revelation is a mode of experience in which answers to “ultimate questions” are received. It always occurs in a particular “natural, social, and historical context.” But though particular in its various forms it is “universal in human existence.” That is, for Gilkey, revelation in some particular and special form occurs universally. In this view he is close to John Hick, whose implicit view of revelation we discussed alongside Gilkey’s in Chap. 8. Both Gilkey and Hick have in mind revelations that are foundational to religious traditions, although for Gilkey revelation is also broader in that it can take “secular” forms. For Hick revelation is religious revelation in that it occurs in religious traditions and it is universal in that it occurs universally in all the world’s major religious traditions, though the form it takes – the way religious reality is experienced in different traditions – varies in Hick’s pluralism. For Gilkey revelation © The Author(s) 2021 J. Kellenberger, Religious Revelation, Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53872-9_11

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is universal across humankind. For Hick revelation is universal across religious traditions. The concern of this chapter is with pervasive revelation. It is not with revelation that is universal. Although pervasive revelation may potentially be universal, what makes it pervasive is not that potential. Rather, pervasive revelation is pervasive by virtue of potentially occurring in all the dimensions of human life: in its possibility it pervades human experience. John Macquarrie motioned toward the pervasive nature of revelation when he observed that it seems “almost anything in the world can be an occasion for revelation.” In the Jewish and Christian traditions the Psalms bear witness to the pervasiveness of God’s revelation of himself. God’s presence is revealed in the heavens, which proclaim God’s righteousness (Ps. 97.6) and tell his glory (Ps. 19.1). The heavens are the “work of thy fingers” (Ps. 8.3). God’s presence is felt in much more than the majesty of the heavens. God “speaks and summons the earth from the rising of the sun to its setting” (Ps. 50.1). But also God’s presence is revealed in the gushing of springs, the growing of grass, and there being plants to cultivate (Ps. 104.10 and 14). “O Lord, how manifold are they works!” exclaims the Psalmist. There is no place where the presence of God is not to be found: if one ascends to heaven God is there, as he is in Sheol and in the “uttermost parts of the sea” (Ps. 139.7–9). God’s revelatory presence is to be found within the small events of one’s life. When one lies down and sleeps and wakes again one is sustained by the Lord (Ps. 3.5); the Lord keeps one’s going out and coming in (Ps. 121.8). The pervasive experience of God’s presence so richly expressed in the Psalms is paradigmatic of theistic pervasive revelation. Pervasive revelatory experience is religious experience continuous with the revelatory experience of religious tradition, although it need not be the Judeo-­ Christian tradition, and though continuous with religious tradition it can take a form that does not embody the symbols of any established religious tradition. Pervasive revelation, the subject of this chapter, is religious revelation received with a felt sense of encounter or religious realization. It is distinguishable from the broadened ways of understanding revelation given to us by Friedrich Schleiermacher and Bishop Berkeley. In the embracive views of Schleiermacher and Berkeley revelation becomes more pervasive than in a traditional understanding of

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revelation, but its status as religious revelation is compromised. For Schleiermacher revelation becomes pervasive by being found in familiar and common movements of consciousness. Mundane insights are counted as revelations by Schleiermacher, and original ideas are not just “revelations” in the popular sense but become revelation in the religious sense. For Berkeley revelation is as pervasive as waking sensory experience because for Berkeley our moment-to-moment sensory experience is itself God’s directly imparted revelation. While each of these two thinkers, or others on their behalf, can claim that all the experiences embraced by their categories of revelation – mundane insights and all or many original ideas for Schleiermacher and every instance of sensory experience for Berkeley  – are religious revelations, clearly many insights and original ideas are gained with no sense of a divine presence or communication and very much sensory experience is had with no felt sense of a divine provenance. By contrast, under our category pervasive revelation is revelation within the sphere of religious significance received with a felt sense of God or an encounter with the transcendent, though not necessarily within an established religious tradition. The Psalms exhibit the presence of pervasive revelation in the Jewish and Christian traditions. In the Islamic tradition acknowledgment of pervasive revelation is provided by Abū Hāmad al-Ghazli and Rābi‘a al‘Adawiyya. As we noted in Chap. 4 al-Ghazli announces: “All that we perceive by our senses bears undeniable witness to the existence of God and His power and His knowledge and the rest of His attributes.” The idea that God reveals himself and his attributes in what we perceive (not through inference, but directly in felt experience) al-Ghazali, as we noted, shares with St. Paul. It is also found in Psalm 97, where the heavens proclaim God’s righteousness. For al-­ Ghazali God reveals himself pervasively in all that we perceive, and he goes on to name stones, plants, trees, living creatures, the stars, and more.1 Rābi‘a expresses her sense of a pervasive revelation of God’s presence when she says, “my Beloved is always with me.”  There is a superficial resemblance to Berkeley. The difference is that in Berkeley’s embracive view of revelation sensory experience is God’s revelation by virtue of God exhibiting to perceivers all that they perceive, though they have no sense of God’s presence in what they perceive, while for al-­ 1

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Pervasive revelation may take the form of God or God’s presence being revealed in all that is perceived and in all the aspects of life. It can also take nontheistic forms. D. T. Suzuki (1870–1966), a well-known writer on Zen Buddhism, brings to our attention the presence of pervasive revelation in the Buddhist tradition. In the introduction to a selection of Suzuki’s writings on Zen William Barrett observes that “the Zen writings abound in statements that the Buddha-nature is to be found everywhere, in the dried up dirt-scraper, the cypress tree in the courtyard” and so on.2 The Buddha-nature in Mahayāna Buddhism is dharmakāya, the cosmic Buddha-nature shared by all buddhas. Barrett does not cite specific Zen writings that say that the Buddha-nature is found everywhere. Suzuki, however, names the Nirvana Sutra as a work in which the Buddha said that every being is in possession of the Buddha-nature. Suzuki does so in recounting a story about a Chinese Buddhist thinker that he tells us was called Dosho (also known as Zhu Daosheng and Tao-Sheng, d. 434). At a time in China when there was doubt in the Buddhist community whether all beings either having or lacking consciousness had the Buddha-­ nature, Dosho nevertheless had the strong intuition that all beings possess the Buddha-nature. His view was deemed heretical and he was expelled. In the story Suzuki recounts Dosho expounds his view to rocks in a field – and they nod in agreement.3 Ultimately Dosho’s view prevails. Suzuki calls it Dosho’s “intuition,” but the basis of his intuition may well have been a felt revelation of the ubiquity of the Buddha-nature. Subsequently it would become possible for Buddhists to have such a pervasive revelatory experience in the presence of rocks, dirt-scrapers, cypress trees, and before the many objects of the earth. The contemporary Vietnamese monk and Zen master Thich Nhat Hahn has written that after the historical Buddha died “the idea of Dharmakaya changed from the body of teaching to the glorious, eternal Buddha, who is always expounding the Dharma [the way of the Buddha].” And he says, “[a]ccording to Mahayana Buddhism, the Buddha is still Ghazali, and St. Paul and the Psalms, what we perceive about us bespeaks God’s presence and is received as revelatory of God. 2  William Barrett, Introduction to D. T. Suzuki, Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings of D. T. Suzuki, ed. William Barrett (Garden City NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1956), pp. xvii–xviii. 3  Suzuki, Zen Buddhism, pp. 247–248.

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alive, continuing to give Dharma talks. If you are attentive enough you will be able to hear his teachings from the voice of a pebble, a leaf, or a cloud in the sky.”4 “Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha,” Thich Nhat Hahn says, “is . . . a light ray sent by the sun of the Dharmakaya. Those in touch with Vairochana [the eternal Dharmakaya Buddha] are also in touch with Shakyamuni . . . . If we cannot listen directly to Shakyamuni, if we are open enough we can listen to Vairochana. In addition many other transformational Buddhas are also expounding the same Dharma – the trees, the birds, the violet bamboo, and the yellow chrysanthemums are all preaching the Dharma that Shakyamuni taught 2,500 years ago.”5 Thich Nhat Hahn does not speak of revelation that is given and received. He says instead that if we are attentive or open enough we will be able to hear the Buddha-teaching of the dharma from the leaves, clouds, trees, flowers, and from all that is about us. The Dharma of the Buddha is pervasively revealed we may say using our category, if we are able to hear it. For Thich Nhat Hahn one’s hearing the Buddha-teaching, the way of the Buddha, does not amount to hearing revealed truths, as for Dosho finding the Buddha-nature in all that is about us is not receiving revealed propositional truths. Similarly in the Christian and other theistic traditions the presence of God may be religiously experienced without any sense of revealed truths. One may experience the presence of God in a natural setting or a quiet moment without a propositional communication being received. The religious experience of coming into God’s presence is very different from prophetic experience, such as the experience of Isaiah and Jeremiah, which led them to say, “Thus says the Lord,” as it is different from mystical ecstatic experience. There is an affective side to experiencing the presence of God. In some settings feeling the presence of God may be comforting, or it may be disturbing. Every experience of the presence of God is marked by some degree of religious awe, awe felt before the awe-inspiring presence of God, although the religious awe that attends experiencing God’s presence may be low key. Often it is not consciousness-wrenching but allows a continuation of an equable demeanor. The sense of God’s presence and  Thich Nhat Hahn, Living Buddha, Living Christ (New York: Riverhead Books, 1995), p. 51.  Thich Nhat Hahn, Living Buddha, Living Christ, pp. 146–147.

4 5

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its attendant awe may be received in the quietude of prayer, but it is not limited to prayer. Evelyn Underhill has written: “Such a sense of the divine presence may go side by side with the daily life and normal mental activities of its possessor.”6 Among believers a felt experience of God’s presence in one form or another may be almost commonplace. It can be embedded in a day’s ordinary experience, perhaps recurring often in a day. In this way the revelatory sense of God’s presence may be thoroughly pervasive for at least some believers in theistic traditions, occurring in the various dimensions of their lives. In nontheistic traditions the sense of religious reality may be similarly pervasive. In the Mahayāna Buddhist tradition, following Dosho and Thich Nhat Hahn, the sense of the presence of the Buddha-nature in the objects of the world  – rocks, trees, birds, clouds – and the sense of hearing from them the Dharma message may, potentially, be commonplace. These forms of the sense of the presence of the divine or God or religious reality may be not only pervasive but widespread among believers, even potentially universal among them. In Chap. 10 an effort was made to show how believers in different theistic traditions with different and even incompatible filled-out concepts of God could yet have faith in and a faith relationship to the one God. At this point in our discussion of pervasive revelation let us consider how one may come into the presence of God or of religions reality with no conception of God or religious reality. “When we share the Dharma,” Thich Nhat Hahn says, “we must speak carefully so that we and our listeners do not get stuck in words or concepts. It is our duty to transcend words and concepts to be able to encounter reality.”7 “Reality,” he says, “is free from all notions” and “we must abandon our notions of God, Buddha, nirvana, self, non-self, birth, death, being, and non-being.”8 Here Thich Nhat Hahn is in sympathy with the apophatic mystical tradition of the West, to which he refers.9 As we noted in Chap. 8, Dionysius, or Pseudo-Dionysius, writing in the apophatic tradition put God in his ultimate nature beyond “words or  Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (New York: Meridian Books, 1995), p. 243. 7  Thich Nhat Hahn, Living Buddha, Living Christ, p. 145. 8  Thich Nhat Hahn, Living Buddha, Living Christ, pp. 135–159. 9  Thich Nhat Hahn, Living Buddha, Living Christ, p. 147. 6

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conceptions.” For Thich Nhat Hahn and for Dionysius religious reality is beyond human concepts and words. The basis for their respective claims may be different, but their perceptions coincide: concepts and words do not apply to religious reality. The point that we wish to bring into relief and explore here is that even if concepts do apply to religious reality or God – even if there is a true and accurate filled-out concept of God – one may come into the presence of God, or religious reality, while having no concept of what it is one has encountered. Clearly many who come into the presence of God do so in the context of a religious community and upbringing (as we saw John Ballie affirm in his own case of God’s revealing Himself to him). And clearly many who have come into the presence of God have an idea of God fashioned by the Jewish, Christian, or Islamic concept. But is a concept of God necessary? In ordinary perception we sometimes see things without knowing what we have seen, without knowing what they are, their name, or the concept of the thing, as when we see a new technological device for the first time. We do not recognize it for what it is, but we do perceive or see it, perhaps clearly. Perception per se (as opposed to recognition) does not require conceptualization. Again, in feeling horror or fright having a clear concept of what is horrifying or frightening is not necessary. We may be frightened of something in the darkness that we cannot see but feel is there. A sense of horror may come to us when a horrible object and its thereat are only suggested. In fact the sense of horror may be greater when its source is not clearly discerned. Experiencing the presence of religious reality can be analogous. The presence of God is experienced with religious awe.10 When religious reality is encountered religious awe in some form and degree is integral to the experience. Does this phenomenal sense of awe, however, necessitate one’s having a concept of what has been encountered? Does it even require a recognition that religious reality has been encountered? Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) in The Idea of the Holy described the ­“numinous  In the discussion that follows I treat the experience of the presence of God. Coming into the presence of God and abiding in that presence is more complex, involving not only an affective response, but an entered relationship and an awareness of a religious requirement relating to God. I have discussed these elements of coming into the presence of God in The Presence of God and the Presence of Persons. 10

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experience” as an experience of a “wholly other” outside and beyond oneself felt with a sense of mystery (mysterium) and deeply affecting awe (tremendum).11 Otto finds the numinous experience in different religious traditions. In the Jewish tradition it or its element of tremendum takes the form of fear of the Lord.12 In the Christian tradition the “numinous emotion” is evoked with the words “Holy, holy, holy.”13 Otto regards it as obvious that the “numinous atmosphere” pervades the writings of St. Paul.14 In the Hindu tradition Otto finds the numinous in Krishna’s revelation of his godhead to Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita.15 In other traditions when the “category of the numinous” is applied to volcanoes, mountains, the moon, sun, and clouds – when they are experienced as numinous – they become divine and are worshipped.16 Outside religion fairy-stories and myths with their element of the wonderful have an “infusion of the numinous.”17 In Otto’s presentation, though the numinous has echoes and intimations outside religion proper, as in fairy-stories, it is within religious traditions that the numinous is fully felt and expressed. But the numinous experience is not limited to established religion. Toward the end of The Idea of the Holy in an appendix Otto draws upon John Ruskin’s Modern Painters and quotes Ruskin’s description of experiences he had when the was young, which, Otto says, were “purely numinous.”18 In the description quoted by Otto, Ruskin says the following of his experience: although there was no definite religious sentiment mingled with it, there was a continual perception of Sanctity in the whole of nature, from the  Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W.  Harvey (London and New  York: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 8–26. The Idea of the Holy was originally published in 1917. 12  Otto, The Idea of the Holy, pp. 13–14. Fear of the Lord in the Jewish and Christian traditions, though, is not stark fear – the shuddering fear of the demons in the letter of James (Jas. 2.19) – but awe and reverence. 13  Otto, The Idea of the Holy, p. 17. 14  Otto, The Idea of the Holy, p. 85. 15  Otto, The Idea of the Holy, pp. 186–88. 16  Otto, The Idea of the Holy, p. 121. 17  Otto, The Idea of the Holy, p. 122. 18  Otto, The Idea of the Holy, Appendix IX, p. 215. 11

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slightest thing to the vastest: – an instinctive awe, mixed with delight; an indefinable thrill, such as we sometimes imagine to indicate the presence of a disembodied spirit. I could only feel this perfectly when I was alone; and then it would often make me shiver from head to foot with the joy and the fear of it, when after being some time away from the hills, I first got to the shore of a mountain river, where the brown water circled among the pebbles, or when I saw the first swell of distant land against the sunset, or the first low broken wall, covered with mountain moss. I cannot in the least describe the feeling . . . . and this joy in nature seemed to me to come of a sort of heart-hunger, satisfied with the presence of a Great and Holy Spirit. These feelings remained in their full intensity till I was eighteen or twenty, and then, as the reflective and practical power increased, and the “cares of the world” gained upon me, faded gradually away, in the manner described by Wordsworth in his “Intimations of Immortality.”19

John Ruskin (1819–1900), who was raised as an evangelical Christian, has a concept of God, but the experience he describes is not shaped by “religious sentiment.” His experience shows us the possibility of a phenomenal encounter with religious reality in which the reality is not characterized with the concepts of a religious tradition. Ruskin refers instead to “the presence of a Great and Holy Spirit,” using terms not unrelated to Wordsworth’s reference in “Tintern Abbey” to a “presence” that he has felt, “a spirit, that . . . rolls through all things.”20 We may furthermore observe the possibility of an experience of religious awe in nature akin to Ruskin’s, or in another setting, that is even less informed by a sense of the nature of that encountered. In such an experience one would feel awe before that encountered but one would apply no concept, not even that of spirit, to it. The experience would be of a “wholly other” that transcends normal experience, a felt wholly other  John Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. 3 “Of Many Things,” (New York and Chicago IL: National Library Association, n.d.), Chap. 17 “The Moral of Landscape,” Sec. 19, pp. 291–292 [electronic resource]. Modern Painters was originally published in 1843. 20  William Wordsworth (1770–1850), “Lines Composed a few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” ll. 93–94 and 100–103. 19

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outside one’s conceptual characterization. It is open to a religious commentator in a theistic tradition, a Christian say, to hold that such an experience is nevertheless of the presence of God, though God is not recognized in the experience. And such a commentator could be right. It may even be that one who has had such an affecting experience of awe before a nameless wholly other will subsequently himself or herself come to realize that the experience was of the presence of God. It would remain, though, that in the original experience God was not recognized as that encountered. Pervasive religious revelation occurs in the various domains of life: before the grandeur and murmurings of nature and in odd moments in the business of life. Awe and the felt presence of the unseen can claim one unannounced at nearly anytime. Almost anything can be the occasion of revelation, as Macquarrie remarked. If we bear in mind that awe before religious reality can come to one who has no sense or recognition of religious reality, we can see emerging the possibility that religious revelation may potentially be as widespread as human consciousness. The upshot of what we have seen in this chapter is that there is a form of revelation (or, if one prefers, several closely related forms of revelation) that is pervasive and that is not doxastically tied to any particular religious tradition. In fact the experience of God’s presence  – or religious reality or the transcendent  – without conceptual circumscription and without a recognition of that encountered may be had by individuals who have no religious affiliation. It is differently characterized in different traditions (presence of God, Buddha-nature), and it may be phenomenally different from one tradition to another, but in these different traditions it is distinct from a deliverance of doctrine or religious truths. When persons experience the presence of God they do so with awe before God. Even when God or religious reality is experienced without recognition the experience of religious reality as an experience of a transcendent that is wholly other is felt with some degree of awe and reverence. Do pervasive revelatory experiences have moral or religio-moral implications? Is there an implication for how one should live? When one has the experience of coming into the presence of God there is a movement of feeling and for some there may be a psychological shift in sensibility. In religious terms one’s heart may be opened. When one’s heart is

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religiously opened to the presence of God it can in a related movement of feeling be opened to other persons. Moreover, to the extent one experiences God’s presence in other persons or experiences the Buddha-nature in them and in other creatures, there are moral or religio-moral implications. Mother Teresa (now St. Teresa) of Calcutta saw Christ in all the suffering persons she tended or encountered. Christians and others who find the presence of God in other persons are well placed to gain an enlivened sense that they are to be treated as children of God and neighbors, and Buddhists and others who find the presence of the Buddha-nature in the earth’s creatures are well placed to gain an enhanced sense of the necessity of compassion for the suffering beings of the earth. However viable these moral or religio-moral implications are, and regardless of the extent to which they are recognized, it remains that there are forms of pervasive revelation that may be phenomenally felt by human beings in the various dimensions of their lives.

Bibliography

Roy C. Amore and Julia Ching, “The Buddhist Tradition,” in World Religions: Eastern Traditions, 2nd ed., ed. Willard G. Oxtoby (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, in Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, 2 vols., ed. Anton C. Pegis, vol. 2 (New York: Random House, 1945). John Baillie, The Idea of Revelation in Recent Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956). George Berkeley, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (London, 1713) [electronic resource]. Bhagavad-Gita, trans. Swami Prabhahavananda and Christopher Isherwood, (New York: Penguin Books, 1944). John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion–1536, in John Calvin: Selections from His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (n.p.: Scholars Press, 1975). Morina Dabattista, “The Oracle at Delphi,” Calliope, Oct., 2004. Dionsyius, The Divine Names, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York and Hahwah NJ: Paulist Press, 1987). Dionsyius, Mystical Theology, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works trans. Colm Luibheid (New York and Hahwah NJ: Paulist Press, 1987). Documents of the Christian Church, ed. Henry Bettenson (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1943).

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Index1

A

Abiding relationships, see Praxis relationships to God or religious reality Abraham, 12, 13, 16, 22, 25, 59, 63 Abrahamic traditions, 2, 26, 29, 43, 62, 65, 67 Advaita Vedānta, 31 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 43–45, 47 B

Baillie, John, 2, 21–24, 46, 47, 52, 58, 59 Barrett, William, 72 Berkeley, George, 55, 56, 70, 71, 71n1 Bhagavad-Gita, 2, 76

Bible, 7, 14, 15, 21, 25, 26, 34, 37, 38 Buddhist tradition, 2, 29, 67, 72, 74 C

Calvin, John, 62 Christian tradition, 17–24, 26, 34, 37, 39, 43, 49, 51, 52, 62, 63, 67, 70, 71, 76 Conciliar guidance, 36 Council of Constance, 35 D

David, 8, 22, 34 Definition of revelation used in this book, 1

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2021 J. Kellenberger, Religious Revelation, Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53872-9

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86 Index

Deuteronomy, 7, 18, 39 Dionysius (Pseudo-Dionysius), 51, 74, 75 Dorff, Elliot N., 13–16, 39, 40 Dosho, 72–74 Dreams, 4, 18, 34, 38–41, 53 E

Embracive views of revelation, 4, 54–56, 70–71, 71n1 Ezekiel, 7, 11–13 Exodus, 2, 13 F

Faith-in, 63, 63n3, 65 Faith in God, 4, 61–67, 63n3 Faith relationships to God, 61–63, 65–67 Fanā, 27 Farrer, Austin, 21–22 Filled-out concepts of God, 63, 65–67, 74, 75 First Vatican Council, 35, 36 Four Noble Truths, 2, 30 G

Gabriel, 17, 26, 29, 31 Gautama Buddha, 2, 29–30, 72–74 General revelation, 48, 49 Genesis, 7, 12, 25, 38, 39, 59 al-Ghazālī, Abū Hāmid, 27, 28, 71, 72n1 Gilkey, Langton, 48–50, 55, 69 Gospels, 17

H

Hahn, Thich Nhat, 72–75 al-Hallāj, Husayn B. Mansūr, 28 Herrmann, Wilhelm, 21 Hick, John, 50–52, 59, 60, 69, 70 Hindu tradition, 2–3, 30, 43, 51, 53, 76 Holy Spirit, 4, 17, 34, 35, 53, 62, 77 I

Ibn al-Fārid, 28 Isaiah, 7–11, 13, 73 Islamic tradition, 25–28, 43, 51, 62, 63, 67, 71 J

James, William, 23 Jeremiah, 7, 11–12, 18, 73 Jesus (Jesus Christ, Christ), 17–18, 20, 22, 25, 34, 38, 62, 63 Jewish tradition, 7–16, 23, 33, 34, 37, 39, 43, 51, 62, 63, 67, 70, 71, 76 John, 61 Jonah, 12–13 Julian of Norwich, 66 K

Kant, Immanuel, 51 Karo, Rabbi Joseph, 40 Kelly, Herbert, 21 1 Kings, 39 Krishna, 1, 76

 Index  L

Leviticus, 7, 18 Loa, 41 Logic of faith-in, 63, 66 Luke, 17, 26 Luther, Martin, 61 M

Macquarrie, John, 46–48, 70, 78 Mahābhārata, 2, 30 Marian visions, 20, 40 Matthew, 17, 18, 34 Mavrodes, George, 20–21, 46 McNamara, Patrick, 58n5 Mormon tradition, 31, 34, 60 Moses, 1–3, 7, 8, 13–15, 18, 22, 25, 26, 29, 33, 63, 65 Mother Teresa of Calcutta (St. Teresa of Calcutta), 79 Muhammad, 25–27, 29, 63 Mystical revelatory experiences, 19, 23, 27, 73 N

Nanak, 32 Native American Church, 38 Neurological research, 58 Newman, John Henry, 44–45 Nontheistic traditions, 2, 4, 29–30, 51, 57, 59, 66, 74 Nya¯ya school, 3, 30, 31 O

Ontological view of revelation, 56–59

87

Oracle at Delphi, 37–38 Oracles, 37 Otto, Rudolf, 75–76 P

Papal infallibility, 35, 36 Paul, St., 22, 28, 71, 76 Praxis relationships to God or religious reality, 67 Prophetic revelatory experiences, 1, 19, 41, 73 Presence of God, 2, 5, 23, 70, 73–74, 78, 79 Psalms, 7, 70, 71 Pseudo-Dionysius, see Dionysius Q

Qur’an, 2, 25–27, 29 R

Rābi‘a al-‘Adawiyya, 28, 71 Rāmāyana, 30 Real an sich, 51, 52, 59 Religious exclusivism, 57 Ruskin, John, 76–77 S

Śankara, 51 1Samuel, 34 2 Samuel, 8 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 54–55, 70, 71 Schulweis, Harold M., 15, 16, 23, 56, 59

88 Index

Scientia, 44 Scripture, 2, 3, 20, 22, 23, 25, 26, 29, 33, 45, 47, 53 Sharma, Arvind, 31 Sikh tradition, 31–32 Smith, Joseph, 31 Socrates, 37–38 Special revelation, 49–50 Spirit quest, 4 Su¯fī tradition, 27–28 Suzuki, D. T., 72 T

Talmud, 14, 33, 39 Tanakh, 2, 7, 12, 15, 18, 26, 29 Teresa of Ávila, St., 19, 40 Theistic traditions, 1–4, 51, 59, 61, 65–67, 69, 73, 74, 78 Therava¯da Buddhism, 60 Tinteroff, Natacha-Ingrid, 35 Tolstoy, Leo, 66

Torah, 1, 2, 7, 12–16, 18, 23, 33, 38, 39 Tradition-grounded views of revelation, 54, 56 Trust in God, 62, 65, 67 U

Underhill, Evelyn, 74 V

Vedas, 3, 30–31, 43 Virgin Mary, 17, 20 Vishnu, 1, 2, 51 Visions, 3, 13, 14, 19, 20, 28, 32, 38–41, 48, 52, 53 Vodou (Voodoo) tradition, 41 Voices, 14, 39, 40, 53 W

Woodruff, Wilford, 34 Woodruff, Wilford, 77