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Revelation
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Revelation is the act of revealing or disclosing, or making something obvious and clearly understood through active or passive communication with the divine. Revelation can originate directly from a deity, or through an agent, such as an angel. One who has experienced such contact with or communication from the divine is often known as a prophet.
Some religions have religious texts which they view as divinely or supernaturally revealed or inspired.
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Revelation is the act of revealing or disclosing, or making something obvious and clearly understood through active or passive communication with the divine. Revelation can originate directly from a deity, or through an agent, such as an angel. One who has experienced such contact with or communication from the divine is often known as a prophet.
Some religions have religious texts which they view as divinely or supernaturally revealed or inspired. Revelation or information from a supernatural source is of much lesser importance in some other religious traditions. It is not of great importance in the Asian religions of Taoism and Confucianism, but similarities have been noted between the Abrahamic view of revelation and the Buddhist principle of Enlightenment.
Epistemology: How does one know if a divine revelation is in fact genuine?
In earlier eras it was taken as a given by many people that God, or the gods, revealed His (or their) will to mankind in some form or another. Since the dawn of classical modern philosophy, and especially since the Age of Enlightenment (circa 1700-1800s CE), this belief has become less well-accepted among a growing segment of the population.
This question is part of the subject of epistemology. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that addresses questions such as: "What is knowledge?", "How is knowledge acquired?", and "How do we know what we know?" In addressing this subject the first issue to note is that the terms "knowledge" and "belief" are often used interchangeably by religious believers, but technically these are very distinct terms.
Often, statements of "belief" mean that the speaker holds a religious belief to be true, although firm proof is lacking. Examples would be the belief that God created the universe, or that God sent a message to the biblical prophet Isaiah. Some religious believers hold that they actually have proof that such beliefs are true, but these proofs are not agreed upon by people within any one religion; they are certainly not agreed upon by people outside of their religion, and they are rejected as proof by both philosophers, logicians and scientists. It is precisely the belief in things which cannot be proved that forced philosophers to ask "What is the difference between belief and knowledge?" This had led philosophers to discover that knowledge differs from belief, in that knowledge is a justified, true belief. (This is an over-simplification, see the article on epistemology and the Gettier problem.)
Abrahamic religions, including Judaism, Christianity and Islam, take it as a matter of faith that God exists, and in some way can reveal His will to people. However, the question of epistemology still exists among members of those faiths, as members need to be able to distinguish between true prophets and false prophets. There are documents in each of these religions which offer criteria with which to distinguish true from false prophets.
In Judaism, issues of epistemology have been addressed by Jewish philosphers such as Saadiah Gaon (882–942) in his Book of Opinions and Beliefs; Maimonides (1135–1204) in his Guide for the Perplexed; Samuel Hugo Berman, professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University; Joseph Dov Soloveitchik (1903–1993), talmudic scholar and philosopher; Neil Gillman, professor of philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Elliot N. Dorff, professor of philosophy at the American Jewish University.
Types of revelation
Verbal revelation
Some people hold that God can communicate with man in a way that gives direct, propositional content: This is termed verbal revelation. Orthodox Judaism and traditional Christianity hold that the first five books of Moses were dictated by God in such a fashion.
Aristotelian rationalism
The neo-Aristotelian philosophers of the medieval era held that revelation was the discovery of absolute truths about God, man, and man's place in God's universe, as discovered through logical philosophical inquiry. A prophet's connection to God was held to be the only way that a person could reach such a state of pure reason.
Natural revelation
Some believe that God reveals himself through His Creation, and that at least some truths about God can be learned by studying nature, physics, cosmology, etc. Adherents of this view find support in Biblical verses such as "The heavens declare the glory of God" .
Non-Verbal propositional revelation
One school of thought holds that revelation is non-verbal and non-literal, yet it may have propositional content. People were divinely inspired by God with a message, but not in a verbal-like fashion.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel has written that "To convey what the prophets experienced, the Bible could either use terms of descriptions or terms of indication. Any description of the act of revelation in empirical categories would have produced a caricature. That is why all the Bible does is to state that revelation happened; How it happened is something they could only convey in words that are evocative and suggestive." ["God in Search of Man"]
Revelation through a people's historical development of their faith
Some believe that given God's non-anthropomorphic nature, the above listed forms of revelation are, by definition, impossible. Instead, God's will is revealed through the interaction of man and God throughout history.
For instance, Rabbi Louis Jacobs proposes that by viewing how the Jewish people have understood God's will throughout history, we see how God has actually influenced the development of Jewish law; it is this process that we should recognize as revelation.
Existentialism
In the 20th century, religious existentialists proposed that revelation held no content in of itself; rather, they hold that God inspired people with His presence by coming into contact with them. In this view the Bible is a human response that records how we responded to God.
One of the major trends in modern Jewish philosophy was the attempt to develop a theory of Judaism through existentialism. One of the primary players in this field was Franz Rosenzweig. His major work, Star of Redemption, gives a philosophy in which he portrays the relationships between God, humanity and world as they are connected by creation, revelation and redemption.
Conservative Jewish philosophers Elliot N. Dorff and Neil Gillman take the existentialist philosophy as Rosensweig as one of their starting points for understanding Jewish philosophy. (They come to distinct conclusions, however.)
Paul Johannes Tillich (1886–1965) was a theologian and Christian existentialist philosopher. Tillich was, along with contemporary Karl Barth, one of the more influential Protestant theologians of the twentieth century. Tillich's approach to Protestant theology was highly systematic. He sought to correlate culture and faith such that "faith need not be unacceptable to contemporary culture and contemporary culture need not be unacceptable to faith". Consequently, Tillich's orientation is apologetic, seeking to make concrete theological answers that are applicable to ordinary daily life. Tillich sought to reconcile revelation and reason by arguing that revelation never runs counter to reason (affirming Thomas Aquinas who said that faith is eminently rational), but both poles of the subjective human experience are complementary.
Tillich's radical departure from traditional Christian theology is his view of Christ. According to Tillich, Christ is the "New Being", who rectifies in himself the alienation between essence and existence. Essence fully shows itself within Christ, but Christ is also a finite man. This indicates, for Tillich, a revolution in the very nature of being. The gap is healed and essence can now be found within existence. Thus for Tillich, Christ is not God per se in himself, but Christ is the revelation of God. Whereas traditional Christianity regards Christ as wholly man and wholly God, Tillich believed that Christ was the emblem of the highest goal of man, what God wants men to become. Thus to be a Christian is to make oneself progressively "Christ-like", a very possible goal in Tillich's eyes.
In other words, Christ is not God in the traditional sense, but reveals the essence inherent in all existence, including mine and your own. Thus Christ is not different from you or me except insofar as he fully reveals God within his own finitude, something you and I can also do in principle. In Tillich's book Systematic Theology I, he argued that: "God does not exist. He is being itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him."
Systematic theology
Systematic theology is the attempt to formulate a coherent philosophy which is applicable to the component parts of a given faith's system of belief. While a systematic theology must take into account the sacred texts of its faith, it also looks to history, philosophy, science, and ethics to produce as full a view and as versatile a philosophical approach as possible.
Thomas Aquinas believed in two types of revelation from God, general revelation and special revelation. General revelation occurs through observation of the created order. Such observations can logically lead to important conclusions, such as the existence of God.
Though one may deduce the existence of God and some of God's attributes through general revelation, certain specifics may be known only through special revelation. In Aquinas's view, special revelation is equivalent to the revelation of God in Jesus. The major theological components of Christianity, such as the Trinity and the Incarnation, are revealed in the teachings of the Church and the Scriptures and may not otherwise be deduced. Special revelation and natural revelation are complementary rather than contradictory in nature.
Karl Barth tries to recover the Christian doctrine of the Trinity in theology from its putative loss in liberalism. His argument follows from the idea that God is the object of God’s own self-knowledge, and revelation in the Bible means the self-unveiling to humanity of the God who cannot be discovered by humanity simply through its own efforts. Note here that the Bible is not The Revelation, rather, it points to revelation. Barth emphasizes again and again that human concepts can never be considered as identical to God's revelation. In this aspect, scripture is also written human language, expressing human concepts. It cannot be considered as identical to God's revelation. However, God truly reveals Himself through human language and concepts. Thus he claims that Christ is truly presented in Scripture and the preaching of the church.
Religious views of revelation, categorized by faith
In Judaism
Rabbinic Judaism, and contemporary Orthodox Judaism, hold that the Torah (Pentateuch) extant today is essentially the same one that the whole of the Jewish people received on Mount Sinai, from God, upon their Exodus from Egypt. Beliefs that God gave a "Torah of truth" to Moses (and the rest of the people), that Moses was the greatest of the prophets, and that the Law given to Moses will never be changed, are three of the Thirteen Principles of Faith of Orthodox Judaism according to Maimonides. Maimonides explains: "We do not know exactly how the Torah was transmitted to Moses. But when it was transmitted, Moses merely wrote it down like a secretary taking dictation....(Thus) every verse in the Torah is equally holy, as they all originate from God, and are all part of God's Torah, which is perfect, holy and true."
Orthodox Judaism believes that in addition to the written Torah, God also revealed to Moses a set of oral teachings, called the Oral Torah. In addition to this revealed law, Jewish law contains decrees and enactments made by prophets, rabbis, and sages over the course of Jewish history. Haredi Judaism tends to regard even rabbinic decrees as being of divine origin or divinely inspired, while Modern Orthodox Judaism tends to regard them as being more potentially subject to human error, although due to the Biblical verse "Do not stray from their words" ("Deuteronomy 17:11) it is still accepted as binding law.
Conservative Judaism tends to regard both the Torah and the Oral law as not verbally revealed. The Conservative approach tends to regard the Torah as compiled by redactors in a manner similar to the Documentary Hypothesis. However, Conservative Jews also regard the authors of the Torah as divinely inspired, and many regard at least portions of it as originating with Moses. Positions can vary from the position of Joel Roth, following David Weiss HaLivni, that while the Torah originally given to Moses on Mount Sinai became corrupted or lost and had to be recompiled later by redactors, the recompiled Torah is nonetheless regarded as fully Divine and legally authoritative, to the position of Gordon Tucker that the Torah, while Divinely inspired, is a largely human document containing significant elements of human error, and should be regarded as the beginning of an ongoing process which is continuing today. Conservative Judaism regards the Oral Law as divinely inspired, but nonetheless subject to human error.
Reform and Reconstructionist Jews also accept the Documentary Hypothesis for the origin of the Torah, and tend to view all of the Oral law as an entirely human creation. Accordingly, Progressive Judaism, Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism, believe that the Torah is not entirely a direct revelation from God, but is a document written by human ancestors, carrying human understanding and experience, and seeking to answer the question: 'What does God require of us?'. They believe that, though it contains many 'core-truths' about God and humanity, it is also time bound, sexist, primitive, and, sometimes, simply wrong. They believe that God's will is revealed through the interaction of humanity and God throughout history, and so, in that sense, Torah is an important part, but only a part, of an ongoing revelation.
Special revelation is something that is very supernatural and spiritual, general revelation is the opposite it is seeing something and then believing, hence the phrase 'seeing is believing'.
The Prophets
The Nevi'im, the books of the Prophets, are considered divine and true. This does not imply that the books of the prophets are always read literally. Jewish tradition has always held that prophets used metaphors and analogies. There exists a wide range of commentaries explaining and elucidating those verses consisting of metaphor. Rabbinic Judaism regards Moses as the greatest of the prophets, and this view is one of the Thirteen Principles of Faith of traditional Judaism. Consistent with the view that revelation to Moses was generally clearer than revelation to other prophets, Orthodox views of revelation to prophets other than Moses have included a range of perspectives as to directness. For example, Maimonides in The Guide for the Perplexed said that accounts of revelation in the Nevi'im were not always as literal as in the Torah and that some prophetic accounts reflect allegories rather than literal commands or predictions.
Conservative Rabbi and philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972), author of a number of works on prophecy, offered a view of the nature of revelation as a process rather than an event. In his work God in Search of Man, he discussed the experience of being a prophet. In his book Prophetic Inspiration After the Prophets: Maimonides and Others, Heschel references to continued prophetic inspiration in Jewish Rabbinic Literature following the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and into medieval and even Modern times. He wrote that
- "To convey what the prophets experienced, the Bible could either use terms of descriptions or terms of indication. Any description of the act of revelation in empirical categories would have produced a caricature. That is why all the Bible does is to state that revelation happened. How it happened is something they could only convey in words that are evocative and suggestive."
In Christianity
Christianity regards varied collections of books known as the Bible as authoritative and written by human authors under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Some Christians believe that the Bible is inerrant (in its original form, totally without error, and free from all contradiction, including the historical and scientific parts) or infallible (inerrant on issues of faith and practice but not history or science).
In a number of passages the Bible claims divine inspiration for itself. Besides the direct accounts of written revelation, such as Moses receiving the Ten Commandments, the Prophets of the Old Testament frequently claimed that their message was divine by the formula "Thus says the LORD". In the New Testament, Jesus treats the Old Testament as authoritative and says it "cannot be broken" (John 10:34–36). 2 Timothy 3:16 says: "All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correction and training in righteousness", and the Second Epistle of Peter claims that "no prophecy of Scripture ... was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit" (2 Pet 1:20–21). That epistle also claims divine authority for the Apostles (3:2) and includes Paul's letters as being counted with the Scriptures (3:16).
Historians note that the doctrine of the Bible's infallibility was actually adopted hundreds of years after those books were written; this view was not formally adopted until the council of Nicaea in 325. These books were not compiled into one work until the council of Nicaea did so with the reason being to identify authoritive works from non-authoritive challenges to the Christian faith. Accordingly, none of those works ever claimed that the "Bible" - a non-existent work at the time - was the complete or infallible word of God.
In the Latter Day Saint Movement
The Latter Day Saint Movement sets itself apart from most other Christian faiths in regards to revelation. Members of this movement believe that their founder, Joseph Smith Jr., was called directly by God the Father and his son Jesus Christ to restore the church that Christ established on the earth during his life and ministry. The church has claimed constant revelation by the leaders and members of the church ever since that occasion. The Latter-day Saints believe that revelation continues to flow from heaven to the church's leaders, and that the president of the church receives revelation directly from God for the direction of the Church. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and some other Latter Day Saint denominations claim to be led by revelation from God to a living prophet, who receives God’s word, just as Abraham, Moses, other ancient prophets and apostles did.
Latter-day Saints believe in an open scriptural canon, and in addition to the Bible and the Book of Mormon, have books of scripture containing the revelations of modern-day prophets such as the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price. LDS Church leaders (from the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles) have taught during the Church's General Conferences that conference talks which are "...[spoken as] moved upon by the Holy Ghost shall be scripture...". In addition, many Mormons believe that ancient prophets in other regions of the world received revelations that resulted in additional scriptures that have been lost and may, one day, be forthcoming. Hence, the belief in continuing revelation.
Each member of the Latter-day Saints is also confirmed a member of the church following baptism and given the "gift of the Holy Ghost" by which each member is encouraged to develop a personal relationship with that divine being and receive personal revelation for their own direction and that of their family. The Latter Day Saint concept of revelation includes the belief that revelation from God is available to all those who earnestly seek it with the intent of doing good. It also teaches that everyone is entitled to personal revelation with respect to his or her stewardship (leadership responsibility). Thus, parents may receive inspiration from God in raising their families, individuals can receive divine inspiration to help them meet personal challenges, church officers may receive revelation for those whom they serve, and so forth.
The important consequence of this is that each person may receive confirmation that particular doctrines taught by a prophet are true, as well as gain divine insight in using those truths for their own benefit and eternal progress. In the church, personal revelation is expected and encouraged, and many converts believe that personal revelation from God was instrumental in their conversion. Joseph F. Smith, the sixth president of the LDS Church, summarized this church's belief concerning revelation by saying, "We believe... in the principle of direct revelation from God to man." (Smith, 362)
In Islam
Divine revelation plays a very important role in the Islamic faith. While religious books of most faiths acknowledge their human author's contribution to the divine text, the Qur'an claims to have been revealed word by word and letter by letter.Muslims believe that God revealed his final message to humanity through Muhammad ibn Abdullah (c. 570 - July 6, 632) via the angel Gabriel. Muhammad is considered to have been God's final prophet. Muhammad's revelations form the holy book of Islam, the Qur'an. The Qur'an is believed by Muslims to be the flawless final revelation of God to humanity, valid until the day of the Resurrection (Qiyamah).
Muslims hold that the message of Islam is the same as the message preached by all the messengers sent by God to humanity since Adam. From an Islamic point of view, Islam is the oldest of the monotheistic religions because it represents both the original and the final revelation of God to Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus, and Muhammad. Members of all sects of Islam believe that the Qur'an codifies the direct words of God.
According to Islamic traditions, Muhammad began receiving revelations from God (Arabic: ???? Allah) from the age of 40, delivered through the angel Gabriel over the last 23 years of his life. The content of these revelations, known as the Qur'an, was memorized and recorded by his followers and compiled into a single volume shortly after his death. The Qur'an, along with the details of Muhammad’s life as recounted by his biographers and his contemporaries, forms the basis of Islamic theology. Within Islam, he is considered the last and most important prophet of God.
Muslims do not regard him as the founder of a new religion but as the restorer of the original monotheistic faith of Adam, Abraham and other prophets whose messages had become misinterpreted or corrupted over time (only misinterpreted according to some). Islam knows different forms and degrees of divine revelation. See for example.
Bahá'í
The Báb, Bahá'u'lláh and `Abdu'l-Bahá received thousands of written enquiries, and wrote thousands of responses, hundreds of which amount to whole and proper books, while many are the shorter texts, as letters. In addition, the Bahá'í faith has large works which were divinely revealed in a very short time, as in a night, or a few days. Additionally, because many of the works were first recorded by an amanuensis, most were submitted for approval and correction and the final text was personally approved by the revelator.
Bahá'u'lláh would occasionally write the words of revelation down himself, but normally the revelation was dictated to his amanuensis, who sometimes recorded it in what has been called revelation writing, a shorthand script written with extreme speed owing to the rapidity of the utterance of the words. Afterwards, Bahá'u'lláh revised and approved these drafts. These revelation drafts and many other transcriptions of the writings of Bahá'u'lláh's, circa 17,000 items, some of which are in his own handwriting, are kept in the International Bahá'í Archives in Haifa, Israel.
For extended comments on the divine revelation of the Báb, Bahá'u'lláh, and `Abdu'l-Bahá see by Robert Stockman and Juan Cole and by Universal House of Justice. Second-hand notes of Pilgrims' Notes | publisher= bahai-library.org | url = http://bahai-library.com/index.php5?file=status_pilgrims_notes| accessdate = 2007-02-26}} See also Horace Holley's preface of .
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In Hinduism
Criticism of the idea of revelation
In the Age of Reason, Thomas Paine maintained that revelation can only be considered valid for the original recipient and when subsequently communicated by the recipient to a second person it ceases to be a revelation but rather becomes a hearsay second hand account, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it.
New experiments in neuropsychology involve a device that some in the media has dubbed the God helmet. The apparatus, placed on the head of an experimental subject, stimulates the brain with magnetic fields. Some subjects reported experiences similar to spiritual experiences. The implication is that the feeling of being inspired by God is a natural, neurochemical event that can be replicated under controlled conditions, and that God thus is not responsible for the experiences reported by those who claim to be prophets.
See also
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