Revelation

Abstract

Divine Revelation may be either of God, or by God of propositional truth. Traditionally the Christian revelation has involved both; God became incarnate and was in some degree made manifest on Earth, and through that incarnate life various propositional truths were announced.¹ My concern in this paper is only with revelation in the secondary sense of revelation of propositional truth. I am not concerned with all knowledge which God makes available to us, nor with all knowledge about himself, but with that knowledge which he communicates directly only to certain individuals, and they communicate to the rest of the world - where the grounds for the belief in these items of knowledge available to the first recipients are not available to the rest of the world, but the latter have to accept them, in the traditional phrase, “upon the credit of the proposer, as coming from God in some extraordinary way of communication”.² Religions often claim to have minor as weIl as major revelations. The former are purported particular messages to individuals about matters of more immediate concern; the latter are big messages of worldshaking significance for the practice of religion. My concern will be only with the latter. I wish to examine whether we have reason to expect a Revelation of this kind, what it will be like, and what kind of historical evidence would show that we had got it.