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Revelation — the idea that God discloses the divine nature, purposes and will to human beings — is central to the theistic religions. Without revelation, the gulf between an infinite, transcendent God and finite human knowers would seem unbridgeable; with it, theology has a starting point. But two questions immediately divide thinkers. How does God reveal — through the universal channels of nature, reason and conscience, or through particular interventions: prophets, theophanies, Scripture, the Incarnation? And what does revelation deliver — a body of truths to be believed (the propositional model), or God's own self in personal encounter (the non-propositional model)? This lesson sets out the contrast between natural (general) and special revelation, the propositional/non-propositional debate, the sharp twentieth-century quarrel between Barth and Brunner over whether reason can reach God at all, and the resulting views of the Bible as revelation. Throughout, the evaluative task is to ask whether either channel can stand alone, and whether revelation can be wholly non-propositional without dissolving into vague feeling.
General revelation (also called natural revelation) is knowledge of God available to all human beings through the natural world, human reason, and moral conscience, without any special divine intervention. The claim is that God has left signs of the divine nature in the created order, legible to anyone who reflects.
Key term: General revelation — knowledge of God available in principle to all people through reason, the natural world and conscience, without requiring Scripture, prophecy or miracle.
The classic text is Paul in Romans 1:20: "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities — his eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse." The argument is not merely that nature suggests God but that it leaves humanity without excuse — general revelation is sufficient to render unbelief culpable, even if it is not sufficient for salvation. The Psalmist makes the poetic version: "The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands" (Psalm 19:1).
Aquinas built his philosophical theology on general revelation. Reason, reflecting on observable features of the world — motion, causation, contingency, gradation, the governance of things — can reach certain knowledge of God's existence and some attributes. The Five Ways are exercises in reading general revelation through rational inquiry. But Aquinas held that this knowledge, while real, is limited in two ways. First, in content: reason can establish that God exists and is one, incorporeal and powerful, but cannot reach the distinctively Christian truths (Trinity, Incarnation, salvation in Christ), which require special revelation. Second, in accessibility: Aquinas notes that the demonstration of God lies open only to a few, after long inquiry, and "with the admixture of many errors." God therefore mercifully reveals even the demonstrable truths so that all may know them with certainty.
William Paley (1743–1805) offered a classic reading of general revelation: just as a watch found on a heath implies a watchmaker, the intricate contrivance of the natural world — the eye, the wing — implies a divine designer. Nature is, in effect, a second "book" of God. John Henry Newman (1801–1890) located general revelation in conscience: the sense of moral obligation, with its authority and the accompanying feelings of guilt and responsibility, points beyond itself to a personal lawgiver and judge — for Newman, conscience is "the aboriginal Vicar of Christ," God speaking within. Both make general revelation an inference from features of experience.
It is important to distinguish two ways general revelation has been understood, because they are differently exposed to criticism. On the argued model (Paley, the design and cosmological arguments), general revelation is a conclusion reasoned to from public evidence — and so it stands or falls with the strength of those arguments and with rival explanations such as natural selection. On the immediate model (Calvin's sensus divinitatis, Newman's conscience, the sense of the numinous), general revelation is not the end of an argument but a direct awareness of God occasioned by nature, conscience or beauty — closer to perception than to inference. The two models face different objections. The argued model must answer Hume and Darwin; the immediate model must answer the charge that such "awareness" is unreliable, culturally variable, and explicable by psychology without remainder. Both, however, share the central difficulty of general revelation: its ambiguity. The same starry sky moves one person to worship and leaves another cold; the same moral conscience is read by the theist as the voice of God and by Freud as the internalised voice of the father. General revelation, critics argue, is a Rorschach blot onto which observers project the convictions they already hold. Defenders reply that ambiguity is exactly what a general revelation should display if God wishes to leave room for free response rather than compel belief — a point that connects revelation to the free-will defence and to divine hiddenness.
John Calvin (1509–1564) gave the immediate model its most influential statement. He held that God has implanted in every human being a sensus divinitatis (sense of the divine) and a semen religionis (seed of religion), so that "there is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity" (Institutes, I.iii.1). This is why religion is universal across cultures, and why, for Calvin, no one is without excuse. Yet Calvin was no natural theologian in Aquinas's sense: he insisted that sin so corrupts and suppresses this innate awareness that fallen humanity turns it into idolatry — "a perpetual factory of idols" — and that a clear, saving knowledge of God comes only through Scripture, the "spectacles" through which the blurred testimony of creation is brought into focus. Calvin thus sits between Aquinas and Barth: he affirms a genuine general revelation (against Barth) but denies that it functions reliably or savingly without special revelation (against an optimistic natural theology). This is precisely the legacy that Plantinga draws on in his reformed epistemology, and that Brunner appeals to against Barth.
Special revelation is knowledge of God communicated through particular, extraordinary divine acts in which God addresses specific individuals, communities or historical moments. Unlike general revelation, it is not universally available but directed and historical.
Key term: Special revelation — knowledge of God communicated through particular divine acts: Scripture, prophecy, theophany, miracle, the Incarnation, and direct address to individuals.
| Form | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Scripture | Sacred text held to be divinely inspired | the Bible, the Torah, the Qur'an |
| Prophecy | A message delivered by one called to speak for God | Isaiah, Jeremiah |
| Theophany | A direct manifestation of God | the burning bush (Exodus 3:1–6) |
| Miracle | An extraordinary event ascribed to divine action | the Exodus deliverance at the sea |
| Incarnation | God present as a human being in Jesus | "the Word became flesh" (John 1:14) |
| Religious experience | A direct personal encounter with God | Paul on the Damascus road (Acts 9) |
For Christian theology the Incarnation is the supreme act of special revelation: in Jesus, God does not merely communicate information about the divine but becomes personally present in history. The Epistle to the Hebrews opens: "In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son" (Hebrews 1:1–2). Christ is not a messenger carrying God's words; he is the Word. This is why, for many Christian theologians, revelation is finally personal rather than merely propositional — its climax is a person, not a proposition.
Special revelation also raises distinctive philosophical difficulties that general revelation does not. The first is particularity (sometimes called the "scandal of particularity"): why would a universal God reveal decisively to one people, in one place, at one time — to ancient Israel, in first-century Palestine — leaving the vast majority of humanity, across most of history and most of the globe, without access to it? This seems to make salvation a lottery of birth. Defenders respond that a historical revelation must by its nature be particular, that general revelation remains universally available alongside it, and that doctrines of inclusivism (God's grace reaching those who never heard) address the fairness worry. The second difficulty is verification: special revelation is typically private — a vision, a prophetic call, a religious experience — and the recipient's report cannot be independently checked. How do we distinguish a genuine prophet from a deluded or dishonest one? The biblical tradition itself wrestled with this (Deuteronomy proposes that a prophet whose predictions fail is not from God), and Swinburne's principles of credulity and testimony offer a modern framework for treating such reports as prima facie evidence; but the gap between a private disclosure and public knowledge is a permanent feature of appeals to special revelation. The third is conflict: different traditions claim different, mutually incompatible special revelations (the finality of Christ, the finality of the Qur'an), and they cannot all be straightforwardly true — which is why the topic connects to religious pluralism and the epistemology of disagreement.
The deepest debate in the theology of revelation concerns its content: does revelation consist of propositions (truths stated) or personal encounter (God disclosed)?
The propositional model holds that revelation is a body of divinely communicated truths — statements about God, salvation, morality and the world that are true and authoritatively binding. Scripture, on this view, contains God's words: doctrines and commands to be accepted as true. Faith is, centrally, assensus — assent to revealed propositions. This is the natural reading of much traditional Catholic and conservative-evangelical theology.
Key term: Propositional revelation — the view that revelation consists of truths (propositions) disclosed by God and recorded in Scripture, to which the appropriate response is intellectual assent.
The propositional model has a long and serious pedigree and should not be caricatured as crude "dictation." Aquinas, its most sophisticated exponent, held that God is the principal author of Scripture, who can use even the literal events and words to signify further spiritual truths (the fourfold sense of Scripture), while the human writers are genuine instrumental authors. The articles of faith, expressed in the creeds, are for Aquinas propositions that God has revealed — yet he is careful to add that "the act of the believer does not terminate in the proposition but in the thing" (Summa Theologiae II-II.1.2): the believer assents to propositions, but through them reaches the reality of God himself, not the sentences. This is a striking anticipation of the non-propositionalist's concern, from within the propositional camp: even for Aquinas, propositions are the medium of faith, not its final object. The model's enduring strength is that it secures determinate content — the church can say what it believes, teach it, confess it and defend it — which a purely non-propositional view struggles to provide. Its enduring weakness is that, pressed hard, it can make the text rather than the living God the object of faith, and can turn believing into the acceptance of a list rather than the entrusting of a life.
The non-propositional model holds that revelation is not a set of truths but a personal self-disclosure: God reveals not propositions about God but God's own self, encountered in events and experience. Scripture is then a human witness to revelation rather than revelation itself; doctrines are the believing community's reflective response, not dictated truths. This model is associated with William Temple ("revelation is not the communication of propositions"), with Martin Buber's I–Thou encounter, and, in a distinctive form, with Barth.
The non-propositional model has strong biblical and experiential warrant. The Hebrew scriptures present revelation overwhelmingly as God's acts — the call of Abraham, the Exodus, the giving of the covenant — recited as story rather than handed down as a metaphysical syllabus; the recurring formula is "I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt," a deed, not a doctrine. The "biblical theology" movement of the mid-twentieth century, with its emphasis on the "mighty acts of God in history," built directly on this, treating Scripture as Israel's confessional response to events in which it discerned God's hand. The model also coheres with the grammar of personal knowledge: I do not know a friend by assenting to propositions about them but by encounter, trust and shared history — and if God is supremely personal, knowledge of God should be more like knowing a person than like knowing a theorem. Its persistent vulnerability remains the one already noted: an act must be interpreted to count as revelation (the Exodus was, to an Egyptian, a political catastrophe, not a disclosure of YHWH), and interpretation is propositional. So the events do not interpret themselves; they require the word that names them as God's doing — which is why even the most resolutely event-centred theologies find themselves smuggling propositions back in.
| Feature | Propositional model | Non-propositional model |
|---|---|---|
| Content | True statements about God | God's self-disclosure in encounter |
| Scripture | Contains God's very words | A human witness to the events of revelation |
| Authority | Inerrant, infallible propositions | The encounter is authoritative; the record is fallible |
| Response | Assent — believing the propositions | Trust — entering a relationship |
The propositional model offers definite content and a stable basis for doctrine, but critics charge that it reduces faith to assent, ignores the human and literary character of Scripture, and is embarrassed where biblical statements conflict with science or each other. The non-propositional model captures the relational heart of faith and accommodates biblical criticism, but faces a sharp objection: if revelation has no propositional content, how do we know anything about the God encountered, and how do we distinguish genuine revelation from delusion? In practice most theologians blend the two — encounter that nonetheless yields some reliable propositional content ("God is gracious," "God raised Christ").
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