Revelation, or God-Speech?

Abstract

Abstract This chapter covers much ground: the issue of a universal revelation, divine grace offered to all human beings, the views of two Church Fathers—Justin and Clement—on revelation, the problem of incompatibilities among religions, the recipients of inspiration and revelation, comparative theology, and the difference between God’s revelation and God’s speech. Its conclusion is that the Holy Spirit speaks in all human lives, individual and collective, whereas he reveals only in the Biblical scripture as interpreted by the Catholic Church. Having discarded the opinion that God would have been silent in non-biblical spheres, the chapter suggests one should employ the concept of God’s self-communication as a wide umbrella under which two categories fall: God’s speech and God’s revelation. Logically put: divine self-communication is the genus, and the two species are divine speech and divine revelation. On the one hand, in non-biblical environments, because of cultural limitations and sometimes of effective human resistance, divine speech manages to communicate only partial truths, namely truths coupled with errors; on the other hand, in the biblical traditions, owing to inspiration, divine revelation attains its goal of communicating a truth not obscured by errors. According to the Catholic view, objective revelation requires subjective inspiration; they are the two aspects of a single, inerrant, process.