Account Of Revelation Research Articles

Context-Attentive Theology: On the Rearticulation of Experience in Theological Inquiry

Abstract This article argues that theology (systematic or otherwise) is ultimately grounded in (religious) experience. To that end, I methodologically demonstrate that theological inquiry cannot coherently be pursued without attention to people’s experience of the divine/sacred. Thus, this article stands as a methodological development and defense of a family of theological viewpoints that I call context-attentive theologies. In order to do so, I examine the writings of three authors whose different approaches to the problem of divine revelation will help me to clarify the meaning of context-attentive theology: Jean-Luc Marion, H. Richard Niebuhr, and Gustavo Gutiérrez. I proceed in four steps. First, I provide an account of context-attentive theology through an examination of the task of theology. Second, I focus on Marion’s phenomenology of revelation to ascertain to what extent it incorporates contextual analysis. Third, I turn to Niebuhr’s account of revelation, which I construe as a context-attentive theology shaped by the “historical turn.” Fourth, I turn to Gutiérrez’s liberation theology to show how Niebuhr’s “radical reconstruction” within the context of the historical turn is further radicalized by liberation theology, which I take as a prime example of context-attentive theology.

Franz Rosenzweig’s Account of Revelation in Light of Its Protestant Background

AbstractIn the subsection “Grammar of Eros (The Language of Love)” in section 2 of book 2 of The Star of Redemption, the beating heart of the work, Franz Rosenzweig offers a peculiar portrait of the event of revelation. What is presented is a dramatization of the encounter between the loving God and the beloved human soul, a developing scene consisting of a series of utterances and experiences, many of which appear unwarranted. Why does Rosenzweig present revelation in this manner? This article seeks to explain the seemingly arbitrary twists and turns in the dramatized “plot” through which Rosenzweig depicts revelation by demonstrating that it follows in its main features the prevalent Protestant understanding of revelation as encompassing not only divine self-disclosure but also the discovery of sin, confession, forgiveness of sin, reconciliation, attainment of selfhood, and redemption, and is framed according to the directives of the Lutheran foundational principle of “at once a sinner and justified (Simul Justus et Peccator). In so doing, it exhibits Rosenzweig’s deep embeddedness in the Protestant theological discourse of his time and shows that The Star should be understood in light of the contemporary Protestant theology.

Enhancing Catholic School Identity: A Response to Peter McGregor

‘The Leuven Project: Enhancing Catholic School Identity?’ appeared in the May 2022 edition of ITQ.1 Motivated by concerns that the article misrepresents the Enhancing Catholic School Identity (ECSI) research in the academic forum and fundamentally rejects the theology of the Second Vatican Council from which it springs, I write to clarify some of its misconceptions and critique some of its theological assumptions. In particular, Dr McGregor’s claims that the ECSI Research has a ‘very novel account of revelation and especially of the meaning of “symbol”’ (2) colour the entire article and preempt its construal of the authors on whose work it comments: Didier Pollefeyt and Lieven Boeve.

From Dialogue to Revelation: Alterity and the Concept of Fraternity (Fraternité) in Léon Askenazi’s Biblical Hermeneutics

In Love: Accusative and Dative, Paul Mendes-Flohr explores ancient and modern Jewish engagements with the commandment to love the Re’a (neighbor) in Leviticus 19:18. Drawing on Rosenzweig’s phenomenology of divine–human love, Mendes-Flohr seeks to delineate the possibility of a humanist ethics of compassion that is not dependent, as in Rosenzweig, on hearing the divine voice. Taking Mendes-Flohr as point of departure, this paper explores the concept of fraternity (fraternité) as it figures in the thought of Yehuda Léon Askenazi (1922–1996), a North African kabbalist thinker and an important spiritual leader of Francophone Jewry in the twentieth century. Looking at two interrelated moments in Askenazi’s long career as a biblical exegete, I quarry Askenazi’s notion of fraternity for an account of alterity. Based on his discussions of the Cain and Abel story, as well as other biblical episodes, I argue that, for Askenazi, the challenge of fraternity, as figuring repeatedly in the Genesis narrative, is the preferred model to think of second-person relationships. Furthermore, I suggest, in contrast to Rosenzweig’s top-down account of revelation and human love, Askenazi’s approach represents a bottom-up model of love of one’s neighbor, which, when achieved, brings about divine revelation.

Abdolkarim Soroush’s Theory of Revelation: From Expansion and Contraction of Religious Knowledge to Prophetic Dreams

ABSTRACT The Iranian scholar Abdolkarim Soroush has recently developed an account of revelation referred to as the theory of Prophetic Dreams. This article seeks to analyse this theory and its relation to two earlier theories developed by him (that of the Contraction and Expansion of Religious Knowledge and that of the Expansion of Prophetic Experience). In addition, it explores whether the theory of Prophetic Dreams has any roots in classical Islamic literature and the ideas of Muslim theologians, mystics and philosophers in the pre-modern era. Finally, it discusses the implications of Soroush’s theory of Prophetic Dreams for issues related to exegesis and theology, suggesting that it has an important bearing on Islamic theological discourses. The article aims to contribute to scholarly understanding of the development of Soroush’s thought by investigating aspects of his project that have not hitherto been explored.

The Qur’ānic View of History, Revelation, and Prophethood: An Exercise in Comparative Theology

This essay examines the qur’ānic view of revelation and prophethood in relation to the biblical and early Christian theologies of revelation. It argues that Christian theology of revelation, inspired by the Bible and early church Fathers, has a progressivist nature. Accordingly, while Christian revelation culminates in the Incarnation, the preceding period stands as a preparation. However, the qur’ānic account of revelation and prophethood suggests neither a gradual development awaiting the Prophet Muhammad nor a preceding preparation for him. This is because Allah is Merciful and Just and has always been equally accessible to all humanity. In the end, while the Prophet Muhammad is the final select individual as a prophet who conveyed the communication between God and the creation, Islam is the final account of this communication and the system of right conduct. Such finality suggests neither fulfillment nor culmination as believed in Christianity.

Another Name for Liberty: Revelation, ‘Objectivity,’ and Intellectual Freedom in Barth and Marion

Abstract Karl Barth’s and Jean-Luc Marion’s theories of revelation, though prominent and popular, are often criticized by both theologians and philosophers for effacing the human subject’s epistemic integrity. I argue here that, in fact, both Barth and Marion appeal to revelation in an attempt to respond to a tendency within philosophy to coerce thought. Philosophy, when it claims to be able to access a universal, absolute truth within history, degenerates into ideology. By making conceptually possible some ‚evental’ phenomena that always evade a priori epistemic conditions, Barth’s and Marion’s theories of revelation relativize all philosophical knowledge, rendering any ideological claim to absolute truth impossible. The difference between their two theories, then, lies in how they understand the relationship between philosophy and theology. For Barth, philosophy’s attempts to make itself absolute is a produce of sinful human vanity; its corrective is thus an authentic revealed theology, which Barth articulates in Christian, dogmatic terms. Marion, on the other hand, equipped with Heidegger’s critique of ontotheology, highlights one specific kind of philosophizing—metaphysics—as generative of ideology. To counter metaphysics, Marion draws heavily on Barth’s account of revelation but secularizes it, reinterpreting the ‚event’ as the saturated phenomenon. Revelation’s unpredictability is thus preserved within Marion’s philosophy, but is no longer restricted to the appearing of God. Both understandings of revelation achieve the same epistemological result, however. Reality can never be rendered transparent to thought; within history, all truth is provisional. A concept of revelation drawn originally from Christian theology thus, counterintuitively, is what secures philosophy’s right to challenge and critique the pre-given, a hermeneutic freedom I suggest is the meaning of sola scriptura.

The Logos and the Authority of Scripture: A Proposal Motivated by Irenaeus’ Trinitarian Account of Revelation

The <i>Logos</i> and the Authority of Scripture: A Proposal Motivated by Irenaeus’ Trinitarian Account of Revelation

What Has Erfurt to Do with Basel? Meister Eckhart and Karl Barth on Preaching

ABSTRACTThe preacher–theologians Meister Eckhart and Karl Barth negotiate the problem of preaching by developing actualistic accounts of theological language. Whilst the revelational actualism of Barth’s analogia fidei is stabilized eschatologically, Eckhart develops an actualized analogia entis that is governed by his distinctive doctrine of creation. As a result of these metaphysical determinations, Barth conceived of an analogy-within-dialectic, whereas Eckhart posits a dialectic-within-analogy, a difference that is correlated with their respective tendency towards voluntarism and intellectualism. Whilst Barth’s account of revelation is haunted by the possibility of epistemological violence, Eckhart’s ‘ontology of peace’ struggles to accommodate the real dialectic of sin and suffering. Both struggle to affirm the mediatorial significance of Jesus’ human nature.

Reason After Revelation: Karl Barth on Divine Word and Human Words

AbstractThough little understood, Karl Barth's moral theology is widely criticized. Indeed, it is so widely criticized because it is so little understood. Among ethicists, the principal objects of criticism are Barth's account of practical reason and the account of revelation on which it depends. This essay argues that such criticisms miss their mark, because they rest on an incomplete understanding of Barth's doctrine of the Word of God that results in an incorrect understanding of his doctrine of divine command. Because critics neglect his account of subjective reception of revelation through which divine command is heard, they ignore the account of disputation, deliberation, and decision present in his account of scriptural interpretation and ecclesial confession. By laying out the discursive practices of scriptural interpretation and ecclesial confession, and by drawing out the deliberative dimensions of Kantian self‐legislation and Hegelian mutual recognition at work in interpretation and confession alike, this essay argues that these practices provide a fuller account of what Barth calls “practical casuistry,” as well as his most fulsome and winsome account of practical reason.

How the “Torah of Moses” Became Revelation

Noting that, in the Hebrew Bible, law, but not narrative, is attributed to Moses, this paper argues that the notion of the “Torah of Moses” as revealed literature, word for word dictation to Moses, is to be traced to a late Second Temple construction of the Pentateuch as apocalypse. The move is evident in the Book of Jubilees, who introduces his work with a detailed account of revelation at Sinai that includes his own work, the “Divisions of the Times,” an apocalypse, but not the “Torah of Moses.” However, as Jubilees overlaps with Genesis in great measure and, it is argued, refrains from alluding to the Pentateuch throughout, the claim would seem to be that the “Divisions of the Times” actually preceded the Pentateuch as one of its sources. The implications of this view for understanding Rewritten Bible and interpretation in the late Second Temple period are considered.

Rosenzweig’s Bible: Reinventing Scripture for Jewish Modernity (review)

Reviewed by: Rosenzweig’s Bible: Reinventing Scripture for Jewish Modernity William Plevan (bio) Rosenzweig’s Bible: Reinventing Scripture for Jewish Modernity, by Mara Benjamin. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. One of the central challenges to religious belief in the modern era has been the application of critical literary and historical techniques of reading to ancient religious texts, particularly the Bible. The challenge goes beyond the theological issue of whether or not the Bible is divinely revealed. Reading the Bible and other ancient religious texts with the benefit of modern literary and historical techniques tends to make them look like any other piece of literature or any other historical document. Is it possible to embrace modern liberal sensibilities in the domain of religious thought and still view the Bible as a privileged source of religious wisdom and law? Put another way, is it still possible to view the Bible as a “scripture?” This is the question that animates Mara Benjamin’s new study of German-Jewish thinker Franz Rosenzweig. In Rosenzweig’s Bible, Benjamin explores two significant features of Rosenzweig’s work that have gone unnoticed or underappreciated. First, Benjamin reads Rosenzweig as a thinker primarily interested in the significance of biblical language for modern Jews and Germans. Second, Benjamin understands Rosenzweig’s most famous and complicated work, The Star of Redemption (published [End Page 81] in 1921), as only the beginning of his engagement with this issue. Benjamin not only offers a novel interpretation of Star, but also tracks the development of Rosenzweig’s attempt to articulate a conception of Scripture within the boundaries of distinctly modern ways of thinking about religious and literary texts. Most studies of Rosenzweig take The Star of Redemption, a notoriously difficult book to understand, to be the definitive statement of his philosophy, of which his later writings are only an elaboration. Benjamin proposes looking at Star as a crossroads in Rosenzweig’s thought, where the strictly philosophical concerns of his earlier work meet his new embrace of the significance of revelation and biblical language. In Star, Rosenzweig attempts to articulate the philosophical implications of giving primacy to the word of revelation found in the biblical witness. In his later writings, however, Rosenzweig left aside explicitly philosophical issues and focused on the significance of biblical language. Rosenzweig’s “new thinking,” which he also called “speech thinking,” is not, Benjamin argues, about speech in general, but about the meaning and significance of biblical speech, a kind of “scriptural thinking.” The animating idea of Rosenzweig’s project was that a direct encounter with the biblical text as revelation, as Scripture, could provide a truth and meaning that Hegelian philosophy could not. Benjamin plays close attention to Rosenzweig’s use of biblical sources in Star and explains what this tells us about his thought. She argues that his use of biblical texts in Star does not resemble the classical Jewish genres of commentary or midrash, but rather constitutes a “rewritten Bible,” Geza Vermes’ term for ancient sources (like the Book of Jubilees) that retell biblical narratives and law. For example, Rosenzweig’s summary of revelation as God’s commandment to “love Me” is based not on a straightforward biblical quotation but rather on an amalgamation—a mash-up, if you will—of two biblical verses (Deuteronomy 6:5 and Exodus 20:2). Likewise, Rosenzweig placed the Song of Songs at the heart of his account of revelation not because he viewed it as a poetic metaphor for revelation at Sinai (as did the classical rabbis), but because he viewed the Song as a source of revelation itself. Indeed, Rosenzweig did not view revelation as a historical event at all, but rather as a universal event available to all humanity. The uniqueness of the Jewish people lays for him not in its historical presence at Sinai but rather in its continued attesting to the possibility of a revelatory encounter with God that can become available to the whole world. After Star, Rosenzweig engaged in a series of translation and educational projects that served to develop his scriptural thinking as a cultural politics for German Judaism. Translating Jewish texts into German not only made them accessible to German speakers...

Revelation in the Present Tense: On Rethinking Theological Interpretation in the Light of the Prophetic Office of Jesus Christ

Abstract Revelation is often assumed to be what God does, and interpretation what persons do in response. The latter is a matter of making the former real or relevant in relation to a new situation. But what if revelation, understood as Christ's self-attestation, were present to and active in our interpretation of itself? This article deploys the munus propheticum Jesu Christi in conversation with John's Gospel so as to disrupt the usual construal of the objective/subjective relationship as regards revelation and interpretation. This is undertaken in order to advance an account of revelation in the present tense and thus of interpretation as being a human hearing of and correspondence to what Christ says and does. Such an emphasis strengthens the theological interpretation of Scripture by yielding to the written Word as the locus of Christ's prophetic presence and activity. Interpretation is thus a matter of becoming transparent to the humanizing presence and contemporaneity of the risen One who speaks himself by the power of the Spirit in the prophetic and apostolic writings.

Dialogue and revelation in the thought of Martin Buber

Central to Buber's philosophy of I-Thou is his understanding of the related notions of dialogue and revelation and his espousal of a non-propositional account of revelation framed in the language and structure of personal dialogical encounter. The consequent re-interpretation of revelation in this form has been widely influential in contemporary theological circles, especially among those theologians and philosophers of religion broadly known as existentialists. However, the wide dissemination and influence of this position does not guarantee its validity. This paper will try to show that the dialogical account of revelation, at least in the form given it by Buber, is logically and philosophically deficient, being based on a set of misleading analogies between inter-human and Divine-human relations.

Scientific Language and the Language of Religion

Scientific Language and the Language of Religion