Revelation
Revelation, or divine revelation, is the disclosing of some form of truth or knowledge through communication with a deity or other supernatural entity or entities in the view of religion and theology.
Types
Individual revelation
believed in two types of individual revelation from God, general revelation and special revelation. In general revelation, God reveals himself through his creation, such that at least some truths about God can be learned by the empirical study of nature, physics, cosmology, etc., to an individual. Special revelation is the knowledge of God and spiritual matters which can be discovered through supernatural means, such as scripture or miracles, by individuals. Direct revelation refers to communication from God to someone in particular.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. Aquinas believed that 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. The teachings of Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, are also of this nature. The holy book of Muslims, the Quran, is the product of a special revelation from God to Muhammad, which led to the emergence of the last divine religion, Islam. Special revelation and general revelation are complementary rather than contradictory in nature. That is, in understanding a "special revelation", first a "general revelation" provides the conditions, and after that "special revelation" occurs, the subsequent conditions for the occurrence of the "general revelation" also change at will.
According to Dumitru Stăniloae, Eastern Orthodox Church’s position on general/special revelation is in stark contrast to Protestant and Catholic theologies that see a clear difference between general and special revelation and tend to argue that the former is not sufficient to salvation. In Orthodox Christianity, he argues, there is no separation between the two and supernatural revelation merely embodies the former in historical persons and actions.
"Continuous revelation" is a term for the theological position that God continues to reveal divine principles or commandments to humanity.
In the 20th century, religious existentialists proposed that revelation held no content in and of itself but rather that God inspired people with his presence by coming into contact with them. Revelation is a human response that records how we respond to God.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote of his personal experience of inspiration and his own experience of "the idea of revelation" in his work Ecce Homo:
Public revelation
Some religious groups believe a deity has been revealed or spoken to a large group of people or have legends to a similar effect. In the Book of Exodus, Yahweh is said to have given Ten Commandments to the Israelites at Mount Sinai. In Christianity, the Book of Acts describes the Day of Pentecost wherein the Holy Spirit descended on the disciples of Jesus in the form of fire that they began praising in tongues and experienced mass revelation. The Lakota people believe Ptesáŋwiŋ spoke directly to the people in the establishment of Lakota religious traditions. Some versions of an Aztec legend tell of Huitzilopochtli speaking directly to the Aztec people upon their arrival at Anåhuac. Historically, some emperors, cult leaders, and other figures have also been deified and treated as though their words are themselves revelations.Methods
Verbal
Some people hold that God can communicate with people in a way that gives direct, propositional content: This is termed verbal revelation. Orthodox Judaism and some forms of Christianity hold that the first five books of Moses were dictated by God in such a fashion. Isaiah writes that he received his message through visions, where he would see YHWH, the God of Israel, speaking to angelic beings that surrounded him. Isaiah would then write down the dialogue exchanged between YHWH and the angels. This form of revelation constitutes the major part of the text of the Book of Isaiah. The same formula of divine revelation is used by other prophets throughout the Tanakh, such as Micaiah in .Non-verbal propositional
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 sense.Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, "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."
Epistemology
Members of Abrahamic religions, including Judaism, Christianity and Islam, believe that God exists and can in some way reveal his will to people. Members of those religions distinguish between true prophets and false prophets, and there are documents offering criteria by which to distinguish true from false prophets. The question of epistemology then arises: how to know?Some believe that 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 called a prophet. The Norton Dictionary of Modern Thought suggests that the more proper and wider term for such an encounter would be "mystical", making such a person a mystic. All prophets would be mystics, but not all mystics would be prophets.
Revelation from a supernatural source is of lesser importance in some other religious traditions, such as Taoism and Confucianism.
In various religions
Bahá'í Faith
, Bahá'u'lláh and `Abdu'l-Bahá, the central figures of the Bahá'í Faith, received thousands of written enquiries, and wrote thousands of responses, hundreds of which amount to whole and proper books, while many are shorter texts, such 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 Bahá'u'lláh's writings, around 15,000 items, some of which are in his own handwriting, are kept in the International Bahá'í Archives in Haifa, Israel.
Christianity
Many Christians believe in the possibility and even reality of private revelations, messages from God for individuals, which can come in a variety of ways. Montanism is an example in early Christianity and there are alleged cases today also. However, Christians see as of a much higher level the revelation recorded in the collection of books known as the Bible. They consider those books to have been written by human authors under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. They regard Jesus as the supreme revelation of God, with the Bible being a revelation in the sense of a witness to him. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that "the Christian faith is not a 'religion of the book.' Christianity is the religion of the 'Word of God', a word which is 'not a written and mute word, but the Word which is incarnate and living".Geisler and Nix speak of Biblical inerrancy as meaning that in its original form, the Bible is totally without error and free from all contradiction, including the historical and scientific parts. Coleman speaks of Biblical infallibility as meaning that the Bible is inerrant on issues of faith and practice but not history or science. The Catholic Church speaks not about infallibility of Scripture but about its freedom from error, holding "the doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture". The Second Vatican Council, citing earlier declarations, stated: "Since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation". It added: "Since God speaks in Sacred Scripture through men in human fashion, the interpreter of Sacred Scripture, in order to see clearly what God wanted to communicate to us, should carefully investigate what meaning the sacred writers really intended, and what God wanted to manifest by means of their words." The Reformed Churches believe in the Bible is inerrant in the sense spoken of by Gregory and Nix and "deny that Biblical infallibility and inerrancy are limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes, exclusive of assertions in the fields of history and science". The Westminster Confession of Faith speaks of "the infallible truth and divine authority" of the Scriptures.
In the New Testament, Jesus treats the Old Testament as authoritative and says that it "cannot be broken". 2 Timothy 3:16 says: "All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness". The Second Epistle of Peter claims that "no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit". It also speaks of Paul's letters as containing some things "hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures".
This letter does not specify "the other Scriptures", and the term "all Scripture" in 2 Timothy does not indicate the writings that were or would be breathed out by God and useful for teaching, since it does not preclude later works, such as the Book of Revelation and the Epistles of John may have been. The Catholic Church recognizes 73 books as inspired and forming the Bible. The most common versions of the Bible that Protestants have today consist of 66 of these books. None of the 66 or 73 books gives a list of revealed books.
The theologian and Christian existentialist philosopher Paul Johannes Tillich, who sought to correlate culture and faith so that "faith need not be unacceptable to contemporary culture and contemporary culture need not be unacceptable to faith", argued that revelation never runs counter to reason and that both poles of the subjective human experience are complementary.
Karl Barth argued 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. For him, the Bible is not The Revelation; rather, it points to revelation. Human concepts can never be considered as identical to God's revelation, and Scripture is written in human language, expressing human concepts. It cannot be considered identical with God's revelation. However, God does reveal himself through human language and concepts, and thus Christ is truly presented in scripture and the preaching of the church.