The Question of Revelation:
A God Who Wants To Be Known
The question of how we know anything is a tricky one. Philosophers since the ancient Greeks have debated the nature and scope of human knowledge. And if knowledge of a physical environment is troublesome enough, knowing another person in relationship is an entirely different business. But what of knowing a reality we can neither see nor touch, but that is intimately bound to us – the ultimate reality we have named God?
One might expect that after 2500 years of Christian theology, there might be some consensus about how this God is revealed to humanity, even if a definitive interpretation of that revelation proves elusive. But the question remains complicated – or perhaps we are the ones who have complicated it, in the making of distinctions between a general sort of revelation through nature or intuition, and more “special” or defining revelation, as in the significant events in the ancient times that we think of as sacred history.
Yet I believe that beneath such distinctions, and our overall puzzlement, lies a failure to ask a larger and more fundamental question, the absence of which has undermined and misdirected our striving to know that which we call God. Before we debate the legitimacy or relative importance of potential sources of knowledge of God, let us consider the nature of this God we seek. For who we believe God to be will profoundly shape both our expectation and our ability to receive such divine revelation as is on offer.
For if you were the God who is believed to be thoroughly and ardently desirous of relationship with the beings made in God’s image, would you not use every means possible to make yourself known to those you love? To invite them into whatever measure of relationship they are capable of? And would you not offer yourself always and everywhere completely without qualification?
It's All Sacred History
The Judeo-Christian tradition has long regarded a particular, if lengthy, period of history as the primary source of God’s revelation to humanity. The narratives of the Jewish patriarchs, prophets and unnamed wisdom teachers, and ultimately of Jesus, are given an elevated authority in the apprehension of God. It would seem that God chose to be very active indeed over a period of a bit more than 2000 years, speaking directly to men and women and performing dramatic miracles through them – and then pulled back. Christians point to the event of Jesus Christ as the final revelation until his return at the end of time. Faith shall be sufficient in the meantime, but faith was vital for all those earlier folks too, so what changed?
We have been given all we need, we are told, in the release of grace through Jesus’s death and resurrection. In this picture, God is indeed willing and desirous of being known, but that desire comes wrapped theologically in a rather complicated agenda to restore a relationship seen to have been damaged in virtually the moment it began. This God seems to stand outside the human realm, embodying and maintaining a particular order of God’s own making, and determining when and where to offer the defining disclosures of Godself.
Yet the line drawn under this special revelation after Jesus doesn’t seem to hold. Jesus’s disciples continue to perform miracles, the apostle Paul is a charismatic and transformative preacher in his own right, and the texts of their teaching are also seen as authoritative for Christians. Then too, a few hundred years on, when a group of church elders were given the task of defining orthodox beliefs, their efforts too are seen as carrying a singular divine sanction. So perhaps that is where the line should be drawn.
But they continued to come, these bearers of direct revelation, and the church has never been quite sure what to do with them. The desert fathers and mothers in the third and fourth centuries and the mystics in the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, for example, all reported direct communication from God as well as effecting healings and other miracles. In truth, there has never been a period when there have not been reports of individuals receiving direct experiences of God – visions, voices, dreams, compelling calls, miracles.
So what is going on here?
Revealing the Imago
In reality, the church today does not deny ongoing personal revelation, that is, that God continues to disclose Godself in particular ways to individuals. But it does generally believe that the period of God’s public revelation has come to a close, and it is careful to stipulates that any authentic personal revelation will not contradict the church’s interpretation of the greater public revelation. But even the church’s interpretation of the revelation in scripture has altered over the years, so where is our line now?
No, I think the better question, the question that honors our nature as defined by the image of God, is why there would ever be a line at all. The paternalistic overlay we have applied to God may support a “father knows best” approach to doling out revelation, but God’s intimacy with human persons who carry an essence of the greater Reality that is God will suggest something much different. The intimacy of a God with those in God’s image, seen in its promise and fullness in Jesus’s intimacy with the God he experienced as Father, offers nothing less than an ongoing, unbroken flow of God toward those who were created precisely for this relationship.
No, I think the better question, the question that honors our nature as defined by the image of God, is why there would ever be a line at all. The paternalistic overlay we have applied to God may support a “father knows best” approach to doling out revelation, but God’s intimacy with human persons who carry an essence of the greater Reality that is God will suggest something much different. The intimacy of a God with those in God’s image, seen in its promise and fullness in Jesus’s intimacy with the God he experienced as Father, offers nothing less than an ongoing, unbroken flow of God toward those who were created precisely for this relationship.
God does not stand outside creation, making discrete choices about what it needs, what we need, in any particular moment. God is not a being at all, as myriad theologians since St. Thomas Aquinas have said. Rather, as Hindu teachers of Vedanta and Christian mystics and contemporary philosophers have professed, God should be seen as the supreme loving consciousness from which each individual manifest consciousness – you and I – emerges. And if we are indeed consciousness within Consciousness, we swim in the sea of grace that puts revelation at our fingertips. Then there is nothing to draw a line around revelation but our own expectation and attention.
As the Need Arises
Jewish and Christian traditions teach that the prophets of the Hebrew scriptures arose when they were needed to convey a message from God to a particular time and place. And how could it be otherwise? If God and humanity share one consciousness, then what moves and challenges humanity will move and challenge God to respond with the revelation that calls humanity into wholeness. A primary focus of the revelation to which the church has given principal authority, in both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, was the tendency of the people of Israel to fall away from the covenant with God they had entered into. Yet the message was always articulated in the face of particular behaviors and injustices; revelation flowed into and took the shape needed by its time and place. But when has there ever been a time and place when humanity did not need a revelation to remind them of who they were and to make clear where they were failing to live up to their calling as the image of God?
Certainly, though, God’s revelation to the figures who populate the Bible was clearer, more dramatic. The voice that called them gave them a plain message, a specific task They spoke directly to God and heard just as directly in return. Surely that constitutes a line between them and us, no?
If there is a line, it may perhaps be drawn not between them and us, but between the times in which they lived and our times. Theirs was a world we cannot imagine today – a world where quiet reigned, a world devoid of the artificial images and sounds that bombard our conscious minds and linger to shape our subconscious. It was a world in which the predominant mythologies that gave shape and meaning to life assumed the reality of discourse between humans and gods. And in those for whom this covenant was constitutive, the reality of that relationship met their commitment and their receptive temperaments to issue in symbolic dreams in the night and vivid visions of likely outcomes in the day. In short, those to whom we look as singular carriers of revelation may simply have been men and women who stood in a particular position of expectation and openness through which the consciousness of God flowed, shaping what they saw and heard in the world.
Alas, those circumstances of quiet expectation do not prevail today, nor have they for many hundreds of years. God’s desire to be known has not diminished, nor has God’s endeavor to become known, but those who have been free enough of insistent external voices to hear have grown fewer. Those with the commitment to step outside of powerful institutions in order to challenge them have diminished to a trickle. The world’s message is loud and created to entice, and has drowned out the ever present still small voice that will tell us who we are. It is no surprise that the early desert fathers and mothers retreated from the cities in order to listen for God, nor that the preponderance of medieval mystics were ensconced in monasteries. Within spaces of quiet and attention, revelation may speak. But the many blessings of the world become an obstacle to revelation when they take center stage and drown out the voice of the God who seeks to be known.
Why We Don’t Know
Perhaps we would rather not know. Revelation carries responsibility. If the mind of God is always available to us, we may not claim helplessness. If this ceaseless revelation is the intimate relationship that Jesus evinced, we have our marching orders. If God is a God of love, of compassion, of justice, if God’s consciousness is the source of our own, we may not withdraw our own consciousness from the divine drive for wholeness for all.
It is not an easy path. Beginning with the Hebrew prophets and continuing through Jesus, and on to lights of recent history such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., those who open a space in their own consciousnesses for God’s consciousness are led to challenge those whose hearts and minds are turned toward self interest, and they pay a high price. Revelation is not an external seeing, but an opening to the Reality that transforms. Revelation does not correct our thinking; revelation transforms the imago dei that each of us carries into the likeness of the God from which we come and in which we
live. Revelation binds us, and sets us apart.
Jesus lived smack dab in the middle of God’s revelation. He regularly made space and time in his ministry to retreat and to pray, to open himself over and over to the revelation that would show him where to go and what to do – that would remind him who he was. How to offer himself as an expression of God so that others might be lured to know themselves as fingers of the consciousness of God. Jesus was a prophet for his times. His challenges were to a church establishment coopted by Roman authority, to a population that used religion to marginalize others, to a mindset that looked for a warrior savior who would restore a peace that could only be born within.
The times in which Jesus absorbed and revealed God were different from ours and presented different obstacles to revelation. But the times to which Jesus preached were no different in their inclination to turn aside from the revelation that would arrive and change us from the inside, and from the inside out, as we ourselves absorb God’s consciousness and carry it to the world that needs it. Jesus experienced the higher law of love that was revealed to him, and went out and revealed it to the world. And, by the way, told his disciples that they would do even greater things than he had done.
And if we would take him at his word, we may need to adjust our ideas about special revelation. Revelation is the way the world was created to work, the way life unfolds, as the consciousness of God flows through and around and among us in every moment, at the very core of life. The ancient voices matter, to be sure; the witnesses to revelation that have been formative for the Christian tradition have filled that role because they experienced and passed to us something critical for our understanding of God. It is crucial too that our own perceptions are checked against the weight of the enduring tradition of revelation. But our own voices matter too, continuing the renewal of revelation for our times and for our needs. Our God is a God who wants to be known, and to know us as God’s very self in the world. God is the grace that hovers, waiting to be admitted into our lives, waiting simply to get our attention. Revelation itself, which is nothing other than the presence of God, will take it from there.
Prophets arise when needed, and they are always needed. Revelation is present when it is needed, and it is always present. It is time to let revelation out of the box that constrains its greatest power within ancient walls, and invite it to flow wherever it wills. It is time for us to once again stand beneath the wave of the God who wants to be known.