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The sense of mystery and its promise would remain too vague without concrete sacramental mediation. Though it is a necessary corrective to en-sure the breadth of our hope, an exclusively apophatic religion or theology would fail to connect us to our future. Promise requires images that can arouse our hope in very specific ways corresponding to diverse times and circumstances.

It is true, of course, that Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism, as well as some significant strains of Hinduism and Christianity, have all expressed suspicion about the excesses of images and sacramentalism. The apophatic strand present in all of these religions justifiably cautions us that our clinging to particular symbols can at times be an obstacle to deeper encounter with sacred mystery. The via negativa. the way of silence, is intended to repair such narrowness. Silence opens us to the radical otherness of mystery. There is a place in all religions for the dialectical negation or subduing of words and images. Revelation involves much more than just a sacramental or verbal manifestation of mystery. It also requires, as a necessary condition of its reception, moments of silence, renunciation, and waiting. Silence prevents our anticipations of revelation from being dominated by our own predictions and keeps open to us the surprising aspects of mystery’s promise.

Nevertheless, people are first brought to an explicit sense of sacred mystery through sacraments or symbols. And even when their religion assumes mystical, apophatic, and active aspects it still has to remain connected to a sacramental base.(See above, Chapter 3.) The distinct shape that mystery takes in Israel’s experience, we have seen, is that of a promise sacramentally mediated through images of shalom, that is, through vivid pictures of peace, righteousness, and abundance on the land. That is why the holy city of Jerusalem and the land of Israel have remained to this day powerful and palpable symbols of the presence of God’s promise. Without such concrete imagery, hope might remain too vague, devoid of context and content.

In Christianity, the sacramental form in which mystery and promise are embodied is preeminently the compassionate person of Jesus of Nazareth.(See Monika Hellwig, Jesus, the Compassion of God (Wilmington: Michael Glazier, Inc., 1973) 121-23.) "He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation. . . ." (Col. 1:15). "In him all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell. . . ." (Cal 1:19). "He reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature. . . ." (Heb. 1:3). "He who has seen me has seen the Father (John 14:9). Thus the New Testament expresses the early Christian conviction that the person of Jesus symbolically reveals to us the reality of God. Jesus is the "human face of God."(John A. T. Robinson, The Human Face of God (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1973). In the faith of the early Christian community, as Rudolf Bultmann notes, the "proclaimer became the proclaimed."(Rudolf Bultmann. Theology of the New Testament, trans. Kendrick Grobel [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951] 33.) The one who announced the breaking in of the Good News of God’s reign turns out to be, in his very own person, the incarnation of God’s promise. The New Testament speaks of revelation as the making known of a mysterion (Rom. 16:25; Eph. 3:3-4; 6:19; Col. 1:27; 2:2; Mark 4:11). For Christian faith, this "mystery," hidden in God from all eternity, becomes most fully manifested in Jesus.(With Moltmann, however, we must emphasize that Jesus himself still has a future. So we do not need to interpret Jesus’ coming in history as though there is nothing left for us to hope for. If we see him as the fulfillment of the quest for revelation. it is not in a static sense, but as the one in whom we now orient ourselves toward the future.)

To Christian faith, Jesus himself is the primary sacrament of our encounter with the divine mystery of promise. To the Church, Jesus is the "Christ," the Word of God, God’s self-revelation. But what is the nature of revelation when viewed in terms of Jesus’ own personal experience? How did he apprehend the revelation of God? Difficult as it is to give confident answers to such questions as these, we must ask them here nonetheless. For it would seem that revelation has its proper origin in Jesus’ own consciousness of the arrival of God’s future.(The location of revelation centrally in the consciousness of Christ has been most explicitly highlighted by Gabriel Moran, Theology of Revelation (New York: Herder and Herder, 1966). Revelation, in the Christian sense at least, is born in the crucible of the Jewish mind, soul, and imagination of the man Jesus of Nazareth with his unique vision of the "reign of God."

Where did his powerful vision of this reign (or "kingdom") of God come from, and what does it reveal to us today? In asking such questions, we are of course also taking up once again the perennial theological quest for who Jesus really was and what possible meaning he might have for our lives. That is to say, we are entering into the area of Christology.(Recent Christian theology has increasingly placed Christology first in the order of theological disciplines, insinuating that we can have no more than a vague knowledge of God prior to an encounter with the man Jesus. The approach taken in this book, however, emphasizes the theological priority of a disclosure of mystery as the whence of revelation, prior to doing Christology. It seems that Christology is overburdened when it is forced to do all the work of mystagogy.) A Christian theology of revelation depends in a special way on the insights of this branch of theology. If it has not yet become evident to the reader, we must here emphasize that a theology of revelation embraces every other realm of the theological enterprise. It includes within itself contributions of all the other fields of theological inquiry. It is closely related to soteriology and pneumatology as well as Christology. And by identifying revelation with promise, we have already seen that it embraces eschatology as well. In the following chapter, moreover, we will observe that cosmic creation also may be interpreted as revelation. Its breadth, therefore, makes it logically misleading for us to list revelation simply as one theological category alongside others. It is a broad concept that includes, in some sense at least, the other divisions of theology as well.

But this comprehensiveness raises the question whether we can legitimately distinguish revelation theology from theology as such. Why have a distinct theology of revelation? Is not all Christian theology revelation theology? Why set revelation apart for special treatment? After all, during most of the Christian centuries, revelation received very little if any formal attention. It did not become a clearly distinct theme in theology until modern times. Apparently for the larger portion of its history, Christianity has been able to get along quite well without an explicitly formulated theology of revelation. So why do we need one now?

Not all theologians are of the opinion that we do. Some of them are reluctant today to speak of revelation because it seems to be too apologetic and particularist, especially in light of the plural nature of our religious situation. Others avoid the notion because it appears to exaggerate what faith can now perceive only dimly. They would prefer to use the notion of revelation only with reference to what we will experience eschatologically.(This is the position, for example, of F. Gerald Downing, Has Christianity a Revelation? (London: SCM Press, 1964) 239-90.) So far, they insist, nothing has been disclosed with sufficient clarity to qualify as revelation. Everything is still too cloudy and ambiguous. We must await the end of history in order truly to experience revelation.(Wolfhart Pannenberg is open to the notion of revelation provided that we understand it in the present as "indirect" revelation that awaits the full disclosure of God at the end of history. See the collection of essays Revelation as History, edited by Wolfhart Pannenberg, Rolf Rendtorff, Trutz Rendtorff, & Ulrich Wilkens, trans. David Granskou (New York: Macmillan, 1968). Until then it would be more modest and unassuming if we did not use the term at all. Others are embarrassed by the idea of revelation because it conjures up obsolete and scientifically unacceptable images of a supernatural world that comes down to us from another realm and arbitrarily interrupts the closed continuum of natural and secular reality. And still others find it problematic because their experience indicates no domain of mystery or sacred hiddenness from which any "unconcealment" or "unveiling" could possibly occur. Obviously, skeptical thinkers have serious reservations about the idea of revelation. But not even all Christian theologians are convinced that a special theology of revelation is helpful.

Still, while remaining sensitive to these objections to the concept of revelation, we must insist on its enduring appropriateness. Christian theology needs to have a special treatise on revelation if for no other reason than to emphasize the indispensable biblical doctrine of the prevenience of God’s promissory vision for our lives and the world.(This is the main theme of Ronald Thiemann’s controversial but helpful book, Revelation and Theology (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985). The awareness that God’s promise exceeds or outdistances anything we could ourselves construct is the very foundation of faith. There may be no better term than "revelation" to accentuate faith’s conviction that we ourselves are not the authors of the promise we live by. Were we to abandon the notion, as some have urged us to do, we would once again have to wonder whether there are any real reasons for our hope. Could the content of Christian faith then be construed as anything more than our own creation? For if revelation were taken to be no more than our psychic or social projections, our beliefs would surely lose their hold on us. If our images of God and the divine promises were seriously taken to be nothing more than religious or theological constructions,(As they are taken to be, it seems, by theologian Gordon Kaufmann, An Essay on Theological Method (Missoula: Scholars Press. 1975) they would forfeit their "otherness" and along with it their capacity to criticize and transform our situation. If we viewed our religious symbols as nothing but our own imaginative inventions, we would be forced to wonder whether we could really be challenged by them or whether we could take them at all seriously. A set of ideas or images that we suspected to be no more than an emanation of our own imaginative powers could hardly summon us to new life or to genuine hope, no matter how charming they may be. The idea of revelation points to the graciousness, extravagance, and surprisingness of a future that always lies somehow beyond our calculation and control, and that breaks into our midst with a form and content that has not been anticipated in its every aspect. It carries with it the implication that this future is always a judgment on the paltriness of our own aspirations. And so, by virtue of its having this character of prevenience, it is an indispensable notion for any theology that takes seriously the biblical theme of promise.

At the same time, however, we may be permitted to entertain reservations about some interpretations of revelation, such as that of Karl Barth and his followers, which make revelation so absolutely interruptive and "different" that it casts all of our natural aspirations in a suspicious light. Barth thinks of God’s word as so completely "other" than what we naturally long for, that when revelation bursts forth in Christ, it crushes all our former (perverse) longings and replaces them with new ones that were in no sense there before. Such a radical reading of revelation may at first sight seem to be quite appropriate in the face of our human frailty. The sinful distortions of our lives and consciousness twist and divert our longings and aspirations in such an idolatrous way that we are forced at times to distrust them completely. For that reason, the critiques of culture by Barth and other representatives of neo-orthodoxy should not be erroneously mistaken for fundamentalist retrenchment. Their call to attend to the element of judgment and new creation accompanying God’s word is an indispensable ingredient in any authentic theology of revelation.(See Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans (London: Oxford University Press, 1972)

However, the neo-orthodox demand that we repudiate our natural hopes and imaginings is, in the final analysis, excessive. At heart it is an insult to the creativity of God and to the natural visionary capacity that sustains human existence. Official Christian teaching has consistently emphasized that creation is good and that this goodness exists as a permanent stratum of our own human existence as well, even in a sinful world. The propensity to dream, wish, and hope is an essential part of our creatureliness. To pull up by the roots and cast away as worthless our inborn visionary habits would be an act of violence toward the created order. If revelation brings something new and unanticipated, it must still somehow connect with the structure of our present expectations as well as with those of all the past generations of human searching. Otherwise, it would amount to a complete annihilation of our created being and consciousness. It would throw all previous history into utter futility. If revelation were to come to us without already having at least some resonance with the natural core of our longings it would hardly be the Good News we take it to be. What James Carpenter states about the neo-orthodox attribution of absolute novelty to Christ applies to the whole of revelation:

Nevertheless, after voicing this reservation, it still seems correct to maintain that revelation does bring something new and unanticipated.(This does not contradict Schubert Ogden’s interpretation, endorsed above in Chapter 3, according to which special revelation is not something "more" than or in addition to what is called original revelation. The two are ontologically inseparable. Special revelation, however, has the character of novelty in that it is encountered in our finite, culturally relative historical and categorical existence. The mystery of God’s love and promise is always, ontologically speaking, fully present to the world, but in terms of our historical existence, it takes on the character of surprise and unpredictability.) Its promise awakens in us longings that, though they may already have been somehow present, were inactive or needed to be clarified, focused and purified. Revelation is a "disclosure" event in which we are confronted with a picture of reality which faith makes out to be the good news we have always been longing for but which we could never have conjured up all by ourselves out of our own ambiguous lives.(The argument of this book is that it is especially the image of God as self-emptying love that confronts us in this interruptive, yet deeply longed for, manner.) It is an essential theological notion because it expresses our sense that the imagery of faith places what we may hope for in a continually new light. It has the power to make sense of things in ways that would be historically impossible without its intervening images of our future. The theme of revelation brings out how faith can help us see things in an ever wider and deeper perspective. It is this illuminative aspect of faith that a theology of revelation seeks to make explicit. It is faith’s discernment of a new vision of reality that encourages us to think of revelation as a distinct theological theme, though certainly not unrelated to the other branches of theology.

What native Americans, such as the Sioux Indians, refer to as a "vision quest" is to some degree representative of the longings of our common humanity. Built into us there is a profound appetite for "vision." We long to see things more and more clearly, truthfully, and meaningfully. "Vision" means the imaginative representation of meaning, truth, and, above all, beauty. Beauty, in turn, refers to a "harmony of contrasts" Our natural quest for a continually wider beauty is a most important aspect of our vision quest. We have a natural instinct for adventurously widening our horizons, expanding our picture of reality’s beauty, and for continually heightening our vista’s contrast and harmony. We are born with creative imaginations that seek to bring increasingly more nuanced harmony into the sweep of our awareness by way of a continually broader variety of symbols, images, and metaphors.

This visionary capacity is given with our existence and cannot be eradicated without great stress to our constitution. Satisfaction of our longing for "vision" is essential to human vitality. But at the same time, experience instructs us that we have strong inclinations to acquiesce in unnecessarily narrow and mediocre images of the future. As Whitehead says, we tend to substitute a sketch for the whole picture.(Alfred North Whitehead. "Mathematics and the Good," in Paul A. Schillp, ed., The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead [Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1941] 679.) Our desire for order and harmony can smother our need for breadth of contrast and novelty. This is the same tendency that leads sacramental religion toward idolatry. We often try to exclude the contrast that makes for wider vision,(Today such exclusiveness may take the form of a refusal to encounter the challenging plurality of religions, thus narrowing our understanding of revelation and forfeiting opportunities for a widening of our notion of the mystery of God.) and so we remain content with excessive rigidity, settling for a harmony without contrast, order without nuance, and unity without complexity. It is in opposition to this complacency that Jesus introduced his disturbing vision of the kingdom of God. His religious faith and awareness are marked especially by an intense longing to expand our purview of human life and of reality as a whole. This concern for breadth of vision appeared especially in his words and parables about the dynamic "reign of God."

Just how disturbing, but also promising, his vision of the reign of God was can be brought out in a fresh way if we interpret it in terms of the four interrelated modalities required by any integral religious vision. In order to be receptive to the revelation of mystery, religious faith must have sacramental, mystical, silent, and active ingredients. If any of these is exaggerated at the expense of others, or if any one of them recedes too far into the background, distortions will appear that either diminish or deny the reality of mystery. The revelation of mystery, we have been emphasizing, requires our careful cultivation of all four ingredients of religion. And when mystery takes the shape of promise, as it does in biblical religion, then hope, the Bible’s characteristic response to mystery, must also balance all four ways according to its own logic.

Jesus’ repertoire of images of the kingdom, his habit of presenting what we can hope for in the idiom of parables of God’s reign, is an exceptional illustration of these four revelatory aspects of religion. We shall focus on the sacramental, mystical, silent, and active aspects of his proclamation of the reign of God. In this way we may be able to link his teachings to the wider world of religious revelation, while at the same time bringing out their freshness and distinctiveness.

Before doing so, however, it may be useful for us briefly to expand on our earlier suggestion that the religious posture of hope in God’s promise embodies the four ways of religion, and that the failure to integrate all of them leads to the perversion of hope.(See Chapter 5.) In the first place, hope has to come to expression in quite specific and concrete sacramental images in order to connect with present reality and thereby to avoid the docetic and gnostic temptations to escape from the present altogether. But if our fixation on a particular imagery is too exclusivist, then our sense of the future decays into a restrictive obsession with the sheer givenness of things. This narrowness rules out the attainment of wider vision. It turns into an idolatry of the present or past, and it is content to live without the tension and challenge of a new and surprising future. On the other hand, a healthy hope is willing to entertain a wide variety of images of the future. We shall see that this is one of the remarkable features of Jesus’ religious imagination. Genuine hope allows our vision to expand to the point of an inclusiveness that takes into account the future of those other than ourselves, indeed of the whole of creation. It avoids fixation on particular symbols that would end up shrinking our sense of the future to a size too small for our deepest aspirations. We may understand the Spirit of Christ as the power that seeks to extend to the ends of creation and its future this all-inclusiveness.

Hope is also mystical. It is mystical in the sense that it seeks union with, and longs to be lost in, the futurity of God. If it blossoms to maturity it surrenders to an "absolute future." (Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, Vol. VI, 59-68. Jesus and the Vision 113) But if the mystical component of hope (its experience of union with this absolute future) becomes disengaged from a specific sacramental context, or if it ignores the requirement of present praxis and the necessity of silent, patient waiting for God’s future, it shrivels into sheer reverie. The mystical aspect of hope then turns into a premature flight from the world of the present. It abandons earthy imagery and worldly reality too early, and this forfeiture amounts to a gnostic denigration of creation. Hope withers when it loses its connection to nature, to time and place, and to the need for action here and now. It turns into an escapism that leaves the present and past world out of the picture of promise. We should note that Jesus’ imagining of the reign of God remains closely connected to the earth and the mundane. It does not yield to mysticism’s characteristic temptation of flight, but remains tied up with the sacramental, silent and transformative ingredients of hope. It seeks the establishment of God’s reign on earth as well as in heaven. It invites patience as well as action.

Hope also has an apophatic dimension. It entertains a justifiable suspicion that its images of promise are always inadequate. Thus it is at times reduced to silence out of respect for the unpredictability of the shape the future will actually take. Because of our petty pictures of reality’s possibilities, it makes us seal our lips in the manner of Job and occasionally quiet our imaginations and thoughts in the fashion of all so-called "negative" theology. It is aware that only God can present to us our true destiny. The apophatic instinct arises out of hope’s concern for breadth, for a wider beauty and perfection than that encompassed by our current visions of utopia. Genuine hope brings with it an intuition that none of our present imaginings could ever adequately represent the full graciousness, extravagance, and surprisingness of the mysterious future we call God. Therefore, it is willing to undergo an asceticism whereby it renounces fixation on any particular human images of the future and opens itself to God’s vision of the world’s possibilities. The need for renunciation in the interest of breadth is one of the main features of Jesus’ own teaching. He speaks, for example, about the need to subordinate our own desires to God’s will, and about the importance of watchfulness in place of calculations: "You know not the day nor the hour."

But there is also a danger hidden in the apophatic side of hope. We may, out of frustration, turn vengefully against all images of the perfection we seek. An exaggerated hesychasm may either decay into an absurd silence, or it may experiment with such a wild array of images, discarding one after another, that it leads to despair. Apocalyptic projections manifest the longing for an undreamed of future, but the chaos of apocalyptic imagmy sometimes stops just short of confusion. If it were not still tethered to the sacramentality of present experience, and to the mystical and active aspects of hope, it could easily pass over the border to an anarchical hatred of present reality. Such transgressions have occurred more than once in the history of religion and Christianity. Here again it is worth noting that Jesus’ preaching, though it shared aspects of apocalyptic expectation, avoided the extreme of world hatred to which this genre is at times disposed.

Finally, genuine hope also requires an element of praxis, a need to be embodied in transformative action in the world. Hope is empty unless it leads to cooperative action that tries to make the vision of God’s future more explicit and sacramentally present in our world here and now. The heirs to biblical faith have often overlooked the prophetic call to social justice. Indeed, a case may be made that the major religious failing of Western theism has been its slighting and even repressing the summons to action central to the prophets’ teaching. Without the doing of justice in the present, it is questionable whether we can experience much of the revelation of God’s future. There can be no full verification of revelation apart from the wager of direct involvement in the praxis of the reign of God.

Still, like the other three elements of religion and hope, the way of action is also subject to its own peculiar kind of temptation. In the case of action, a possible failing is impatience. An activism divorced from sacramentalism, mysticism, and silence may attempt to seize the mysterious and incalculable mystery of the future and make it a present possession subject to human control. In doing so, it will inevitably shrink hope down to the level of mere planning. Planning is essential, but it does not exhaust the meaning of hope. For hope also has sacramental, mystical, and silent aspects that open us to the self-disclosure of an unfathomable future. Genuine hope points our social existence toward an ever wider vision. It makes us aware of the narrowness of all our current images of the future. Hope is most authentic when it displays a capacity, when necessary, simply to wait in silent expectation. It is healthiest when it sustains a balance of all four religious ingredients.

Jesus as the Revelation of God’s Promise

Jesus’ life and his teachings about the reign of God give evidence of this balance. In his person as well as in his vivid images of the kingdom, Jesus sacramentalizes the compassionate God whose promise is coming to fulfillment. In his urgent vision of the unity of humanity with God, presented especially by John, we see the mystical side of his hope. In his continually turning his will, his longings, and his future over to God we observe the apophatic tendency of his hope. And in his connecting the reign of God to our present praxis of justice, thereby subordinating ritual to justice and piety to caring for the poor, he links hope to action. In sum, the life and words of this remarkable man open up the mystery of the future to his followers in such a radical fashion that he functions for them as the very revelation of God.

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus opens his ministry with these words: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel" (1:15). When placed within the context of expectation that runs from Abraham through the prophets, Jesus’ announcement that the time is now fulfilled is indeed dramatic. It implies nothing less than that the absolute and unsurpassable future promised by God from the beginning is now entering into our life in a decisive way.(See G. R. Beasley-Murray, Jesus and the Kingdom of God [Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s. 1986] 73.) What is noteworthy here is how Jesus links his own anticipation of the arrival of God’s future to the contemporary standards of expectation that he inherited from his culture. In interpreting God’s promise, he does not uproot previous patterns of hope but instead seeks to transform the traditional images of Israel’s understanding of its prospects. He came not to destroy but to fulfill.

There is, however, an apparent impatience in Jesus’ declaration that the long-awaited kingdom is now at hand. We have seen that one of the temptations of all religions is that of a refusal to wait patiently for the fullness of mystery to disclose itself. Such a refusal can lead to a shrinking of the transcendent into the narrowness of our own contemporary designs. Judaism stands forth to this day as a powerful witness to our need to wait in hope until the time is ripe for the messianic age, which to Jewish faith has not yet arrived. During the Jewish Passover meal these words are still uttered: "I shall wait resolutely for the coming of the Messiah. And even though he tarry, yet shall I wait for him." Theologian Paul Tillich emphasizes this point about waiting: "We are stronger when we wait than when we possess."(Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations, 151.) Is it possible then that the eschatological teachings of Jesus violate this imperative to wait? Is there too much impatience in his message? And, moreover, is there perhaps a premature closure of history in Christian faith’s identification of Jesus as the conclusive fulfillment of God’s ageless promises?(Moltmann says: "The existence of the Jews again and again forces Christians to the knowledge that they are not yet at the goal, that their church is itself not the goal, but that with eschatological provisionality and brotherly openness they remain on the way. The Experiment Hope, 66.)

These are difficult questions, and they can only be addressed inadequately here. For Jesus, however, it is clear that the time is always ripe for the coming of the kingdom. The kingdom, which stands for the reign of justice and peace, is needed at every moment of history, if for no other reason than that people are suffering. "All life is suffering" is the First Noble Truth of Buddhism. And Jesus shares with the Buddha a compassionate desire to cut right to the heart of human suffering and to eliminate it as soon as possible. If this is impatience it is not the sort that diminishes the divine. Rather, it is an impatience that grows out of profound contemporary compassion for the abandoned, the poor, and the lost. If anything is clear in the gospels, it is that the pain of others vehemently violates Jesus’ sensitivity. And to Christian faith, his deeply human caring stands sacramentally for the ultimate caringness of God. In its all-inclusiveness it opens us up to a vision far wider than our own efforts and plans could allow.

The Buddha’s departure from previous religious and theological patterns was the consequence of his profound longing to eliminate suffering as soon as possible. And in the case of Jesus, we would hardly be stretching things if we surmised that his own reshaping of religious and eschatological expectation was the result quite simply of his own exceptionally intense compassion for the needy, the poor, the outcasts, the guilt-ridden. and the forgotten whom he encountered every day. His longing to remove their misery compelled him to announce that the God of Moses, who long ago had heard the Hebrew people’s loud outcries and had responded to them, was now once again near at hand and ready to rescue the people from their pain. It is Jesus’ special discernment of human tribulation that makes his proclamation seem to be a bit "impatient."

When he stood up to read the Isaiah scroll at the beginning of his ministry (Luke 4:16-21), Jesus announced that the time of liberation for all who are imprisoned in any way had dawned on "this very day." Christian faith has deciphered in this man’s exceptional outpouring of empathy for the poor, the captives, the abandoned, and the sick, the consummate entrance of an ultimate love and mercy into our world. In our experience of Jesus’ compassion, we experience the compassion of God. If there is something "impatient" about all of this on Jesus’ part, it is an impatience born of compassion and not out of a will to control the mystery of the future.

In fact, the empathy evident in Jesus’ life, action, and teaching does, after all, require at its roots a profound religious patience with respect to our social, political, and economic schemes. What the gospel, as well as the teaching of all the prophets, rejects is the kind of impatience we find in most social planning. Such planning seeks to establish a smooth, unblemished order as quickly as possible. But almost inevitably when we begin to implement our envisagements of the ideal social arrangement, we end up excluding some groups and individuals whose presence in our system keeps it from running as effortlessly as we would like. The homeless, the insane, the non-conformists, and the economically disadvantaged tend to mess things up, and so we ignore their presence. In Jesus’ vision, though, no arrangements are ideal or adequate until and unless they have included all segments of society and have not left any groups or individuals out of the picture. Since such an arrangement has not yet appeared, and since it will never be perfectly approximated on the plane of pure history, Jesus’ "impatient" eschatology shows how far the fullness of God’s future is yet from complete realization. By his being such a radical departure from our ordinary accommodation to suffering and injustice, Jesus prophetically sets forth our future possibilities. He demonstrates that an impatience born of compassion does not conflict with, but actually supports, the apophatic posture of patience and concern for breadth essential to all authentic religion and hope.

Furthermore, the religious temptation to flee impatiently from history is also offset by the sacramentality of Jesus’ teaching, especially in the parables. Jesus typically employs earthy, mundane, and natural images to communicate the intensity of his hope. He discerns a religious depth in such simple realities as the anticipation accompanying the sowing of seed. The promise hidden within the inauspicious origins of a mustard tree gives him an image of the disproportionality between present reality and the full flowering of God’s future. But Jesus tempers such sacramentalism, in turn, with an apophatic posture of patience. In the interest of breadth, his vision of the kingdom, as exemplified in his parable of the sower and the seed, demands that our own trust put down its roots deeply into the ground and that we be wary of the shallowness of any too-hasty sprouting. He urges us also to allow the weeds to grow together with the wheat, and to avoid any premature harmony and "purity" at the expense of the nuance and complexity of the full harvest of God’s vision. He does not try to separate the just from the unjust, but sees God’s goodness and compassion encompassing both.

Finally, his parables are also invitations to action in the present. They announce the breaking in of God’s future, and they call us to a metanoia, to a transformation of our lives into vehicles of the spirit of inclusiveness that refuses to leave things the way they are. The balance of sacramentality, mystical openness to the future as God’s future, silent waiting, and vigorous action ensures the revelatory power and religious integrity of his gospel of hope.

Especially noteworthy in Jesus’ life and teaching is the announcement of what we are calling, in the terminology of Whitehead, the "wider vision." It is worth quoting in full here the famous philosopher’s enunciation of what he took to be authentic religion:

Jesus’ personal sense of the present and coming reign of God is an opening to and revelation of this wider vision. He does not seek to uproot our natural instincts and desires but only to direct them toward a wider fulfillment. In his parables of the kingdom, we observe a blending of the most familiar imagery with a summons to an unimaginable breadth of vision and hope. His religion is not one that encourages withdrawal from the world of our senses. Instead, it seeks to extend the sensuality and earthiness of our experience toward a divine mystery that embraces all things. Jesus requires a kind of renunciation, not for its own sake, but only for the purpose of allowing ourselves to be embraced by a wider and eternal panorama. It is not a puritanical, spiritual athleticism that he prescribes, but an asceticism of the future that opens us to the enjoyment of a wider vision. What he asks us to renounce is not our enjoyment of the good things of this world, but our failure both to share this enjoyment with the poor and to imagine and trust in the infinity of goodness and compassion that transcends and grounds the good world.

In order to keep his vision of God’s future connected to present reality, Jesus’ teachings employ a vivid imagery based on the worldly experience of his day. Although there is considerable controversy among New Testament scholars about the authenticity of many of the sayings and teachings of Jesus himself, there is little doubt about his passion for proclaiming the nearness of the reign of God. The image of a reign or kingdom, we can readily observe, is a very worldly one. The practice of embodying the sense of promise in such secular imagery as a basileia is thoroughly Jewish, thoroughly worldly, and at the same time thoroughly religious. Jesus’ teachings about the dynamic "rule" of God consistently make reference to present reality. His parables take as their symbolic basis not only natural occurrences but also the social, domestic, political, and economic realities that shaped the lives of his contemporaries. In his sacramentalism of the reign of God, he refers to fathers and sons, to kings and servants, to the use and abuse of money, and to many other purely "secular" realities. "The reign of God is like . . ." is an expression he uses often. And it is remarkable how, in his articulation of what it is "like," he employs the most pedestrian of characters and locates them in the most commonplace of circumstances. This sacramental style is indicative of one who did not despise the earth but who loved it dearly. While he was deeply disturbed about the injustice and poverty that prevailed, he did not seek a future that would have no roots in or consequences for present realities.

At the same time, however, Jesus’ imagining of the kingdom pulls us and our world beyond the mere givenness of the present. It exhibits a deep discontent with tbe status quo. Jesus’ profound mystical and apophatic sense of divine love and the otherness of God’s compassionate plan for the world give his teaching a critical dimension that unsettles all who invest too much in the way things are. His intuition of a wider vision continually demands that the present stretch itself to include the unprecedented novelty of God’s reign. He is especially sensitive to how the social conditions of his time tended to crush the life and self-esteem Out of entire groups of people. This situation, rooted in both the political and religious ideology of his time, was intolerable to him. And so his most powerful teachings were directed at those conditions that bring misery and hopelessness to so many.

The social situation in which Jesus lived was one in which a distinctively Jewish identity had to be constructed in the face of constant pressures to become assimilated into the Roman Empire.(For the following see Marcus Borg, Jesus: A New Vision [San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987] 79-96.) In order to resist this pressure, several religious alternatives for affirming one’s Jewishness were proposed by such groups as the Essenes, Sadducees, Pharisees, and Zealots. Each of them offered a "way" of solidifying Jewish identity so that it would not be absorbed into the Roman culture. However, in order to follow any of these "ways," specific rules and regulations had to be followed closely. Only in this manner could one prove that he or she fully belonged to a particular religious sect or political faction. At times the requirements for membership in such an affiliation were so exacting that many who were financially poor, or mentally, intellectually, or physically impaired, or who felt morally disqualified, could not participate in any of the dominant religious groupings. Consequently, they were unable to take advantage of the cultural and sub-cultural opportunities for gaining a sense of personal and social significance that were available to the more fortunate "belongers." They inevitably felt left out of any respectable "system," and therefore were especially vulnerable to the feeling of shame. These were the outcasts, the poor, the abandoned, the despised, or the "sinners," those who did not "belong." They were what today’s sociological terminology would brand the "marginalized."

It was especially to such people as these that Jesus announced his Good News concerning the reign of God. In addressing his gospel to those who were not only in but also outside the various systems, he indicated that religious boundaries now had to be stretched beyond what was conventional. In fact, there could no longer be any social or religious demarcations at all that would elevate one group to superiority over others. All alike are God’s children. Unlike the sectarians who had made membership dependent upon fulfilling religious, ritualistic, political, or economic prerequisites, Jesus’ wider vision of the kingdom was expansive enough to include all, even the excommunicated. It was not necessary for those abandoned by society to fulfill any special social or religious conditions in order to belong to the kingdom proclaimed by Jesus. In Luke’s gospel Jesus says: "It is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom" (12:32) Here the emphasis is probably on the word "give," indicating the absolute gratuity of God’s gift, and that one does not have to earn one’s deliverance by fulfilling a list of obligations.

Both in word and action Jesus attempted to convince his disenfranchised listeners of their unconditional worth. "Blessed are you poor," he proclaims in Luke’s version of the Beatitudes. And at the beginning of his public ministry he says, "The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor" (Luke 4:18). Jesus understood his public vocation to be that of announcing the limitless breadth of the divine vision. Only as such can we understand his passion for extending the circle of religious and social belonging. Thus his parables teach the all-inclusive nature of the future reign of God that is now dawning.

Moreover, his own life embodies in action what he proclaims in word. He becomes a living parable of inclusiveness and belonging, especially in his table-fellowship with sinners and rejected people. In Jesus’ culture, sharing a meal -- and especially a banquet -- with someone was a highly charged symbol of acceptance of that person. And so when he sat down to eat with tax-collectors, prostitutes, and other non-belongers, and with Pharisees and wealthy too, he clearly signaled God’s unconditional acceptance of them all.

The revolutionary implications of this parabolic speech and behavior have yet to be thought Out fully, much less applied in real life. Many different images and concepts are required to unfold it. We are merely suggesting here that the Whiteheadian notion of a "wider vision" goes some way toward interpreting the revelatory meaning of Jesus’ consciousness and action. Jesus’ inclusive images of the kingdom and his mission to seek out those who are lost in order to make them part of the wider picture is, to Christian faith, the vehicle of God’s revelation. By making room for the incongruous, the unqualified, and the disparate within the dimensions of a single religious society under God’s fatherhood, Jesus’ words and actions shatter all conventional views of human reality. His proclamation of the reign of God requires the painful dismantling of all non-inclusive arrangements of social and religious reality. In our own time, there are at least some efforts to include women, ethnic minorities, the homeless, and other previously repressed and excluded minorities as fully belonging to social and religious circles. Jesus’ teachings and actions on behalf of the kingdom surely support such endeavors, and we can hardly expect to experience his Spirit today apart from our own involvement in such processes leading toward complete inclusiveness.

But where did this incorporative vision of Jesus come from? Ultimately, we must surmise that it came from his own unique experience of sacred mystery. Just when his sense of an all-inclusive reign of God was solidified we cannot say. Was it when he was still a child? When he was alone in the desert? When he was baptized by John? During his episodes of prayer in lonely places? We simply do not know for sure. What does seem certain, scholars generally agree today, is that the distinctive character of Christian revelation bears a close relationship to Jesus’ unique experience of God as "abba" (usually translated as "father" but expressive of the deepest familiarity and trust). The term "abba" was in Jesus’ day apparently used as an intimate and familiar address to elders in whose presence one felt completely secure. In Jesus’ use of this religiously unusual appellation, he showed that for him the ultimate character of mystery is nothing other than the most intimate and inclusive love. His sense of God as "abba" is the font that nourishes his vision of the kingdom as well as his own inclusive actions. We may infer then that Christian revelation begins to receive its own specific shape in Jesus’ consciousness of God as "abba."

The point of Christology, as Schubert Ogden has clarified, is not so much to tell us who Jesus is as it is to tell us who God is.(Schubert Ogden, The Point of Christology (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982) 20-40.) Or to put it in terms of the present book, its point is to clarify for us what the ultimate character of mystery is like. Humanity’s religious quest, with its innumerable sacramental representations of incomprehensible mystery, receives a unique answer in Jesus’ revelation of God as "abba." And when the New Testament poses the question "who is this man?" or "who do you say the Son of Man is?," the point is not to have us focus on Jesus as much as on the mystery whose character his life and teaching are revealing to us. The point of our dwelling on Jesus as the Christ, then, is to bring us to a clear sense of the meaning of the mystery of God revealed in him. Perhaps nowhere does the character of this promising mystery present itself more graciously, extravagantly, and surprisingly than in Jesus’ exhortation to think of God as "abba."

Cross and Resurrection

According to Christian faith, the Jesus who was crucified early in the first century now lives. Indeed, his life -- according to Paul and John -- is our own life. Jesus’ resurrection means that he is still present to us, no less than to his disciples who gathered in Jerusalem and Galilee after his death on the cross. And the life that he has now with us in the Spirit is our access to the ultimate mystery he called "abba." God’s promise and the world’s own aspiration toward a new vision come together in the Jesus who is now risen from the dead. His resurrection is the promise on which Christian hope is based. But as Carl Braaten says, "The resurrection as an event is not only a basis of hope in the future; it is the power of the future becoming present now. . . ." The resurrection" . . . not only points to the future; it is the future entering the present."(Carl Braaten, Christ and Counter-Christ [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972] 50.) Thus, because it is the definitive (though not conclusive) arrival of the mystery of the future, for Christian faith the resurrection is, in its inseparability from the Cross, the central event of revelation.

The articulation of Christian belief throughout the ages confesses that in Jesus there exists the very reality of a God become human. Ultimately, therefore, the unfolding of Christian faith leads to the unanticipated and indeed scandalous conclusion that, in Jesus, the Godhead took up our own struggles and aspirations, suffered frustration, and experienced all that it means to be a finite human being who suffers and dies. The content of revelation includes at its very core the idea of a self-humbling God who experiences suffering and death in the crucifixion of Jesus.(Dermot Lane remarks: "It is difficult for us today to understand a love that is not capable of some form of empathy, sympathy and suffering. From a purely human point of view, a love that does not suffer is somehow something less than love. It was this kind of love, the love that suffers out of love, that was revealed in the passion and death of Jesus on the cross." Christ at the Center [New York, Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1990] 72.) And yet, the other side of this self-gift is resurrection. In the resurrection is prefigured the prospect of a future for the cosmos, for humans, and, we may even say, for God.

Jesus died as a sacrifice to an all-inclusive vision of the world’s future. But in spite of this death, the vision still lives on in the Spirit. The cross is followed by resurrection. And the Spirit of God in Christ remains alive in our midst. We can detect the reality of this Spirit most vividly in present social, political, environmental, and religious movements that seek the full inclusion and unity of those beings and persons who have been left out by our restrictive social, political, economic, environmental, and religious practices. We become vehicles of this Spirit and its vision whenever we ourselves live a life of concern for social and religious unity and inclusiveness (and as we shall emphasize later, a concern also for reconciliation with the natural world).

The seeking out, embracing, and including of the lost and forgotten is the main thrust of Jesus’ life and teaching. Such a life requires the renunciation of any special or separate status on the part of the includer. As long as the one who initiates the act of inclusion insists on preserving a special status there can really be no inclusion or relationship of empathy after all. We cannot really embrace others as on an equal footing with ourselves unless we forfeit any attempts to define ourselves as more privileged than they. What allowed Jesus to attract to himself so many of those lacking social or religious credentials is his self-effacing desire to exist alongside of them rather than above them. Though he clearly exemplified moral excellence, he never condemned those who lived immorally, but regarded them as partaking of his own sonship with his heavenly Father. The gospels portray him as resisting all temptations to privilege, and this renunciation allowed outcasts to approach him and to belong to his open circle without fear. It was a posture that eventually led him to his death on the cross.

But if Jesus is the sacrament of God’s own reality, as Christian faith teaches, we must conclude once again that the essential content of revelation is nothing other than the kenosis of God that opens up the future to an all-inclusive vision promised in the resurrection. What finally becomes manifest in Jesus, and especially in his death, is that the promising mystery that embraces our world is. at heart, utterly self-emptying love. Eberhard Jüngel writes that:

Then Jüngel adds that faith in God did not end with the flight of the disciples after Jesus’ death:

By identifying with the dead Christ, God experiences the negativity, the alienation, the relationlessness of death. But in God’s self-emptying identification with a dead man, there is also the unassailable reality of an eternal love that promises victory over death. Death means essentially a state of relationlessness, but the love of God expressed in the unbroken divine relationship to a dead man overcomes the alienation. As Jüngel goes on to say,

The historical life that Jesus lived was clearly one devoted to the overcoming of relationlessness. The sense of not belonging, of being unaccepted by the social, ethical, and religious requirements of his times led him to identify in a special way with the outcasts in order to give them a new and more secure sense of relationship, and therefore of life. But even while Jesus’ chief passion was to restore broken relationships, he himself became increasingly the victim of efforts to break his relationship to the world. And in his own death by crucifixion, Jesus himself died the death of an outcast abandoned even by those who had been closest to him. He experienced the very depths of relationlessness.

Relationship, as we now see more clearly in the emergence of ecological consciousness, is the substance of all being and of life itself. Without relationship among entities -- whether at the levels of matter, life, or persons (and in Trinitarian terms, of God also) -- there is simply no reality. This is why death is so abhorrent. For it means the loss of relationship, the experience of being cut off from life, loved ones, and seemingly of God, too. In the Hebrew Scriptures, death is clearly seen as a state of being estranged from one’s people, from participation in the promise, and also from God. God is a God of the living, and the dead no longer appear to have a relationship to the God of life.

Christian faith discerns in Jesus’ death, that is, in an event of utterly broken relationship, the revelation of God’s eternal love and its power to restore relationship. The resurrection then is grounded in the love of God entering into and appropriating relationlessness so as to overcome it. Revelation is the disclosure of the self-humbling of God and with it the promise of ultimate reconciliation and unity that arises out of the unbrokenness of the love that gives itself away completely and by doing so manifests itself as the ground of all life and relationship.

In the previous two chapters we sketched the broad religious and symbolic context out of which the notion of revelation may be understood. We noted that without our having an antecedent sense of the silent and mysterious depths of reality, the idea of revelation has little meaning. An awakening to mystery, then, is the first step in a theological appreciation of revelation. Religions in general are ways of bringing mystery to awareness. They generally appreciate the necessity of mystagogy as the condition for opening up our consciousness to the possibility of revelation. Through their sacramental representations of the sacred, in their mystical longing for transcendent unity, in their experience of the demand to act justly and lovingly in the world, and in their assuming the apophatic posture of pure silence, religions place us before the possible unfolding of a holy mystery.

Because of their diverse sacramental features, religions differ considerably from one another in the ways by which they formulate for their followers the fundamental character of this mystery. Although they generally agree that mystery is in some sense gracious, salvific, and fulfilling, there are endless variations in their imaginative envisagements of the nature of ultimate reality. It is not our task here to summarize these differences. We must leave that enormous undertaking to the historians of religion. Instead, we shall focus here only on the manner in which biblical religion, and particularly Christianity, unfolds its own unique experience of the dimension of depth to which the many religions witness in their widely dissimilar ways.

Mystery as Promise

All religions have some vision of "salvation," fulfillment, or liberation. Because of the universal experience of suffering, people have naturally sought a definitive solution to sorrow and evil. They have looked toward some final state of deliverance. And religions have attracted so many followers because they provide ultimate ways toward release from suffering, death, and other limits. But they do not all propose the same route to redemption. The religions descended from Abraham, for example, have a unique appreciation of mystery and a distinctive understanding of the salvation that coincides with it. They experience mystery especially in terms of "future," and they understand deliverance or salvation as an experience whose definitive occurrence resides not in the past or present, but only in the future.(See Jürgen Moltmann, The Experiment Hope, edited and translated by M. Douglas Meeks (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975). Much of the interpretation of mystery given in this chapter follows ideas of Moltmann. However, the writings of Ernst Bloch, Teilhard de Chardin, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Karl Rahner, and their many followers have also influenced the ideas presented here.)

This vision of the ultimate futurity of reality sets biblical religion apart from the other traditions. Primal religion was chained to the cycle of seasons. Its sacramental relation to animals, fertility, and earth gave it a cyclical character based on the repetition of natural occurrences. It was not yet aware of the radical openness of reality to the future. It remained bound to the soil, the sun, the moon, the forests, rivers, and seasons. This sacramental attachment to nature still lives on as an important layer within many religions. And it would be a considerable impoverishment of religions if they ever forgot their origins among the ancient hunters and gatherers of the Stone Age and the more recent planters and harvesters of the agricultural period originating about ten thousand years ago. The sacramental life of religious people to this day carries with it metaphors (such as the dying and rising of a god) that owe their original meaning to the religious imaginations of our forbears of the early agricultural period.(It is possible that the metaphor of "resurrection," for example, was originally nurtured by the experience, going back to the neolithic period, of planting in the ground seeds which "die" and then "rise" to new life.) Although biblical religion overlays the natural world with historic meaning, it nevertheless does not completely abandon the natural-sacramental mode of religion. This is a point worth holding on to as we search for a response in the religions to our global environmental crisis.

All of the axial religions, in fact, maintained some connection to nature’s rhythms and cycles. But they also nurtured a new restlessness that loosened them from early religion’s immediate connection to nature. The Vedantic quest for the One, the Platonic postulation of an ideal world of being beyond the becoming of the sensible world, and the Buddhist renunciation of the religious clinging to concrete worldly objects -- these and other developments in the first millennium BC. augured a new and more disturbing understanding of mystery while showing the provisional and imperfect character of the world of ordinary human existence. Simultaneously they relativized the sacramental orientation of early religion by warning of the narrowing effects of idolatrous attachments.

The religion of Israel developed a unique version of the axial disengagement from purely nature-oriented religion. Filled with an unprecedented hope for a future fulfillment within the context of history, it no longer thought of the cycles of nature as the primary sphere in which fulfillment is to be found. As noted above, it did not entirely abandon nature. It is impossible to do so. But it began to think of mystery more in terms of a vision for history than in terms of the sacral dimension behind natural phenomena. And it learned to think of God as one who continually holds out a fresh promise for the future, as one who calls us to hope in a vision yet to be fulfilled.

Hans Küng summarizes the temporal and futurist slant that biblical religion gives to the axial intuition of a transcendent mystery:

This religious attitude of looking toward the future for deliverance is known as eschatology. Thus Judaism and Christianity may be called eschatological religions. The term "eschatological," derived from the Greek noun eschaton, literally means "final" or "last." In Christian theology, the term "eschatology" formerly meant a study of the "last things," i.e. death and life beyond death. But in its broader and more biblical meaning, it designates the hopeful looking forward to a future salvation.(for a summary of recent theological interpretations of eschatology, see Zachary Hayes, Visions of a Future [Wilmington: Michael Glazier, Inc. 1989]) The notion of revelation, we shall be emphasizing, needs now to be grasped again in its profoundly eschatological nature.(Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 37-94.)

Eschatological thinking appeals to believers partly because it provides a response to the perennial problem of suffering. The solution to suffering in eschatological religion begins with a hope that the God who comes to us from the realm of the future will bring the end of frustration. By hoping for a future deliverance, biblical eschatology renders present misery only temporary, and even though distress may still remain, the prospect of an eventual solution at least makes pain more bearable. Without such hope, suffering is intolerable.

In the face of suffering, eschatological religion conjures up a rich array of images pointing to future salvation. It speaks of shalom, of the "day of the Lord," of the coming of the Son of Man, of the "reign of God." But perhaps its fundamental contribution to the history of religion is its idea of a personal, caring God who makes promises and intends to deliver people from their suffering. It is in the realm of the future that this God’s reality most fully resides. The esoteric Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch observes that the God of promissory religion "has the future as the mode of his being."(Quoted in Moltmann, The Experiment Hope, 48) This God is the source of endless surprise, holding Out the vision of a realm of fulfillment and joy far surpassing all present anticipations. The image of a promising God who meets us Out of the mysterious future subverts the archaic religious instinct to seek fulfillment in nature or in the present moment alone, or in an escape from history into timelessness. The promising mystery holds out a new vision of creation’s possibilities and thereby sabotages our instincts for securing our existence only in the predictability of natural recurrences.

The invasion of promise into human consciousness has proven to be quite disturbing, as the biblical texts testify. Promise is troubling because it demands of us a willingness to let go of the present and to forsake our tendency to define reality only on the basis of what has already happened in the past. Its God is one who makes all things new (Rev 21:5): "For behold I create new heavens and a new earth. . . ." (Isa. 65:17).

What is meant by promise? Jürgen Moltmann, who -- perhaps more thoroughly than any other contemporary theologian -- has retrieved the biblical theme of promise and hope as central to the Christian vision of revelation, answers as follows:

In the Bible, God’s transcendence is located not so much "up above" as up ahead, in the realm of the future. Moltmann seeks to recapture the biblical notion of the future as the realm of divine transcendence. But he emphasizes that the future can be conceived of as the primary abode of God only if we allow that it contains possibilities and surprises that we are incapable of calculating on the basis of present experience.(Jürgen Moltmann, Zukunfi der Schöpfung (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1977) 21-22.) The future is God’s, and God’s future is not a simple unfolding of potentiality latent in our present or past. Rather, in its transcendence it comes to us in a way that we cannot predict or control. It cannot be completely planned. And genuine hope, the fundamental consequence of biblical faith, possesses an openness to this future and a willingness to undergo the transformation that it requires as we go to meet it.

By offering a new future, the biblical word urges us to move actively toward the realization of the promise it announces. The revelatory word of promise not only announces, it also transforms. Opening ourselves to the novelty of God’s future requires an active struggle with those inclinations in us that seek security in a settled past or an untroubled present. So we often resist the futurity of being. But in so doing we obscure the goal of our deepest and most intimate yearnings. In disclosing undreamed-of possibilities for us, revelation seeks to expose the very core of human longing as well. This process can be quite uncomfortable even while it is very promising. The mysterious depth of God’s future may first present itself to us as an abyss to be avoided rather than as a ground of consolation. The future appears to us a mysterium tremendum.

For this reason, contrary to what many critics of religion have claimed, accepting the promise held Out by eschatological faith is by no means an easy or childish escape from the difficulties of human existence. The uncertainty of a future that appears only in the form of promise rather than as an instantaneously complete manifestation of the sacred is terrifying. Accepting the unpredictability of the future is too much for us at times, and so we seek refuge in the more certain and predictable realm of nature or in our past achievements. Trusting in an uncertain future is much more challenging than is a religiosity based on the securing of ourselves to present certitudes. Eschatological religion does not appeal to the human instinct for safety as much as to our passion for adventure. Much that goes by the name "religion" is little more than a sanction of the status quo or a flight from the messiness of historical existence. Our religiosity easily reverts to an idolatrous sacramentalism or an aversion to temporality and history. But eschatological faith is intolerant of such escapism.

Abraham

We gather from the Bible that the promissory vision of existence originated in the dreams of a semi-nomadic people in pre-axial Mesopotamia. Among the natives of the Fertile Crescent during the second millennium BC., perhaps there was a "wandering Aramean" known as Abram.(We are not concerned here with questions of the historical facticity of the ancestor narratives in the Bible. Rather, we are concerned only with the way in which such accounts express the promissory faith of Israel.) Like all semi-nomads, he was required by seasonal changes to shift his herds and family constantly in search of new resources. Such a restive life allowed no final settling down into one fixed place. Thus the nomadic existence nourished a spirit of anticipation. Fresh possibility loomed constantly on the horizon. In such disquiet there may have occurred the first hints of the futurity of mystery that would culminate in a new and distinct religious tradition.(Even when Israel finally abandoned the nomadic life of her ancestors, the wandering spirit remained at the heart of its God-consciousness, and this served to make Israel’s religious experience unique among the nations. See Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 79.) The biblical understanding of God would eventually blossom from this ancient intuition of reality’s promise.

According to the Bible, Abram used to travel the caravan routes linking Ur, Haran, Damascus, Shechem, Hebron, and Egypt. At a certain point in his wanderings, he experienced a summons from God to leave his ancestral home and go forth to a new life of unknown promise. In some of the most memorable words of the biblical tradition, God is said to have called Abram:

It is impossible to determine the exact circumstances surrounding this calling. The biblical narratives about the ancestors are colored over with religious and political ideals of later periods of Israel’s history and hopes. It is conceivable that there was an historical Abram who experienced mystery in the mode of a future promise. In any case, the picture presented in Genesis portrays him as one who felt God’s future beckoning him toward the uncertainty of a whole new way of existing. Perhaps he felt a deep uneasiness about abandoning himself to its promise. But he is pictured as surrendering himself to God’s promises in an attitude of trust that has remained the norm of authentic piety to this day in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, all of which claim him as their father.

As the book of Genesis tells it, God periodically renewed the promise to Abram: "To your descendants I will give this land." (12:7) "All the land which you see I will give to you and to your descendants forever" (13:15). "Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them. So shall your descendants be" (15:5). "Behold my covenant is with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations" (17:4). And in Abram’s old age, God bestowed on him a new name:

As we have already noted, the biblical stories about Abraham express the sentiments of later stages in the history of Israel. So it is hard to sift out the events as they actually happened or to distinguish them from later interpretations. But, for our purposes, such otherwise significant scholarly effort is not necessary. It is sufficient to emphasize the distinct mode of the appearance of mystery as it is portrayed in these passages. What stands out is that revelation comes in the mode of a promise of future fulfillment to which we can relate only by adopting the posture of hope. Promise is the form of revelation, and hope is the indispensable attitude for the reception of revelation. Revelation is not, biblically speaking at least, a vertical interruption from above. It is not a passing of information from "up there" to "down here." Nor is it a mystical rapture with the One such as we find, for example, in Vedantic Hinduism. Neither is it Buddhism’s sudden entrance into nirvana. Revelation is not the present uncovering of the nature of ultimate reality, as much traditional theology would have it. The fullness of the future cannot be exhaustively disclosed in any particular present moment within history. For that reason, it is difficult for theology to maintain that revelation has yet been completed. Thus revelation may best be understood as the disclosure of God’s vision of the future in the form of a promise. And in any present moment, we attune ourselves to this revelation only if, like Abraham, we let go of the present and renew our hope in the promise of an open, uncertain, but fulfilling future.

Characteristics of Promise and Hope

The main features of the divine promise are its gratuity, extravagance, and surprise. These three persistent elements of revelation are already present in the story of Abraham, and they recur in numerous other biblical narratives. Revelation’s gratuity -- its undeserved nature -- is manifested, for example, in Abraham’s doing absolutely nothing to earn the promise bestowed on him and his posterity. The promise always arrives in a most unexpected way, often when conditions seem to be impossible and incapable of redemption. "Grace" is the name that Christian theology has given to this freely bestowed promise of fulfillment. The gracious character of the promise implies that we ourselves are not in a position to wrest any revelation from the heart of mystery. We can make no claim upon tt, even by the most virtuous of our actions. We may open ourselves to it in hope, but we cannot exact it. It comes as a gift.

Second, revelation is extravagant. There is no apparent limit to the abundance promised to those who trust in God’s promise. Abraham’s posterity will be numberless. The land his posterity will inhabit will be bounteous to the point of overflowing. Throughout the Bible, God’s revelation is constantly portrayed in images of excess. This immoderate nature of revelation is a quality that our parsimonious human habits of religiosity find quite disturbing at times. Usually our expectations of how any conceivable revelation might confront us are framed in terms entirely too narrow to contain its superabundance. But it always spills over the upper limits of our apparatus for receiving it. And so we typically filter it out and shrink it down to our own size rather than embrace it in its fullness.

In the third place, and precisely because of its gratuity and extravagance, the revelatory promise catches us by surprise. It goes beyond our wildest expectations and imaginings. None of our present anticipations of the mystery of the future can adequately forecast the actual shape it will take as it comes into conformity with God’s vision for the world.(For this reason, the theology of Karl Barth, with its emphasis on the otherness of God’s word, is a healthy corrective to the straitjacketing effect of many of our hermeneutical efforts.) The consistent biblical teaching, which becomes most explicit in the apocalyptic literature, is that the future is ultimately God’s future. Biblical religion, therefore, requires that we always keep ourselves open to the possibility that this future will surprise us. The indispensable condition for the reception of revelation is an openness to the possibility of being surprised.(This is a point that has been made more consistently in the works of Andrew Greeley than in the writings of most theologians.)

The appropriate response to the free, extravagant, and surprising promise of God is hope. Hope is a radical, unquestioning openness to the breaking in of God’s future. It is not the same as mere wishing, or naive optimism, although hoping does not necessarily exclude wishing and optimism either. But wishing without hoping can, as Freud shows, easily become nothing more than illusory projection. And wishing may be little more than the fantasizing of a future whose shape is determined exclusively by what I (first person singular) would like now (present tense).(H. A: Williams, True Resurrection (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1972) 178-79.) Such an attitude, insofar as it is devoid of hope, closes one off from any possibility of being surprised by the actual arrival of a truly transcendent future. Though we cannot and perhaps should not even try to purify our hope of all elements of wishing,(See William Lynch, Images of Hope (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974.) we may still distinguish it from less expansive modes of desire. Hoping is understood here as openness to the radically new. It is a willingness not necessarily to renounce but at least to relativize the optimism of wishing, which is usually oriented entirely from the point of view of our present situation and needs. Instead, hope transforms our natural human desiring into an openness to that which present awareness may not even begin to envisage as possible.

Hope is a posture that embodies all four of the religious ways discussed in the previous chapter. First, it generates a highly sacramental aspect in its rich images of the future. For it is through our images of hope that God’s future first comes to birth in our world. Human imagination is the vehicle of divine revelation.(Ray Hart, Unfinished Man and the Imagination (New York: Herder & Herder, 1968) 180-266.) Such an observation might seem at first to arouse an enormous number of epistemological difficulties. For if revelation is so closely tied to our faculty of imagining, how do we know that It is true to reality? How can we tell when our images of the future arise out of hoping rather than solely out of wishing? How do we know when imagination is exclusively projective and when it has elements of radical openness to a transcending future?

It would seem that our longing for the future is genuine hope rather than mere wishing, only if, along with its images of the future, it also includes mystical, apophatic, and active elements that keep these images from being frozen into absolutes. As we argued in the preceding chapter, religion is most wholesome when it balances its four elements -- sacramentalism, mysticism, silence and action. The same criterion of authentic religion -- namely, that of keeping the four aspects in dynamic tension -- can be used to distinguish hope from unrealistic fantasy.

Hope, as we have just noted, has a sacramental character in that it is always embodied in images of the future. Without a lively imagination there can really be no hope. Hope cannot take root in our lives without very concrete imaginative representations of the future. For example, as we shall observe, Israel’s hope in God’s promise takes on the vivid shape of a search for a secure homeland. But hope’s openness to the futurity of mystery is ensured especially by its including also a mystical willingness to transcend endlessly the particularity of sacramental images. Moreover, its realism is grounded in an apophatic patience and capacity to wait in silence, as well as in its embodiment in concrete action, or in what contemporary theology calls praxis. It is by maintaining a healthy tension among these four aspects that hope avoids escapism and opens itself to the revelation of God’s promise.

Let us look a bit more closely at the mystical, apophatic, and praxis-oriented aspects of hope. Hope manifests its mystical side in its longing for ultimate union with the future and therefore deliverance from the relativity of the present. Prophetic religions have often been sharply contrasted with Asian religions because the former seem to be less interested in mystical union than the latter. Such a comparison, however, is difficult to sustain. For in hope’s reaching out to the future, it is also seeking intimate union with sacred mystery, which in the prophetic context happens to have the shape of "future." The fact that mystery bears the character of futurity, however, does not make prophetic religions less mystical than any others, if by mysticism we mean a longing for and experience of union with ultimate reality. There is even a sense in which the person who hopes seeks thereby to lose or abandon herself to God, taking on the attitude of complete surrender that is typical of mystical experience everywhere. In that sense at least, the desire for union with God is no less passionately mystical in biblically based religions than it is in the Asian traditions. The difference is that hope does not insist upon a full epiphany of God, nor does it pretend that in any historical moment we can ever achieve complete and total enjoyment of God.

Hope also gives evidence of an apophatic or renunciatory aspect in its willingness to let go of the present and in its patient waiting for the genuine arrival of God’s future. This willingness to wait is clear evidence of a mature hope’s openness to the graciousness, extravagance, and unexpectedness of revelation. Hoping, we have noted, is not an easy attitude to assume. It may indeed be quite painful. (As Moltmann indicates, the Greeks even saw hope as an evil to be avoided, because it is an attitude that time and again leads to disappointment. According to the myth of Prometheus, hope is the last and greatest of the evils that escape from Pandora’s box: "In addition to all other evils, man acquired yet another: hope. It deceives him with illusions and thus intensifies all his sufferings. If we were able to be free of hope, then we would be able to come to terms with all forms of our suffering. We would no longer experience our suffering as pain. We would then have no more fear; without fear and without hope we would be invulnerable like the Stoics. Hope is a fraud. Only if one sees through this deception is he or she at peace. Give up hope, then you are happy!" The Experiment Hope, 16.) The first implication of hope, after all, is that the present must be abandoned. Hope carries its own kind of asceticism.(Williams, 178-79.) It requires that we cease our clinging to the way things are. Genuine hope, moreover, is faithful to the apophatic requirement of authentic religion in its willingness to forsake obsession with any single sacramental image or vision of the future. As it allows the mysterious future to enter into the present, it abandons any exclusivist fixation on previously consoling images and begins to experiment with new ones. It seeks to transcend utopian visions of the future that had been built up out of our previous wishings. It lets go of the present in order to receive the open, surprising, and inexhaustible reality of the future. In its exposure to surprise, genuine hope yields to the future in a way that allows the latter to retain its "otherness" and ineffability. It does not try to coerce, but expresses its willingness to let go of comforting and optimistic imaginings spun too abundantly out of our own narrowness of perspective. It does not seek to force mystery to take on the shape of our desires. For that reason, it is entirely appropriate for us to speak of an apophatic dimension of hope. No less than Buddhism, a religion of hope must be ready to renounce those cravings that tie us down to the present. Its adoption of the "way of silence" guarantees the realism of hope over against the short-sightedness of mere optimism.

Finally, hope contains an active aspect in its refusal to wait in sheer passivity. Hope realizes that the arrival of the future requires our energetic involvement in its coming. The vision unfolded in biblical revelation can become incarnate in our world only as we cooperate actively with the power behind that vision. For this reason, Christian teaching rightly rejects a quietism that leaves our human activity and creativity out of God’s revelatory vision. Of course, it spurns any "works-righteousness," according to which our own actions are made the sole criterion of salvation. But it also finds unacceptable the notion of a faith that fails to challenge us to a praxis corresponding to God’s plan for the world and its future. Concretely, this implies that we incarnate our hope, for example, in action for justice on behalf of the poor and abandoned.

In summary, then, if we follow the Bible, hope in God’s promise is the core of authentic religion. The story of Abraham’s fidelity to the promise is the model of fidelity to God. Stories of such unflagging loyalty are necessary to fuel our own faith in revelation’s promise. For Buddhists, the story of Gautama is the central model for their own persistence on the path toward enlightenment and final freedom from suffering. When Buddhists hear about Gautama, with all his struggles and temptations, they are encouraged to sustain their own life quests, keeping in view the fact that Gautama eventually reached his true destiny. All religions contain narratives of such courage, and it is in these heroic accounts that the character of a religion is most vividly represented. For Jews and Christians, as well as Muslims, it is Abraham’s enduring faith in God’s promise that constitutes our shared model of faith and hope.

We notice that Abraham had many apparently solid reasons to abandon his pursuit of the promise. His own wife’s infertility hardly augured well for one who was promised descendants that would outnumber the stars in the sky. He was commanded, by the same God who had given him the promise of enormous progeny, to sacrifice his own son Isaac. Yet Abraham continued to trust, and his perseverance remains the standard of religious fidelity in the prophetic faiths.

Judaism

Revelation, as we observed above, takes the shape of very concrete Images of God’s vision for the world’s future. In order to have any content, it requires a symbolic or sacramental component. In Hebraic religion, the ideal of a land in which to dwell at peace is the great sacrament of hope. Through it, the mystery of the future enters concretely into the religious consciousness of the people. To this day, much Jewish faith requires a specific homeland as the indispensable sacrament of its encounter with the mystery known as God. Its need for sacraments of promise explains the symbolic power of the land of Israel or the city of Jerusalem as an emblem of hope. Without such visible and tangible monuments to the future, existence as a people would become inconceivable to many Jews. The importance of a homeland for this people cannot be appreciated aside from the deep religious need for sacramental representations of a future in which to hope. Hope must be embodied in concrete realities if it is to arouse all levels of our longing.

The story of the Jewish quest for the "land" is well known. Most of what Christians have traditionally called the Old Testament centers around the quest for a Promised Land, the successful occupation of this land, the struggle to hold onto it, the anguish at losing it, and the prospects of reclaiming it. Often, Christians and other religious people have difficulty understanding the seeming obsession with geography and locality in Jewish religion. Many religions have so spiritualized the object of their aspiration (as have even some later developments in Judaism itself) that the Jewish concern for a rather small Middle Eastern territory, today the state of Israel, seems utterly secularistic (as indeed it often is). However, we have suggested that there is a need for at least some sacramental representation of mystery in all religion. Though it is not without its own temptations, some degree of sacramentalism is indispensable to the very integrity of religion. Without a sacramental component, religion -- or religious hope -- can easily take flight from our earthiness and from the reality of bodily existence. It will then be transformed into the style of religious escapism known as "gnosticism." Gnosticism itself, however, merely translates the desire for some special place in history or among the nations to a longing for an elite spiritual status in the eyes of God. The sad consequence of gnosticism is that its etherealized piety and its demand for esoteric knowledge make it largely irrelevant to human history. Without some bonding to the earth and to the political and economic realities of our existence, hope turns into reverie or romantic utopianism. And from such unrealistic aspirations, the road to cynicism and despair turns out to be very short. The great lesson Christians can learn from Judaism is the importance of some visible, bodily representation of a future in which to hope.

Let us recall briefly the main episodes in the story of the Jewish quest for the land. The ancestors of Judaism lived a servile existence in Egypt without a home to call their own and without a clear national identity. Then Moses rose up in their midst, initiated a revolt against the pharaoh’s regime, and crossed over the "Sea of Reeds" in a liberative event known as the Exodus. He led his band of followers into the wilderness where they wandered for a period. All the while, the dream of a new land sustained them. Eventually, as the story goes, they arrived in Canaan where they merged with the inhabitants and gradually became the biblical people of Judah and Israel. Moses himself never reached the Promised Land, but his liberating efforts, his hope for the future, and his fidelity to the "promise" have made him the central ancestral figure in Judaism.

Judaism traces its existence as a distinct nation or people to such dreamers of the future as Abraham and Moses. And with them, it still continually looks toward the future. Along with Christianity, it anticipates the breaking in of a free, extravagant, and surprising future. The primary historical basis for its hope in the future lies in the deliverance from Egypt as recounted in the biblical Book of Exodus. The narratives comprising this book seem highly exaggerated when we view them simply in terms of scientifically historical standards. In fact, there may have been only a relatively small band of people who followed Moses out of Egypt, whereas the Book of Exodus speaks of thousands. But we would be missing the point of Exodus if we concentrated only on the question of whether it actually happened that way. For its purpose is to arouse trust in the future, and it looks back to the past liberation of the Hebrew people and to their settlement in a new land as the sacramental and narrative basis for our hoping here and now in the mystery of a future that is still dawning.

Having fled from slavery and the threat of losing their identity as a distinct people, Moses and his followers gave thanks to Yahweh, the deity to whom they attributed their new freedom and their creation as a people with a new future. The Exodus, we should note, occurred long before what we have called the axial age. During the thirteenth century BC., the religious consciousness of the Hebrew people had not yet fully developed the axial yearning for a transcendent Oneness with its intolerance of a multiplicity of gods and goddesses. Yahweh, therefore, was not originally the one-and-only transcendent being that he was later to become. Initially, he may only have been Moses’ tribal or family deity, but as Israel’s religion developed during the following centuries, the name of Yahweh took on a more comprehensive and eventually monotheistic character. Finally, during the axial period, Yahweh began to be seen not only as the great promiser, liberator, and mighty warrior who had fashioned a distinct people, but also as the creator, savior, and ruler of the entire world. Judging by the writings of Second Isaiah, strict monotheism, which is intolerant of trust in a plurality of deities, arrived decisively somewhere around the sixth century BC.

According to Exodus, after the deliverance from Egypt, Moses and his followers continued their relationship with the God of freedom and hope. At Mount Sinai, Yahweh forged a "covenant" with his elected people. Once again, the theme of the land was central. Yahweh graciously promised the Hebrews their own home and high status among the nations if they on their part would but put their trust in him and in the future fulfillment of his promises. They would have to show their loyalty by turning away from idols, from gods that would only enslave them once again. They must place their trust in Yahweh, the liberator and promise-keeper, alone. The Ten Commandments and the Law in its entirety make explicit what it means to live freely and trustingly as a community of hope. The imperative to turn away from idols is in fact an invitation to freedom. Any obsessive clinging, including any exclusivist possessiveness toward the land itself as though it were a right and not a gift, leads away from the free life and back to slavery.

During the wilderness journey, the Hebrews are said to have "murmured" in defiance of the divine promise given through Moses. Unwilling to adopt the patience and waiting that always accompany authentic hope, they fell back into idolatry, forsaking the dream of freedom. Meanwhile Moses struggled valiantly to sustain their hope in the promise. But, in a way characteristic of all humans, the people yearned for security in the present and the past. They expressed their distaste for freedom and the uncertain future by a longing to return to Egypt. It would be better to be slaves again than to wander in the wilderness devoid of safety. In slavery there is at least a kind of security, while the call to freedom and the unknown future is full of risk. The Bible credits Moses and his faithful followers, however, with not allowing their vision of future deliverance to die. And it is in great measure to their steadfastness that the Jewish and the Christian faiths owe their vision of the unconquerable power of hope in God’s future.

The struggle against despair remains a constant one in all religion and in human life as such. In Israel, it is especially the prophets who take up the cause of Moses and Abraham and insist that God’s people not give into the temptation to hopelessness. It is especially on the prophets that there falls the obligation of keeping the promise pure and alive in the people’s religious life. There is a natural tendency for a nation living close to the land and making its living from the earth to consort with the gods of nature and fertility. From the perspective of our awareness of the history of religion, such devotion seems quite understandable and forgivable. But to the prophets of Israel it was an abomination because it signaled an abandonment of the revelatory promise given earlier to Abraham and Moses. In sum, it was a forsaking of the liberating mystery that had disclosed itself as a personal God of promise. Returning to nature symbolized a despair about history and its possibilities for fulfilling the deepest longings of creation and of human existence.

In fact, the fulfillment of history’s promise always seems too far off, whereas the gods of nature offer immediate satisfaction. It is very tempting to lose ourselves in the natural and to anesthetize any deeper longing we may have for a wider vision. But the prophets, speaking authoritatively on behalf of the God of Abraham and Moses, challenged the people to trust in the promise unconditionally. They protested any flirtation with the gods and goddesses of nature. They even objected to the establishment of a monarchy that would tempt people to settle for the superficial sacramentalism according to which divine mystery is represented only in the image of monarchical political power. If Yahweh is King, it is not in the same sense as the typical despots who have so little concern for justice.

It is in their demand for justice that the prophets stand out most sharply. In the eighth century BC., a young dresser of sycamores named Amos from the southern kingdom of Judah experienced a calling to journey to the northern kingdom of Israel in order to protest the social injustice, especially the widening gap between the rich and the poor, that had become prevalent there. He thought of himself only as a humble farmer and did not identify himself with the professional prophets of the day. But he was consumed by a passion for righteousness, and he spoke out on behalf of the God of justice. He observed that the Israelites "trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and turn aside the way of the afflicted" (Amos 2:7). He attacked them for their presumption that being chosen by God from among the nations is a guarantee of salvation rather than a call to responsibility. Israel had failed to abide by the conditions of the Sinai covenant, and now the promised "Day of Yahweh" would spell doom rather than joy.

The prophetic message is that God is faithful to his promise but that the promise is not to be taken lightly. It requires that people adopt the same concern for the needy as Yahweh had done in electing Abraham and in rescuing his people from Egypt. But Israel and Judah had failed to follow the demands of the election and covenant, and had thoughtlessly turned back onto themselves. The land had become an idol rather than a sacrament of the future. The praxis required by authentic hope had been ignored. The neglect of justice had led to an obscuring of the religious heritage of hope. Revelation, at least in the biblical sense, can be experienced only if justice prevails. Where justice does not yet reign, the appropriate sense of God is also absent.

In the prophetic outcries of Amos, Hosea, Micah, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel we see yet another instance of axial religion’s critique of a piety based only on sacramentalism. About the same time that the Upanishads were expressing an uneasiness with Vedic ritualism, Amos and Micah were excoriating the superficial sacrifices of the Israelites. While the Buddha was reforming religion in India, even to the point of abandoning the ancient Hindu rites altogether, the prophets of Judah and Israel were impeaching the superficial piety of their own culture. They rejected any sacramental religious solace that was not accompanied by positive social, political, and economic implications. A more thunderous indictment of ineffective religiosity is hard to find than the one preserved in the book of Amos. Here God reproaches Israel:

Like the Buddha, the prophets insisted that religion cannot be separated from compassion for those in need. Sacramental, mystical, and silent religion must also have implications for life in this world. Trust in the promise requires an attitude of inclusiveness that embraces all and excludes none.

The Vision

The biblical idea of revelation as God’s promise has both auditory and visual overtones. Usually we think of revelation as a disclosure of God occurring through the mediation of the spoken word. The prophets, for example, called upon their listeners to hear the "word of the Lord." In the Bible, the dabhar or the logos of God appears to be the primary medium of divine revelation. But revelation may also be understood as the unfolding of a vision. The latter notion has not been as prominent in the theology of revelation as has the former, but it is no less biblical. The prophets leave us with vivid pictures of God’s plan for the future. They require that we use our own imaginations to portray, however inadequately, the freedom, extravagance, and surprisingness of God’s eternal vision for the world and humanity. The concept of God’s vision for history, and for the entire cosmos, is indispensable for a genuinely biblical understanding of revelation.(As noted earlier, this idea is worked out most explicitly in Gabriel Fackre’s The Christian Story.

Although "vision" does not capture everything implied in "word," it allows us to focus on the pictorial features implied in the revelatory promise. It enables us to assimilate revelation to the notions of dreaming and imagining without which we can have no vivid sense of what is promised to us. In dreaming and imagining we form pictures of the future. The eschatological age, according to the prophet Joel, will feature those who dream dreams and see visions. Since the future has not yet fully arrived, it can come into our lives now only on the wings of dreams and imaginings. Biblical religion, unlike our naive "realism," actually encourages us to dream about the future. And although we must be critical of our dreams, since they may easily become unrealistic, the reception of revelation requires on our part an actively visionary way of thinking.(On the importance of day-dreaming as our access to the dawning of future possibilities, see Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Vol. I, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1986).

Once again, though, we must ask ourselves how we know when our visions are simply projections of childish wishing, rather than images more truly revelatory of mystery. We shall address this question at greater length in Chapter 11, for around this issue the question of the plausibility of revelation revolves. But even here, we may invoke the simple criterion implied in the teachings of the prophets themselves: we can trust our visions if they are all-inclusive ones, open to the assimilation of ever new, surprising, and alien elements. In other words, the authenticity of our visions is a function of their heuristic breadth. (As we indicated several times earlier, authentic religion must have an apophatic dimension. It is in its move toward silence that it acquires a breadth that is lacking in sacramentalism as such.) Earlier we spoke of mystery in terms of depth. Here, the notion of vision invites us to think of mystery also in terms of breadth. Accordingly, the "truthfulness" of a vision resides in its capacity to spread out and integrate coherently into itself elements of experience that would otherwise remain unnoticed and unintelligible.

Most of the time our visions of and plans for the future tend to leave something out. And this is why, in retrospect, they seem so naive. They are misguided because they have failed to consider items that in a wider perspective turn out to be indispensable for genuine wholeness. For example, when we close our eyes to elements of society such as the homeless, the unemployed, the mentally ill, and others who do not seem to fit into our idealization of social order, or if we forget the sufferings of past generations, we end up with sketches that are inadequate to God’s own vision of the future. Much evil, including the slaughter of millions of innocent people, has been wrought, especially in the present century, by "visionaries" who were not expansive enough in their dreams of social order to include those too weak, poor, or ideologically unsuitable to fit into the plans of the powerful for the future.

In order to avoid such narrowness and naivet~, the biblical prophets, unlike their obsequious establishment rivals, did not turn toward the future with rosy-eyed optimism. Their hopes were tempered by a sober realism about the current state of affairs. They took note of present injustice, particularly the exclusion of the poor, and proclaimed the inadequacy of any vision of the future that failed to include the suffering and the marginalized victims of society. The prophets called for a continual widening of what it means to be a community of hope, and they did so by refusing to allow any forgetting of the poor and outcasts. Social planning that excludes certain groups for the sake of efficiency and homogeneity is in the long run completely unrealistic. The prophets forbade such narrowing of social ideals. They refused to let the children of Abraham forget the dark side of history, the sufferings of the past, or the poverty of their own origins. To them, the vision of future shalom had to be all-inclusive.(It is especially in the company of the prophets that we shall locate the revelatory role of Jesus. See below, Chapter 6.)

Although the prophets were speaking primarily of social and economic inclusiveness, we are called upon by revelation to extend their criterion of inclusiveness to other arenas (such as race and gender, for example) today. If a vision is to be realistic it must be open to an ongoing expansion that continually takes more and more data into account and fits these data together in increasingly more meaningful ways. In our own day this means that a vision of the future cannot ignore what the sciences tell us about reality. And now, more than ever, it must be attentive to what other religions are saying. Without losing its distinctive boundaries (which are essential for the passing on of information) a "truthful" revelatory vision must nevertheless be continually open to new data. Of course, none of us can ever hold the breadth of reality within the narrowness of our own awareness. But at least we may be open to the possibility of a wider vision, one far surpassing our own. And we may even speak of an ultimate vision, one in which there are no limits whatsoever on inclusiveness.

Such a limitless breadth of vision is sacramentalized in the biblical image of shalom. Authentic faith is the search for an ever-widening vision of peace.(This is a major theme in Alfred North Whitehead’s understanding of religion. See Science and the Modern World, (New York: The Free Press, 1967) 191-92.) It is the quest for a perfection too grand to be contained in any present moment, a vision that only the uncertain future is adequate to hold. Faith’s vision, because of its infinite scope, cannot be squeezed into the narrowness of the "now." It can be approached only through the mediation of an imagination suffused with a hope held in common with others.(See Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man [New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1969] 75.) Revelation, therefore, is the disclosure not only of the depth but also the breadth of mystery. Such breadth would be intimated only by the vision of a future in which all can hope. Such a vision would thereby provide a meaning not only for our own lives but for all of history and even of the universe as a whole. The function of revelation is to set forth such a vision.

The Image of God’s Humility

God, as Karl Rahner puts it, may be understood as our "absolute future." (Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, Vol. VI, trans. Karl H. and Boniface Kruger (Baltimore: Helicon, 1969) 59-68.) But the absoluteness of the future hides itself, and it is sacramentally approachable by us only in the concrete particularity of our present experience with its always limited images of the future. But whereas psychology might suggest that these images are our own creations, faith allows us to see in them an incarnation and revelation of God, our absolute future. The infinite mystery of the future, notwithstanding its ultimate hiddenness, condescends to dwell within the restrictive arena of our present human imaginings. It does so by limiting itself and taking on, after a fashion, the shape of our own hopes in order eventually to lead us further into the depth and breadth of God’s own vision for the world.

The theme of the "land" in Judaism is one such sacramental incarnation of God’s future in the religious life of a particular people. To our overly spiritualized religious sensibilities, a geographically limited locality might seem to be a too secular and even materialistic way of symbolizing that which is promised to us. And yet the restrictedness of such symbols is quite consistent with our central image of the humility of God. The biblical understanding of revelation is thoroughly incarnational, and not just in the New Testament. The sons and daughters of Israel also believe that the eternal mystery of the world does not keep itself separate from the temporality of our particular world. It grasps hold of us and elicits the response of hope only by embodying itself in something so concrete as a homeland in which to hope. It is through our relationship to such mundane longings that we begin to construct our visions of the future. To separate hope from the bodily, social, and geographical realities in which we abide will lead us away from and not toward the God of promise.

In order for revelation to be a meaningful notion to us, we must experience the promise of the future in the particularities of our own lives and our own times. The promise of God, if it is still to be effective, must enter into the warp and woof of our existence here and now. Otherwise, it is nothing more than an abstraction. Perhaps it even needs to come alive in a new way every day of our lives. This means that we will not experience revelation simply by reading the Bible or attending a religious service. Although these are indispensable, the concrete situation of our encounter with the futurity of mystery is our everyday life with others in the world of today. If the idea of revelation is as intimately tied up with the theme of promise as we have argued in this chapter, then any appreciation we might have of it has to begin with an honest reflection on what our own hopes are.

The Bible and the tradition of the Church cannot all by themselves tell us what we can hope for. We read and remember the stories of God’s promises in the Bible. Yet we do so not in order to go back in time and repristinate a lost culture, but to look forward with the stories of God’s past promises in order to hear them again challenging us in our own language and in terms of our own needs and aspirations. Revelation is not fundamentally a codified set of beliefs written down in Scripture or doctrinal formulations. We can happily move beyond such an idolatrous notion of revelation today. Since it comes to us from an inexhaustible future, revelation is potentially as fresh every day of our own lives as it was to Abraham, Moses, the prophets, and Jesus. But only by acknowledging our own hopes can we begin to allow it to enter into our present.

Our sense of revelation, therefore, must begin with a scrutiny of what we long for in the hidden depths of our own being. In our encounter with revelation, we must be open to having these longings transformed from private wishing into communal hoping. But the beginning of an understanding of revelation requires an admission that we have concrete and often mundane wishes, beneath which there may already lie the seeds of a hope that will become increasingly more receptive to Gods s vision.

In Abraham’s and Israel’s experience, the mystery of God’s promise is felt palpably through the image of a new land, through anticipation of a multitude of progeny, through the hope of a long and blessed life for the people, through a vision of shalom. Accordingly, God is understood as the one who makes and keeps the promises we live by. Although our earthy sacramentalism can easily be vitiated by our inclination to idolatry, this is not a valid reason for completely mystifying religion. The value of sacramental images of hope is that they keep our religious life firmly planted on the terrestrial ground from which we have ourselves sprung. And at the same time, they remind us of the humility of the mystery that condescends to meet us in the concreteness of our ordinary human hopes and desires. When Christian faith discerns the limitless logos (or vision) as becoming "flesh," this linking of the divine to the corporeal is not entirely unprepared for in the sacramentalism of Israel and even of the world’s other sacramental religions.

We can now begin to see how our twin themes of revelation as promise on the one hand and the image of God’s self-emptying on the other converge. The revelatory image of a self-emptying God explains not only the fact of reality’s mysterious openness, as we noted at the end of Chapter 3, but also why mystery presents itself to us in the mode of a promising future. The futurity of mystery is grounded in the humble self-absenting of God. The gift of a future to hope in is a consequence of God’s self-concealment in such mundane realities as the land or an infant, a humble shepherd, a crucified man, a community of the oppressed. For our sake and for the world’s future, God renounces any impulse to make the divine mystery a totally present, completely available reality. Such a presence would overwhelm the world and paralyze any possibility of its further becoming. It would inhibit the self-creation and self-transcendence essential to ourselves and an evolving universe. The self-effacement of a God who withdraws into the future, and who meets us in the humble guise of sacraments of promise, allows our world to exist as relatively autonomous and self-coherent. At the same time, this faithful and humble God of promise continually offers the possibility of redemption and new creation, for the world often fails to choose the appropriate paths toward its true destiny. At each point along the journey of its movement toward the future, the world meets the responsive grace, extravagance, and surprisingness of an always new and unexpected future. Revelation means the arrival of this future in our midst in the form of promise. The biblical understanding of revelation as promise invites us to understand this future as "God."(In this sense. Moltmann is correct in saying that the content of the promise and its author are one and the same. The Experiment Hope, 50.)

The Conviction that mystery is revealed to us is not unique to Christianity and biblical religion. Religion in its entirety can be viewed generously as the disclosure of a transcendent mystery. In our own cultural context we call this mystery by the name "God." But peoples of other times and places have also experienced the breaking of mystery into their lives, and they have related to it, talked about it, and worshipped it through many different verbal and iconic designations. We cannot appreciate the Christian understanding of revelation unless we keep this wider religious world before us. A Christian understanding of revelation will become distinctive to us only if we view it in the context of other kinds of religious awareness.

Searching for distinctiveness, however, need not imply looking for ways in which Christian revelation might be better than others. Any singularity we may find in Christianity does not necessarily imply "superiority" to other faiths. Such a comparison would be pointless and arrogant. There is, of course, a considerable body of Christian opinion that still insists on a comparative devaluation of other religions. But we are now beyond the time in our global religious evolution when we need constantly to be so exclusivistic. This is not to say that all religions are the same, or that they can be reduced to some common essence. Such a simplifying perspective would enormously diminish the rich diversity of religious paths that history has bequeathed to us. Religions are not the sort of realities that can easily be comparatively graded. Perhaps aspects of them, such as their ethical implications, may be compared, but as total approaches to mystery, to human existence, and to the world, it makes little sense to say that one is clearly better than another. None of us occupies a neutrally objective perch, above or outside of all traditions, from which we could ever securely make such an assessment.

Fortunately, there is now developing, here and there, a new spirit of mutual openness and respect among influential religious thinkers representing the various faiths. For Catholic theology, the ecumenical movement and the Second Vatican Council have signaled the end of the old "apologetic" approach to revelation.(See the Council’s document on revelation, Dei Verbum) In the past, a defensive style of theology, remnants of which still unfortunately live on, sought to preserve an often rather narrowly conceived Christian notion of revelation from attack by alternative positions, whether religious or secular. As a result of the self-enclosure of this kind of theology, its treatment of revelation could not receive much nourishment from other traditions. Such isolationism is no longer acceptable in Christian theology.

Still it may be useful at this point for us to speculate on why religions are so vigilant in defense of what they perceive to be revealed truth. Such an examination may go some way toward helping us understand why the idea of revelation has been set apart by theology for special treatment in the first place. Why do Christians and members of other faiths stand guard so securely over their respective deposits of faith?(The Greek word for bishop, episcopos, literally means "overseer") The following explanation of religion’s preoccupation with apologetics is offered by British theologian John Bowker. It is certainly not intended as an adequate account, but it does offer a rather novel perspective, and it is one that we shall draw on at other points in the present book.(John Bowker, Is Anybody Out There? [Westminster, Md.: Christian Classics, Inc., 1988] 9-18; 112-43.)

Whatever else they may be (and they are other things besides), Bowker claims that religions are, at the very least, systems for processing information. They are living structures with boundaries built up over the course of sometimes many centuries for the purpose of encoding, storing, retrieving, and transmitting to the next generation a very important kind of information. This information is usually connected explicitly with some notion of revelation. It is a very special kind of information. It may be non-verbal as well as verbal, but it is not trivial. It has to do with salvation, liberation, and fulfillment, the goals that have traditionally mattered most to the majority of the earth’s human inhabitants. Religion responds to the deepest and most urgent of all human concerns. It answers questions about the final meaning of life, and in doing so it shapes the identity of individuals. It responds in a decisive way to the need to be loved or forgiven and to the longing to discover the purpose of the universe.

Religions are so important because they provide information about how to negotiate the most intransigent roadblocks we encounter in life. Whereas other techniques, like those of science and engineering, can remove more mundane obstacles, religions attend to the most irremovable limits on life: fate, guilt, meaninglessness, and death. Since religions deal with such important matters, the information they convey to their followers is the most valued of all. And so it needs to be carefully protected, more than any other kind of information. It is no wonder then that religions are so defensive -- and for that reason also at times so dangerous.(Ibid., 15-18)

Information, Bowker says, does not just float about aimlessly in the universe. It has to be ordered and processed if it is to carry any meaning.(Ibid., 114ff.) But for this purpose it requires a system, an organized channel through which content can flow and be reliably passed on to receivers. Any information system must be allowed to sustain a definite identity throughout the passage of time. It requires some degree of stability. And for that very reason it has to have clear boundaries consisting of sets of constraints. Without such limits the channeling system would collapse, and any revelatory information would dissolve into the noise of indefiniteness. A cell without a membrane would be too shapeless to carry the information essential for life. A computer without the constraints of its circuitry or a specific program could not organize and process information. The informational component in a cell, organism, or computer has to be constrained if it is to be informative. Clear boundaries must be imposed upon a system in order to allow for the processing and transmitting of information. And since religions are information systems (or, perhaps more accurately, complexes of informational sub-systems), they are not exempt from the need for definite constraints to protect the information they seek to transmit.(Ibid.)

The term "constraint" often has a negative ring because it seems to imply oppressive limitation. But modern information science insists that constraints are a positive and necessary feature of any information system. Without our adhering to the constraints of grammar, for example, we could not communicate information in speaking or writing. Our verbalizing would be unstructured and unintelligible. Religious systems are no exception to the informational need for limits. Were it not for their doctrinal constraints they would have no distinct identities. To be something definite, and not just a vague spewing forth of data, an information system requires clear borders. In the case of religions, doctrinal, ritualistic, and scriptural limits are necessary to protect the information about ultimate questions that they each consider important enough to pass on to the next generation of believers.

Especially in the early phases of a sect or religion’s existence, a period of relatively narrow and restrictive self-definition seems necessary. A religion needs to get its sense of revealed truth under some control lest it fade off into indefiniteness. But even in later phases, the boundaries need to be maintained in the face of various threats to a tradition’s identity. For that reason, religions will often tend to be conservative and apologetic. After all, they are absolutely convinced that they have information worth preserving. Not that they are totally immune to change. For they are each the product of a winnowing process which sometimes only over the course of many generations establishes clearly the constraints within which they assume distinctive shapes. Witness, for example, the tortuous history that culminated in the Nicene Creed or in the formulations of the Council of Chalcedon. But once doctrinal essentials are established, religious communities will not casually erase or redraw the revered boundaries that protect and channel the information they hold to be indispensable for ultimate fulfillment. So whenever a religion’s boundaries are being attacked, either by insiders or outsiders, they must apparently be fortified.

This tendency to exclusivity has been present throughout the history of religion. It is apparently the role of bishops, popes, imams, gurus, and other officials to monitor the flow of information in a religious system by carefully patrolling its borders.(Ibid., 14.) It is the function of codified doctrines and authoritative teachings to determine who is in and who is outside the system. Offensive to particular individuals and to outsiders as they may sometimes be, some sort of boundaries seem to be essential, informationally speaking. They are needed in order to keep the religious system from melting into a shapelessness that would prevent the ordering and transmitting of any information at all. A religion without boundaries simply could not function as a vehicle for passing on the revealed information.(And yet, we shall observe later how Christian revelation also has within it an impulse to transcend all boundaries in the interest of the inclusiveness manifested in the life and teachings of Jesus. See below. Chapters 6 and 9.)

The problem, however, is that some religions draw their boundaries more sharply than others. And some subsystems within a tradition are stricter about doctrinal constraints than other subsystems. This is clearly the case with various factions of Islam. Or, to give a more familiar example, within Christianity Roman Catholicism is generally more concerned about boundaries than is Anglicanism.(Bowker, 129.) At times a religion’s or a denomination’s borders can become unnecessarily hardened. And when this occurs, religion can become exclusivist and self-protective to the point of being a menace to others.

The point here, though, is not to dwell on the negative implications of religions’ concern for constraints. Rather we may be Content for the moment simply to acknowledge that some kind of boundary maintenance is essential in order to protect the saving or revealed information that religions value so highly. Even in the most liberal forms of Christianity, traditional religious teachings, sacraments, and Scriptures exercise some sort of constraint on what people teach their children about the meaning of life, death, and reality as a whole. Religions can never be completely a case of "anything goes." They require "membranes" with at least some degree of thickness. Otherwise they spill over into such vagueness that they lose their identity altogether.(Bowker, 124-32.)

Thus, information theory helps us understand the apologetic tone of so much religion and theology. It allows us to see why the concern for a specially revealed deposit of truth can be so important in the shaping and maintaining of a religion’s identity. And it also suggests why religions often claim that their respective revelations are superior to those of others. Such a claim can be a very effective means of boundary maintenance.

However, we may now take a step beyond Bowker’s illuminating use of the new information-systems model. For information theory also instructs us that religions, like other systems, cannot sustain any vital flow of information if they remain absolutely conservative and defensive. Information theory also requires that there be an element of unpredictability in any truly informative message. In order to be informative, a system has to avoid not only the chaos or "noise" of indefiniteness, which boundary maintenance is designed to assure, but also the monotony of excessive redundancy. Of course, some redundancy, that is, a tendency to repetitiveness, is a requirement for the flow of information in any system. For it is in such redundancy that informational constraints and boundaries are embedded. For example, the constant and repetitive adherence to the rules of grammar is essential for linguistic communication. But if the redundancy is excessive it will drown out the unpredictability and novelty that the passing on of information also needs.

This holds true for the obvious reason that if information were totally predictable it could not really be informative. If a system were simply an "order" without any openness to novelty, it would be frozen into a single identity and would therefore be incapable of anything other than self-duplication. It would be incapable of mediating any genuine revelation. Its absolute rigidity would inhibit the entrance of novel, surprising content. The same material would be repeated over and over, impeding the flow of real information to present recipients. If I already know the content of the message coming across a telegraph wire, I can hardly call it informative or revelatory when it finally arrives. Absolute predictability inhibits the flow of information since everything is already fixed irreversibly in a stationary pattern. Only an entropic disassembly of the elements involved in information can allow for a reassembling into truly novel and informative patterns. A leaning toward disorder is necessary if information is to have the surprising character it requires in order to be information. As a system processes information it needs randomizing moments or trends in order for wider and more intensely informative patterns to emerge.

Thus any kind of information, revelatory or otherwise, has to walk the razor’s edge between noise and redundancy, between chaos and monotony, between unintelligibility and repetition. Without a certain amount of redundancy, information would have no intelligible shape. But without a system’s capacity for moments of deconstruction, no meaningful or relevant information could be inscribed in it. A periodic veering toward the state of "noise" loosens up a system to receive new life and information. Without such a capacity for randomization, a code would be too "stiff" to carry a message. If religions are information systems, then their revelations must also be in some way continuously open to novelty, precisely in order to sustain their informational character.

The extant religious traditions all began when the boundaries and constraints of their historical predecessors had become too restrictive to mediate the saving information required to interpret new historical circumstances. Buddhism, for example, originated when the Buddha perceived Hindu religious practice to be too confining to bring the fulfillment and release from suffering for which living beings longed. Islam began when Muhammad became sensitive to the dehumanizing implications of the idolatry of popular religious practice. And Christianity started in the fresh experience of the compassion of God by Jesus of Nazareth. Gautama, Muhammad, and Jesus all transgressed the boundaries and constraints that had shaped and channeled the flow of religious information in their respective cultures. It is clear then that religion and revelation are more than the passing on of a fixed tradition. The beginnings of influential religious movements are usually tied up with acts of rebellion and revolution. However, adventurous religious movements at some point typically abandon the innovative openness of their originating moments. They circle the wagons not only to contain their well-winnowed traditions, but also in order to seal themselves off from novelty. Too much novelty would lead to chaos, but without some opening toward surprise a religious system eventually stifles the traditional information it seeks to transmit.

Christian Attitudes Toward the Religions

As we move forward in our inquiry into the nature and plausibility of revelation, it will be helpful to keep before us the rules by which all systems process information. The transmission of ideas associated with revelation will be especially bounded by protective constraints. But a religion’s understandable concern with clear borders may at times restrict the very novelty that originally made the ideas seem to be specially revealed.(In order then for revelation to remain truly alive it must always be a source of new surprises for each generation of believers. We shall see later that our conceiving revelation in the form of "promise" allows for just this novelty, whereas a purely antiquarian retrieval of a "deposit of faith" from the past is by itself inadequate as a way of understanding the self-disclosure of God.) Even though emphasis on doctrinal constraints is an inevitable phase in the formation of a tradition, there comes a time in its unfolding when a purely defensive posture leads to stagnation arising from under-nourishment. At such times a relaxation of the apologetic approach and a new openness to the foreignness of alternative ways of looking at mystery become essential simply for the sake of the vitality and survival of the tradition’s revelatory capacity.

We are now living at such an exciting time for religions. World history is bringing the various traditions together into such mutual proximity that they can no longer ignore one another. Simply thickening their protective membranes and emphasizing doctrinal constraints, or the normative superiority of one deposit of faith over the others, now leads only to an obstruction of informational flow. In the final analysis, sheer defensiveness becomes an impediment to the communication of revelation.(As we shall see later, the openness of authentic Christian faith to the future, to novelty, and surprise invites it therefore to undergo considerable transformation in its encounter with other traditions. Christianity, following Jesus and Jesus’ God, should be expected to be somewhat vulnerable and "defenseless" in any relational encounter with other faiths. If it defends anything vigorously it should be its own defenselessness and inclusiveness. Informationally speaking, this would entail a willingness to allow its boundaries to shift in response to new information in its encounters. In this way it preserves its identity instead of losing it. Like persons, a religion must "die" [abandon any non-relational exclusivism] in order to live.)

Although there is still considerable resistance on the part of many devout Christian believers to the new openness now being extended toward other religions, there is also a great deal of enthusiasm about it on the part of many others. Religion on our planet is now embarking upon a new and adventurous stage in its history. To an unprecedented extent, members of the various faiths are today in conversation, seeking to learn new things from one another. This occurrence is too threatening for large segments of some traditions and subsystems, and so they have retreated into themselves, building thicker walls against the invasion of alternative points of view. But in other respects, the new inter-religious encounters are already changing the religious landscape of our world in a wholesome way. And they are inviting us to rethink our ideas of revelation in terms of inter-religious conversation.

Today, most Christian theologians have rejected, at least in principle, a purely exclusivist approach which would deny the revelatory value of other religions. Where significant controversy now exists, it involves the so-called "pluralists" on the one hand, and the "inclusivists" on the other. Informationally speaking, the pluralist theological option radically relativizes the importance of distinct religious boundaries, proposing that different religious traditions may all be equally valid ways of experiencing the revelation of an ultimate reality transcending the comprehension of any particular tradition(See the essays in John Hick and Paul Knitter, eds., The Myth of Christian Uniqueness (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1987). The inclusivist approach in Christian theology, however, without denying the value of other traditions, is more concerned with boundary maintenance.(See, for example, Gavin D’Costa. ed., Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books. 1990). It is open to dialogue with other traditions and willing to have Christian faith enriched by ecumenical encounter and exposure to the sacred texts of other traditions. But it is not willing to sacrifice this teaching, expressed as early as Acts 4:12: "There is salvation in no one else [except Jesus Christ], for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved."(We are far from resolving this very important debate. Both the pluralist and the inclusivist positions are making important points. The perspective taken in this book (especially in Chapter 8) is that of an evolutionary cosmology in which the universe itself is the primary revelation of mystery and in which religions and their symbols are seen as expressions of the cosmos (and not just of isolated, cosmically homeless human subjects). Religion is something that the universe does through us in its evolutionary journey into mystery. Contemporary theology, including discussions between pluralists and inclusivists, is still hampered by a pre-evolutionary, a cosmic understanding of religion.)

Whether one takes the pluralist or the inclusivist position, it is generally agreed that any Christian theology of revelation that we construct today has to be sensitive to the new consciousness of religious plurality emerging in our time. Previously, it was especially in the theology of revelation (and also Christology) that Christian theologians argued apologetically for the eminence of the Christian religion. They maintained that it has this status by virtue of a privileged access to God given in a special revelation withheld at God’s discretion from other religions. Much Christian theology still has overtones of this apologetic approach, but it is being challenged by a more ecumenically minded sensitivity to the revelatory possibilities in all the religions.

The traditional language of Christian religion and theology emphasized the centrality and normativeness of Jesus Christ as the decisive and final revelation of God. For centuries, Christians have been taught that the fullness of God’s being becomes manifest only in Christ. And this teaching seemed to imply that we need not look elsewhere for any further data of revelation, least of all in the other religions. Our theologies of revelation focused almost exclusively on the Christ-event and its biblical environment. The exclusively Christo-centric character of revelation theology made it difficult for us to take seriously the revelatory character of primal religions, of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and other religious ways.

The simple dynamics of human psychology provide some explanation for the tenacity of an exclusivist Christo-centrism. A devotee’s concentrated commitment to Christ is not entirely different from one person’s loyalty to another in ordinary situations of friendship or romance. Because of the limitations of our existence, it is difficult for us to divide our loves indefinitely. We normally need a central focus of devotion, and in our commitment to one individual we may sometimes devalue or deny the reality of others. In romantic love, sometimes it is as though virtually nobody else exists outside of the beloved. And even though to some degree one may outgrow sheer obsession, the normal predilection for a select person or group will still persist. The awesomeness of the world requires that finite beings "partialize" it in order to relate to it at all. We have to bite it off in little chunks, or else risk madness.(Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death [New York: the Free Press, 1973] 244.) We simply do not have the capacity to consume it in all its depth and complexity. It would not be surprising, therefore, if this limitation overlays our grasp of any possible revelation of the mystery that encompasses us.

In the enthusiasm of devotion to Christ, a Christian will often insist that Jesus alone is savior and Lord. Such exclusivist language is consonant with the state of being enraptured or in love. Indeed, if it were absent one might even question the intensity of the devotion. When Christians proclaim Jesus Christ as universal savior, is this entirely distinct from the excessiveness of all love-language?

Still, when John’s gospel testifies that in the incarnate Word all things have their being and when St. Paul extends Christ’s lordship to the entire universe, are we not beyond the kind of exuberance that pertains to romantic expression? Is there not something more literally cosmic and metaphysical here? In any case, the universalism accompanying Christo-centric exclusivism constitutes a major problem in today’s inter-religious encounters. It is also a major issue in the theology of revelation. In what sense can Christians call Jesus Christ the decisive revelation of God, the savior of all humanity, or the Lord of all the universe, without treading on the religious toes of Hindus or Buddhists or others who sense no such universality in Christ?

In all honesty, today Christians have to ask whether their own concepts of salvation are any more universal in intention than those implied, for example, in the Buddhist ideal of the bodhisattva, one who is portrayed as having such sentiments as these:

At the moment when nirvana is about to occur, the bodhisattva (as portrayed in Mahayana Buddhism) pauses on its threshold, deciding that it is not yet the right time to enter fully into the blissful state of fulfillment. The mass of living beings still remains stuck in the cycle of rebirth and suffering. Other living beings have not yet attained the bliss of nirvana, so it would be inappropriate to enter into the rapture of final liberation as long as even one of them remains suffering outside. Thus the bodhisattva. filled with almost infinite compassion, renounces salvation until all living beings have been liberated. Would it be surprising if a Buddhist tendered the same sort of devotional regard toward the salvific person of the bodhisattva that Christians give to Jesus?

Following Chapter 1 of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, Christian theology has traditionally taught that revelation is present in a general sense throughout creation. In some way or other, all things are manifestations of God’s glory. More recently, theologians have allowed that other religions, which are also a part of God’s universe, have a special role to play in manifesting the Creator. The Second Vatican Council explicitly affirmed the revelatory value and significance of the great religious traditions. But following mainstream Christian teaching, it continued to affirm the decisiveness and finality of the revelation given in Christ. It maintained that the prevalence of sin has blinded us to the full glory of God, and it seemed to imply that other religions can give no more than a glimpse of it. Only in Christ has sin been decisively vanquished and the fullness of God’s being been made manifest(At the second Vatican Council both Lumen Gentium and Dei Verbum reaffirmed this traditional conviction.) And this seems to be the consistent teaching of the Christian churches.

Thus, along with the element of universality mentioned above, the doctrine of the unsurpassability of Christ as the final revelation of God has come to be a crucial point of controversy in inter-religious discussion involving Christians and other traditions. But do we not now have to keep in mind, even more than the Second Vatican Council, what a Buddhist or Hindu might think of our theologically exclusivist language? Should we make any theological statements today, even amongst ourselves, that will antecedently rule out the possibility of deeper conversation and eventual agreements with sincere members of other faiths? None of us can yet give definitive answers to these questions, and it may be years and even centuries before theological discussion has moved us close to any kind of resolution. But the question of how to interpret the doctrine of the universality and unsurpassability of Christ in the context of inter-religious dialogue is now with us for good, and the fact that it will not go away means that we may be at least a little closer to an answer than we were before.

A priori, of course, we cannot rule out the possibility that God can make one phase or moment of history more decisively revelatory than others. In fact, to suppose that every period in history or every person is just as transparent to mystery as any other seems quite implausible. In the evolution of an emergent universe, each "higher" development can make its initial appearance only at one particular time and place. There is something singular and unique about every new breakthrough in evolution and history. Perhaps the same could be said concerning the revelation of mystery through the religious traditions of humanity. It is not inconceivable that there would be degrees of revelational intensity at various phases in the religious dimension of the cosmic process, especially if there is a discernible axis of "progress."(Whether the evolving universe is a progressive development is highly disputed. Generally speaking, scientific skeptics, like Stephen Jay Gould, repudiate the notion of evolutionary progress. Religious scientists, such as Teilhard de Chardin, however, discern clear lines of progress, at least in terms of the emergence of complexity-consciousness. while it is impossible to discuss this controversy here, it is at least worth noting that it is not irrelevant to the question whether one historical revelation may be taken as an advance over others.) That God’s love, manifest in diverse ways throughout the duration of the universe, might come to a full and unsurpassable self-expression in an individual human being who lived and died in the Middle East almost two thousand years ago does not seem incongruous with what we now understand about the nature of an evolving universe, especially if we regard religion as a phenomenon emergent from the universe rather than just something done on the earth by cosmically homeless human subjects. Nor can we rule out the possibility that one aspect of God’s total self-revelation is normative for all the others. Indeed, most Christian teaching in the past seems to have made exactly this claim for the Christ-event.

But in our religious situation today can we continue to maintain such an exclusivist Christo-centrism? Is honest dialogue with other religions possible as long as the cards of conversation are stacked in such a way as to make the dialogue partner’s position inferior to ours from the start? Does not "dialogue" then become just another word for a not-so-subtle proselytizing? Do we not implicitly subordinate our conversation partners to ourselves if we insist from the start on the definitiveness and unsurpassable character of Christian revelation? Can Christians plausibly continue to affirm the revelatory supremacy of the Christ-event and at the same time be fully open to other traditions that have their own unique convictions about religious meaning and truth?

Before any of us undertakes to address these questions it may be well to recall two facts about religion that have become more visible in theology and other disciplines especially in the last one hundred years or so. The first of these facts is that religious reference is always symbolic rather than direct and literal. The character of mystery is mediated to human beings only by way of concrete aspects of the world. These may be called symbols or "sacraments" of mystery. Objects, persons, events, metaphors, analogies, and stories are the vehicles through which we first encounter the divine. Even "God," Paul Tillich says, is a symbol for God.

The fact that religious expression is symbolic, however, does not mean that it is inferior to direct, non-symbolic language. To say that religious expression is ‘‘merely symbolic" implies that non-symbolic reference to mystery is the ideal. But a completely clear or literal representation of ultimate reality would trivialize mystery to the point of idolatry. Accepting the symbolically vague nature of religion is not a surrender to softheadedness, but an implicit affirmation of the transcendence of the mystery that no human expression can capture adequately. Religion, we shall see, requires silent or apophatic moments precisely as protection against our taking symbols too literally. If we think carefully about the symbolic nature of religious language, it may lead us to acknowledge its inadequacy. And if we accept its inadequacy, this will leave an opening for us to learn things about mystery from other traditions that our own symbols may not convey.

The second axiom contemporary theology has to accept in our religiously plural context is that religious consciousness, no less than any other aspect of human awareness, is historically conditioned. All religious thought. utterance, and practice grow out of particular times and circumstances. They are bound up with specific localities and are subject to the cultural and linguistic constraints that prevail at the time they come to expression. Thus, there is a certain perspectival limitation or relativity inherent in all human attempts to affirm the absolute.

Acceptance of this relativity, however, does not mean that theology is forced to accept relativism, the view that nothing is absolute. It only means that any religious representations of the absolute are themselves relative. That is, they must be interpreted in terms of the cultural and linguistic patterns out of which they originate. If they are taken as completely timeless -- in the sense of being immune to the conditional character of historical existence -- they then become idols themselves instead of pointers to the mystery that transcends history and culture. To accept the contingent character of our religious language may seem at first to threaten its informational boundaries, and so in reaction we may be tempted to elevate our particular traditions to a status of timelessness that they in fact do not possess. But alternatively we might also take the new awareness of the relativity of our own doctrinal constraints as an opportunity to open ourselves to a wider world of revelation as it is mediated by other similarly conditioned religious traditions.

After all, there is no reason to insist that the Christian religion and its theological language are an exception to the two rules we have just enunciated. In the first place, Christianity, like most religions, is tied up with specific symbols or sacraments. Think, for example, of the wide variety of images and ideas by which the New Testament itself seeks to interpret the life and person of Jesus. The specificity and culturally shaped character of religious symbols is necessary if a saving mystery is to be communicated in a rich way to a particular people at a particular time. And second, even by virtue of its own doctrine of the incarnation, Christian faith accepts its thorough immersion in the particularity of concrete historical circumstances. This means that there is a certain relativity (not relativism) at the very heart of its own understanding of mystery. To confess this relativity is religiously necessary. And at the same time, it is the indispensable condition for honest dialogue with other traditions. There is little hope of our learning, appreciating, and appropriating the content of other religions unless we first accept the relativity, and that entails the revisability, of our own standpoint. If we assume from the start that we cannot learn anything from others because our own position has no room for growth, then entering into dialogue would be dishonest. And as pointed out earlier, it would also unnecessarily contract the informational character of our own faith tradition.

However, to return to the main issue before us, it may seem that we are being disloyal to traditional Christian teaching if we in any way cast doubt on the universal and unsurpassable character of Jesus the Christ as decisively revelatory of God. So in what sense can we continue to proclaim the special authority of Christian revelation while at the same time fully embracing the implications of our two axioms: on the one hand that our religious language, including our Christological categories, is never adequately representative of God, and on the other that it is always conditioned by historical relativity?

A Mystery-Centered Approach

Perhaps the best approach to take in this matter is a "mystery-centered" one. Without reducing all religions to a quest for one common essence -- which the pluralist position is often accused of doing -- and without making the simplistic claim that all religions are saying or doing "the same thing," it nevertheless seems that in their own widely divergent ways they all seek and express union with something like what we have been calling "mystery." In our dialogue with other traditions, the key to sustaining conversation (rather than cutting it short by claims that others will interpret as arrogant) is to keep before ourselves the possibility that in some way or other all religions may be relative, culturally specific ways of looking toward an ineffable mystery. Intuitions of mystery are universally possible and not confined to specific cultural-linguistic frameworks, simply by virtue of the fact that all people have limit-experiences and occasionally at least ask the limit-questions that transport us beyond the confines of the everyday. Indeed, it is awareness of limits that allows us to share human experiences across widely diverse cultures. Whatever transcends these limits, whether it be an emptiness, an abyss of nothingness, or a plenitude of being, is what we are calling mystery. This dimension of mystery is not a "common essence." However, the experience of limits is universal in human experience, so it seems reasonable to suppose that all religions bear some relationship to this experience.

According to this hypothesis, what is all-important is not our religions themselves, but the mystery of which they speak and to which they point. In the final analysis, what is really "unsurpassable" in all religions is the mystery that they mediate, and not the religions or theologies that speak of this mystery. And this is a point upon which, it seems, the greatest voices of all the traditions have already agreed.

Sensitive religious people have always been more oriented toward mystery than toward their own religions. Jesus, for example, clearly pointed his disciples toward an ultimate reality beyond himself and beyond the conventional religious certitudes of his day. And even though the New Testament expresses a Christo-centrism, its focus on Christ is best understood as a sacramental mode of theo-centrism. Without its general orientation toward God, Christology. like any kind of religious symbolics, would be idolatrous. It is clear that Jesus himself was God centered. The gospels indicate that like all humans he struggled with the temptation to self-assertion, but that he conquered the urge to make his own personality into a cult object. So if there is something unsurpassable about him for believers, it is ultimately derived from the mystery that he sacramentally mediates - Whenever a religion speaks of the "unsurpassability" of its central revelatory event, personality, or doctrine, religious wisdom exhorts us to acknowledge that only the unfathomable mystery to which these realities point is indeed unsurpassable. Jesus, for example, would never have insisted that his own being is unsurpassable. Rather, he would have given this status only to that ultimate mystery he referred to as "abba."(See Leonard Swidler, "Jesus’ Unsurpassable Uniqueness," Horizons XVI [Spring, 1989] 116-20.) If Jesus’ own person is unsurpassable it is so only in the sense that it is for Christians the primary sacrament of the encounter with the infinite God?(Edward Schillebeeckx, OP. Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God [New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963] 7-45.)

But as we have already observed, from the point of view of Christian revelation, the unsurpassability of the divine mystery itself consists in the limitlessness of its self-emptying love. If we keep this kenotic aspect of mystery in mind whenever we use the adjective "unsurpassable," it may be possible to enter into religious dialogue in a spirit of openness and humility rather than with a doctrinaire inflexibility.

Moreover, it is not a requirement of authentic Christian faith to hold that the Christ-event is the only way through which divine mystery is mediated to human consciousness, including that of Christians themselves. Although there has been much controversy and even bitter dispute on this issue, Christian doctrine has never insisted that our sense of mystery is bound exclusively to the Christ. Mystery becomes transparent to people through the mediation of numerous aspects of nature, society, and human experience. It would be contrary to the spirit of Jesus’ own faith, life, and teachings to tie our sense of the divine to the relativity of a single sacramental matrix, even if it is Jesus himself. The Christ-event can still legitimately be taken as sacramentally normative for Christians without entailing a symbolic exclusiveness.

Today, in fact, the idea of revelation must be unfolded with an eye toward rendering intelligible the very fact of the plurality of religions themselves. In the past, apologetic presentations of revelation theology sought to suppress the significance of any religion but Christianity itself. It was almost as though the large majority of human beings have lived in total darkness. unillumined by the light of Christ. Now, however, we may acknowledge with more sincerity than before that the light that illuminates us in Christ also shines through other faith traditions in other ways.(See Lumen Gentium, Chapter II, #16) Not to acknowledge this possibility is itself a kind of idolatry that obscures, as does all idolatry, the self-revelation of mystery. Idolatry is the elevation of a particular and relative approach to mystery to the status of sole and exclusive representation of it. Such idolatry can be as much a part of exclusivist Christianity as of any other efforts to tie the mystery of God down to the particularity of a single culture and time in history. On the other hand, by viewing the plurality of faiths from the point of view of our central revelatory image, that of God’s self-emptying love, we may effectively confront the temptation to idolatry. Indeed, in the light of this image, we would be surprised if there were not a rich variety of revelatory religious paths. This point will be developed below.

The Four Ways of Religion

In Christianity, Jesus the Christ is the primary symbol or sacrament of our encounter with God. The distinctiveness of Christianity from other traditions lies especially in its choice of this particular "sacrament" as central. Most of the differences among the religions have to do with their understandably one-sided attachment to the particular sacramental images, events, experiences, or persons that they choose as representative of mystery.

But there is more to any religion than just the sacramental constituent. Religion of course always requires at least some symbols. But in addition to being sacramental, it is also mystical, silent, and active. Only a cursory look at the story of religion is needed to see that there is more than one way of orienting ourselves religiously toward mystery. And this diversity must influence our ideas of revelation as well.

We may present the four main "ways" of religion in the form of a simple typology suggested by a comparative study of distinct emphases found respectively in four different kinds of religion: early (or "primal") religion, Hinduism, Buddhism, and the prophetic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam).(An expanded version of this typology is given in my book What Is Religion? [New York: Paulist Press, 1990) The sacrificial practices of preliterate peoples suggest one way, the sacramental. The Hindu Upanishads’ quest for union with the "One" implies another, namely, the mystical. The Buddha’s renunciation of selfish craving together with his silence about theological issues offers yet another, what we shall call the apophatic (or silent). And finally, the intense social concern of the prophets provides yet another way, the active. If religion in general means an adventure toward mystery, it is now clear that there is more than one way of moving toward this goal.

More specifically: 1. Primal religion takes a predominantly sacramental or symbolic approach to mystery. It senses mystery only in relation to concrete objects, persons, and events. 2. Hinduism, especially Vedanta, exemplifies what we shall call the mystical tendency present in all religion. Mysticism, as we are using the term here, perceives more explicitly than sacramentalism the presence of an ultimate unity of mystery beyond finite realities and seeks to enter into this unity immediately and intensely, at times with little apparent need for sacramental mediation. 3. Buddhism, with its "way of renunciation," is characteristically silent (scholars would say "apophatic" or "hesychast") with respect to the nature of mystery. The "way of silence," which is likewise an ingredient, at least to some degree, in all religion, is so alert to the inadequacy of any sacramental images of mystery that it sometimes puts them completely aside, intending thereby a radical purification of religious consciousness. 4. Finally, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (to oversimplify for the moment) may be taken as exemplars of the active side of religion. For them, the approach to sacred mystery is inseparable from a transformative praxis in the world of political, social, and economic existence.

Sacramentalism, mysticism, silence, and action are the four main religious "ways" of entry into mystery. To some degree they are each present in all the religions, but often with differing emphases. The history of religion teaches us that religion will preserve its integrity only if it keeps all of these four ways in mutual tension and relationship. Each of the four ways must be critically connected with the other three, or else it runs the risk of losing its religious character altogether (if by "religion" we mean a receptivity to the reality of sacred mystery). As we construct a Christian theology of revelation in the context of our growing awareness of the plurality of religious revelations, it will be helpful to keep this picture of the fourfold complexion of religion before us. It will enable us to see better the connections Christianity has with other religious traditions, and it will also assist us in clarifying the diverse ways in which mystery reveals itself in Christian faith.

Corresponding to each of our four religious components there is a representative sociological role or institution. Sacramental religion generates the office of shaman or priest as the representative of a divine order. The mystical way produces the type known as the contemplative. Our third religious type, represented especially by Buddhism, is based on the ideal of detachment, renunciation, and silence. These ideals are associated especially with the ascetic, one who renounces any clinging to the things of the world (traditionally represented in the institution of monasticism). And finally, prophetic religion inspires a fourth religious type, the activist, whose life is dedicated to the transformation of the world and society into a more just context for human life.

The activist, of course, may also be a priest, contemplative, and ascetic, all at the same time. But often the activist lives in tension with the other three types. The activist may criticize the priest, contemplative, or ascetic for not caring enough about the process of political and economic renewal of the social world. And the priest or mystic may question whether activists, preoccupied as they are primarily with the secular realm, are sufficiently oriented toward sacred mystery. But the activists, such as the biblical prophets, claim that the life of social concern is thoroughly religious, and they make "doing justice" the very heart of any authentic religious relation to the sacred mystery of God.

Each of our four ways also has its corresponding manner of interpreting the world of "secular" reality. Sacramental religion’s attitude toward the world may be characterized as one of enjoyment. It rejoices gratefully in the goods of creation and interprets their gift-like character as a hint or revelation of the ultimate beneficence of God. Mystical religion exemplifies the religious relativizing of the world. It senses the ultimacy and unity of mystery more dramatically than sacramentalism, and it seeks to move more decisively beyond particular things, thus relativizing them in the light of the transcendent. Apophatic or silent religion, exemplified by the Buddhist renunciation of clinging, and also by the hesychast strains of other religious traditions, is significant for its patient letting be of the world. And activist religion seeks to change or transform the world. Strains of all four attitudes are found in any of the major religious traditions, though they are present with distinct emphases.

Finally, each of our four types is subject to its own peculiar temptation. As mentioned earlier, the four ways need to communicate with each other in order for religion to be healthy. If any one of them loses contact with the others, it degenerates into a caricature that eventually divests it of its revelatory character, of its transparency to mystery. For example, if sacramentalism is uninformed by the mystical tendency to relativize the things of the world, or by the apophatic suspicion of symbols, or by the activist need to change the social world, it will inevitably degenerate into idolatry and empty ritualism. When this occurs, it forfeits its mediating or revelatory character. If mysticism loses touch with sacramental symbols, with apophatic patience, and with the needs of the social world, it becomes a form of religious escapism. If the ascetical way of silence is not carefully qualified by at least some degree of sacramentalism, by the mystical sense of transcendence, and the activist concern for the world, it tends toward nihilism, the view that all things are empty of value. And finally, if religious activism breaks its ties with sacramental, mystical, and silent religion, it becomes indistinguishable from secular humanism, such as Marxism for example. These four temptations of religion, all of which in the extreme would frustrate any revelation of mystery, can be thwarted only if each religious way allows itself to be nourished by the other three.

Awareness of all four ways of religion and of their respective temptations allows us to approach the subject of revelation in such a way that in inter-religious dialogue, areas of religious agreement may show up more obviously than when we look only at the obvious sacramental differences. Of all four, it is in the sacramental arena that differences stand out most sharply. It is especially here that disputes and controversies arise. Different cultures will choose correspondingly different media by which to focus their sense of mystery. For example, in Christianity the primary sacrament is Jesus as the Christ, whereas Hindu bhakti might choose Krishna or Kali or numerous other deities. (It is likewise in the sacramental dimension that conflicts arise concerning the gender of God.)

It is extremely difficult, and probably impossible, for all peoples on earth to reach agreement all at once on the appropriateness, decisiveness, or normativeness of a specific sacramental mediation of mystery. However, this impasse need not prevent us from acknowledging the convergence among religions regarding the other three aspects of religion. The sacramental is only one of four essential religious ingredients. Some religious agreement may occur in reference to the mystical, apophatic, and active modes even where it is lacking in the sacramental.

For example, there has already been some convergence among representatives of the various traditions regarding the mystical dimension of religion. Likewise, we may look for more and more agreement on at least some of the active components of religious life. Regardless of a faith’s sacramental peculiarities it is still possible to recognize some overlapping with other traditions on the question of what needs to be done in our world today. Buddhist monks, for example, are now engaging in protests against social injustice. And a convergence on the issue of planetary environmental ethics is very promising for the future.

Most important, however, is the possibility of inter-religious agreement flowing out of a common sharing of the religious way of silence. Here, more than anywhere else in religion, there can be virtual unanimity. The theme of the "ineffability" of mystery is taught to one degree or another by all the religious traditions.(See my book What Is Religion?, 113-27 for example.) To the extent that they are at all open to mystery they unanimously agree that no set of sacramental expressions can ever adequately communicate the content of religious experience. They are sensitive to the inadequacy of any images of, or language about, ultimate reality, and so they all make room for silence as an authentic religious corrective. Thus the occasional avoidance of images and symbols is a distinct and venerable religious "way" of opening ourselves to mystery. Authentic religion requires that at least at times we cease our habitual verbalizing and imagining what mystery is like, and silently allow it to be itself, purified of our always inadequate symbolic representations. The way of silence becomes the opening to an ever deeper sense of mystery. Thus it is an indispensable disposition for opening our lives to the revelation of God.

The fact that sacramental religion employs a multitude of symbols, rather than just one, already implies a wholesome conviction that no single concrete object, personality, or event can all by itself correspond completely to the unknown and unnamable mystery. And a sure sign of the informational openness of a religion is its willingness to experiment with a wide variety of metaphors. But the most obvious way in which religions acknowledge the reality of divine mystery is by their assuming the posture of pure silence. Like sacramentalism, mysticism, and action, silence is an essential condition for the reception of revelation.

In Buddhism, the emphasis on silence leads to a distinct world religion. Gautama, the Buddha, considered theological discourse to be utterly inappropriate. Talk about God or nirvana gets in the way of the process of bringing actual people salvation from suffering here and now. Other religious traditions share at least some of the Buddhist reserve about religious talk. There is an apophatic strain in Hinduism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And it is in their meeting on the plain of stillness that these very diverse traditions manifest their deepest sharing of mystery. In that sense their common reversion to silence renders sacramental differences somewhat less significant than they might otherwise appear to be.

Religious Pluralism and the Humility of God

In terms of a Christian theology of revelation, however, the sacramental normativeness of Christ is still the main issue. So we repeat now the question asked earlier: How can we enter seriously into inter-religious discussions while clinging to the doctrine of his uniquely normative and universal significance?

We cannot respond to this question without recalling, as we shall do in each of the following chapters, what we take to be the startling imagery presented by the Christian understanding of the revelation of mystery. Earlier we noted that the central content given in the Christian understanding of this mystery is summed up in the theme of the humility and self-abandonment of God. When ultimate power conceals itself in apparent powerlessness and when mystery "loses" itself in the particulars of history or in the uniqueness of a particular personality, there is already a ratification of the symbolic and the relative as the media of revelation. The fact that we have to resort to symbolic language and commit ourselves to a relative perspective in our thinking about God is not a defect for which we need to apologize. Rather, it is a direct implication (and imitation) of the humility of God. It follows from God’s own eternal decision to forsake any domicile located exclusively outside of our time and space. The concrete sacramentality and historical relativity in our speaking of God is, therefore, not a problem to be solved in spite of our Christo-centrism. It is a direct expression and consequence thereof.

The image of God’s self-humbling generosity is also the key to the plurality of religions. Given the extravagance of God as manifested in the evolving universe at large, it would indeed be surprising if there were not also a splendid variety in the religious unfolding of the cosmos as well. Nothing would be more out of character with mystery, with nature and its evolution, or with history and selfhood, than a drab homogeneity in any phase of cosmic emergence. And religions, we have to remember, are part of this cosmic emergence. In God’s letting-be of the world by humble self-limitation, there is established the probability that there will be a plurality of (relative) paths toward the one Absolute. Each one of these paths is unique, and it would be unfruitful to measure them as though only one of them is in full possession of the truth and is thereby clearly superior to the others.

However, acknowledging plurality does not require that we suppress the Christian intuition of something unique, decisive, and unsurpassable in the Christ of faith. Yet this unsurpassability needs to be understood in such a way as to avoid the connotation of a superiority that negates the revelatory value and validity of other religious traditions. If there is anything decisive for faith in Christian revelation, it is the unsurpassably self-sacrificing character of the God who becomes manifest in Christ. The crucified Christ is the sacrament of a God who renounces omnipotence in order to "let us be."(This "letting be" does not mean that we ourselves become totally free of limits. In the first place, no being could be actual without being determinate, and that means This Christian image of God’s humility and "letting be" does not mean that we ourselves become totally free of limits. In the first place, no being could be actual without being determinate, and that means limited. there is ,of course, the possibility that in our hubris we will demonically go beyond our proper limits in wake of God’s loving self-renunciation. But God’s own self-sacrifice is itself the criterion of human existence as well, ans in our imitation of God’s own self-emptying, we would discover our own proper limits. See Geddes MacGregor, He Who Lets Us Be [New York: Seabury, 1975]) can also be our guide when we encounter other religions. We too can adopt an attitude of letting them be. Indeed this is the model for all human conversation. Adopting a tolerant and humble approach in inter-religious conversation is our own way of sacramentally representing the God revealed in Christ. Faith in revelation is at heart a commitment to imitating the self-absenting God who lets the world be, in order that it may flourish in rich and luxuriant spontaneity and variety. That the world of religion also manifests this florescent diversity should not surprise us. Instead, it can be another of the many reasons we have for rejoicing in the extravagance of the mystery revealed in biblical religion as the one who makes and keeps promises.

The idea of revelation in Christian theology is usually associated with a "word" uttered by God. In the Gospel of John, this word, or the logos, is said to be fully manifest in Christ, the Word made flesh. So rich is the biblical notion of God’s word that we have to seek a variety of terms to capture its meaning for today. No single expression is adequate, but Gabriel Fackre convincingly argues that we might grasp some of its meaning if we translate it as "vision." Revelation, then, is the setting forth of God’s vision for the world. God the Father is the Envisager, God the Son is the Vision itself, and God the Spirit is the Power of the vision to transform the world. (Gabriel Fackre, The Christian Story [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978]198) In Jesus, the vision of God becomes incarnate in our world and history, and in our obedience to and conformity with Jesus’ Lordship and the power of his Spirit, we cooperate in keeping the vision alive in our midst.

However, if we follow the biblical traditions closely, "revelation" has primarily auditory overtones. It comes to expression essentially in language. This means, though, that there can be no revelatory "word" without a background of silence out of which it is spoken. The revelation of the word of God would make no sense apart from an ineffable dimension of reality which in revelation becomes articulate. Such a dimension is sometimes called the spiritual, the sacred or the supernatural. It is also known as the realm of mystery.

The term "mystery" is not without difficulties. To the modern mind, mystery often implies little more than the unexplored and not-yet-understood aspects of our physical universe. It designates only a range of unanswered questions that science will eventually solve. As human knowledge advances, it seems, the realm of mystery, at least as it is often understood, will gradually shrink and eventually disappear from view altogether. But if revelation is a meaningful possibility, then mystery would have to be something more. In all its silence and fullness it would have to be immune to any process of erosion. And if we are to render the idea of revelation theologically intelligible today, we need first to show that, prior to hearing the word of revelation, we already have some pre-revelational relationship to the silent plenitude of mystery from which any possible disclosure of religious meaning could come to us in the first place.

In former ages, the presence of a dimension of mystery could be taken for granted. It was felt quite palpably as the environing context of the world’s reality, and so auditions and visions from that realm were not altogether unexpected events. Indeed, mystery was so much a part of life’s presuppositions that there was no need to make revelation the explicit notion it has become today. The disclosure of mystery was so recurrent that it would have been quite superfluous to construct a distinct theology of revelation. As an explicit concern of systematic theology, revelation is a modern development, roughly coinciding with the emergence of post-Enlightenment skepticism. Today, we focus on revelation partly because its very possibility has come under question. And this is in great measure because the reality of an encompassing and incomprehensible mystery, which would be the only "whence" of revelation, is no longer an obvious aspect of everyone’s experience.

Therefore, the first step in a theology of revelation has to be what Karl Rahner has called "mystagogy," understanding by this term a "pedagogy" into mystery. We must first determine whether and where a hidden mystery already impinges somehow upon our lives, apart from any explicit sense of a special historical revelation. Without the impression that our lives are shrouded in mystery, any notion of revelation will inevitably fall flat. It will have no disclosive intensity unless it comes to us out of the intuited depths of a fundamentally silent but nonetheless real domain of mystery that already bears some relationship to us. Revelation cannot really mean for us an "unveiling," or an "unconcealment" of anything unless we already have at least some vague intuition of or access to the unspeakable mystery that it unfolds. As we shall see later, it is too much to expect that the biblical word of revelation will itself bring this sense of mystery along with it, as though we were encountering it there for the first time. Revelation can clarify mystery and tell us what it is really like. It can help us to name the mystery, but it need not be burdened with the task of introducing us to mystery. For we are by our very nature already open to mystery. It is a fundamental structure of our being to be open not only to the world, but also to transcendent mystery, even apart from the experience of any special revelatory vision or word. (See Wolfhart Pannenberg, What Is Man, trans. by Duane A. Priebe [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970] 1-13.)

The constant presence of this mystery to the world and to human existence is equivalent to what the Christian theological tradition has variously called original, universal, natural or general revelation, which it distinguishes from the special or decisive revelation given in Christ. In Romans 1:19, Paul uses the verb phaneróô (to show or manifest) when he says of humans in general, "what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them." And he uses the same verb in Rom. 3:21 in speaking of the special revelation that comes to expression in Christ: "But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law. . . through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe." The New Testament clearly endorses the notion of a universal revelation.( In the Prologue to the Gospel of John, for example, the Word is said to be the "true light that enlightens every man" (John 1:9). And in the Acts of the Apostles, Paul is pictured as saying to the Athenians: "What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you" (Acts l7:23).[Ibid.] In our human awareness of the mystery that enshrouds our existence, there is already a manifestation of God’s being that we may appropriately call by the name "revelation."

But, as we have already noted, the sense of mystery often seems to be absent today. Consequently, we must begin our reflections on revelation with an inquiry as to whether and where mystery might already impinge upon our lives.(Of course, the process of historical, biblical revelation has already in some way shaped the cultural context in which the task of mystagogy is undertaken. There is no purely pre-religious sense of mystery, since in very many ways the biblical revelation, as well as those of other religious traditions, has shaped the sensibilities of all of us. But to many of our contemporaries the intuition of mystery has grown dull. And the apparent circularity of which mystagogy partakes does not exonerate us from the task of elucidating where mystery touches our lives, so that we might appreciate in a fresh way how revelation enters the picture.) For many people, such mystagogy is unnecessary. They already sense the reality of the sacred; they accept consciously their openness to a dimension of infinite depth, and so the possibility of an explicit revelatory clarification of this mystery seems quite congruent with their experience. For others, however, mystery is not a very meaningful concept. If it signifies anything at all, it is perhaps simply the scientifically unknown world. Mystery, today, often means nothing more than a set of problems that will eventually be solved by science. For example, physicist Heinz Pagels in a recent book on the origins of the universe writes:

This popular scientific author goes on to say that physicists will eventually understand the basic laws of the universe, and then, "the existence of the universe will hold no more mystery for those who choose to understand it than the existence of the sun." And then he concludes: "[A]s knowledge of our universe matures, that ancient awestruck feeling of wonder at its size and duration seems inappropriate, a sensibility left over from an earlier age."(Ibid., xiv.)

Observe that Pagels is using the term "mystery" as the equivalent of "problem to be solved," or "present gap in our knowledge." Accordingly, mystery is a region of the unknown that will shrink away as our knowledge progresses. The term "mystery" is nothing more than a name for our temporary ignorance. And since any religious revelation apparently presupposes a mysterious domain of the unknown, there is little wonder that so many scientific thinkers have serious difficulties with religion in general and especially with the idea of a special religious revelation. The goal of science seems to some of them, at least, to be that of eventually eliminating any mysterious region out of which revelation might occur.

However, to religious experience and theology, the term "mystery" designates much more than a blank space in our knowledge eventually to be filled in by science. It is not just a void begging to be bridged by our intellectual achievements. Such lacunae in our present knowledge should be called problems, not mysteries. A problem can ultimately be solved and gotten out of the way through the application of human ingenuity.(On the distinction between problem and mystery see especially Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having (Westminster: Dacre Press, 1949) 117.) It falls under our cognitional control and can be disposed of by our intellectual or technological efforts. Mystery, on the other hand, is not open to any kind of "solution." Instead of vanishing as we grow wiser, it actually appears to loom larger and deeper. The realm of mystery keeps on expanding before us as we solve our particular problems. It resembles a horizon that recedes into the distance as we advance. Unlike problems, it has no clear boundaries. While problems can eventually be removed, the encompassing domain of mystery remains a constantly receding frontier the deeper we advance into it.

Albert Einstein is often cited as the exemplar of those scientists for whom mystery means much more than just a set of solvable problems. Though he could not embrace the notion of religious revelation, he still perceived a dimension of mystery so enduring that the advance of science could never eliminate it:

Einstein saw mystery as real, not just a cover-up for our scientific ignorance. In his view, the sense of mystery will intensify as scientific knowledge advances, for the greatest mystery is that the universe is even intelligible at all. There is little hope for our grasping the possibility of any sort of revelation if we have not, at least minimally, become comfortable in the manner of Einstein with the impression that the universe is shrouded in mystery.

Limit-Experience

An awareness of mystery can make its way into the consciousness of all of us, even though we may not call it by that name. The sense of mystery comes home to us most explicitly in "limit-experiences" and "limit-questioning."(Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order, 91-118; Stephen Toulmin, An Examination of the Place of Reason in Ethics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970] 202-21.) Limit-experiences are those happenings in our lives that shock us into a recognition that our ordinary existence is encompassed by a previously unacknowledged realm of the unknown. Often they coincide with moments of tragedy or perplexity, but they may also pop up at times of joy and ecstasy and even during the most ordinary of moments.

In his autobiography My Confession, Leo Tolstoy provides a vivid illustration of how mystery-opening questions may interrupt the routine of one’s life. At a time when he was already a famous novelist and had achieved great wealth and fame, he found himself drawn irresistibly toward the unsolvable questions: What is the purpose of life? Why go on living? What value lies in continuing one’s work? Is life perhaps a stupid cheat? These questions expressed his perplexity about the suffocating nature of an all-too-familiar world. One response to them is a despair that insists on the finality of the ordinary and gives into cynicism. But another is to see such provocations as tortuous openings to the utterly extraordinary and surprising, that is, to mystery.

The presence of limits is felt whenever we find ourselves restlessly asking the big questions to which religions have always been the primary mode of response: What is the meaning of my life? Why am I here? Who am I? What is my destiny? These questions disclose our native openness to mystery even in the midst of the everyday. Functional or pragmatic questions consume the larger portion of our lives, but occasionally things happen that break up the routine and allow us to see our world in a new light. Sometimes these are moments of "earthquake," such as an experience of personal failure or the death of a loved one. Occurring at the edge or "limits" of normal life, they thrust us toward a fearsome but also vaguely promising dimension of reality. They may initially bring a sense of anxiety, but along with it a surprising anticipation of new life. We may even experience a vague longing for such limit-experiences precisely because we have a premonition that they will expose us to new and enriching depths of the unknown.

In the midst of these limit-experiences we are faced with a decision whether to trust in mystery or perhaps give into a despair that binds us even more tightly to the familiar. Limit-experiences bring home to us the boundaries of the ordinary and make us more receptive to the possible presence of another dimension beyond the everyday. But they can also be the occasion for a retreat from the promise of the unknown. They may provoke us to step back into the banal security of the already-mastered world. At any rate, during such moments we seem to brush up explicitly against mystery, even if we then take flight from it.

Our awareness of ordinariness and triviality or tedium can arise only because some part of us has already somehow gone beyond the limits of the everyday world and dipped deeper into mystery. As Hegel, among other philosophers, has put it, to know a limit as a limit is already to be beyond that limit. To recognize and feel confined by the pedestrian quality of our lives is already a hint of our being open to the wider world of a threateningly refreshing mystery. Knowledge of the chains that bind us is the first step in an awareness of our fundamental freedom. A conscious and grateful openness to the mysterious regions beyond our imprisonment may, broadly speaking, be called "religion." The cultivation of a religious attitude, we shall see, is indispensable to the full reception of revelation. Religion is the grateful awareness of and response to a mystery that exposes the limits of the mundane.

A religious detection of the extraordinary can arise out of situations of shipwreck and also at moments of dissatisfaction such as Tolstoy experienced. But we must hasten to add that a sense of mystery can also arise in a very imposing way during moments of deep joy. Ecstatic experiences may actually introduce us to mystery much more emphatically than moments of shipwreck. In a special way, the feeling of being deeply loved by another person can endear one to mystery, as can the experience of great beauty. On such occasions we may intuit a depth of reality that no amount of scientific expertise can adequately probe. The world then appears largely unconquerable by our finite human mental and technological powers. Though such a discovery is intolerable and frustrating to our will to control, genuine religion rejoices in our coming upon a continually surprising region of the unconquerable. Such discovery means that the world is infinitely open-ended, and that the human spirit need never fear the suffocation that would result from a conviction that mystery can eventually be blotted out by our rational expertise or technological prowess.

Limit-Questions

Mystery also shows up at certain points even in our rational, academic, and professional involvement in such disciplines as science and ethics. It becomes most prominent in what Stephen Toulmin calls the "limit-questions" that arise in connection with such disciplines as science and ethics. While we are actively engaged in science or any other intellectual or practical pursuit, we are not usually focally attending to mystery. But an awareness of the dimension of mystery may emerge when we begin to ask why we are involved in such pursuits at all.

Usually in our intellectual endeavors, we are not explicitly aware of mystery. For example, in the day-to-day work of scientific investigation, a scientist is preoccupied with questions for which a definite resolution is anticipated. The researcher anticipates that scientific problems will someday be solved and eliminated, and that new problems will take their place. The ongoing search for a unified field theory, a room-temperature superconductivity, or a cure for AIDS, requires no special attention to mystery. In fact, such focal attention might even prove to be a distraction if it were unremitting. But at least occasionally the scientist will likely step outside of the problem-solving mode. She might find herself suddenly asking: why am I involved with science at all? Why have I chosen it as my career? What does my work have to do with the rest of life? What is the meaning of my work? Why do I experience the drive to ask questions and to seek answers? Does the universe ultimately make sense, or is science just a game that leads nowhere? Is it really worthwhile spending my days in pursuit of the truth?

These are examples of what Toulmin and his theological admirers are today calling limit-questions.(Toulman, 202-21) They are a different kind of question from those that occur within science. They do not fall inside, but rather only at the limits of scientific investigation. Thus they do not lend themselves to a solution like that of scientific problems. In fact, the deeper one goes with such questions, the more interminable they seem. Such questions indicate how our minds as well as our lives are open to mystery. According to theologians David Tracy and Schubert Ogden, these are the questions to which religion seems to be the most appropriate response.(Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order, 94 -109; Schubert Ogden, The Reality of God and Other Essays [New York: Harper & Row, 1977] 31). In other words, it is at the point of limit-questioning that mystery begins to appear in relation to our intellectual and academic disciplines. So if any revelatory disclosure of this mystery is a possibility, it would not produce a content that can be placed in the same category as the truths we arrive at through science. Revelation would be a response to the limit-questions that arise at the edge of science. It is not a set of propositions that could compete with or come into conflict with scientific ones. Seen in this light, therefore, there can be no genuine contradiction between science and revelation.

Limit-questions also arise at the boundary of ethical inquiry. Ethics, the discipline that attempts to give answers to our moral problems, can, like science, be carried out without any specific reference to mystery. In fact, today a great deal of ethics is being done in our universities by scholars who apparently have no taste for any kind of religion. Ethicians are similar to scientists, at least in the sense that they too are engaged in a kind of problem-solving activity. They dispute among themselves about whether this or that public policy is the violation of the value of justice, or whether a certain action is the breaking of a contract, or whether a certain decision constitutes infidelity to a promise. They ponder such issues as whether abortion, capital punishment, and war are wrong or right, or in what circumstances a patient may be allowed to die: All of this ethical deliberation can take place with or without a sense of mystery, and with no appeal to religion or revelation.

Once again, however, the ethical problem-solving process, like that of science, eventually comes up against limits that open out into what we are calling mystery. It is difficult to ignore indefinitely such questions as the following ones: Why should we bother about ethics at all? Why be responsible? Why should we adhere to any contracts and promises whatsoever? Why should we be concerned about human life or human rights? In short, why pursue the good? Why practice justice? Here the ethician is no longer asking questions that the discipline of ethics, strictly speaking, can itself adequately address. Rather, these are limit-questions. And if we pursue them seriously instead of suppressing them, as we are often prone to do, they may lead us to a sense that both our problems and their solutions are themselves enshrouded in mystery.

If there is any religious or revelatory response forthcoming from the realm of mystery opened up to us by these limit-questions, it would not be an ethical sort of answer. If there is a revelation of mystery it could not give us absolutely clear solutions to specific ethical, political and social problems, any more than we can expect it to solve scientific problems. To do so would amount to a trivializing of the mystery. It is inappropriate for us to expect religion and revelation to compete with ethics, any more than we expect them to compete with science. To look for specific biblical texts as the definitive resolution of questions about war, sexuality, personal rights, public policy, etc., and to present these as revealed truths, is highly questionable. In the final analysis the use of religious sources in this way amounts to a serious repression of mystery and a trivializing of revelation. Instead, we would look to revelation to address our limit-questions, in this case to shed some light on why we should be ethical at all, why we should be responsible, why we should keep our promises to one another.

One way of beginning to understand the idea of revelation, then, is to see it as a response not to our problems but to our limit-questions. It is a crippling reduction of revelation to place its content side by side with the propositions arrived at by way of problem-solving disciplines such as science and ethics. Revelation, we shall see, is the symbol-laden unfolding of the encompassing presence of mystery rather than a magical response to specific sets of problems. Like religion as such, it is more interested in grounding our trust in life than it is with resolving our scientific or ethical dilemmas. Though revelation requires that we take an ethical stance, especially, in the Christian context, that of doing justice, it is not reducible to ethics. And although it gives us a vision that encourages us to seek further intelligibility, it does not fit neatly into the various disciplines of intellectual or scientific inquiry. Its relation to our intellectual pursuits is that of supporting those foundational assumptions that give us a reason for doing science and getting involved in ethics in the first place. To do science we must first believe that truth is worth seeking, and to do ethics we must already assume that the good life is worth living. Revelation, seen in these terms, is the gift of a vision of, and a word about, mystery that gives us an ultimate reason to seek truth and to live the good life. But it is not just a list of propositional truths or ethical requirements.(See below, Chapter 10, for further development of this point in the context of the encounter of revelation theology with modern skepticism.)

To summarize, it is especially at the limits of our experience and problem-oriented questioning that we consciously come up against the truly incomprehensible and uncontrollable mystery to which our lives are inherently open. At these limits, we begin to ask questions that seem unsolvable and irremovable. Our asking limit-questions occurs at all only because mystery has already grasped hold of our consciousness. In a universal or original sense mystery is already revealed to us through these limits. When we reach these limits, however, we often retreat to the safety of mere problems. Or we try to transform mystery into a set of solvable quandaries. We anxiously renounce the inexhaustible depth that becomes evident through our limit-questions. But it is possible that such questions occur to us at all only because we are already somehow situated beyond the merely problematic and because, in the core of our being, we are already abiding within a wider field of self-revealing mystery.

This mystery is present to our lives, but often without being explicitly known as such. We must try therefore to make it more explicit. One way of doing so is to reflect on what Paul Tillich calls the dimension of "depth" that underlies all of our experience of reality.(For a fuller discussion of Tillich’s form of mystagogy see my book, What Is God?(New York: Paulist Press, 1986) 11-24.) In our relationship to others, to our own selves, to nature, and to society we have all received the impression that there is always something more beneath the surface, no matter how deep we go. In every area of experience we can hardly avoid the sense that we could dig deeper and, after we have done so, deeper still. It is difficult to deny the truism held by both religions and the sciences that things are not what they seem to be.("Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1977) 98-100.) Concealed beneath all appearances, and normally not the object of our focal awareness, there is an inexhaustible dimension of depth. Evidence that we have already experienced this depth lies in the fact that we can now look back and observe how superficial were our former impressions of things, of others, and of ourselves. If we had had no experience of going deeper we would not be able now to recognize the shallow as shallow, the superficial as superficial, or appearances as distinct from reality.

Take, for example, our experience of other people. We may think we know them and understand them, but then they will do something or say something that surprises or disappoints us. We then have to dig deeper into their personalities if we are to continue our relationship with them. And when we have penetrated beneath the surface of their being, we discover that we have still not yet fully plumbed their depth. The deeper our knowledge of the other becomes, the more clearly we realize that we will never fully understand that person. This happens because the other person is grounded in a dimension of depth, enfolded in an unspeakable and silent mystery.

We experience something similar in our efforts to understand our own selves. We may think we know who we are, but as we continue our life journeys we discover aspects of our personalities that we never knew about before. The deeper we travel on the road toward self-understanding the more we realize there is no end in sight. We seem to be borne up by an inexhaustible depth that renders us more and more mysterious even to ourselves. And in our relationship to nature and society we also experience how the appearances they present to us also conceal an infinite depth. The deeper science goes in its understanding of the cosmos, the more it seems to open up wider fields to be explored. And the more we look beneath the surface of our social and historical existence the more we encounter the inexhaustible dimension of depth.(.(Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948) 57. The above reflections on depth are suggested by Tillich’s important sermon on "The Depth of Existence," 52-63.)

This commonplace experience of depth is not distinct from the experience of mystery. And, as in the case of mystery, once we become conscious of the depth that yawns inexhaustibly beneath our lives we may begin to inquire about what this depth is really like at heart. What is the true character of this misty but ever-present horizon that continues to deepen as we plunge more fully into it? Is this depth simply a bottomless abyss, or does it have a ground to it? Is it an indifferent void, a hostile impasse, or a caring presence? We suspect, with Paul Tillich and many other theologians, that we need a very specific way to encounter the ‘‘universal’’ revelation of the depth or mystery of reality. We look, in other words, for a special or decisive revelation through which we may experience concretely the essential character of this omnipresent dimension of depth.(Schubert Ogden rightly stresses that there is no "more" in special than in universal revelation. And the New Testament itself does not require that we look at special revelation as a supernatural addition to make up for the inadequacy of natural revelation. Rather, it is sufficient to say that special revelation makes explicit the fullness of God’s love which is always already poured out into the world. "Although such [explicit] revelation cannot be necessary to the constitution of human existence, it can very well be necessary to the objectification of existence, in the sense of its full and adequate understanding at the level of explicit thought and speech." On Theology, 41. And: "what Christian revelation reveals to us is nothing new, since such truths as it makes explicit must already be known to us implicitly in every moment of our existence. But that this revelation occurs does reveal something new to us in that, as itself an event, it is the occurrence in our history of the transcendent event of God’s love," 43.)

Even if we are brought to the point of agreeing that there is indeed a dimension of reality to which the term "mystery" is applicable, we still wonder what this mystery is really like. For it seems to be ambiguous. It is both threatening and promising, and we sometimes wonder whether we can entrust ourselves to it. Perhaps instead we should try to avoid it. It is not surprising that much of our life is indeed an anxious flight from mystery. In the light of this ambiguity of mystery, the quest for special revelation becomes most relevant. The quest for this revelation is at root an inquiry about what mystery is really like. It is not inaccurate to say, at least from the point of view of Christian theology, that the search for such a revelation is the major driving force in the history of religion. And what differentiates one religion from another is the specific set of symbols or myths by which each answers the question about the essential character of the mystery that encompasses us all: "At the base of every religion, as its origin and principle," Schubert Ogden writes, "is some particular occasion of insight, or reflective grasp through concept and symbol, of the mystery manifested in original revelation."(Ibid., 40.) To Christian faith. revelation in the special sense of the term occurs decisively in Jesus who is called the Christ.

Nevertheless, the idea of a special revelation can probably have meaning for us only if we have already experienced an orientation to mystery. The experience of a decisive unveiling of a divine vision or the utterance of God’s word presupposes on our part at least a dim sense of an expansive realm of the unseen and the unspoken as its hidden source. We have noted, though, that today the reality of such a domain has come under question. Hence, a theology of revelation must begin with at least some effort to awaken us to mystery. A foundational aspect of all theology today is mystagogy.

The term "revelation," as mentioned earlier, comes from the Latin revelare, "to remove a veil." Most religions, at least since roughly the middle of the first millennium BC., have maintained that a veil of illusion or of mere "appearances" normally obscures from us what is ultimately deep, important, or real. And these same religions offer various ways by which our ignorance, alienation, or lack of enlightenment can be overcome. In this sense, all the great religions are concerned at least implicitly with special revelation. And so, in our use of the term "revelation" in this book, we shall be referring primarily to special revelation, and only by implication to original or universal revelation. Special revelation, understood as the symbolic disclosure of what lies in the depths of mystery, is an essential aspect of all religion.

The period of history ranging roughly from the eighth to the second century BC. gave rise to the Hindu Upanishads and to Buddhism in India, to the religions of Lao-Tzu and Confucius in China, to the eschatological ideas of Zoroaster in Persia, to the classical biblical prophets in Israel and Judah, and to the philosophy of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in the Greek world. This period has been aptly called the axial age by philosopher Karl Jaspers.(Karl Jaspers. The Origin and Goal of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953). By the term "axial" Jaspers intends to designate a major transitional period in human history and in our species’ understanding of reality. It is a pivotal period because during it there occurred parallel religious revolutions almost simultaneously at different places on our planet. Generally speaking, these independent spiritual developments intensified the sense of the ultimate unity and transcendence of a divine mystery. Or as is especially the case with Buddhism, they gave rise to an unprecedented longing for a state of enlightenment beyond the suffering and unsatisfactoriness of temporal experience. In a broad sense, at least, the major religions and philosophies anticipated special revelatory experiences or moments of enlightenment that would transform human existence and bestow on it a final meaning.

Even before the axial period, archaic or primal religions already had an at least embryonic sense of a sacral dimension that could interrupt life and bestow on it a wider significance than that given in ordinary existence. The religion of early humans focused on the maintenance of stable tribal existence in the face of nature’s wild elements and the hostility of other peoples. The purpose of religion was to an extent, though certainly not exclusively, that of world-maintenance. The axial religions, on the other hand, initiated a more explicit longing for a perfect reality beyond the immediate world of social and natural existence. Religion became less concerned with maintaining the world than with restlessly transcending it on the way to something infinitely better?(John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) 22-29.)

Still, even in pre-axial religion there are the beginnings of a more explicit and adventurous openness to the novelty of mystery. For example, the main religious figure of the pre-axial period, the shaman, characteristically breaks through to a strange but salvific world beyond the ordinary. By way of trances and frenzied actions, the shaman, who functions as a scout of the "other world," discloses or reveals an other-than-ordinary dimension of reality to the members of a tribe. Shamanic mediators of a sacred realm abound in early religion. And we fail to appreciate the notion of revelation as it comes down to us in later religious traditions, including the Christian religion, if we forget its primal connections to the visionaries of pre-literate societies. In its earliest forms, even in the Bible, revelation takes place in the ecstatic experience of exceptional personalities who open up an extraordinary realm of mystery beyond the everyday modes of awareness.

However, revelation is present in preliterate religion in an even more fundamental sense than just ecstatic eruptions. In primal religion, revelation has a fundamentally sacramental character. Early religious inklings of "another dimension" were felt especially in those aspects of nature considered important for human subsistence and survival. The aboriginal forms of religious experience may have occurred in the Paleolithic Age going back at least 35,000 years and even beyond. During this hunting-and-gathering period, religious experience was probably tied up closely with the hunt. Because they were indispensable to human survival, animals were endowed with special, perhaps sacral, characteristics. During the Old Stone Age it is quite likely that totemism arose. In totemism, a particular animal or (less often) some other natural phenomenon or artifact is given a special role as the ancestral being around which the social unit’s life is structured. Participating in the life of this totem is a way of communing with the sacred. And the totem becomes a symbolic medium through which mystery is disclosed, though perhaps not in the sense of the radical other-ness that we discern in the axial and post-axial religious traditions.

Moving closer to modern times, religion undergoes the dramatic transformations we have associated with the axial age. As it does so, the sense of an all-encompassing realm of mystery becomes more prominent in the religious ideas of influential religious visionaries and seers. Ordinary experience of mundane reality becomes more sharply distinguished from and relativized by the awareness of a realm of perfection or of supreme bliss far surpassing anything given in our everyday lives.

For example, the Hindu Upanishads which emerged during the axial age inform us that we are normally tied up in a world of maya (which means "veil" or illusion). And Vedantic Hinduism seeks to open us up to the fact that we are really at one with Brahman. or ultimate reality. The attainment of moksha, or ultimate liberation and fulfillment, occurs when our ignorance (avidya) is removed and we realize that we are already in union with God. Such a "revelation," which may take place through meditation or other forms of yoga and devotion, shows us retrospectively that we have lived most of our lives in ignorance of ourselves and of the true nature of reality. In the history of religions, revelation often means the removal of a veil of ignorance.

Revelation in the wider context of religion also typically implies some sort of enlightenment or illumination. This, as we have noted, is the primary metaphor by which Augustine understood Christian revelation. But in Hinduism also, the experience of moksha entails an experience of unprecedented clarity about things. And in Buddhism, the illuminating moment of enlightenment may be understood as a kind of revelatory experience even though there is no self-revealing God. For Zen Buddhism, the experience of Satori may not mean the breaking in of new truths from some realm beyond, but it does imply seeing things with a clarity that was previously absent. Even in the case of the Hebrew prophets, the experience of God is an eye-opening one. They are aware of the discontinuity between our perception of the world as we ordinarily experience it through our blindness to injustice, and the world as we may come to see it through the eyes of Yahweh, the God of justice and compassion. Revelation universally implies a clarification of vision. And although biblical revelation is not reducible to enlightenment or the removal of ignorance and unclarity, since this would amount to what is called gnosticism, it nevertheless shares with the wider religious world the sense that we all stand in need of enlightenment. The Christian Church Fathers were especially inclined to understand revelation in this sense.

Mystery and the Humility of God

A theology of revelation must attempt to give an interpretation of the basic data of our experience, including the mysterious. We have an insatiable longing to make sense of the enigmatic features of our personal existence, of history, of the cosmos, and of reality as a whole. We naturally look for some revelatory image that will illuminate reality and make it intelligible. The quest for revelation is inseparable from our perennial human longing for some scheme that will allow things to fit together coherently. Even Albert Camus insisted that it would be dishonest of us to deny that a longing for clarity and lucidity about the nature of reality is an essential part of our existence. (Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays [New York: Vintage Books, 1955] 20.)

At the same time, however, both Camus, who was an atheist, and the great religious teachers have warned us not to be too hasty in piecing the puzzle of reality together. We run the risk of diminishing the mystery of reality and of ourselves if we plunge precipitously into shallow certitudes. The unraveling we sense at the edges of human existence and of the world must not be prematurely knotted by our own restrictive meanings. If there is a revelatory key to reality, we must allow it to unfold at its own pace. And at the same time we must be open to surprise at the shape it eventually takes.

In its focus on Jesus Christ as the revelation of God, Christianity claims that the ultimate mystery of reality becomes incarnate in the life of a particular human being at a particular time in the history of the world. In Christianity, a major feature of the sacred is its paradoxical identification with the mundane. The infinite mystery takes on the definiteness of finitude as its mode of actual existence. The eternal identifies with the temporal and perishable. God, in other words, appears to Christian faith as a self-emptying mystery. The mystery becomes definite by limiting itself. In the Christian story, the inexhaustible depth of reality surfaces as a person like us -- Jesus of Nazareth -- who suffers crucifixion and death.

Interpreting this picture is the main task of revelation theology. In pondering it, we are led to an unprecedented understanding of mystery. The mystery of the world’s infinite open-endedness initially strikes us as so frustrating that we try to transform it into an extended set of problems that we can control. But in the light of Christian revelation we are led to believe that the boundless, and perhaps initially terrifying abyss of mystery is in fact the consequence of an infinite God’s own humble and loving self-withdrawal. In order to give the world and ourselves the open "space" in which to unfold our existence, the ground of our being absents itself, leaving behind, so to speak, a seeming void or abyss. By concealing its infinity within the limits of particularity, the absolute God graciously opens up for us an unlimited dimension of depth in which to live and move and have our being. The outcome of an infinite self-emptying, then, is an emptiness that seems infinite. This emptiness initially strikes us as a mysterium tremendum, that is, an awe-inspiring and even terrifying abyss. So we either shrink back from it in anxiety that we will be lost if we plunge into it, or else we try to domesticate it by reducing it to the merely problematic. In either case we fail to apprehend the absolute lovingness that lies concealed within the infinite void. A Christian theology of revelation instructs us that what might otherwise strike us as the occasion for despair is really the consequence of a boundless love.

That the abyss of mystery can be an occasion for despair is easily illustrated by modern atheism from Friedrich Nietzsche to Jean-Paul Sartre. The most serious forms of atheism interpret the boundlessness and seeming emptiness of mystery as an invitation to nihilism. There is surely an "abysmal" aspect to reality, and nihilistic philosophy and art are intelligible as an articulation of this terrifying face of mystery. But revelation, with its image of the suffering God, allows us to interpret the void not as absurd, but as the consequence of God’s self-giving, self-limiting love.

However, the sources of Christian thought, especially the Old Testament, require also that we understand revelation as the disclosure of God’s power. Indeed, in a manner of speaking, God’s power is the central content of revelation. The one who delivered Israel with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm is the same power that delivered Jesus from death and established him as Lord. The psalmists and prophets constantly implore Yahweh to make manifest the divine power in the face of the attacks of enemies. In light of this dominant theme of God’s power in the Scriptures and theology, the specter of God presented in the crucified man, Jesus -- so utterly self-limiting -- seems contradictory. The image of divine vulnerability and suffering that we encounter in the New Testament and in less dominant strands of theological tradition goes against what we expect God and power to be like. It seems to feed our agnostic suspicions that there is nobody in charge of the world and its destiny. God is supposed to be almighty, all-powerful, that is, capable of doing whatever "he" wills. That God freely suffers self-limitation in order to be one with us and our world is an idea that Christian theology has itself only reluctantly acknowledged. And it has done so only after making very careful qualifications. Its Trinitarian theology confesses the "communication of idioms," according to which the features and actions associated with one person of the Trinity are attributable to the others also. Accordingly, the sufferings of the Word made flesh cannot be viewed as though they occur outside of God’s life. But long ago the Church also rejected patripassionism, the view that the suffering of the Son can be attributed to the Father also. And in many other ways the theological tradition has kept its distance from the idea of a kenotic God, even though to an increasing number of theologians today it has always been essential to Christian revelation.

How can we make sense of this apparent contradiction? Perhaps behind its reluctance to speak of a suffering God, there lies a legitimate concern that if suffering and death are ascribed too literally to the Godhead, the very foundations will be taken out from beneath our world. Moreover, we might wonder whence would come the capacity to deliver us and the world from evil, to bring the divine promise to fulfillment, if the person of God is itself so beset by defenselessness. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s famous remark, "only a weak God can help," sounds too extreme to many. And Jürgen Moltmann’s recent revival of the theme of the crucified God, has been criticized as misleading even by such progressive Catholic theologians as Karl Rahner and Edward Schillebeeckx.(And yet Hans Urs von Balthasar, who in many respects appears more cautious in his theology than either Rahner or Schillebeeckx, has endorsed, through his reflections on Trinitarian theology, the notion of a suffering and dying God much more strongly than most other Catholic theologians: ‘the death, and the dying away into silence, of the Logos so become the centre of what he has to say of himself that we have to understand precisely his non-speaking as his final revelation, his utmost word: and this because in the humility of his obedient self-lowering to the death of the Cross he is identical with the exalted Lord." Mysterium Pasehale, 79.)

On the other hand, the enormity of suffering by creatures on this earth, and perhaps especially the human suffering of the present century, makes it difficult for us to return to any concept of divine omnipotence in which God stands silently and apathetically beyond the world’s evolutionary and historical struggles, able but unwilling to intervene. Such an idea seems theologically and spiritually bankrupt nowadays, even if at one time it was credible. On the other hand, the image of a self-limiting God who joins in utter solidarity with the suffering, the sinful, and the dying is more significant than ever today.

The earliest Christian sources already display an awareness that the philosophers and the wise of "this present age" will not easily entertain the paradox that power is made perfect in weakness. The identity of power with vulnerability is a great stumbling block to our ordinary sense of what is rational. But the revelatory image of a self-emptying absolute may just be the revelatory scandal which, if accepted in faith, can make all else intelligible. Even though the image of God’s humility is paradoxical to human reason, we may be enabled by it to make much more sense of our world than we could without it.( Perhaps the best approach to the problems we have raised is that of John MacQuarrie. He proposes a "dialectical theism," according to which we would avoid the conclusion that any statement about God can be understood as the whole truth. Dialectical thinking requires that whenever we make a statement about God, such as "God is all-powerful," we also allow that in some sense that God is weak and powerless. Such dialectical thinking pushes us toward some "higher" resolution, even if we never quite arrive there. In Search of Deity: An Essay in Dialectical Theism [New York: Crossroad, 1985]). The kenotic image of God provides a surer access to mystery than the more dominant idea of a coercive and domineering divine power. And, as we shall see later, our being grasped by the image of the self-limiting God promotes a heuristics (an impulse toward further discovery) that allows us to bring into our picture of the world, society, and ourselves elements that are usually excluded as unintelligible. In other words, the revelatory image of a self-limiting, self-giving, self-emptying God fosters a continually widening coherence in our understanding of reality and mystery. It evokes a distinct form of enlightenment that lets us see the possibility of redemption in the world and in history, and it provides an empowerment for a human praxis that helps to bring this redemption to pass.

Rather than moving directly into the task of developing a contemporary theology of revelation, it may prove helpful to some readers if we pause here and sketch at least a brief outline of the history of Catholic revelation theology. Such background information may help us to appreciate the extent of the struggle the idea of revelation in Catholic theology has undergone in order eventually to be liberated, especially through the work of the Second Vatican Council, from association with theological schemes that tended to narrow its meaning unnecessarily. At the same time such an outline may help to locate more clearly the distinctive character of the present attempt to develop a theology of revelation.

We noted earlier that Catholic theology of revelation has suffered in the past primarily from a "propositional" and correspondingly impersonal tendency. That is to say, it has understood revelation very much as though it were a set of truths and very little as the unfolding of a dialogical relationship between God and the world. Today, on the other hand, most Catholic theologians, along with an increasing number of Protestants, interpret revelation fundamentally as God’s personal self-gift to the world. This is a dramatic departure from the dominantly apologetic treatments of our topic since the time of the Reformation.

The new personalist or dialogical emphasis in revelation theology is not incompatible with a propositional understanding, but it goes far beyond it. Gerald O’Collins, who certainly agrees with the new accent, observes that the personalist way of looking at revelation as God’s self-disclosure does not exclude the possibility of framing its content simultaneously in the form of statements of truth.

Still, although traditionally revelation has been understood in a formal sense as God’s communication of truths to us, materially and in fact it has never been reducible to the mere transmission of information. In spite of the excesses of the propositional approach at the level of theological articulation, the lived experience of Christians throughout the ages has been one in which revelation, even when it is not called by this name, has been experienced predominantly in a personal, dialogical way. It would be an exaggeration to say that traditional theology has been mistaken in speaking of revelation in propositional terms, for example, during the period in which Scholasticism was virtually equated with Catholic theology. But it has failed, as incidentally all theology has to an extent in every age, by speaking of revelation in a manner that does not adequately thematize what actually goes on in the concrete faith life of Christian believers. The attempt to reduce revelation to propositional statements of truth may serve the cause of apologetics, but it leaves out the main substance or content of revelation as it has in fact been felt and internalized.

Theology has been so preoccupied with what we shall later call "boundary maintenance," the need to guarantee the integrity of revelation in the face of skepticism or alternative religious positions, that it has felt the need to codify its content in the form of credal and dogmatic propositions. This attempt at codification is especially understandable, and certainly forgivable, since the content of revelation needs to be guarded in one way or another. Without conceptually clarified boundaries, any religious tradition risks being dissolved into culture at large and thereby loses its critical edge vis-a-vis the social and political environment. The problem, then, is not with the propositional codification but with the narrow identification of a set of propositions with the sum and substance of revelation. Such an identification is parallel to the fallacy in science of identifying the world of nature with the scientific models that we use to organize our understanding of it. Nature is in fact always much richer and more complex than our imaginative and mathematical models, and we unduly shrivel our understanding of the cosmos if we equate it in a simple way with our scientific schemes. Likewise, it is of the very essence of faith that we acknowledge the transcendence of divine mystery over any of our propositional and symbolic representations of it. Indeed, not to do so is idolatrous. And so, if the ultimate content of revelation is the divine mystery of God, then no set of propositional truths can mediate it to us either. Avery Dulles writes,

Few theologians, it turns out, have rigorously equated the marrow of revelation with any particular set of propositional truths. But especially under the pressure of apologetical concerns, they have sometimes caused the theology of revelation to focus so intently on credal formulations that the life of faith and the intimate relation of God to the world underlying the statements of dogma have often been virtually ignored. The renewal of revelation theology, especially since Vatican II, is trying to redress this imbalance.

We must be careful to avoid caricaturing traditional theology. This is especially the case with the theology formulated along the lines of Thomas Aquinas’ great synthesis. Although Thomistic and later scholastic philosophies are rightly criticized for their rationalistic excesses, they did not totally obscure the personal dimension of revelation, but in their own way kept it alive. Aquinas himself did not lock revelation up in a purely logical mold, but instead saw it fundamentally as the presence of the Lord in the heart as well as the mind.(Summa Theologiae I a. 8, 3; 2, 3, 5, 6.) As we shall see in Chapter 4, religions all have an informational component which requires some sort of propositional formulizing, and Christian falth is not exempt from this requirement. But even the most "scholastic" theology of the late Middle Ages did not entirely reduce revelation to a set of sentences. Hidden beneath its rigorous preoccupation with dogmatic clarity, there was still the often inadequately articulated confession of the sense of God’s personal presence to. the world and to faith. It is this lived faith that revelation theology ideally attempts to clarify.

Revelation Theology Prior to Vatican II

Whenever the main theological concern is one of defending the faith from the threats of outsiders, it is difficult to undertake the work of a truly constructive theology. The latter occurs more readily in circumstances where religious energy can be focused on the development rather than just the protection of doctrine.(Sometimes, of course, serious challenges may help to stimulate doctrinal growth rather than retrenchment.) Before Vatican II, the Church councils and the Roman magisterium spoke of revelation generally in the context of the condemnation of unorthodoxy.(Dulles, Revelation and the Quest for Unity, 82.) At the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, for example, there was no real theological deepening of the notion of revelation because the main concern was with safeguarding the deposit of faith that the council fathers held to have been passed down in Church tradition under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. And although Vatican I did not explicitly dwell on the topic of revelation, its promulgations on infallibility and faith alluded to the "deposit" that comes to us from the apostles and that needs to be protected by Church authority.(Gabriel Moran, Theology of Revelation [New York: Herder & Herder, 1966] 27.)Vatican I understood revelation as a fixed body of supernatural truths under the protection of papal authority:

The implied view of revelation here is that it is a somewhat manageable body of unchanging truths that can be clearly segregated from the "poison of error." The Council goes on to insist that papal infallibility is itself a "divinely revealed dogma," ( Ibid., 102) thus exposing once again its assumption that revelation comes wrapped in the form of doctrinal propositions.

Perhaps it is unfair of twentieth-century religious thought to be excessively critical of the rather emaciated views of revelation that came to expression at Trent and later at Vatican I and in the many manuals that followed. At the same time, however, it is not helpful to imagine that we can find much of a basis for a theology of revelation in these sources. The reason for such a sober conclusion is simply that the apologetic method, almost by definition, leaves too much out. Indeed, while it allegedly defends matters of faith, it typically deals primarily with revelation only from the point of view of what appeals to finite human reason. It rightly allows a place for intelligence and reason within faith, but it simultaneously suppresses much of the very substance of the faith it seeks to defend. Hans Waldenfels observes that in the standard modern manuals of theology, apologetics does not treat the topic of revelation in so far as it is known through faith, but only in so far as it can be grasped in a purely "natural" way.(Hans Waldenfels, Offenbarung (Munich: Max Hueber Verlag. 1968) 27.) Such a method is bound to abstract considerably from what lies in the depths of faith experience.

While the topic of revelation appears abundantly in apologetic treatises and manuals after Trent, it is impossible to find a fully developed revelation theology in Catholic circles until the present century. A formal theology of revelation does not appear in the Bible, nor in the Church fathers, nor in medieval scholastic theology, either. But this is not surprising since the fact of revelation was so foundational to Christian faith that it did not need to be reflected upon in the deliberate fashion that apologetics requires.(See Gabriel Moran, 22-23.) We look in vain for treatises de revelatione prior to modern times. And even after the Council of Trent in the mid-sixteenth century, the theme of revelation entered into the realm of theological discussion through the doorway of apologetics rather than as a fully developed theological notion. In their opposition to Protestantism, Tridentine and post-Tridentine theologians sought to defend the revelatory role of tradition and the magisterium over against the sola Scriptura (Scripture alone) emphasis of Protestant Christianity. In doing so, they and the many manuals that followed understood revelation usually in a starkly minimal sense as the locutio Dei, the speech of God. And in order to distinguish the Catholic position from that of the Protestants, they placed enormous weight on tradition and the Church magisterium as vehicles of God’s speech. Thus the Bible as God’s Word became a subordinate item in Catholic understanding of divine revelation. And in spite of Vatican II’s corrections, to this day the Bible is still quite often passed over by many Catholics as they look for the sources of their faith.

In our own century, the famous Dominican theologian Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, in a massive apologetically oriented two-volume work, De Revelatione. gives an elaborate definition of revelation, setting forth its efficient, material, formal, and final causes. According to his definition, revelation is a supernatural action of God made manifest "per modum locutionis" (by way of speech).(Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., De Revelatione (Rome: F. Ferrari, 1945) 136.) Such manuals as that of Garrigou-Lagrange typically cite Hebrews 1:1 as a scriptural basis for this understanding: "In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son. . . ." The notion of God’s locutio is easily assimilable to that of propositional truth which in turn best suits the interests of apologetics. And it is in this sense that most post-Tridentine Catholic theology prior to Vatican II understood the notion of revelation.

Even though this approach highlighted the "speaking" of God, it was still largely uninformed by, and should not be confused with, the biblical notion of "God’s word." And it shows little awareness of the biblical understanding of revelation as history, revelation as event, revelation as dialogical encounter, or revelation as personal relationship. The apologetic preoccupation was with preserving the "truth" of revelation, so much so that the biblical vision of revelation as the generous self-disclosure of God’s vision for creation and history was virtually forgotten. What is more, the central biblical experience of God’s revelation in the mode of promise was almost completely ignored.(We are speaking here of the formal theology of revelation and not of the concrete life of faith in which, at least to some degree, the theme of promise remained alive, though not always in the biblical sense.) Even now most Catholic theologies of revelation generally fail to accentuate sufficiently the promissory character of the biblical interpretation of God’s self-disclosure. In contrast to this puzzling oversight, we shall attempt in the following pages to give the notion of revelation as promise the prominence it deserves.

Protestant and Catholic tracts on revelation began to appear more abundantly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were still often written in an apologetic spirit, but by this time the enemy was not so much alternative Christian movements or heresies. Instead, Protestants and Catholics both had to defend the plausibility of any revelation whatsoever against the challenges of rationalism and scientific agnosticism. To an extent this apologetic tone still persists in many theologies of revelation, and even in this book we cannot ignore those questions raised by the critical spirit of academic modernity. Chief among these is the question whether revelation itself can be said to be a coherent notion in a scientific age.

When the apologetic emphasis is dominant, however, it becomes difficult to develop a very substantive theology of revelation. If the chief concern is that of defending the facticity of revelation (usually too narrowly defined), then the content and significance of revelation remain unexplored.(Moran, 25.) Accordingly, much that passes as revelation theology prior to Vatican II has failed to lead us very far into the depth and riches that the notion implies. For this reason, we shall devote most of this work to a setting forth of the nature of revelation, and reserve for our final chapter a brief inquiry into its possible consistency with reason. Such an approach is reflective of the pattern of many recent theological discussions of revelation. We shall not begin with a simple definition of the term "revelation" as the traditional treatises such as that of Garrigou-Lagrange have, defining it as the locutio Dei. Instead, we shall spend the largest part of our efforts groping toward a provisional understanding of the notion. Only after reaching at least a fragmentary grasp -- "definition" would be too strong a term -- of the nature of revelation would it be opportune to inquire into its critical plausibility.

Vatican II and Beyond

The Second Vatican Council’s document on revelation, promulgated November 18, 1965, is entitled Dei Verbum, the "Word of God." Perhaps nothing signals more directly the new ecumenical and biblical tone of the council’s understanding of revelation. Contemporary theologians, attuned as they now are to the renewal of biblical theology, may find the constitution on revelation quite unremarkable. But when we situate it in the context of previous magisterial statements, it takes on the appearance of a dramatic breakthrough in Catholic teaching. It is helpful to know that this document emerged only after a difficult struggle with those at the council who were simply intent upon restating the ideas of Trent and Vatican I. The first draft of the document was honed in a rigorously unbiblical and unecumenical way. Thanks to the intervention of Pope John XXIII and other bishops, the first draft was rejected. The final, approved text, like many other council documents, gives evidence of the modern Catholic Church’s intention to keep the lines of communication open to the world, of its willingness to learn from the experience of non-Catholic churches and theologians, and of a refreshing openness to the results of modern theology and biblical scholarship. It is the spirit of this liberating openness that encourages those of us who are theologians to keep probing ever deeper for the meaning of revelation in terms of our own circumstances almost thirty years later.

By accentuating the theme of God’s Word, the final text, known as Dei Verbum. clearly signals Catholic theology’s exposure to Protestant views of revelation in which the theme of God’s Word, rather than Church magisterium and tradition, is given primacy. No longer present is the old temptation to separate tradition or ecclesiastical magisterium from Scripture as autonomous sources of revelation. Instead, the document states that

In this way, the council avoids any narrow biblicism that would tend to derive all important truths for our lives from the pages of Scripture alone. It fortunately declares that the Word of God is not limited to the letter of Scripture: "It is not from sacred Scripture alone that the Church draws her certainty about everything which has been revealed."(Ibid.) At the same time it emphasizes that the teaching office of the Church "is not above the word of God, but serves it."(Ibid., article 10.) Moreover, the council endorses the methods of modern biblical scholarship which reject literalist and fundamentalist readings of Scripture. It shows an awareness of the need to "search Out the intention of the sacred writers" by way of form criticism. It acknowledges our need to become aware of the historical context and different genres of the various books of the Bible. While still conceding points to Trent, Vatican I, and the apologetic orientation of previous Church documents, Dei Verbum overall is an inspiration to those who are concerned with developing and interpreting anew the notion of revelation. Although many of its articles are now commonplace in modern theology, the fact that it sanctions new methods and emphases gives one confidence that the Church’s teachers, including its theologians, are commissioned to search for an ever-deeper appreciation of the meaning of revelation.

In addition to the theme of God’s Word, the council also reflects the Catholic Church’s embrace of twentieth-century theology of history in which God’s Word is seen as inseparable from events and deeds. By way of revelation, Dei Verbum states,

Thus revelation is no longer understood here simply as the communication of knowledge, but as a process, involving events as well as words, by which humans are invited into an ever-deeper relationship with God.(Dulles, Revelation and the Quest for Unity, 86.)

Most significantly also, Dei Verbum -- without developing the point in detail -- clearly understands revelation as the disclosure of God’s own selfhood: "Placuit Deo in sua bonitate et sapientia seipsum revelare. . . ." ("In his goodness and wisdom God chose to reveal himself. . . .").(Dei Verbum, article 2. Emphasis added.) Latourelle comments:

The document on revelation goes on to say that the fullness of God’s self-revelation becomes manifest in Christ.(Ibid.) It is this personalizing of revelation that we wish to highlight. The notion that revelation is God’s self-revelation has turned out to be one of the most important developments in all of modern theology. Greatly due to the influence of theologian Karl Rahner, Catholic theology of revelation has now shifted dramatically away from the propositional, impersonal, and apologetic features it carried in the past. In doing so, it has merged in substance with much non-Catholic theology of revelation as well.

The Present State of Revelation Theology

Although Vatican II’s document on revelation has de-emphasized the propositional approach to revelation theology, much work remains to be done in the area of bringing to clarity the unique content and meaning of biblical revelation. This is now a broadly shared ecumenical enterprise. Increasingly since Vatican II, Catholic and non-Catholic theologians have read and appropriated each others’ work in this area. The present book will itself reflect how Catholic theology of revelation can now be animated just as much by the reading of Protestant sources as of Catholic ones. Because of the Second Vatican Council’s endorsement of a biblical approach to revelation, with special emphasis on the "Word of God," Catholic theology has been implicitly commissioned to mine the resources of modern Protestant theology of revelation which traditionally has been much more explicitly concerned with the theme of God’s word.

The emphasis that both Protestant and Catholic theology must now develop more forcefully (and Vatican II already took implicit steps in this direction) is that God’s revelatory word comes in the form of promise. No contemporary theologian has brought out this dimension of revelation more emphatically than Jürgen Moltmann, a Protestant. And it is especially in relation to his own bold endeavors that a contemporary, ecumenically viable theology of revelation may be constructed.

Another area of revelation theology needing considerable development today is that of how to interpret the Christocentric character of Dei Verbum. The council’s constitution on revelation implies that the fullness of the divine self-disclosure occurs only in Christ: "The deepest truth about God and the salvation of man shines out for our sake in Christ, who is both the mediator and the fullness of all revelation (mediator simul et plenitudo totius revelationis)."(Ibid.) How literally does this powerful and sweeping claim, supported by several important texts in the New Testament and by centuries of Christian tradition, need to be taken? This question arises for Christian theology today primarily because of our growing awareness of the revelatory claims of other religious traditions. In our conversations with representatives of these alternative visions of reality, what does it mean to say that Christ is the plenitudo totius revelationis (the fullness of all revelation)?

The issue of how to interpret the alleged finality of Christian revelation is receiving considerable attention in theology today, and in Chapter 4 we shall look into it somewhat more closely. It goes without saying that any efforts we might make with respect to this difficult and controversial matter can only be tentative, not to say clumsy. But it does not seem wise, nor for that matter in keeping with the spirit of tolerance and inclusiveness that we associate with Christian faith, simply to ignore it. The question of the meaning of the traditional teaching about the centrality, finality, and unsurpassability of Christ in revelation needs to be raised and discussed over and over. Dei Verbum is not as sensitive to this question as we might have hoped, although in comparison with previous magisterial statements both its tone and content are significant departures from the apologetically bound past. The decree on revelation, as well as other products of the Second Vatican Council, make initial gestures toward acknowledging the situation of religious pluralism, but we need now to go much further.

Finally, the present condition of revelation theology is one in which the kenotic aspects of God’s self-revelation are thankfully being accentuated more forcefully than ever before. Dei Verbum implies that God’s self-revelation is indeed a self-emptying, but it does not make this point very explicit, nor does it develop it. In the present work, therefore, without in any way claiming adequacy for our treatment, we shall bring to the front the theme of God’s self-emptying as central to the theology of revelation. When taken together with the biblical motif of promise, the notion of a divine kenosis may provide for our own situation today a solid and compelling foundation for a fresh theology of revelation.

Christian faith is a response to the "revelation" of a divine mystery. It is the obedient embracing of a promise by God given to the world first through Israel and then through Jesus Christ and the Church. The word "revelation" is derived from the Latin word revelare (literally, to remove a veil). And although we must avoid basing a theology of revelation on the etymology of this term, we may at least say that in some sense "revelation" entails a disclosure. It is the "word" of God, the communication of a promising and saving mystery. In the final analysis, the substance of the revelatory word of promise is the gift of God’s own self to the world.

In traditional Catholic systematic theology, revelation is generally understood as the locutio Dei, the "speech of God." Although to Augustine it implied a divine "illumination" of our souls, it has usually meant God’s passing on to us propositional truths to which we would otherwise have no access. A standard traditional definition of revelation is "the communication of those truths which are necessary and profitable for human salvation . . . in the form of ideas."(From P. Schanz’s Apologie des Christentums (1905), quoted by Werner Bulst, Revelation. trans. by Bruce Vawter (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1965) 18.) Alternatively, revelation has been defined typically as "direct discourse and instruction on the part of God." It is "an act by which God exhibits to the created mind his judgments in their formal expression, in internal or external words."(B. Goebel, Katholische Apologetik (1930), as quoted by Bulst, 18.)

To many believers, such definitions are still sufficient. But for some time now, Christian theologians have questioned the adequacy of this rather "propositional" understanding of revelation. In contemporary theology, both Catholic and Protestant, the concept of revelation has come to refer more radically to the gift of God’s own self to the world. Although even the First Vatican Council stated that it has pleased God to reveal himself and the eternal decrees of his will to the human race [Denz. 1785],(Bulst, 23) the Protestant theologian Paul Althaus is quite correct in pointing out that Catholic theology of the past has had an overly intellectualized and depersonalized notion of revelation.(Bulst, however, thinks that Althaus’ observations are unjustified[22]) Today, this situation has dramatically changed. A new reading of the Bible, the Church Fathers and other theological sources, and perhaps especially the documents of the Second Vatican Council have been moving Catholic theology toward a new consensus about the nature of revelation. More and more theologians propose that the content of revelation is fundamentally the very reality of the divine self. In this book, we shall explore some of the implications of this development in the theology of revelation.

In the Bible, God’s self-revelation comes in the form of promise.(From the perspective of biblical theology it was especially Gerhard von Rad who brought this theme of revelation as promise to the front. Old Testament Theology, 2 vols., trans. by D. M. 0. Stalker (New York: Harper & Row, 1962-65). But it has been especially Jürgen Moltmann who has made it a central theme in contemporary systematic theology. Theology of Hope, trans. by James W. Leitch (New York: Harper & Row, 1967). Although the formal theological notion of revelation is not the subject of explicit discussion in the Scriptures, it is substantively present in the many shapes that God’s promise takes in the biblical stories. One specific type of revelatory promise, that of Jesus’ post-Easter appearances to his disciples, is the foundation of Christian faith and hope.(Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 139-229.) Christians believe that a special "promissory" revelation from God lies at the origin of their common faith. Promissory events in its history have summoned the Christian community, the Church, into being. The revelation of a great promise is what gives the people of God their sense of origin, identity, and future destiny. And for all who place their trust in it, this revelation illuminates reality in an ever new and surprising way.

Christianity, however, is not the only religious tradition based on a sense of revelation. Indeed, in a broad sense at least, most religions may be interpreted as responses to the revelatory disclosure of a sacred mystery. Any Christian reflection on the idea of revelation, such as we shall undertake in this book, now has to be situated in a context shaped by our growing appreciation of the plurality of religious revelations. However distinct Christian revelation may appear to be, it is still linked to the long human search for meaning and mystery upon which our earliest human ancestors embarked as long ago as the Old Stone Age. We cannot leave out of our considerations the broader religious context from which Christianity historically emerged and within which it now has to understand itself. In order to appreciate any possible uniqueness of a Christian revelation we must seek to locate it within the context of the wider world of religion.

The Problem of Revelation

However, we cannot ignore the fact that the very possibility of any kind of religious revelation has been seriously challenged by modern thought. While we shall be concerned in this book primarily with the nature of revelation, we must also honestly acknowledge that today there is much doubt about whether what we call "revelation" has actually happened and if the notion has anything to do with reality. In former ages, divine revelations were seemingly commonplace. Even the dreams of ordinary people were interpreted as messages from the gods. Shamans, seers, prophets, ecstatics, and other mediators of the "other world" abounded. Cultures devoid of a sense of revelatory phenomena were rare indeed. But the assumption that nature, history, and human consciousness can be abruptly perforated by sacral manifestations from a realm beyond the ordinary has been rejected by modern skepticism. Even though popular culture is still open to supernormal appearances from the "beyond," many sincere seekers of truth now scoff at the very idea of revelation. That a sacred or mysterious realm of alternative reality can intervene in and startlingly illuminate our profane or secular experience seems unbelievable to many. And that we should base our lives on the alleged authority of any such apparently extraneous intrusions, rather than on empirically and publicly testable experience available to all, often seems preposterous.

The following quotation from Paul Davies, a well-known contemporary scientist and writer, illustrates the negative light in which the idea of revelation is often perceived today:

Even if Davies’ position is an enormous caricature, it shows clearly that in the arena of public and, especially, academic discourse we can no longer take the idea of revelation for granted. Revelation has become a problematic notion even to some theologians. Indeed, academic theologians have at times proposed that we drop it altogether. It seems to them, no less than to scientific thinkers, to be magical and superstitious. Stanley Hauerwas, a widely respected contemporary theologian, writes: "The very idea that the Bible is revealed . . . is a claim that creates more trouble than it is worth."(As quoted by Ronald Thiemann, Revelation and Theology (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985) 1. And Ronald Thiemann, who disagrees, nevertheless observes that Hauerwas’ statement

Both Hauerwas and Thiemann are speaking, though with differing convictions, out of a Protestant context. Catholic theology (as well as most Protestant theology), on the other hand, has not experienced the same degree of disillusionment with the notion of revelation. In fact, it has kept the theme very much at the forefront of its systematic theology. One of the documents of the Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum, was devoted especially to the topic of revelation, and it has encouraged theologians to deepen and broaden their interpretations of it.

But is this persistence in affirming the importance of revelation theology perhaps another sign of Catholic theology’s not yet having caught up with the times? Is it a signal of its unwillingness to adhere to current academic standards? Whatever answer one may give, we may at least acknowledge that Catholic theology cannot afford to ignore the problems that have given rise to the disaffection with revelation theology in much contemporary secular and Christian thought. For Catholic thinkers also dwell within the same general intellectual and cultural world out of which Hauerwas and Thiemann are writing. And so, if their theology is to speak to our present situation, it must show that it is aware of the problematic character of the idea of revelation. And it must undertake some response to the ways of thought that make the notion of revelation seem implausible or pointless to other contemporary theologians. In the past whenever Catholic theology failed to take into account the issues raised by current intellectual developments (such as the rise of science, the Enlightenment and historical criticism) it began to lag behind the times and thereby lost a great opportunity for growth. It then became irrelevant to many cultured individuals. The same may happen to its theology of revelation unless it addresses the ideas that provoke even some present-day theologians to dismiss it as an obsolete notion.

What are these ideas that lead some theologians to question the very possibility of revelation? Although there are many, they all come to a head in the general mood of suspicion, fostered by our universities, that symbolic or metaphoric expression, the primal language of faith, is incapable of putting us in touch with a transcendent world. Modernity has given birth to the widespread conviction that religious symbolism cannot truly reveal or disclose anything other than our own secret wishes and desires. And now in some of its so-called postmodern variants, contemporary thought portrays symbols, and all of language for that matter, as a completely self-referential play of discourse devoid of any transparency to transcendent reality. Rationalism and scientism (belief in the epistemological supremacy of reason and especially of scientific method) produced the conjecture, in some quarters at least, that the symbolic/mythic/poetic/ narrative modes of expression employed by all the religions are perhaps nothing more than our own subjective projections or constructs, and not representations of an independent sacral reality.

Such skepticism forces us to ask whether any sort of revelation can withstand the scrutiny of "enlightened" consciousness. And now another kind of suspicion has been superimposed upon rationalism and scientism. It suggests that all religion is little more than a covering up of childish desires or oppressive ideology. Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud, to name the most prominent representatives of this suspicion, all taught that religion, including the idea of revelation, is an expression of weakness, wishful thinking, or resentment.(See Paul Ricoeur, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. Ed. by Charles Reagan and David Stewart [Boston: Beacon Press, 1978] 213-22.)

As we move forward in our study of revelation we shall keep the fact of modern skepticism in mind. For the moment, though, it is sufficient to observe how deeply it has influenced contemporary theology, leading at times to utter embarrassment about the idea of revelation. Modernity has brought forth much that is good and true. To repudiate it entirely would be to dismiss a great deal that our religious traditions themselves would fully endorse. But modernity, like other periods of history, is ambiguous. In addition to its humanizing and liberating developments it has also produced some beliefs that themselves may now need to be critically examined.

Among these modern beliefs is the suspicious attitude in which symbolic expression is now held by philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, literary criticism, and theology. Much of this suspicion of symbols is very helpful, for it brings to our attention the childishness, escapism, resentfulness, and oppressiveness that have at times become attached to religious consciousness. What Paul Ricocur calls the "hermeneutics of suspicion" needs to become a component of all our theologizing today. (Ibid.) However, suspicion has always been an essential aspect of authentic religion. The religious motif of silence (the apophatic aspect of religions) has had the precise purpose of discouraging us from clinging to our religious symbols in so possessive a way that they no longer disclose the mystery of reality. Thomas Merton once wrote that our ideas of God usually tell us more about ourselves than about God.(Likewise the thirteenth-century mystic. Meister Eckhart, is said to have prayed: "God deliver me from God.") He and others who are sensitive to the apophatic side of religion see the role of silence in religious worship as an admission of the inadequacy of any of our religious images. But today the theme of silence and suspicion has been wrested from the religious matrix Out of which it originally appeared in human history. It has turned back, vengefully at times, upon the whole world of religion with an almost nihilistic repudiation of the revelatory power of symbols. Isolated from its sacramental nursery, the "way of silence" has now become the "way of suspicion" iconoclastically declaiming the revelatory possibilities of all symbolic expression.

Contemporary theology has not been untouched by this suspicion. And if it is to be faithful to the silent or apophatic aspects of humanity’s cumulative religious wisdom, it must appropriate aspects of suspicion as part of its method. However, as long as we go to the extreme of doubting altogether the disclosive power of symbols we shall not be able to construct viable theologies of revelation. For symbols remain the primary medium of revelation. If they are constantly being debunked, then the idea of revelation is indeed in serious trouble. Therefore, a theology of revelation has to be concerned with the question whether religious symbols are only our imaginative human constructions, as theologian Gordon Kaufmann asserts,(see Gordon Kaufmann, An Essay on Theological Method [Missoula: Scholars Press, 1975]) or whether they can be taken as interruptive, revelatory mediators of a mystery of being and new life that lies beyond our own power to penetrate.

In Chapter 11 we shall return explicitly to a discussion of how we may address the doubt that has arisen regarding the likelihood of revelation. But throughout our entire inquiry we shall keep an eye on its problematic character. If we are to construct a plausible theology of revelation for our time we cannot ignore the reasons why many intellectuals and even some theologians now question its very possibility. But first we must attempt to formulate the nature and meaning of revelation. We cannot make a case for its possible truthfulness until we have attained some clarity as to what it is we are talking about. This will be the primary task of the following chapters.

The Cosmic Setting Of Revelation Theology

Theology is now required, both by the sacramental emphasis of our religious traditions and also by our growing environmental crisis, to bring the cosmos back into the theological picture, and perhaps even to give it primacy over history, as the fundamental context for a theology of revelation. Thomas Berry has even proposed that we must now look at the universe, within whose unfolding our human and religious histories are only a very recent chapter, as the "primary revelation."(See Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988) 120. See also the articles by and about Thomas Berry collected in Cross Currents XXXVII, Nos. 2 & 3 (1988) 178-239. Also see Anne Lonergan and Caroline Richards, ed., Thomas Berry and the New Cosmology (Mystic, Conn.; Twenty-third Publications, 1987). For a popular introduction to some of Berry’s ideas see Brian Swimme, The Universe is a Green Dragon (Santa Fe; Bear & Co., Inc. 1986.) And Jürgen Moltmann, likewise, has pressed the case for situating the historical dimension of revelation within the more encompassing notions of creation and cosmos.(Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation. trans. by Margaret Kohl (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985).

We live in an age of science, astrophysics, evolutionary biology, and information. These cumulatively have given us an entirely new picture, or story, of the universe, and we are obliged to treat the notion of revelation in terms that relate it to these developments. The perennial human questions concerning what this universe is all about are being raised in a new and striking way today. Does cosmic evolution have any direction to it? How does our species fit into the evolutionary picture? How are we to understand our own existence now that it has become clearer than ever that we too are part of an evolving world? What sense can we make of the apparent randomness, struggle, and impersonal natural selection that seem to be the main ingredients of evolution? Why did the universe take fifteen billion years to bring forth conscious beings here on earth? What sense can we possibly make of the immense size of the universe, in which so far we have no evidence that other intelligent life exists? And what if intelligent or spiritual life does exist elsewhere? Then what is the meaning of Israel’s election or of the redemptive significance of Jesus of Nazareth with respect to these hypothetical cosmological conjectures?

Scientifically informed people are asking such questions today, and their inquiries should not remain off-limits to our theologies of revelation. Working along with science, theology is obliged at least to attempt some response to them from the point of view of whatever intelligibility is discerned by faith in revelation. From the beginning, Christians have been called upon to give an account of their faith in terms of contemporary modes of thought (for example, 1 Peter 3:15). Questions about the universe and our place in it enchant more and more people today, but revelation theology remains pretty much mute with respect to them. Yet if our theologies of revelation cannot respond -- in some fashion at least -- to the big questions of our time, then they will quite rightly be ignored by contemporary culture.

Of course, revelation cannot and should not be made to address any of the questions that science is in principle capable of answering by itself. This, as we shall see, would be a desperate misuse of the concept of revelation, which is not in the business of handing out otherwise accessible information about the world. But if we fail to relate revelation to the most interesting, and especially the ultimate or "limit" questions that arise out of the scientifically informed inquiries of many people today, it will eventually become a lost notion for all of us. Hence, with all due respect to the autonomy of science, we must seek to situate revelation in terms of the important cosmological issues of today. We must not allow the content of faith and theology to intrude into the sphere of scientific investigation. But we may certainly relate their substance to the scientific understanding of the cosmos. In fact, we shall even argue that revelatory knowledge not only does not contradict or interfere with scientific knowledge, but that it actually promotes the autonomous pursuit of science along with other disciplines.

The content of revelation must speak to our deepest questions about the universe. Among these questions today are those raised by our global environmental situation. What relevance might revelation have to the new flurry of issues raised by the environmental crisis? Does revelation have anything substantive to offer us as we rethink our relationship to nature? For many sensitive people this is the most urgent question of all today, and they often look in vain to theology for some assistance. The perceived environmental ineptitude of theology and religious education is accentuated now by the many accusations, often well-founded, that "revealed" religions are themselves partly responsible for promoting ideals of cosmic homelessness that have set us adrift from, and made us indifferent to, nature. A theology of revelation must now pay special attention to such observations as these. As we shall see, revelation cannot be construed in such a way as to provide a specific environmental policy (any more than we can expect it to offer us a definitive social or economic program). Revelation does not work that way. However, if it has a truly worthwhile content, we may at least look to it for some illumination about the fundamental nature of the universe, as well as for some vision of the natural world and our relation to it that would provide good reasons why we should care for it at all.

Without entering into the intricacies of scientific discussion itself, the present book’s reflections on the meaning of revelation will presuppose the framework of the new cosmology that has been emerging for some time now out of contemporary physics, astrophysics, and biology. We shall take for granted the evolutionary character of the cosmos as well as other discoveries of modern science. If our theology is to be taken seriously by scientists and other intellectuals, it is imperative that we frame our theories of revelation in terms that reflect our living in the universe as it is described and understood by the best of contemporary science.

For the past century, the idea of revelation has usually been tied closely to the notions of history or existential subjectivity, seldom to cosmology. But in its primal expressions, revelation was always linked in some way to nature, usually without its devotees being self-conscious about it. The revelations of all the religions have a sacramental character, in that they come to expression in terms of correlative views of the cosmos. Recognizing, quite correctly, that we today cannot literally accept the original cosmological clothing of biblical and other religions, recent theology has gone to the extreme of "de-cosmologizing" revelation altogether. This uprooting of revelation from any cosmic setting whatsoever is disastrous for our theologies. For it ends up leaving the universe, and that eventually means us too (since we belong to nature more than it belongs to us), out of the theological picture.

For example, in order to salvage the "core" of Christian faith for the scientifically informed, Rudolf Bultmann argued that revelation has to do primarily with God’s address to the hidden subjectivity and inner freedom of each person. His theology gives the impression that nature, considered independently of us humans, is in no significant way revelatory of God. God acts in the world, of course, but primarily through the medium of our privately transformed selfhood. Bultmann’ s existentialist theology with its penetrating portrayal of theological method and hermeneutics (the art of interpretation) was an important breakthrough in theology, and there is no need here to be excessively critical of the work of this brilliant theologian. We are all indebted to him. Nevertheless, we must question the theological legitimacy of his tying the idea of revelation so closely to human freedom, or for that matter to human history, without connecting it also to an updated view of nature. Perhaps Bultmann himself was not in a position to make such a connection, but now the resources are available for us to re-cosmologize Christian revelation. We shall sketch the outlines of such a task in Chapter 8.

History and the Self

Although in one sense cosmology provides a more encompassing framework than history for a theology of revelation, the conscious awareness of a revelation of God comes into the universe through individual selves embedded in human society and its history. In the prophetic religions. the revelation of God’s promise came first to Abraham and to Israel. Out of this promise, a sense of reality as history arose. For that reason, our theology has become accustomed to thinking of revelation in terms of God’s interventions in human history. Therefore, the notion of a cosmic revelation has been subordinated and even suppressed. While revelation holds that God created the world, the theme of creation has been subordinated to that of the history of a redemption that takes place in order to set right what happened as the result of the so-called Fall. An important trend in recent theology is now asking whether the emphasis on our fallenness and sinfulness has made us focus so intensely on the history of redemption that we have forgotten the foundational doctrine of creation and, along with it, the need for attention to the fundamental goodness and beauty of the cosmos.(See especially Matthew Fox, Original Blessing (Santa Fe, New Mexico: Bear & Co.).

However, it is no longer necessary for us to keep the themes of cosmology and redemptive history apart. For now we are coming to see more clearly than ever before that the universe itself is an enormously adventurous and revelatory story. Because of its own historical character we may now link nature more explicitly to the story of revelation. Science itself is providing solid reasons for our envisaging the cosmos as historical. And in doing so, it challenges us to bring the theme of historical revelation into deeper synthesis with cosmology.

Finally, a theology of revelation will be of little interest to us if it fails to address the individual’s personal search for significance. The surprising and even shocking content of revelation must address us in our solitary existence, at those levels of our being that the categories of history and cosmology cannot adequately cover. Even though revelation is offered to the entire universe, at the human level of cosmic emergence it is obviously in the transformation of our own personal lives that it is most vividly experienced. Contemporary theology has rightly emphasized the need to de-privatize revelation, to display its power in socio-political transformation. We shall highlight this feature of revelation theology in our discussions of church (Chapter 7) and history (Chapter 9). However, the very notion of revelation would never have arisen were it not for the fact that its substance is experienced intimately and palpably by especially sensitive individuals. Because awareness of revelation is always mediated to a people by way of individual experience, in the case of Christianity by Jesus’ intimate experience of God as "abba," a study of it must examine in some detail what happens to the self as it is shaped by faith in revelation. This will be our topic in Chapter 10.

An examination of the meaning of revelation for the individual self, however, looks simultaneously to the themes of mystery, cosmology, and history. For as individuals we are not isolated from the network of spiritual, historical, and cosmic relationships that shape our personal existence. Even in the depths of our aloneness we are still a unique synthesis of sacred, natural, and social occurrences. Thus the question of the meaning of our individual lives is interwoven with those concerning the meaning of mystery, cosmos, and history. A theology of revelation must constantly keep this ecology in mind.

Theological Method

If theology is to produce appropriate results, it must follow a method. And like any other discipline, it needs to become self-conscious about its method. As Rudolf Bultmann puts it, method is nothing other than a way of putting questions.(Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons] 49-50.) Being methodical means being careful and critical about the kinds of questions we address to the sources of our theology. This is also the basic principle of "hermeneutics," the process of interpreting texts.

Theology is a hermeneutical process in that it constantly seeks to address questions to and interpret classic texts that traditionally shape a religious tradition.(David Tracy states, "What we mean in naming certain texts, events, images, rituals, symbols and persons "classics" is that here we recognize nothing less than the disclosure of reality we cannot but name truth . . . . In these classics, he goes on to say, we find a "disclosure of reality in a moment that must be called one of ‘recognition’ which surprises, provokes, challenges, shocks and eventually transforms us; an experience that upsets conventional opinions and expands the sense of the possible; indeed a realized experience of that which is essential, that which endures." The Analogical Imagination [New York: Crossroad, 1981] 108.) A theology of revelation has to look to those classic texts, persons, symbols, and events in which the divine promise is embodied. For Christian theology these sources include especially the Bible, but also the deposit of interpretations of revelation known as tradition. In a critical fashion, theology sets up a kind of conversation between our situation and the revelatory texts. It has to be very conscientious about the kinds of questions it addresses to the classic sources, for it is quite possible to ask the wrong questions and thus miss the real substance of the significant texts.

Theology must avoid reducing these sources to what responds only to our carelessly formed interrogations. It also has to strive to maintain a posture of attending in openness to the texts in order to catch their challenging "otherness." Nevertheless, the first step in any theological formulation of the meaning of the classic sources for us is that of critically clarifying the questions that arise Out of our own situation.(See Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology Vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1951)8, 30-31, 34. 59-66; and David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order (New York: Seabury. 1975) 45 ff.) The situation in which we exist may be pictured as a series of four concentric circles going from more encompassing to less: mystery, cosmos, history, and the self. Our method is the venerable one of correlating the questions arising from an analysis of our experience within each circle with the answers that revelation appears to offer to these questions. Obviously, our formal understanding of these four circles that make up our situation will already have been shaped to a great extent by a history and tradition influenced by the classic texts and events associated with the biblical revelation. Thus our theological method is bound to be somewhat circular and "impure." None of us are so untouched by the biblical stories of God’s self-disclosure that our understandings of mystery, nature, history, and self are innocent of the interpretations provided of them by the impact of biblical faith and doctrinal traditions on our culture and language. And yet there is always such a wide margin of unintelligibility in our present experience of these four circles that a fresh conversation with illuminative texts and sources, in this case those of biblical faith, is always in order. Thus a method of correlating our sincerest questions with the classic sources of revelation seems to be the most fruitful way to approach theology?(This is true in spite of the critiques of the correlation method made by Karl Barth and more recently in the nuanced discussion by the so-called "Yale school" of interpretation. See George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine (Philadelphia: The Westminster press, 1984); also, in a Catholic context, Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, Foundational Theology (New York: Crossroad, 1985) 276-84. Any theology that strives to be relevant to our situation practices a method of correlation, whether it is aware of it or not. If it is not attempting in some way to be relevant (without being reductionistic) then it will not arouse the interest of any potential readers.)

The Gift of an Image

What do we discern in the classic sources of revelation? H. Richard Niebuhr suggests that these sources offer to faith, among many other rich elements, the gift of an image that makes intelligible what would otherwise remain unintelligible: "By revelation in our history we mean . . . that special occasion which provides us with an image by means of which all occasions of personal and common life become intelligible.(H. Richard Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1960) 80. Niebuhr writes that through the image given in revelation "a pattern of dramatic unity becomes apparent with the aid of which the heart can understand what has happened, is happening and will happen to selves and their community" (80). We shall suggest that the revelatory image illuminates not only history and human community. but also, because of our inextricable connection with it, the cosmos in its entirety. As long as we leave the cosmos out of our theologies of revelation we display an exclusivity that in the end impoverishes our sense of God’s revelatory vision for the world.) In the surrender of faith we allow ourselves and our consciousness to be shaped by a set of revelatory images and stories. Revelation is comparable to the surprising appearance in science of imaginative models that, all in a flash, illuminate the world of nature and tie together previously unexplained enigmas in a fresh way. The best of such models also promise further discovery and richer syntheses in the future. An imaginative breakthrough in science has the extraordinary capacity to bring previously unreachable aspects of nature abruptly within the explanatory ambit of a single integrating picture or model. Newton’s theory of gravity is one such example. More recently, Einstein’s theory of relativity, Max Planck’s discovery of the quantum, and other developments in contemporary physics have gathered together widely diverse natural occurrences into tighter unity and surprising coherence that leads to even further discovery. Science now looks forward to an elegantly simple formula capable of illuminating the incredible diversity of physical manifestations observable in the cosmos in an even more integral and intelligible fashion.(Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, [New York: Bantam Books, 1988] 155-69)

Analogously, revelation, if it is to catch our attention, would also have to provide an image, or a set of images, that can respond to the confusions arising Out of the four circles in which our lives are embedded. We rightly expect it also to provide a new coherence and openness to further insight. Indeed there is little point in our making reference to revelation unless it brings with it an unexpected power to make reality more intelligible and our lives more meaningful.(See Niebuhr, 69.) In this book we shall be asking whether the central revelatory image given in Christian faith can bring fresh intelligibility to our experience of mystery, cosmos, history, and personal existence. As in the case of science we shall also examine the capacity of this revelatory image to lead us indefinitely deeper in our explorations of the four-circled world. One major criterion of revelation’s authenticity will be its heuristic power, that is, its capacity to bring the now unintelligible, forgotten, and even absurd aspects of our experience into the framework of a continually expanding and deepening intelligibility.

But is there in fact any centrally revelatory image presented to us by the classic Christian sources that might function as such an illuminating, integrating, and heuristic principle of meaning? The chapters that follow will argue, each in its own way, that there is indeed such an image. Much contemporary theological reflection has begun to focus, perhaps with more clarity than ever before, on what it discerns to be a startlingly interruptive, but remarkably healing and integrating image embedded in the sources of revelation, but not often sufficiently highlighted. This is the image of the humility of God made manifest in Jesus. The biblically based portrait of an all-powerful yet self-abandoning divine mystery is now emerging more decisively than ever out of our present-day theological reflection on the roots of Christian faith. Informed by contemporary experience of the apparent eclipse of mystery, by the sorrow and oppression in much social existence, by the horrors of genocide, and by the modern threat of meaninglessness to the individual’s existence, we now seem to be noticing more explicitly than ever before the image of God’s self-emptying, or kenosis, that has always been present in Christian tradition. (See, for example, the studies by Donald G. Dawe. The Form of a Servant (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1963); Lucien I. Richard, O.M.I., A Kenotic Christology (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America. 1982); Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God, trans. by R.A. Wilson and John Bowden (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); and Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale. trans. by Aidan Nichols, O.P. (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1990).We now behold more clearly in the passion and crucifixion of Jesus the illuminating and healing image of a vulnerable, suffering God who, out of love for the world, renounces any claims to coercive omnipotence and gives the divine self-hood over to the world in an act of absolute self-abandonment.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s reflections from prison that only a "weak" God can be of help today were a powerful stimulus to this contemporary theological re-imaging of God. Much theology now speaks provocatively of the powerlessness of God. Perhaps though, with Edward Schillebeeckx, it is more appropriate for us to speak of the "defenselessness" or vulnerability of God rather than of weakness or powerlessness. We need not deny that God is powerful in order to emphasize the divine humility. Experience teaches us, Schillebeeckx says, that those who make themselves vulnerable are actually capable of powerfully disarming evil. God remains powerful, but power -- the capacity to influence reality or bring about significant effects -- is redefined through the divine decision to remain defenseless in the face of our own human use of power in order to oppress:

Theological reflection on the image of divine defenselessness (which is not the same as powerlessness) can help us make new sense of our otherwise confused and even desperate experience of the enigmas accompanying the four circles of our lives.

The image of a self-emptying, fully relational God seems to lie at the very heart of Christian revelation. It is the underlying dynamism of the doctrine of the Trinity which Karl Barth held to be the central and distinguishing content of Christian revelation.(See Eberhard Jüngel, The Doctrine of the Trinity: God’s Being is in Becoming, trans. by Scottish Academic Press Ltd. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmann Press, 1976). And the self-emptying of God is now also seen to lie at the foundation of the world’s creation as well. In the words of theologian Jürgen Moltmann:

What does this image of a self-humbling God mean in terms of each of the four circles that make up our situation? In faith’s response to its kenotic image of God there lies a surprising way of bringing new meaning to our normally confused sense of mystery, to our puzzlement about evolution and other recent discoveries about the physical universe, to our perplexity at the broken state of social existence, and finally to our own individual longings and sufferings. The realms of mystery, nature, history, and personal existence can take on deeper coherence and significance as we view them in the light of the vulnerability of God.

At the same time, a persistent reflection on this central image may be able to explain, to some extent at least, why Christian theology has arrived at so many dead-ends in its ruminations about mystery, creation, suffering, and human freedom. Theology’s failure to take seriously this most shocking and yet so simple of revelatory images (a revelation so startling and surprising that we are immediately compelled to doubt that we could ever have thought it up all by ourselves) leads only toward further perplexities and incoherences in our experience of each of the four circles. The refusal of much traditional theology to place the kenotic image of God at its center has led to impossible tangles in its attempts to interpret the world and human experience. On the other hand, the hypothesis of the self-emptying God who lovingly renounces any claims to domineering omnipotence has enormous explanatory potential in our attempts to interpret things.

Our reflections will focus especially on the potentially illuminating capacity of this kenotic image of God. We shall not lose sight of other aspects of revelation, but we shall constantly seek to relate them to the theme of divine suffering love that comes to fullest expression in the image of the crucified man, Jesus. Especially the theme of God’s word and promise, but also those of exodus, redemption, covenant, justice, wisdom, of the Logos made flesh, of the Spirit poured out on the face of creation, of the compassion, paternity and maternity of God, and especially the Trinitarian character of God -- all of the indispensable elements in a Christian theology -- communicate their depth only when they are united with the theme of divine self-abnegation which, at least to Christian faith, comes to its most explicit expression in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus?(We will not be able to develop in this book how the kenotic image of God also has potential for illuminating interreligious conversations, especially those taking place between Christianity and Buddhism. See, however, John B. Cobb, Jr. and Christopher Ives, editors, The Emptying God (Maryknoll; Orbis Books, 1990).

We shall seek to emphasize as sharply as possible just how interruptive of "normality" is the picture of the incarnate God who suffers along with creation. This image is shocking, even almost blasphemous, when examined from the point of view of our ordinary standards of rationality, or of what we usually think should qualify as ultimate reality, or omnipotence or as the foundation of our being. Because it is so arresting of the ordinary, it justifiably bears the name "revelation." While it breaks apart our pedestrian interpretations of mystery, universe, history, and existence, the idea of a self-emptying absolute can paradoxically bring an unprecedented intelligibility to our experience of these four interwoven realms. Retrospectively it can help us understand why, in the absence of faith in a suffering God, we experience so many unsolvable puzzles and blind alleys in our exploration of the world and our efforts at self-awareness.

The history of the idea of revelation in Christian theology is long and complex, and it is not the purpose of a systematic theology of revelation simply to reiterate this chronicle. In any case, able historical studies have already set forth the story of revelation theology, and they require no duplication here.( See especially Avery Dulles, Revelation Theology: A History (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969) and Models of Revelation (New York: Doubleday, 1983). A contemporary theology of revelation must inevitably be somewhat selective and synthetic with respect to the themes it wishes to highlight and correlate with our most urgent questions. But the image of the God who suffers, the Absolute who through "defenselessness" manifests its power, seems to sum up, even if it does not exhaust, the substance of the Christian interpretation of the mystery that enfolds us. And so it is upon this image (and along with it the theme of revelation as promise) that we shall focus in the following chapters.

A systematic theology has to do more than just retell the biblical stories. Nor should it simply repeat doctrines from the past in their customary formulations. If it is really to speak to people in their actual lives, it must continually search for new ways of presenting the insights of traditional faith. This is the only way it can be loyal to the tradition it represents. It is the judgment of the present author that the doctrines and theologies surrounding the idea of revelation, in the linguistic and conceptual shape that they have come down to us, are now in need of drastic refashioning. This is in no way to suggest that they be discarded. Rather, they must be reinterpreted. In their customary crystallizations they do not always address our contemporaries at those points of anxiety or inquiry where people need the most assistance and illumination. In at least some of their traditional formulations, theologies of revelation are often strange-sounding, if not entirely alien to the ways in which people today actually live and think. This is especially true of the intellectuals for whom many traditional theological formulations of revelation have been deeply unsatisfying.

For such sincere inquirers we need to restate the meaning of revelation in a way that does not place unnecessary or impossible demands on them. With Bultmann we must seek the place where revelation challenges us and even disturbs us, but we should avoid all false stumbling blocks to faith.(Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958] 36.) This means first of all that a certain economy of expression is essential in our theology today. Without being reductionistic, we need to come directly to the point about the substance of revelation. We must avoid excessively elaborate descriptions of traditional theological disputes. It is too much to ask, even of the most enlightened readers of theology, that they become acquainted with two thousand years of terminological and doctrinal controversy as a condition for being introduced to the substance of their faith. A fuller understanding of revelation may eventually require such historical knowledge, but it is the task of systematic theology, as distinct from historical theology, to sift out of the traditional material what strikes it as the content most suitably challenging, as well as Good News, for our time and for our present readers. This means that systematic theology will always have a provisional, selective, and somewhat speculative character. It will also suffer considerably from the limitations of the particular theologian.

In this book, our focus is on the image of the self-humbling mystery to which even the word "God" itself may no longer always seem to be fully adequate. Because the concept of God has been associated in the minds of many with a reality that is anything but self-effacing or humbly relational, it has become a problematic term itself. At times we are tempted to abandon it, but as Paul Tillich has reminded us, it is really irreplaceable. We cannot let go of it. However, we can come to a better and more biblical understanding of it. And the quest for such understanding is one of the tasks of a theology of revelation. In his study of the doctrine of kenosis, Donald Dawe writes:

But Dawe adds a sobering comment:

The image of a God who renounces omnipotence enters into our consciousness with such unexpectedness that we cannot help but see it as a revelation. It is a radical deconstruction of what we anticipate the absolute to be. Our normal powers of reason and even our religious imagination could hardly have conjured it up. In the words of St. Paul, it is "foolishness" when viewed through the eyes of conventional wisdom (I Cor. 1:25). There is an otherness or reversal inherent in this revelatory image that completely confounds and surpasses our more superficial expectations. But by breaking through our projections, it awakens in us new hope and new life. John Macquarrie writes:

While this is an image that liberates and fulfills our deepest longings for love and compassion, it is one that we continually resist, both in our lives and in our theologies. We still want God to be a potentate, even a magician. Yet, as Karl Rahner asserts, "[t] he primary phenomenon given by faith is precisely the self-emptying of God. . ." (Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, trans. by William V. Dych [New York: Crossroad, 1978] 222.) Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead observed that when Christianity came into the Western world its image of God began to be modeled on Caesar rather than on the humble shepherd of Nazareth.(Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, Corrected Edition, edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: the Free Press, 1978) 342.) The God that Friedrich Nietzsche found so offensive was a moralistic dictator who is primarily interested in moderating human behavior and expropriating our own power. Sigmund Freud thought, quite correctly, that the image of God conveyed by Western theism and religious education is overlaid with Oedipal overtones. Like the superego, this deity issues consolation only at the price of an accusatory coerciveness and restrictiveness. The kenotic God of revelation, on the other hand, unfortunately remains hidden both to believers and unbelievers.

Much contemporary theology has been attempting to undo the assimilation of the idea of God into that of a controlling and dictatorial power. But the work is far from complete. Macquarrie observes:

One of the tasks of a theology of revelation today is to restate the meaning of reality, the meaning of mystery, cosmos, history, and selfhood, in the light of faith in the God who renounces despotism and participates as a servant in the lives of those who struggle and suffer.