John F. Haught, who received the Ph.D. from Catholic University, is professor of theology at Georgetown University. He has written extensively on religion and science. His books include The Revelation of God in History; What is God?, The Cosmic Adventure, Nature and Propose, and Religion and Self-Acceptance.
Published by Michael Glazier, Wilmington, Delaware, 1988. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.
SUMMARY
(ENTIRE BOOK) How does God reveal himself to us? This question is basic to theology and is here addressed in a new light.
Chapters
- Chapter 1: The Idea of Revelation
The author attempts to express the consensus of much recent theology (Jewish, Protestant and Catholic) that the idea of revelation in history does not imply a magical intrusion of foreign information, as is often imagined in popular piety. Rather it is the opening of the universe to the very possibility of a truly historical mode of existence. Such an interpretation of revelation need not conflict with the legitimate demands of reason.
- Chapter 2: The Cosmos and Revelation
Faith, when viewed from the point of view of cosmology, may be defined as the act or state of leaving our human consciousness open to being patterned by a higher emergent dimension whose substance always remains beyond our comprehension. It is the allowing of our human existence to be taken up into a cosmic story whose final meaning is promised but not yet clear.
- Chapter 3: History and Revelation
Instead of our speaking only of God’s revelation in history, it is just as appropriate for us to speak in terms of God’s revelation of history. History is the content, and not just the medium of revelation. History is itself what is revealed or “unveiled.”
- Chapter 4: Society and Revelation
The revelatory meaning of the Kingdom of God, and of suffering and death. The God whose very essence is a future filled with the eternal pledge of fidelity is promised anew to us in the social impossibilities that seem so hopeless to us today.
- Chapter: 5: Religion and Revelation
The religious intuitions of our species have always suggested a wider context for our existence than the historical and the social – to a broader horizon even than cosmology. The most comprehensive situation in which we dwell is neither history nor society nor the cosmos, but mystery.
- Chapter: 6: The Self and Revelation
It is through trust in the truth of being that revelation enters into our history and society. Without this individual response to the promise, we could not speak of “revelation in history.”
- Chapter: 7 Reason and Revelation
A trust in the promise of unconditional divine love given by revelation provides the context in which the desire to know can be liberated from the restraints of self-deception.
- Chapter 8: Encountering Revelation
Even though the church may seem deeply flawed, it has kept the memory of God’s promise alive and made it possible for us to recover it anew in each age. It is here we can still come into intimate encounter with revelation.
- A bibliography