unrecognised gift and unacknowledged invitation".
Lane's argument that "without our response in faith, revelation remains at the level of an unrecognised gift and an unacknowledged invitation (Lane, 1985, 34)" represents a useful epitome of an emerging perspective in fundamental theology on key aspects of the nature of faith and the role of revelation. In this view, revelation is not primarily a set of propositions to be accepted or discounted cognitively, and the human experience of faith is not solely or simply an issue bounded by mainstream religious activity.
Although theology has traditionally been conceived as rational inquiry, 'faith seeking understanding' as defined by Anselm (ACU Course Notes, 2002, 1.1), a wholly rationalist approach to seeking understanding of God seems doomed to inadequacy. As O'Collins points out, "revelation confronts the believer with God as the primordial mystery" (O'Collins, 1981, 19). According to the First Vatican Council
The divine mysteries by their very nature so transcend the human intellect that… they remain covered by the veil of faith itself and shrouded as it were in darkness (Ibid, 19).
The issue is complicated by the fact that faith needs to be seen not as a tool of theological speculation, but as a subject of inquiry itself. An account of faith which stresses its natural and universal character leaves less place for a propositional explanation of revelation ('God's edicts' for Vatican 1) but opens space for revelation to be seen as God's self-disclosure and self-communication. This perspective creates the possibility of dialogue between human and divine and ultimately to a response in faith which leads to communion and divinisation of the human.
Explication of Lane's argument requires an exploration of contemporary views of revelation, faith, grace and their connection through experience and symbol.
Revelation
Contemporary theology differs significantly in its presentation of revelation from the traditional, pre-Vatican II view, although to some extent the contrast is overstated. Although the First Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution Dei Filius spoke of God revealing (Himself), most of its language presupposed a propositional view of revelation (O'Collins, 1981, 54). Revelation came to mean:
· the communication of a divinely authenticated set of facts (otherwise inaccessible to human reason and now accepted on God's authority); and
· the body of information thus communicated (ibid, p54).
Some of this flavour is retained in the present catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) when it cites Dei Filius to describe
another order of knowledge which man cannot possibly arrive at through his own powers; the order of divine Revelation (CCC, 2000, 19).
According to Marthaler, a deleterious consequence of debates of the reformation era was not simply a hardening of doctrinal positions, but a diversion of inquiry from the nature of faith to the content of belief - 'revealed truths'. Catholics in particular became suspicious of the idea of a personal relationship with God (Marthaler, 1993, 29). The Enlightenment, on the other hand, questioned revelation at a much more fundamental level, raising issues about God's activity and even God's existence which had largely been treated as unproblematic by theologians.
Marthaler argues that Vatican l represented a reaction to strands of thought in theology unloosed by the Enlightenment. It did this by steering a middle course between fideism and rationalism, with due regard to the demands of reason while still accepting that faith depended ultimately on supernatural virtue - that is, God's grace (ibid, 32). Still, the Constitution's language was primarily an assertion of the validity of the content of revelation.
An attempt by the Prepatory Theological Commission at the Second Vatican Council to introduce a schema De Revelatione which attempted a restatement of Vatican I's theology was roundly condemned at the Council and withdrawn on the instructions of the Pope (Rynne, 1999, 90). The Constitution Dei Verbum which eventually emerged from a series of four drafts differed dramatically in content and style from Dei Filius, without overturning the first Council's teaching (Lane, 1981, 48).
Dei Verbum is overwhelmingly biblical in tone and presents revelation in a personalist rather than rationalist approach. From its opening article Dei Verbum presents revelation as primarily being God's self-disclosure (O'Collins, 1993, 52).
Acknowledging clearly the divine initiative, the document interprets revelation as the personal self-revelation of the triune God who invites human beings to enter freely into a dialogue of love, so that through their response of integral faith they may receive salvation (O'Collins, 1993, 48).
Dei Verbum's perspective on revelation is also reflected in the catechism:
God, 'who dwells in unapproachable light', wants to communicate his own divine life to the men he freely created, in order to adopt them as his sons in his only-begotten Son. By revealing himself God wishes to make them capable of responding to him, and of loving him far beyond their own natural capacity (CCC, 2000, 19).
In this paragraph the catechism takes the argument beyond God's self-revelation to self-communication, opening the possibility of dialogue between creator and created.
The Universality of Revelation
Revelation, especially in the propositional model, has frequently been conflated with the books of the Old and New Testaments, the written account of the special revelation of God in Jewish history and through its ultimate manifestation in the person of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word of God. Vatican II went further than previously in identifying revelation in other religious belief systems, pointing out that
Ontologically and spiritually all human beings are directed towards God [Nostra Aetate, 1-5] (Collins, 1993, 80).
This universal or natural revelation, according to Lane, is the backdrop against which special revelation makes sense.
Universal revelation is about the primary communication of God to persons that takes place in the experience of faith through contact with creation, human existence and other people (Lane, 1981, 39).
The experience of creation is both personal and universal, it represents an encounter with 'the other' available to all humanity. This basic experience is the entry point to the Jewish peoples' understanding of their history as an encounter with the divine. This encounter led them to anticipate a new and enduring covenant which Christians see in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Christ is not only the fulfilment of Judaic revelation, but an illumination of our understanding of universal revelation, because "the revelation of God to us in Jesus tells us what is going on in the world around us" (Lane, 1981, 45). Because Jesus, in Christian belief, is una persona with God, he represents the ultimate in God's personal self-revelation (ibid, 46).
Human experience
The catechism describes how revelation is effected through humanity's experience in history, from creation, through the Patriarchs and the history of Israel to the last revelation, through God's Son (CCC, 2000, 20-230). As Lane points out, this is a considerable step as appeal to experience in revelation had been outlawed since the condemnation of Modernism at the beginning of the 20th century (Lane, 1981, 50).
Dulles argues,
Revelation does not initially occur in the form of propositions, still less that of prefabricated propositions miraculously inserted into the human mind (Dulles, 1983, 267)
And elsewhere that
To be human is to be socially and historically constituted (Dulles, 1992, 20).
Revelation is therefore located first of all in human experience and there is no limit to the experiences which may carry the message of God's self-revelation. The experiences may be part of the common and everyday conduct of life, or they may be those perceived as having a deeper spiritual and ultimately religious significance. Equally, negative experiences may carry suggestions of transcendence and even sin carries the possibility of discernment and access to deep truth.
On the basis of innumerable examples from the Bible and Christian (not to mention non-Christian) religious experience, the conclusion stands. Negative episodes of suffering, evil and sin, as well as 'happier moments of glad grace' (Yeats), can convey the divine self-manifestation (O'Collins, 1993, 66).
In fact, some would give priority to the negative experience of life in the world as the origin of supernatural awareness:
That is to say, it is [not] through the world's values but through their irremediable insufficiency that God is made known to us in practice. (Lane, 1985, cited by Trethowan, online, 11)
Unhappy experience was the starting point for Kierkegaard (Marthaler, 1993, 30). He began with the uncertainty and doubt that people experience in their daily lives, the existential doubt which brings people to the brink of despair. At this point the only choice is between succumbing to despair or taking a 'leap of faith'.
In his existentialist view, individuals define themselves not in terms of what they understand but in terms of the choices they make…For Kierkegaard, truth is subjectivity. It comes also to be called existential truth, a lived truth rather than a mere verbal truth (ibid, 31).
The shift from insecurity and doubt to the acceptance of revelation is in fact the traditional path of spiritual conversion, as illuminated by Augustine's conversion:
…Augustine's conversion was an experience of grace. At the end of his own resources for seeking and living truth, and at the point of tears and self-disgust, he suddenly knew the presence of God as a power active within himself which enabled him to overcome the forces warring within himself (Grascia, 19xx, 116).
Conversion is the ultimate and transformative spiritual experience, such as Paul experienced on the road to Damascus. Experience then becomes part of the divine self-communication, the human component of the divinely instituted dialogue.
'Experience' recalls the place where the individual subject and the community meet God. 'Self-communication' reminds us that revelation always entails grace, that active presence of the triune God who delivers us from our evils and comes to share with us the divine life (O'Collins, 1993, 59).
Transformative experience changes the whole person, in terms of practice, prayer and worship and the content of belief. In this sense, conversion reunites the subjectivist or existentialist perception of religious experience to the rationalist view of revelation as propositional knowledge. Religious experience always presupposes some degree of understanding (Lane, 1981, 21).
Doctrine and beliefs are essential to religious experience. They supply the basic horizon of understanding within which religious experience occurs. Most of all, religious doctrines provide us with an interpretation of experience (ibid, 21).
Experience and Symbol
God's self-communication in experience is known through symbol, the vehicle through which humans perceive and conduct communication.
If revelation is about the entry into human history of a new divine meaning, then such meaning must be 'carried'…(Ormerod, 2000, 138).
Symbols are the carriers of meaning and are crucial to all perspectives of revelation. Symbols may be viewed as
…signs imbued with a plenitude of depth of meaning that surpasses the capacities of conceptual thinking and propositional speech (ibid, 17).
The role of social and historical symbols is to evoke participation in revelation by the individual:
By evoking participation, the revelatory symbols mediate a lived, personal communion with God…This may be described as an experience of God, or grace…(Dulles, 1983, 269).
Grace and Faith
Dulles credits Kahl Rahner with redirecting theology from the study of what God is or what God has done towards the appreciation of God's communication (Dulles, 1992, 21). Rahner adopts the Scholastics' distinction between uncreated grace (God's presence in the recipient), and created grace (God's divine gifts for particular needs) (Galvin, 1980, 66). In doing so, he attributes priority to uncreated grace, the divine indwelling in humanity (ibid, p67).
Grace
In Rahner's theology of grace, God's communication takes the form of a divine offer of God's self, made universally, at all times and in all places where human freedom exists (ibid, 70). The divine offer may be present
· Simply as an offer to human freedom without personal response from us
· Present and accepted in an act which is both an event of grace and a deed of human freedom
· Present in rejection by our freedom (ibid, 69).
Even when rejected, the offer does not vanish but remains.
The divine offer of self-communication forms a constant dimension of human existence, always present, yet not part of human nature itself, affecting the whole of our being and directing us towards unsurpassable nearness to the triune God of grace and eternal life (ibid, 71).
Although God is the abiding and holy mystery, the incomprehensible ground of humanity's transcendent existence, God is not only the God of infinite distance but also the God of absolute closeness in true self-communication (ibid, 65).
A full personal relationship with God is established only in one who responds positively to the divine offer, with at least implicit faith, hope and love (ibid, 66).
Rahner adopts the Scholastic concept of obediential potency to refer our openness to the self-communication of God (ibid, 72). This obediential capacity may be viewed as the source of Kierkegaard's leap of faith.
Faith
The response of the individual through his or her leap of faith has been variously described by theologians: 'divine illumination' for Augustine, 'inner instinct' for Aquinas, the 'natural desire for God' for de Lubac, the 'supernatural existential' for Rahner, the 'unrestricted desire to know and love God' for Lonergan (Connolly, 19xx, 100-101).
The ultimate object of revelation is God.
In this revelation, the invisible God, prompted by…overflowing love, addresses men [and women] as friends and answers them with the purpose of inviting and receiving them into communion with [God's] self (Dei Verbum, quoted by Connolly, 19xx, 94).
For Blondel,
Man's great action, his self-surrender to God, is based on his awareness of him (Trethowan, online, 11).
Just as this awareness is available to all people at all time - universal revelation - the response made by humans represents primordial faith, separate from the doctrinal content of any or all religious traditions. Faith is a structuring activity, a human universal, which is brought to bear on our many experiences and the variety of symbols we interpret (Lane, 1981, 53). Faith is distinct from belief and from the content of religious beliefs, although it leads to them and the ultimate revelation of God in Jesus Christ. The simple response of primordial faith is not sufficient in itself because, as Aquinas points out,
The act of the believer does not terminate with the proposition but with the reality (behind the proposition) (Lane, 1981, 59).
Revelation is thus God's self-offering at all times to all people through their wide variety of experiences of symbol and reality. God has already given the gift, the uncreated grace, of an obediential potency to all, a gift which remains within, awaiting response. It is that response in grace which completes the circle, which provides the ultimate unity of faith and revelation. As Connolly puts it,
The response of faith is not exclusively the work of the human person, but the result of an encounter with God's act of self-disclosure. As such, there exists a fundamental unity between revelation and faith…..There can be no revelation without the response of faith which receives it, and there can be no faith without the grace of God's revelation, which elicits the response of faith in the human person (Connolly, 19xx, 92).
References
CCC (Catechism of the Catholic Church), 2000. Sydney: St Paul's Publications.
Connolly, J R 1993 Christian Faith: A Contemporary View. In Rausch, T P (ed) The College Student's Introduction to Theology. Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press.
Dulles, A 1983 Models of Revelation. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan.
Dulles, A 1992 The Craft of Theology. New York: Crossroad.
Galvin, J P 1980 The Invitation of Grace in O'Donovan, L J (ed) A Word of Grace. New York: The Seabury Press.
Grascia, M M 1993 Theological Anthropology. In Rausch, T P (ed) The College Student's Introduction to Theology. Collegeville, Minnestota: The Liturgical Press.
Lane, D A 1981 The Experience of God. New York: Paulist Press.
Marthaler, B 1993. The Creed. Mystic, Connecticut: Twenty Third Publications.
O’Collins, G 1981 Fundamental Theology. London: Darton, Longman and Todd.
O’Collins, G 1993 Retrieving Fundamental Theology. London: Geoffrey Chapman.
Ormerod, N 2000 Method, Meaning and Revelation. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America.
Rynne, X 1999 Vatican Council II. New York: Maryknoll.
Robin Ryan is currently studying theology through ACUWEB. He has already completed PhD studies in Education.
