Growing up, my family and I attended a fundamental holiness church; very charismatic and intently focused on “personal” revelation. I remember asking our pastor one evening, “Where did the other people Cain encountered come from?” His reply was, “That’s a question that can only be answered through revelation.” Of course he was speaking of a mystical type of occurrence that happened when God miraculously revealed God’s mysteries to the human mind. While I believe in miraculous revelation, his response left me puzzled.
Our faith tradition often relied on “prophecy”, “words of knowledge”, or some other form of divination to answer questions as mundane as “Should we go to the store today?” or the deeply theological, such as, “Does this passage of scripture represent a Christophany?” So why couldn’t this seemingly simple question, at least simple to the mind of an eleven year old, be addressed with an intellectually driven, thoughtful response? “Give me something better,” I thought.
I certainly believe that God has and will continue to miraculously reveal Godself to humanity and I affirm the long tradition in theology that states, “even if people could reason their way to belief in God and some sort of moral code, Christian doctrines like the Trinity and salvation through Christ are inaccessible to reason.” (Placher, 12) However, my early encounter with the intellectual disconnect that can manifest itself in the Holiness/Pentecostal/Charismatic movement left me feeling uneasy with the over reliance on “personal” revelation.
H. Richard Niebuhr said:
Such revelation is no substitute for reason; the illumination it supplies does not excuse the mind from labor; but it does give to that mind the impulsion and the first principles it requires if it is to be able to do its proper work. (Hodgson/King, 113)
While I’m not sure that Niebuhr had the same sort of “revelatory moment” in mind as the type I have described, he does however place a much needed emphasis on reason as a crucial component when attempting to understand personal history. In this way, reason then becomes an indispensable element leading one to a “revelatory moment”.
This leaves me with a dilemma, a “tension” if you will. The diversity of human experience leads to the inevitable conclusion that all attempts at reason are subject to the individual human condition. We are all subject to the effects of our unique brokenness that leads to varying responses to, and apprehensions of, the revelatory experience. How then do we justify the elevation in our discourse of one persons “revelatory moment” over that of another? Maybe the answer is, “We don’t.”
For me, the beginning of reason is recognizing how “the interconnectedness of the webs of our beliefs might provide a richer understanding of how we judge what we believe and of the meaning of revelation.” (Placher, 19) In his book, He Is There and He Is Not Silent, Francis Schaffer in his discussion of the Trinity speaks of “unity in diversity”. Could it be that the diversity of human thought is not an obstacle to truth through revelation, but an ultimate consequence/benefit of the infinite God making Godself known in and through God’s finite creation?
Maybe I’ve created more questions for myself than I’ve answered, but I think that’s the nature of theology: exhaustible creatures seeking to know the inexhaustible God.
