The Understanding of Revelation. Michael Knowles

‘What is revealed’

It is because revelation for Christianity is cooperative and incarnational, and not monarchical as explained, that it is able to distinguish, though often only after difficult debates and bitter arguments, between the cultural and the divine in revelation. When Paul instructs women to cover their heads when at the Eucharist or states that the wife should be subject to her husband or that slaves should obey their masters, and when Christ ordained only men to the priesthood, the Church is empowered to decide the applicability of such matters. The Church does not and may not amend or reject one jot of what is revealed. It decides however what is revealed just as it decided which texts constitute the canon of Biblical Revelation in the first place. This is the tightrope on which we walk. It is the rejection of this distinction which makes Islam static and which makes Christianity developmental, open to change and adaptation.

It is its monarchical understanding of revelation which summons Islam back again and again to insistence on the observance of the prescriptions of the Koran, irrespective of time, place and culture, and to the glorification of Median and Meccan society under the rule of Mohammad as the ideal society. That is the root cause of its inherent fundamentalism. However, for Christians there can never be an ideal Christian society. We see in a glass darkly. Whichever social order is based on justice, freedom equality and peace is a Christian society, but only to the extent that those qualities are correctly understood and put into practice. What those qualities are in their fullness and how they are to be carried out needs constantly to be explored. So too ecclesial society. Ecclesia semper reformanda est.

It is its understanding of revelation as cooperative and incarnational that justifies Christianity’s perennial use of non-scriptural philosophies and non-scriptural terminologies in the formulation of its theology, of non-scriptural and of pagan rites and symbols in its liturgies. The justification is that the moral prescriptions and rituals endorsed by the Bible are in very many instances from pagan sources, just as Abraham himself was. He was taken from his pagan origins to establish God’s People. The origins of God’s People are therefore pagan. How could it be otherwise?

The languages of the Bible are peculiar to it but are of common usage. There is for Christians no one sacred language in the way that Islam believes that the Arabic of the Koran is God’s language. Likewise bread and wine are not specifically Christian. And so on. Christ rode into Jerusalem to his universally redemptive death and resurrection, not on some clouds of heaven, but on a donkey. It also had its day. God reveals himself and works through the creature in all its forms. How could it be otherwise?

The Catholic response to alternative philosophies and religions from the Council of Jerusalem onwards has been incorporation whoever possible. Nihil humanum a me alienum puto. The history of incorporation from St. John and St. Paul to the present day is familiar to everyone. Two characteristics of the Catholic response stand out. Openness to truth in all its myriad forms and flows and sources; and care to judge everything at the Church’s understanding, which itself develops, of God’s revelation in Christ given to in the Scriptures and its Tradition. For Catholic Christianity the Bible is not the sole source of revelation and what it contains has to be read within the context of the liturgy, traditions and authority of the Church. The Islamic theology of the Koran takes Moslems forever back to Mohammad’s prescriptions for seventh century Mecca and Medina. The Catholic theology of the Bible should forever anchor the Church in its origins, which it must always in every circumstance treasure and study reverently and delicately but from which it must always sail forwards to new destinations.

I hope this reflection upon the Islamic notion of revelation enables us better to appreciate what the Christian understanding of revelation is and is not and to perceive the social, political and ecclesial implications or uses.

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