The Understanding of Revelation Michael Knowles

The Way in which God Reveals Himself.

Christianity will acquire a deeper understanding of Divine revelation in the Bible and in Christ through interaction and comparison with the Islamic notion of revelation in the Koran. The way in which God reveals himself is himself. What God is and how he reveals himself are not fully distinguishable, if at all.

The Islamic understanding of Koranic revelation is that the Koran had no human imput at all as to its contents; that Mohammad did not contribute one single sentence, not even a single word. Even the quality and style of language was not his in any way. Muslims hold that the Koran, its total contents, pre-existed not just Mohammad, but from eternity in God’s presence and was communicated by the Angel Gabriel to Mohammad’s consciousness while he was in a coma or mystical state.[1] “Recite” is the instruction it is believed Gabriel gave three times to Mohammad and each time Mohammad replied “What shall I recite?” To which Gabriel responded with Surah 96, one of the shortest of the surahs, which starts with the words “Recite in the name of your Lord who created –created man from clots of blood. Recite! Your Lord is the most Bountiful One who by the pen taught man what he did not know”.[2] Mohammad then recited each revelation as it now existed in his consciousness to listeners who faithfully recorded it in writing (4. The accepted belief among Moslems is that Mohammad could neither read nor write. There is a hint of that in 29.49-50). The Islamic understanding therefore of revelation is that it is totally divine, composed even in its language and style of speech and writing purely by God, without any human imput. In Bishop Kenneth Cragg’s words (‘’The Event of the Quran 1994) ‘Mohammad’s spirit was taken possession of, his normal mental capacities displaced, to make room or residence for God’s word’.

The Christian understanding of Biblical revelation is very different. It is that God did not write one single word or line of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, that the books, songs, prayers, poems letters, gospels of the Bible were written in every line by human beings , some whose names are known, some –probably most- unknown, consciously and deliberately, employing the languages, styles and forms of writing -myths, stories, histories, genealogies and so on- known and available to them, employing this range of forms for specific purposes as designed and intended by them. For example, the first canonical gospel is the Gospel according to St. Matthew and is not the Gospel according to God. The Greek word kata meaning ‘according to’ has a profound theological significance which has been quite overlooked and ignored. “The original testimonies did not fall from heaven, are not supra temporal divine documents nor the writings of ecstatics filled with a divine madness which excludes all individuality and eccentricity, nor yet the writings of instruments who simply transcribed like secretaries at the dictation of the Spirit ……but real men in all their humanity, historicity and fallibility who bear witness to God’s word in language that is often hesitant and in concepts that are often imprecise” (Hans Kung. The Church 1968. p.16).

However, while it is the Christian understanding of Biblical Revelation that God did not write even a single word of the Bible, it is the Christian belief that God inspired the Bible in its entirety, that God made use of human languages at certain various periods in their development, of various cultures, of cultural norms and beliefs, of words and ideas as developed by human beings, of particular histories, locations, national and international developments and events as actually occurred and as related in the Bible, of human myths and stories and forms of writing to communicate knowledge of himself to the human race. By ‘inspiration’ is meant guidance by God of the human writer to communicate through the writer’s language, culture, beliefs and ideas truths about himself and his relationship with humankind.

The difference between the Christian understanding of Biblical revelation and the Islamic understanding of Koranic revelation is most useful to enable us to understand better what our Christian faith is as to the reality of God and our relationship to each other, with society and with the world in general. There is profound significance for us in the implications of these differences. The significance lies in the different understanding of God in the two religions. The Christian God is not the same as the Islamic God. Actio sequitur esse. God reveals himself according to what he is. In Christianity revelation is cooperative, incarnational and developmental. In Islam revelation is monarchical and static. The Christian God therefore in relation to humankind is cooperative, incarnational and in his dealings developmental. While the God of Islam in relation to humankind is monarchical and in his dealing static. Put another way, the Christian God is Three Persons in one substance, and by the will of the Father and the work of the Holy Spirit the Second Person became man; the Islamic god is one Person to whom mankind should submit (the world ‘Islam’ meaning ‘submission’).

[1] “It was Muhammad’s belief that the words he uttered when directly under the influence of the ecstasy were the very words of God ‘sent down; to him. His theory, if he maybe said to have had a theory, was therefore one of strictly verbal inspiration. The original of the Qur’an,he supposed, is in heaven, and he refers to it variously as ‘the preserved tablet’ (85.22)…’a well-guarded book’ (56.77) or ‘the mother of the book’ (43.3, 13.39)The contents of this archetypal book were delivered by Gabriel to Muhammad as occasion required. Cf 17.107: ‘We (ie God) have parcelled out the Koran into sections, that thou mightest recite it unto men by slow degrees and we have sent it down piecemeal’. Prof. C.R.North An Outline of Islam. Epworth Press. 1952 p.18).

[2] The fact that Mohammad continued with these recitals from 610 when he was 40 and in Mecca, throughout his Medina period and then back in Mecca to no less than a year before his death in 632 (cf 9.17-28) raises an immense problem for Moslems. A text written by God himself as from eternity would hardly contain the frequent alterations of instruction which occur in the Koran and which, together with Mohammad’s increasingly stronger emphasis on his own authority and that of the texts he was laying before believers, are fairly obviously his response to his changing circumstances and the problems, especially the resistance, he kept encountering. Of course the counter argument the believer might make is that God from eternity foreknew precisely how the inhabitants of Mecca and Medina, especially its Jewish inhabitants, and the surrounding tribes would react to Mohammad and that foreknowledge shapes the text of the recitals.

Religious Autocracy