What are the essential questions on divine revelation?

Answer 1

A:Revelation has been defined as the communication of some truth by God through means which are beyond the ordinary course of nature. To establish whether an alleged revelation is truly divine, there are certain essential questions that ought to be asked:

• If the revelation is to be found in the Bible, is it too consistent with the culture and times of the prophet? If so, the revelation might have been intended as no more than an allegory, since God should be timeless.

  For example, Isaiah, writing at the end of the eighth century BCE (Isaiah chapter 6), could still see God in human form; Ezekiel, at the beginning of the sixth century, spoke of the "likeness of the glory of God," only partially using anthropomorphic images; Zechariah, writing approximately 520 BCE, no longer dealt with God directly, but communicated through 'messengers' or 'angels' and rather than seeing God himself, saw only the lampstand as a symbol of God.

• If the revelation is in the form of a prophecy, did the person who claimed to have received the revelation really commit it to writing before the promised event? Claiming to have received a revelation afterwards proves nothing.

• Is there only one possible interpretation of the revelation? If it is at all possible to understand a revelation in more than one way, it is not really a revelation at all.

  For example, the Old Testament passages believed to be prophecies or prefigurements of future events were written in the context of the author's time, and even if read as prophecies could be oracles of numerous alternative future events.

• Is the event that is linked to the divine revelation entirely consistent with that revelation? It is just as important not to reinterpret events subjectively to fit a previous revelation as it is not to reinterpret dreams or biblical passages to fit a subsequent event.

• Was the event corroborated by a truly unbiased observer who wrote his own report of that event? Pious people, with the best of intentions, can misreport events, coloured by hope or expectation of a revelation, especially if they were not actual witnesses to those events.

• Why would God have communicated to this particular person in this way? If divine revelations are less than commonplace, we can expect any revelation indisputably and clearly to further some divine plan.

  For example, when the Virgin Mary is said to have revealed herself to Bernadette Soubirous while she was gathering firewood with her sister and a friend near Lourdes, this should have been a most momentous point in world history, yet there was no great occasion that required the presence of the Virgin Mary and there was no resulting change in the course of world history. Since there was no great reason for the revelation, it can be argued that it was not a truly genuine revelation.