Conceptions of Divine Revelation

Revelation, as commonly understood, has to do with the dispelling of ignorance.

The counterpart of “the revealed”, therefore, is “the hidden” (Wolterstorff 1995: 23).
However, the term has many meanings or uses—religious as well as non-religious—
which are related to each other analogically. A distinction should be made, first,
between the process and product meaning of the word. “Revelation” can either refer
to the act/process of revealing something, or to the content that is revealed. Second,
while in ordinary discourse one can “have a revelation” without there being a
revealer (an agent that reveals), in religious contexts revelation is usually understood
as a “person-to-person affair” (Helm 1982: 14; Mavrodes 1988: 96).
The following scheme (S) identifies the elements that are necessary for a revelatory
claim (a claim that a revelation has occurred) to be true:
(S)
m reveals a to n by means of (through, etc.) k (Mavrodes 1988: 88).
In addition to a revealer (m) and an audience (n), an act of revelation must have a
content (a) that is made known or available to the audience through some means (k).
Given this scheme, several areas of controversy can be pin-pointed. Since the topic
is divine revelation, m is of course identified with God. However, in contemporary
Christian thought, there is a debate about the nature of a. Is the content of divine
revelation propositions about or related to God, or is it God himself, or both
(O‘Collins 2016a: Ch. 1)? Many theologians emphasize that God
reveals himself rather than propositions or “information”. This debate (to which we
will return) must be understood against the background of the Christian doctrine of
the incarnation, which claims that God “became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:
14).
Furthermore, there is a debate about whether n—the audience—includes only those
who have actually acquired knowledge through the revelation, or if n can also
include those who potentially could have acquired such knowledge, but in fact did
not. In other words, is revelation a “success word” or does it cover cases where
knowledge is merely made available? (For different views, see Sluys 2000; Blaauw
2009; Gunton 1995: 113; O’Collins 2016a: 76).