Revelation

Questions for Discussion

1.  What does the concept of a divinely revealed text mean to you and how important is it in how you relate to scripture?

2. How does your religious community relate to modern scholarship which suggests that texts within the Bible or Qur’an may have evolved over time and show evidence of having been edited at different times in history?

3. How central is the study of your Scripture and other important religious texts to your life and religious practice?

Jewish Texts on Revelation

1)      And this is the Torah [instruction] which Moses set before the people of Israel (Deuteronomy 4:44) by the order of the Lord, through the hand of Moses (from one of several biblical verses, e.g. Numbers 10:13).
        —The Daily Prayer Book, recited when Torah reading has been completed and the Torah is lifted in the air and will be covered prior to its return to the Ark.

2)      Rabbi Abba stated in the name of Samuel: For three years there was a dispute between the House of Shammai and House of Hillel, the former asserting, Jewish law is in agreement with our views and the latter contending, Jewish law is in agreement with our views. Then a Voice from Heaven announced “These and those are the words of the living God, but Jewish law is in agreement with the rulings of the House of Hillel. Since, however, both are the words of the living God what was it that entitled the House of Hillel to have the law fixed in agreement with their rulings? Because they were kindly and modest, they studied their own rulings and those of House, and were even so [humble] as to mention the positions of the House of Shammai before theirs.
—Babylonian Talmud, Eiruvin, 13b (6th century)

3)      That ever-flowing fountain [of emanation from which the Torah originates] has different sides, a front and a back; from this stems the differences and the conflicts and the varying conceptions regarding the clean and the unclean, the prohibited and the permitted, the useable and the unusable, as it is known to the mystics. The great and continuing voice contains all these diverse ways of interpretation, for in that voice as it was turned toward him and made his decision for purity, the other for impurity,  each according to the place where he stood and where he received it. But all originates from one place and goes [despite all apparent contradictions] to the one place… For the differences and contradictions do not originate out of different realms, but out of the one place in which no difference and no contradiction is possible. The implicit message of this secret is that it lets every scholar insist on his own opinion and cite proofs for it from the Torah; for only in this manner and in no other way is the unity [of the various aspects of the one stream of revelation] achieved. Therefore it is incumbent upon us to hear the different opinions, and this is the sense of “these and those are the words of the living God.”
—Meir ben Ezekiel ibn Gabbai, a Kabbalist born in Spain c. 1480 (Quoted in Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories by Gershom Scholem)

4)      Anyone who studies from a Rabbinic Bible, such as the Mikra′ot Gedolot [classical commentators on the Bible] is struck by the number of different commentaries surrounding the few lines of biblical text on each page. Most religions that possess a sacred scripture have editions with a commentary attached. Sometimes they have two commentaries, but I am aware of no other religion that has editions of scripture surrounded by five to ten or more different commentaries. All of this traces back to a verse in the Book of Psalms: One thing God has spoken; two things have I heard (Ps. 62:12) and its gloss in the Talmud, "One biblical verse may convey several teachings . . . In Rabbi Ishmael's School it was taught: And like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces (Jer. 23:29), i.e., just as [the rock] is split into many splinters, so also may one biblical verse convey many teachings" (TB Sanhedrin 34a). In other words, multiple interpretations of each verse of Scripture can be correct, even if they contradict one another. The term for this concept of pluralistic interpretation is Shiv′im panim laTorah (each verse of Torah has 70 different faces/facets).
—A Torah with 70 Different Faces, Allen S. Maller, Jewish Bible Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 1 2013,http://jbq.jewishbible.org/assets/Uploads/411/jbq411shivimpanim.pdf

5)      Revelation is not an act of interfering with the normal course of natural processes but the act of instilling a new creative moment into the course of history. …Sinai is both an event that happened once and for all, and an event that happens all the time. What God does, happens both in time and in eternity. Seen from our vantage-point, it happened once; seen from His vantage-point, it happens all the time. Monuments of stone are destined to disappear; days of the spirit never pass away.
—God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism, Abraham Joshua Heshel (1907-1972)

6)      …What distinguishes one religion from another is the revelatory event that it accepts as authentic, or primary, as opposed to others that it dismisses as illusory, or secondary. When, where, and how did God reveal Himself, or His will? To the biblical community at Sinai? Through Jesus of Nazareth in first-century Judea? To Mohammed in the Arabian desert in 610 C.E.? To Joseph Smith in upstate New York in 1820? All of the above, or only some? Our answers to these questions determine our religious identity.
—Sacred Fragments: Recovering Theology for the Modern Jew, Neil Gillman, 1990

7)      Modern biblical scholarship has convinced me that the Torah originally consisted of oral traditions that were only later written down at different time periods. The text of the Torah is thus for me a human document. What, then, gives it any connection to God at all, let alone divine authority? Put another way, in what sense, if any, is the Torah the revelation of God? … Jewish law, then, is of human authorship, a human, communal response to events that the Jewish community accepts as revealing God or God's will for us. The law is divine because of its internal wisdom (its soundness as a way of living, as demonstrated by experience), its moral goodness, and its durability (strength). Here, as usual, wisdom, morality, and power are characteristics that we call divine. The authority of Jewish law for the Jew is then a function of both its communal acceptance and its divinity.
—For the Love of God and People: A Philosophy of Jewish Law, Elliot N. Dorff. 2013

Christian Texts on Revelation

From the Church Fathers:

1)      “… Since that which is by nature finite cannot rise above its prescribed limits, or lay hold of the superior nature of the Most High, on this account He, bringing His power, so full of love for humanity, down to the level of human weakness, so far as it was possible for us to receive it, bestowed on us this helpful gift of grace. For as by Divine dispensation the sun, tempering the intensity of his full beams with the intervening air, pours down light as well as heat on those who receive his rays, being himself unapproachable by reason of the weakness of our nature, so the Divine power, after the manner of the illustration I have used, though exalted far above our nature and inaccessible to all approach, like a tender mother who joins in the inarticulate utterances of her babe, gives to our human nature what it is capable of receiving; and thus in the various manifestations of God to man He both adapts Himself to man and speaks in human language, and assumes wrath, and pity, and such-like emotions, so that through feelings corresponding to our own our infantile life might be led as by hand, and lay hold of the Divine nature by means of the words which His foresight has given. For that it is irreverent to imagine that God is subject to any passion such as we see in respect to pleasure, or pity, or anger, no one will deny who has thought at all about the truth of things. And yet the Lord is said to take pleasure in His servants, and to be angry with the backsliding people, and, again, to have mercy on whom He will have mercy, and to show compassion— the word teaching us in each of these expressions that God’s providence helps our infirmity by using our own idioms of speech . . . .”

Gregory of Nyssa, c. 335-394 CE, Against Eunomious II.

2)      “God has placed the knowledge of himself in human hearts from the beginning. But this knowledge they unwisely invested in wood and stone. They thus contaminated the truth, at least as far as they were able. Meanwhile the truth itself abides unchanged, possessing its own unchanging glory. . . . How did God reveal himself ? By a voice from heaven? Not at all! God made a panoply which was able to draw them by more than a voice. He put before them the immense creation, so that both the wise and the unlearned, the Scythian and the barbarian, might ascend to God, having learned through sight the beauty of the things which they had seen.” John Chrisostom, 344/354-407 CE

From official documents of the Catholic Church:

3)      “The divinely revealed truths that are contained and presented in the text of Sacred Scripture have been written down under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Relying on the faith of the apostolic age, Holy Mother Church holds as sacred and canonical the complete books of the Old and New Testaments, with all their parts, on the grounds that, written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God as their author, and they have been handed on as such to the Church herself. In composing the sacred Books, God chose and employed certain men, who, while engaged in this task, made full use of their faculties and powers, so that, with God himself acting in them and through them, they as true authors committed to writing everything and only those things that he wanted written. Therefore, since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers should be regarded as asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that we must acknowledge the Books of Scripture as teaching firmly, faithfully, and without error the truth that God wished to be recorded in the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation. Dei Verbum, 11…

4)      “Now since in Sacred scripture God has spoken through human agents and in human fashion, the interpreter of Sacred Scripture, in order to ascertain what God himself wished to communicate to us, should carefully search out what the sacred writers truly intended to express and what God thought well to manifest by their words.” Dei Verbum, 12.
         

5)      “Christ the Lord, in whom the full revelation of God the Most High is brought to completion, commanded the apostles to preach to all people the gospel, which having been promised beforehand by the prophets, he himself fulfilled and promulgated with his own lips. In their own preaching of the gospel, the source of all saving truth and moral instruction, the apostles were to impart to all the gifts of God. This commission was faithfully fulfilled by the apostles who handed on by the spoken words of their preaching, by the example they gave, and by the institutions they established, what they had received from the lips of Christ, from his way of life, and from his works, or what they had come to learn by the prompting of the Spirit. This commission was also fulfilled by those apostles and others of the apostolic age who, under the inspiration of the same Holy Spirit, committed the message of salvation to writing.” Dei Verbum,8.

6) “No public revelation is now to be expected before the glorious manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ (1 Tim 6:14; Titus 2:13)” Dei Verbum 4.

7) “The Word is alive, so Scripture needs to be proclaimed, listened to, read, welcomed and lived as word of God in line with tradition from which it is not separable” Dei Verbum 10.

From the evangelical Churches:

8) From The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, 1982 by representatives of evangelical leaders

1. God, who is Himself Truth and speaks truth only, has inspired Holy Scripture in order thereby to reveal Himself to lost mankind through Jesus Christ as Creator and Lord, Redeemer and Judge. Holy Scripture is God's witness to Himself.

2. Holy Scripture, being God's own Word, written by men prepared and superintended by His Spirit, is of infallible divine authority in all matters upon which it touches: it is to be believed, as God's instruction, in all that it affirms: obeyed, as God's command, in all that it requires; embraced, as God's pledge, in all that it promises.

3. The Holy Spirit, Scripture's divine Author, both authenticates it to us by His inward witness and opens our minds to understand its meaning.

4. Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God's acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God's saving grace in individual lives.

5. The authority of Scripture is inescapably impaired if this total divine inerrancy is in any way limited or disregarded, or made relative to a view of truth contrary to the Bible's own; and such lapses bring serious loss to both the individual and the Church.

WE AFFIRMthat the whole of Scripture and all its parts, down to the very words of the original, were given by divine inspiration. Art 6

WE AFFIRMthat inspiration was the work in which God by His Spirit, through human writers, gave us His Word. The origin of Scripture is divine. The mode of divine inspiration remains largely a mystery to us. Art 7

WE AFFIRMthat inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of Scripture, which in the providence of God can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy. We further affirm that copies and translations of Scripture are the Word of God to the extent that they faithfully represent the original. Art 10

The theological reality of inspiration in the producing of Biblical documents corresponds to that of spoken prophecies: although the human writers' personalities were expressed in what they wrote, the words were divinely constituted. Thus, what Scripture says, God says; its authority is His authority, for He is its ultimate Author, having given it through the minds and words of chosen and prepared men who in freedom and faithfulness "spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit" (2 Pet. 1:21). Holy Scripture must be acknowledged as the Word of God by virtue of its divine origin. Exposition: Creation, Revelation, and Inspiration

9)   An Introduction to the Old Testament,  the Canon and Christian Imagination (2003) Walter Brueggeman (professor emeritus, Columbia Theological Seminary, GA)

Excerpts from the Introduction:

To be sure, the term Old Testament voices a Christian convention. Thus the two parts of Scripture stand together as “old and new,” the “old part” coming to fruition and fulfillment in the New that attends to Jesus as the Messiah.

First, the “Old/New” connection seems to preempt completely the Old and to exclude any reading of it except a reading towards the New.

Second, the phrase Old Testament is unfortunately too often understood as an affirmation of supersessionism.

What we have in the Old Testament, rather than reportage, is a sustained memory that has been filtered through many generations of the interpretive process, with many interpreters imposing certain theological intentionalities on the memory that continues to be reformulated. This is not to suggest that the Bible is historically “unreliable,” but rather that different questions must be asked of the dynamic interpretive process that eventuated in the Bible. The biblical text itself does not purport to be “history” in any modern sense of the term.

Texts from the Qur’an on Revelation

1)      He has laid down the same religion for you as He enjoined on Noah: that which We have revealed to you and which We enjoined on Abraham, Moses, and Jesus:" Establish the religion and do not make divisions in it "....42:13

2)      It does not befit God to address any human being except by inspiration, or from behind a veil, or He sends a Messenger who then reveals by His permission whatever He wills. He is indeed Most High, All Wise. 42:51

3)       Accordingly We have revealed to you a Spirit by Our command. You had no idea of what the Book was, nor faith. Nonetheless We have made it a Light by which We guide those of Our servants We will. Truly you are guiding to a Straight Path 42:52