Revelation as inner experience:
God as guest. Neither a body of truths nor a series of events, revelation is a matter of privileged communion with God. It assumes immediate experience. Immediate means unmediated experience. Directly with God. His spirit and my spirit. The naked God. God is spirit and when my spirit merges with God's spirit we have communion. (Nicely put by the refrain: "You ask me how I know he lives, he lives within my heart." Editorial note: Notice the key phrase "how I know". The question how do you know is even below what a doctrine of revelation is all about. This song provides not just a view of revelation, but it also is an epistemology. This song expresses this view of revelation even better, especially the last line of the chorus.)
Revelation is interior because God, not having phenomenal existence, (meaning God doesn't exist in the physical world in any sensible way) can only reveal himself to spirit.
This stress on the interior of man's spirit is aided by the practice of spiritual disciplines. There the goal is to facilitate going deeper within where the merging of God's spirit with our own results in finding the Lord inside.
Revelation doesn't come in the form of a doctrine, an external announcement. Revelation comes in the form of an inward experience. A sharp distinction is drawn between faith as the acceptance of revelation and belief as the acceptance of doctrine.
The content of this revelation is neither publically announced events which have taken place outside us in history nor publically presented interpretations of those events. It is to find God revealed personally within and desires foremostly to know only God. It does not desire to know about God, but only to know God.
In sum, the site of revelation is within us. The site of revelation is not outside of us. The indwelling Christ is the highest authority in this model - the Christ within, not the Christ without. The contrast is the outer word, the external word versus the inner word, the Holy Spirit, who speaks to our hearts.
4 comments:
This is all quite mystical (and individualistic -- if I've learned anything from FV, it's that American Christians generally need to move away from individual, and towards corporate/covenantal Christianity), but still there is something to it. Is not true, Holy Spirit-granted revelation the difference between what happens when a Christian, or the nonregenerate, read the same Bible?
I think your thoughts echo those of Paul when he said that he considered all his achievements "rubbish" compared to the surpassing greatness of "knowing Christ". In the end, just as in many companies, it will not be what we know, but WHO we know that matters.
I haven't had time to read all these posts with the care they deserve, but what strikes me at the immediate/superficial? level is that there is no reason these various views of revelation have to be exclusive. Not either/or but both/and. God is able (obviously! being God) to communicate his essence, his desires, his law, etc. in many ways.
"it will not be what we know, but WHO we know that matters."
WHAT we know has a lot to do with exactly who is the WHO that we know. Mormons claim to know the same WHO that we claim to know. What's the difference? WHAT mormons "know" about Jesus defines the WHO they know to be a different WHO than Christians know.
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