Sunday Afternoon Thoughts

When we think about revelation in the context of inter-faith dialogue an immediate problem seems to present itself. Surely, claims to revelation are claims that here, and here exclusively is the act of God and elsewhere a whole series of human attempts to reach God.  Here is God being active, the God of the Scriptures the God of the creeds. The God who makes decisions and commits God's Self to courses of action in the world.  And there is the world of religious striving.  For which, if you wanted to be unkind, God sits with His arms crossed, waiting for something to happen.  What I want to do in these reflections this evening is to work out with you why that is not a helpful or a truthful paradigm if we look at what we mean both by revelation and divine action. And there is one point that might be made right at the start of this reflection about revelation and divine action.

The paradox is this.  To speak of a God who reveals God is certainly to speak of divine action, to speak of divine freedom.  And, thus, what God does is both determinate and free. The God who acts out of freedom is also the God who cannot be contained in what God says or delivers.  And there's the paradox.

If we're serious in talking about divine revelation, we are surely talking about the revelation of what cannot be completely and definitively possessed.  The tightrope between those two poles of paradox has been walked with varying degrees of elegance by theologians, philosophers and contemplatives for quite a few thousand years.  But it doesn't do to forget that tension is built-in as soon as we begin to associate revelation with the act of God. 

The first thing to say is that this is the best explanation of something Walter Brueggemann constantly talks about and which I admit I hadn't much consider, the Freedom of God and its surpassing of our expectations of what God will do and has done.  I have a far better idea of what he means by that now than I did before I listened to Rowan Williams, for which I am very grateful.   I also understand now that it is impossible for any humanly understood revelation to be entirely satisfactory because it is a revelation of something far larger than human understanding can encompass.  Just as I believe the material universe can never be anything like totally understood by even all of human beings considered as a mythical whole. 

Rowan Williams and then Thought Criminal.  It raised an issue for me, that revelation is also interpretation.  That is, what did the revelation mean?  And even before that, was it a revelation?  Case in point (and I'm using the KJV because I'm too lazy to transcribe the Scholar's Version I prefer):

Father, glorify thy name. Then came there a voice from heaven, saying, I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again. 29The people therefore, that stood by, and heard it, said that it thundered: others said, An angel spake to him. 30Jesus answered and said, This voice came not because of me, but for your sakes. --John 12:28-30

So, was it a revelation?  Or not?  And if it was, what did it mean?

All matters of what God said/did are matters of midrash.  Therein lies the real paradox, the paradox behind  Rowan Williams' paradox and Walter Brueggemann's insight that the Freedom of God surpasses our expetations.  Or what Graham Green called "the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God."

We have to first determine, then, was it an act of God?  And was it a revelation?  That tension the Rev. Williams speaks of "is built-in as soon as we begin to associate revelation with the act of God."  But the tension is there ab initio; or perhaps it is a different tension, another paradox.  What I here as the voice of an angel you might hear only as thunder.  And I say the voice spoke to Jesus, and Jesus says the voice was meant for you and me.

Tensions abound; as they should.  "The peace of God, it is no peace, but strife sown in the sod."  And it takes a village; or more accurately, a community.  These things are not decided by one person; nor by one community.

There in lie further paradoxes.

And in the context of inter-faith dialogue, the frame is to recognize communities within the larger community of humanity. Which, too, is a teaching of religion; and a revelation.