{"title":"Godsends","authors":"W. Desmond","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198795353.013.22","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198795353.013.22","url":null,"abstract":"This is a reflection on the nature of revelation by means of the idea of the ‘godsend’. While seeming to be ordinary, this word carries communication of what is beyond the ordinary. A godsend suggests something like a chink or crack through which something is revealed—a kind of gap, or permeability, a porosity to a light that comes from a source beyond. In that gifted porosity is there an opening to revelation? Does the godsend say something about the surprise of revelation? In response I follow three steps: from word, to idea, to story. I begin by looking at the word and its etymology and consider what this implies. Then I look at the idea of revelation in connection with the claims of philosophical reason. Here my concern is to illuminate some theoretical considerations concerning reason and revelation, from the more reflective conceptual point of view, especially in relation to the modern sense of reason. Thirdly, I turn to story as true to the godsend, and I pay particular attention to a story that witnesses to a kind of fidelity to singularity, the story of Flannery O’Connor entitled ‘Revelation’.","PeriodicalId":199412,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Divine Revelation","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116552534","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Afterword","authors":"F. Murphy","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198795353.013.43","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198795353.013.43","url":null,"abstract":"This Afterword attempts to summarize the main ways of interpreting revelation in this book. One group takes ‘revelation’ as a term which describes revelation as something which a group of people ‘believe’ happened, where this belief shapes the religiosity of the group. A second way of interpreting revelation sees it as actually given to the group from beyond itself, but as also expressive of a society. Thirdly, we find philosophical interpretations of revelation, as the self-disclosure of a reality or being which transcends individuals and social groups, but where reason rather than faith is pivotal in receiving the revelation. Fourthly, revelation is interpreted theologically, as the objective disclosure of a transcendent reality which can only be received in faith. It is claimed that the first three frameworks for understanding revelation depend upon the fourth, since it grounds their otherwise circular assumptions, such as the receptiveness of the human mind or the self-giving quality of being.","PeriodicalId":199412,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Divine Revelation","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126641560","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Inerrancy","authors":"A. McGowan","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198795353.013.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198795353.013.8","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter begins with an attempted definition of the term ‘inerrancy’ before going on to discuss its history and development. This includes a consideration of the origins of fundamentalism as well as noting the influence of B. B. Warfield, A. A. Hodge, and the Princetonian tradition. The chapter then turns to the publication of a volume by Jack Rogers and Donald McKim which sparked the modern debate on inerrancy. In the book, The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible: An Historical Approach, Rogers and McKim opposed the use of the word ‘inerrancy’. Those who opposed Rogers and McKim’s argument gathered in conference and this led to the publication of The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. The debate centred upon whether the word ‘infallibility’ or the word ‘inerrancy’ should be used in defining the nature and authority of Scripture. The chapter goes on to analyse the use of the term ‘inerrancy’, noting first the arguments against its use, followed by the inerrantists’ defence of their position. In conclusion, the chapter argues that those evangelicals who want to use the term ‘inerrancy’ and those who prefer to speak about the ‘trustworthiness’ of the Scripture have a great deal in common and that much of the debate is terminological rather than substantive.","PeriodicalId":199412,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Divine Revelation","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114296828","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Revelation in the Visual Arts","authors":"Ralf van Bühren","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198795353.013.38","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198795353.013.38","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter deals with visual artworks as media of divine revelation. Readers gain insight into how Christianity as a religion of revelation has used images since the third century to transmit knowledge of God and his action in history. Early Christian pictures rate among the oldest communication media of revelation. Placed intentionally above the altar, the apse mosaics of late antique churches served anagogical purposes leading beyond the pictorial work to transcendent realities. The perception of images in the Middle Ages could represent the beginning of anagogical ascent towards the divine, engaging the viewer’s imagination. In Renaissance and baroque art occurred a rhetorical shift. Gazes and pointing gestures of the figures draw the viewer’s attention to the stage-like performance of the divine in a perspectival or visionary space. The issue frequently became controversial in contemporary history because the concord between artistic self-expression and the Judaeo-Christian understanding of revelation was no longer a given. At present, the individual responses to divine revelation continue.","PeriodicalId":199412,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Divine Revelation","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132964940","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Charismatic Revelations","authors":"D. Shantz","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198795353.013.16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198795353.013.16","url":null,"abstract":"The notion of ‘charismatic revelations’ is a modern one, reflecting the individualism and theological conflicts arising from the Reformation of the sixteenth century. Charismatic revelations can be found in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Protestant movements such as German Pietism and English Evangelicalism and are notable in twentieth-century Pentecostalism and charismatic renewal. Charles Taylor has described the burden of individualism that came with the break-up of Christendom under the impact of the Reformation and the rise of modern science. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there arose ‘a new Christianity of personal commitment’ (Taylor 2007, 143–144). In German Pietism and English Methodism the stress was upon feeling, emotion, and a living faith, reflecting the logic of Enlightenment ‘subjectification’. The predicament of these believers and their religious individualism was marked by spiritual instability, melancholy, and doubt. This predicament provides the context for understanding the rise of charismatic revelations. Under the burden of growing secularism, religious pluralism, and existential angst and isolation, a host of modern believers found meaning and hope through experiences of direct encounter with God that included his personal speaking addressed to their inmost being.","PeriodicalId":199412,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Divine Revelation","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128335743","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Scripture, Tradition, and Creeds","authors":"Kenneth Oakes","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198795353.013.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198795353.013.7","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter will consider Scripture, tradition, and the creeds sequentially, with a focus on historical and theological description, and with a view towards some deep commonalities among the three branches of Christianity. There is a variety of ways to explore each element of the triad of Scripture, tradition, and the creeds and their interrelationship. One could conduct this exploration sociologically, historically, or theologically, and with the inevitable Protestant, Roman Catholic, or Orthodox tendencies and emphases which will inevitably surface. The structure presented here would likely be most familiar to Protestants, but one could also generate arguments for this heuristic arrangement from the other two major Christian communions. Initially, however, some remarks on a Christian account of revelation will be offered as a necessary and salutary orientation for understanding the place and role of Scripture, tradition, and the creeds in terms of God’s presence among and self-communication to humanity, and humanity’s response to this presence and communication.","PeriodicalId":199412,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Divine Revelation","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130603846","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"God and Revelation","authors":"R. Swinburne","doi":"10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780198795353.013.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780198795353.013.9","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter will be concerned solely with revelation of true propositions. It will not be concerned with truths which God supposedly conveys to particular humans which are of importance only for those humans (for example, that he wishes a particular human to pursue a particular vocation), but only with those truths which are supposedly of importance for all humans (even if they concern a privilege or command given to a particular individual or tribe). This chapter will also follow the normal theological understanding of a ‘revealed truth’ as one which is to be believed on the ground that God has told us that it is true, even if—as with some purportedly revealed truths—it is also a truth which some of us could discover for ourselves if we were clever enough and so is said to be discoverable by ‘natural reason’. Christianity and Islam have both strongly affirmed that God has told us truths of great importance for human life, which we should believe because he has told them to us; and hence this category of ‘revealed’ truths. Many recent thinkers, beginning with the eighteenth-century ‘Deists’ such as Voltaire and including some twentieth-century Christian theologians, have claimed that all we can know about God and morality is what our ‘natural reason’ can show us, and that we can have (or at least do not have) any knowledge of truths revealed by God. The chapter argues that it is possible for us to have such knowledge, and that we have the criteria to assess the competing claims of different religions to possess such truths.","PeriodicalId":199412,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Divine Revelation","volume":"96 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121293700","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Quantum Mechanics and Revelation","authors":"S. Barr","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198795353.013.35","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198795353.013.35","url":null,"abstract":"It is widely acknowledged that quantum mechanics may have profound philosophical implications, but what those implications are has been debated for nearly a century. The question addressed in this chapter is whether it has any implications that touch upon the truths of Christian revelation. The short answer is that quantum mechanics does not say anything directly about revealed truths but does have implications relevant to certain philosophical truths that the Church regards as entailed by Christian revelation. These include the truths that human beings have free will and that human beings are not entirely reducible to matter or explicable in purely physical terms. Before getting to these questions, the chapter makes some preliminary remarks about quantum mechanics for context.","PeriodicalId":199412,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Divine Revelation","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116635270","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Divine Revelation and Digital Religion","authors":"Zachary Sheldon, Heidi A. Campbell","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198795353.013.40","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198795353.013.40","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter considers the relationship between divine revelation and digital religion by exploring how revelation of divine or religious truth is presented and negotiated on the internet and within digital culture. Revelation is a fundamental component of religious practice and experience and has long been studied in its relation to mediation. Digital culture offers unique resources that allow individuals to receive, engage, and share in divine revelation in digital contexts. The multiplicity of digital contexts and their blended ties to offline practices in worship practices have become known as digital religion (Campbell 2013), which can be likened to a bridge which connects and extends religious practice online into offline religious spaces and contexts. This chapter will consider how revelation is understood and enacted in different spaces of digital religion by providing an overview of Digital Religion Studies and looking at Campbell and DeLashmutt’s (2014) research on multi-site churches to offer insights into how churches structure and negotiate their digital worship practices to assist people in engaging with divine revelation. In particular, we emphasize questions of presence and authority that churches ought to consider in regard to how their use of digital technology may impact views on divine revelation in digital contexts.","PeriodicalId":199412,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Divine Revelation","volume":"137 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127396070","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}