Christ vs. Pannenberg vs. the Hermeneutic Death Spiral, pt 4:
It goes without saying that this revelation is God’s proprietary knowledge given to man which he passively receives, which engenders faith, making this faith a unique kind and not of a flattened, contextless, prosaic, voluntary conception.
Revelation comes to man today in the receiving and experiencing of something objectively divine to any casual observer, what I can phenomena, which is either his personal appearance or his appearance in an act of history, both of which are not subject to a moral denial except if it can be proven that the information revealed did not come to pass or was not true. A personal appearance of God is integrated into the historical prophetic word of demonstration when its corpus is complete, as in the age post-apostolic. In this appearance is witnessed the reality and nature and plan of God in the prophetic cause and effect, which produces his theophany within the spirit as man realizes that God exists objectively and beyond mere conception.
It does not come from man, it’s not created by him, it’s not through a feeling, it’s not from spending hours in a library and finally coming to a conclusion about a thing. These are human-revelatory.
This revelation is either coming directly from an encounter by God, as in the like reception of the Word by the Old Testament Prophets, which is made known by speech or writing and subject to future confirmation, or it refers to historical events known by all which could never have been precisely anticipated by man of the historical realization of these past divine promises. This revelation establishes the reality and nature of God and his plan of redemption to faith, expressed in the movement of the prophetic cause and effect of history.
It’s not a matter of our work or intuition. This is what we do with it after it has been established and exposed. Revelation through study, logic, emotion, dreams, desires, calculation, will and its other personal forces, anything that man performs, is not a revelation, its personal insight as part of the personal sanctification process. They are possible kinds of a righteous revelation, but only an insular kind by man’s own efforts that follow obediently after God’s. God’s revelation is not determined by what man does or feels, but what man does is to be motivated by what God wants and reveals in his historical act of revelation, which begins and ends in the prophetic, oracular revelation of Messiah.
Although “revelation” is without the slightest question a matter either directly of Messianic knowledge from prophecy and his fulfillment or the encounter with God by faithful members for the purpose only of furthering the prophetic Gospel (the “good news” of prophetic fulfillment by Christ), this changed radically over time. Christian faith came to be said having no exclusive motivating power in messianic prophecy, as this would imply the need for proof, and this is thought a symptom of lack of faith, not one of a person that sees truth as objective and demonstrated before it can be subjective. Instead, faith is feeling, private experiences, doctrinal and propositional conclusions, tradition, and a myriad host of other subjective alternatives that are great for self-actualization but worthless as revelatory means of the biblical sense.
The lack of interest by Christ and the apostles of deliberately defining “revelation,” except through interpretation of subject context which the hearer is expected to know, speaks the loudest in the search for an explanation of the degeneration of the concept of “revelation.” What Christ and the Apostles made no effort to define what we, on the other hand, have found crucial is telling us this concept is not in need of such definition before the sincere searcher of Truth. It is because it is so precious it is left as a decision for the reader, the outcome of which exposes the inner quality and nature of their motivational faith center and their fitness for a future life in divine Transcendence. The meaning of “revelation,” as it applies the kind of biblical information that is to rule faith and the Church, will be hidden from all who would operate as revelatory receivers outside of it. Because we have lost that 1st-century understanding or never wanted it to rule over us we have created our own.
There is an important fact of the revelation of Jesus and its expressions by the apostles that actually began it is own destruction of revelation into predominantly human experience, but this is an evidence of its honestly rather than its tacit agreement as to that direction. The pre-cross Judaic world had only a provisional, future hope that what God said would happen in respect to the redemption of the Jews and, with some interpreters, the world. The Post-cross nature of revelation changed then from what became a fulfilled past prophetic vision in Jesus Christ to one that also included an eschatological one. There was always a heavy apocalyptic strain of OT prophecy, which predicted events that would occur from the prophets time and completed at the end of history, and this was maintained by Christ. There was left a hope for the final chapter of God’s plan to unfold, and uncertainty, but this uncertainly was undergirded by the certainty of what Christ had already completed. It was the first time in a religious theology that the truth of the pronouncements of its founders and leaders were not entirely dependent upon the faith or efforts of people, for what they said to be true of the gods and their intentions could never have positively verified either backward or forwards. Christ deliberately injected an element of uncertainty and dubitability into the future aspect of the revelation at the very moment when there was none, in the act of delaying it and removing himself from the earth. This made a new provisional layer to ride on top of proven one: Christ never completed God’s vision, but left a space of time between the fulfillment of the epistemic means of redemption and the final application of that means objectively. This is in perfect accord with the idea of revelation that both reveals and conceals. This was left so for the purpose of giving an incentive to those who received the revealed knowledge and operated on it to continue an upward expansion of their understanding as that studied the word, without which there would be a tendency for laziness and to remain only in the past.
But uncertainty also encouraged the choice for seizing on this unfulfilled and uncertain aspect to deny revelation and God. Sin is quintessentially expressed not only in the spirit, in the mind, which is the most private place in existence, but when there is no external pressure on it, which pressure Christ removed by not subjecting the world immediately to judgment for what they were. It was left for choice with no possibility for anyone to claim compulsion. If an idea is debatable, and it’s something not viscerally desired, then you take the uncertainty, doubt, and enmity toward it because, well, because you can. It’s an epistemic trap that only God could have devised an implemented, and the effectiveness of a good trap for a smart and circumspect subject is that it is so camouflaged that one does not even know its there to do its work.
The trap worked and continues to work as designed.
Wolfhart Pannenberg’s History: How the Trap Works
Wolfhart Pannenberg is my favorite theologian, thought by many to be the greatest living. He insists that revelation is history, roughly the equivalent to the” prophetic word of demonstration.” In the first volume of his systematic theology, he brings from his massive erudition and deep learning a compact review of how the concept of revelation changed through the ages that are very eye-opening.
The following is my condensation of Pannenberg. I claim deliberate plagiarism throughout, insofar as I take his words unless otherwise noted, and tell you their meaning without using quotes, using his vocabulary and some of his phrases. Pannenberg obviously holds views that track closely with my own, but if this is not true then they should be, given his consistent offering of the prophetic as the point of departure on the way to error. But no one wants to misrepresent anyone. I encourage the reader to take up this the first volume of his Systematic theology instead of taking my word for being what I believe is his accurate interpreter. Even if I do misinterpret him, this would stand as an excellent example of how even the best scholars come close to the real meaning of revelation but refuse to go the distance.
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