142 - Divine Revelation: Our Moral Relation with God

Divine Revelation:
Our Moral Relation with God
By Kern R. Trembath
New York, Oxford University Press, 1991. 230 pp. $32.50.

It is the contention of Kern Robert Trembath that "all or most theories of Christian revelation" are deeply flawed, for they posit a "gap" between ourselves as sinful beings and the perfect ideal to which we ought to attain. Revelation has been traditionally interpreted as the divine bridging of that gap. Thus "God supplies ... the divine intentions for human beings who, without those intentions" would be unable to discover the divine will. Trembath finds all such thinking to be "wrongheaded." If Christian revelation is conceived of as having its locus in the overcoming of sin and, yet, sin is "by definition a violation of an existing personal relationship," in Trembath's thinking it would seem to follow that we cannot hope to know anything of a renewed relationship unless we have been experiencing something of the original relationship all along.

Remarkably, Trembath believes that we can recover the terms of our "prior" pre-sinful relationship through an examination of human existence now. For Trembath, human beings are intrinsically moral beings whose very capacity for love and hope "is grounded in goodness, and ultimately in that Goodness whom Christians call God."

Revelation is, thus, not information about "objects" external to ourselves, such as "the history of Jesus" or "the origins of the universe," but it has to do with finding out about persons. "The purpose of the doctrine of divine revelation is to uncover the nature of the relationship between God and human beings so that we can participate in it more fully and deliberately." Salvation and revelation are, thus, essentially two sides of the same coin.

Trembath, who regards himself as an evangelical Christian, relates an admittedly non-evangelical experience from his college days when he had a Schleiermachian experience of nature mysticism. Backpacking on the Sierra Nevadas and looking to the stars, he experienced an intense sense of "being loved." Trembath would not grant that this might have been mere self-engendered emotionalism, for he contends, "We all know the difference between loving ourselves and being loved

144 - Divine Revelation: Our Moral Relation with God

by others." Though he would not adduce it as a proof of God's existence, he contends it was a "cosmic disclosure" situation.

Revelation, for Trembath, occurs as a matter of will. In our rapture before nature or in our experience of goodness, God's self-disclosure is to be found, that is, if one wishes to see it. However, "if someone does not wish to see this world as the target of God's self-disclosing and saving acts, then for that person the world is not God's target."

From my many objections to this book-beginning with the Trembath's consistent awkwardness of style-I shall illucidate three briefly.

First, the book is deeply Pelagian. Since we all have been created with an innate capacity for relationship with God, for Trembath any failure of relationship lies solely in the "experiential and decisional configuration of human beings." When Trembath began with the suggestion that the traditional Christian understanding of revelation is overly oriented toward sin, I thought he might be on the right track. But it turns out that Trembath exhibits virtually no sense of sin or alienation at all. The Protestant-Augustinian contention that even our faith is a sheer gift of God seems utterly lost on him.

My second objection is that this book is breathtaking in its epistemological naivete. Trembath objects to any traditional notion that the revelation of God bridges the gap between God and ourselves as a self-authenticating miracle of divine self-giving. This he finds "arbitrary." However, by assertion alone Trembath takes as a given that experiences such as nature mysticism or experiences of love or hope or goodness have a transcendental source. So much for Kant, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, etc., etc., etc.

Finally, I found in the book an apparent ignorance of the nineteenth century liberal attempt to do precisely what Trembath is attempting, that is to reinterpret the Bible's manifest sense of the transcendence and holy otherness of God in terms of one or another immanental schema. If he knew the nineteenth century, perhaps he would not have styled his reduction of Christian revelation to natural theology as a venturing into "unchartered" waters. Nor would he be so sanguine in his assumption that he can derive the traditional doctrine of the Trinity using only natural theological prior assumptions.

Ronald G. Goetz
Elmhurst College
Elmhurst, IL