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Is Revelation Coherent?
By David Griffin

It is certainly the case that much theological talk about revelation has been associated with an antirational approach to religious truth, in fact, much of the motivation in modern theology for making revelation a central concept has been to have a starting point immune from the onslaughts of national criticism, criticism based on biblical studies, the history of religions, hostile world views, and epistemologies, and the demands of logic and morality. But the idea of revelation as such has no necessary connection with irrational approaches in the quest for truth."

IN a recent article Kai Nielsen argues for the primacy of philosophical theology,¹ which he defines as "philosophical analysis of fundamental religious concepts and claims."² He argues this case primarily by examining the very concept that is generally used to support the opposite point of view, the concept of "revelation." The result yielded by his analysis is the following:

"…it certainly appears to be the case that we have very good reasons for believing the concept of revelation is incoherent; thus we have a very good a priori argument against the actuality of revelation: There are no revelations, for (given the incoherence of the concept of revelation) it is not possible that there could be a revelation. After all, what is not possible cannot be actual."³

Nielsen's basic purpose in carrying out this analysis is to show the primacy of philosophical theology, and this point I do not wish to dispute. One certainly must have some idea what a particular claim means before he can "believe" it. But if the argument he uses as a

David Griffin received his doctorate from the Claremont Graduate School and is presently Assistant Professor in the Department of Theological Studies at the University of Dayton
¹ Kai Nielsen, 'The Primacy of Philosophical Theology,' Theology Today, (July, 1970)
² Ibid, p.156.
³ Ibid , pp.168f.

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means to this end is correct, i.e., that "revelation" is an incoherent concept, then, as he says in a parallel case, "the Jewish and Christian theologian plainly ought to close up shop."⁴

As one who has been working for several years on this very question of the intelligibility of the idea of revelation within Christian theology, I wish to suggest a way of understanding the concept which makes sense, and does not have the implications of irrationality which men such as Nielsen rightly deplore. Needless to say, in presenting an analysis of the Christian concept and claims regarding revelation I will be affirming Nielsen's fundamental formal point as to the primacy of philosophical theology.

Nielsen quite accurately indicates the major elements that must be involved in a rational defense of the idea of revelation: (1) The concept must not be such as to make the rational discussion of revelation out of place. (2) There must be a basis for choosing, or at least continuing to affirm, one of the many putative revelations as a true one.⁵ (3) The possibility of revelation, general and special, must be shown to be conceivable; this involves having a coherent concept of God, and some coherent idea of what it means to speak of this God's self-disclosure.⁶

Obviously no completely satisfactory treatment of these complex issues could be given in this article. But I do hope to show that the issue of the possibility of a coherent treatment of revelation is not as closed as Nielsen suggests. My treatment of the first two issues will be quite brief, so that most of the article can be devoted to the third and most crucial issue.

I

It is certainly the case that much theological talk about revelation has been associated with an anti-rational approach to religious truth; in fact, much of the motivation in modern theology for making revelation a central concept has been to have a starting point immune from the onslaughts of rational criticism, criticism based on biblical studies, the history of religions, hostile world views, and epistemologies, and the demands of logic and morality. But the idea of revelation as such has no necessary connection with irrational approaches in the quest for truth.

⁴ Ibid , p.158.
⁵ Ibid, pp.156, 169.
⁶ Ibid, pp.156, 165f.

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Increasingly, it is being recognized that no comprehensive view of reality ever is or could be developed by first neutrally examining all of the relevant data and then constructing a comprehensive hypothesis or theory. We have learned that this type of Baconian ideal is not applicable even in the more limited fields of physical and historical science. Rather, examination of the data and reflection upon them always presuppose some prior belief, insight, or "hunch." This is especially evident in the various comprehensive philosophical positions. Some aspect of experience is taken, perhaps unconsciously, as the essential clue in terms of which to understand the whole. Hence, the philosopher as well as the theologian has a non-rational starting point. There is not necessarily anything irrational involved, since having a non-rational starting point (one which was not first rationally justified) is a necessary part of the human process of knowing.

Several theologians have suggested this similarity between the philosopher and the theologian. Both in fact take some aspect of experience as the clue to the whole of reality. The difference, insofar as method is concerned, is a formal one; i.e., the person called a theologian is one who makes explicit the basis of his perspective. For example, John Cobb has defined theology in the following way: "By theology in the broadest sense I mean any coherent statement about matters of ultimate concern that recognizes that the perspective by which it is governed is received from a community of faith."⁷ By "community of faith" he means not only a religious tradition, but also a tradition such as the Western philosophical tradition, or some branch of it, such as the Hobbesian, Kantian, or Hegelian. According to this view, there is, in all comprehensive thinking, at least an implicit acceptance of something that functions in the same way that a "revelation" might function for the theologian.

Of course, there have been many uses of the concept of revelation that would fail to exemplify the parallel proposed here between the philosopher and the theologian. But there have also been definitions which do make the analogy valid. For example, H. Richard Niebuhr

⁷ John IS Cobb, Jr , A Christian Natural Theology (Philadelphia, 1965), p.252 cf also Langdon Gilkey, Maker of Heaven and Earth (New York, 1959), pp.155-62, Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology I (Chicago, l95l), pp.24-28, and Gordon Kaufman, Systematic Theology A Historicist Perspective (New York, 1968), p. ix "What distinguishes the Christian theologian from many philosophers is his conscious awareness of the tradition which sustains his thought."

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has spoken of revelation as "the intelligible event that makes all other eventsintelligible."⁸ That he does not intend his endorsement of the idea of revelation to support an irrational leap of faith is further indicated by the fact that he relates the above definition to Alfred North Whitehead's statement that "rational religion appeals to the direct intuition of special occasions, and to the elucidatory power of its concepts for all occasions."⁹ Niebuhr compares a revelatory occasion to a luminous sentence in a complicated argument, "from which we can go forward and backward and so attain some understanding of the whole."¹⁰

I wish to make clear that I am not appealing to the Tu Quoque argument which William W. Bartley has so rightly criticized.¹¹ This is the argument that, since there are limits of rationality, the philosopher too has to make an irrational commitment; hence the theologian's own irrational commitment is justified. Bartley counters this by pointing out the difference between being committed to a certain position (so that you intend to hold to it no matter what) and being convinced of its truth. The difference is that one who is convinced but not committed can continually allow his position to be subject to criticism.¹² Bartley's proposal is that for a position to be "rational" it does not have to be justifiable; rather, it only must be open to maximum criticism. I am suggesting that the Christian theologian need not be thought of as committed to what he takes to be the Christian revelation. Rather he is convinced that his starting point is the correct one, but (ideally) continually allows it to be subjected to all types of rational criticism.

II

The second issue involves the basis for choosing, or at least reaffirming, the Christian claim about God's decisive revelation in face of all the other putative revelations. An answer has already been suggested by my endorsement of H. Richard Niebuhr's idea that a special revelation is an event which is not only intelligible in itself but helps make all other events intelligible. "Revelation proves

⁸ H Richard Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation (New York, 1941), p.93.
⁹ Ibid, quoted from Religion in the Making (Cleveland, 1960), p.31.
¹⁰ Ibid.
¹¹ William Warren Bartley III, The Retreat to Commitment (New York, 1962), pp.88-175.
¹² Ibid, p.151.

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itself to be revelation of reality not only by its intrinsic verity but also by its ability to guide men to many other truths."¹³

This is a form of the claim that revelation is "self-authenticating" to which Nielsen should not object.¹⁴ For the rational criteria of coherence and adequacy to the facts are not rejected; rather, these formal criteria provide the basis for judging the truth of the other ideas one is led to see on the basis of a revelatory event. The point of saying that revelation is self-authenticating in this context is not to imply that one resorts to immediate, intuitive, personal standards; it is only to deny that there are some substantive conclusions that a purely "natural" reason (i.e., one unaffected by any faith-perspective) could arrive at which could serve as an external standard by which to judge the truth of any putative revelation. This is the valid point in the arguments of those who have reacted against "natural theology" and claim that a revelation, if the concept is correctly understood, cannot be judged by some external standard (which would thereby be assumed to contain a higher perspective).

It is interesting that Gordon Kaufman, whose argument (in a 1957 article) to this effect Nielsen quoted rather extensively and with disapproval, has more recently stated a position more consistent with the view taken here. A revelation event is of decisive significance if it gives "the meaning that illuminates all our existence, giving us means to understand even the most elusive corner of ourselves and our world."¹⁵

I suggest that this idea of the relation of revelation to the endeavor to discover and conceptualize the truth about reality can be expressed in terms of the notion of a "vision of reality."¹⁶ This refers to a pre-conceptual way of viewing reality. According to this notion, the differences among the ways the various traditions conceptually understood reality would be rooted in different pre-conceptual visions of reality. And it would be at this underlying level that the unity in any one tradition would be found. For example, it is obvious that Paul, Augustine, Calvin, Karl Barth, and Schubert Ogden do not share the same conceptualizations of God, man, and the world. The idea of a similar underlying vision of reality accounts for the fact that the same adjective, Christian, can be meaningfully

¹³ Niebuhr, op cit, p.139.
¹⁴ Cf Nielsen, op cit , p.169.
¹⁵ Kaufman, op cit , p.73.
¹⁶ This term has been used by John Cobb, of A Christian Natural Theology, pp.263-70, God and the World (Philadelphia, 1969), pp.117-119.

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applied to them despite the tremendous distances separating them at the conceptual level.

The suggestion made here is that the referent of the term revelation in a Christian context is fundamentally the Christian vision of reality. This is a middle position between two more well-known views. The traditional procedure was to identify the content of revelation with some or all of the explicit statements of the Scriptures. In reaction to this, due largely to the awareness of the cultural conditioning of all the biblical images and concepts (but also partly to the influence of non-realistic philosophies), a non-cognitive understanding of revelation arose; revelation was not to be understood as communicating a content with any possible truth value, and certainly not a content about extra-human reality. For example, some Ritschlians included religious assertions in the category of value judgments, as distinct from ontic and ontological judgments. Bultmann speaks of an existentiell understanding of existence, which is not a cognitive matter at all, but primarily cognative.¹⁷ Others use the term "blik," which also refers to a non-cognitive perspective.

My position is that a vision of reality is both pre-conceptual and cognitive. It can, with various degrees of adequacy, be formulated in, and hence expressed though, various conceptualities. Its truth can be judged indirectly, by its fruitfulness in leading to truth on the conceptual level. Hence, it is possible in principle to judge among competing claims of revelation. Or more precisely, the various "truths" that are alleged to have come by means of revelation can be tested. The Christian theologian is not irrational in continuing to affirm his vision of reality as long as a conceptuality embodying it seems more coherent and adequate than any conceptualities embodying competing visions of reality.

Of course, the practical difficulties involved in this type of "verification" are exceedingly complex. Yet, since man does have the capacity for a degree of transcendence over his cultural conditionedness, these practical difficulties do not make this procedure impossible in principle.

III

Thus far, I have suggested that the difficulties associated with the irrational connotations of the term revelation and the variety of

¹⁷ Cf Schubert Ogden, Christ Without Myth (New York, 1961), pp. 47f.

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alleged revelations can be overcome by thinking of the content of revelation as a pre-conceptual vision of reality. On the one hand, revelation is seen as analogous to the non-rational starting point of all other attempts at comprehensive understanding, and, on the other hand, its truth is judged indirectly by its fruitfulness in leading to conceptual understandings which can be tested by the normal rational criteria.

But I have not yet suggested any reason as to why the term "revelation" is an appropriate one for referring to the Christian vision of reality. This issue is the central one in Nielsen's challenge, and rightly so. For the term is not appropriate unless one can meaningfully think of this vision of reality as resulting from God's self-disclosing activity. It is precisely at this point of speaking of God's activity in the world that modern theology has been the weakest. Ritschl, who in a very important sense is the father of much of the Protestant theology of this century, eschewed any discussion of how God was to be conceived as present or active in Jesus.¹⁸ (It was primarily in this area that he held to his methodological ban on ontic judgments and their correlative ontological presuppositions.) Emil Brunner tried in The Mediator to answer the Chalcedonian problem but later decided that theology had to leave the issue of how God and man were related in Jesus as a mystery (perhaps partly because he recognized that his own earlier attempt was Monophysite).¹⁹ Rudolf Bultmann's basic methodology avoids these types of questions; Christology proper is exhausted by soteriology.²⁰

Langdon Gilkey, in a well-known article, clearly formulated the problem at the heart of neo-orthodoxy and "biblical theology."²¹ Orthodoxy had spoken of God's activity in a way which implied the reign of causal law was often suspended. Liberalism, in reaction, viewed the divine activity as the continual, immanent creative activity which is the same in all times and places. Neo-orthodoxy reacted violently to what it saw as liberalism's reduction of revelation to the subjective insight of religious geniuses. Biblical faith was said to be based on the special acts of God. And yet, it could not return to orthodoxy's view that God's action interrupted the causal nexus.

¹⁸ Albrecht Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, III, 17-23, 398, 438f , 451, 452.
¹⁹ Emil Brunner, The Mediator (Philadelphia, 1947), pp. 316-20, The Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption, Dogmatics Vol I (Philadelphia, 1950), pp. 351-62.
²⁰ Cf Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, I (New York, 1951), p. 191.
²¹ Langdon Gilkey, "Cosmology, Ontology, and the Travail of Biblical Language,"Jjournal of Religion (1961).

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Hence, although it used the orthodox language of God's action, in reality neo-orthodoxy's position differed little from that of liberalism on the crucial issue. Those events which faith perceived as God's acts could also be explained completely without reference to God's action. The description from a secular perspective would be just as adequate as faith's description, for faith saw no additional element in the event itself. This means that language about God's activity was not merely analogical, but fully equivocal.

By way of indicating a prerequisite for a viable solution, Gilkey rightly concluded:

"What we desperately need is a theological ontology that will put intelligible and credible meanings into our analogical categories of divine deeds and of divine self-manifestation through events. . . . Only an ontology of events specifying what God's relation to ordinary events is like, and thus what his relation to special events might be, could fill the now empty analogy of mighty acts, void since the denial of the miraculous."²²

Of course his proposal requires a fully developed concept of God which is itself coherent. Within the limits of this paper I will for the most part have to presuppose such a concept, appealing to the work of those such as Charles Hartshorne, John Cobb, and Schubert Ogden.²³

IV

Many of the criticisms leveled against the coherence of the concept of God are really directed against only a particular concept of God, that of traditional theism, which these process thinkers also agree is incoherent. And, insofar as the criticisms of Antony Flew, to whom Nielsen refers, are meant to be valid against all ideas of God, they have been answered quite decisively, in my opinion, by Schubert Ogden.²⁴

However, the principle objection raised by Nielsen concerns the intelligibility of one aspect of language about God, that of his acting in general, and of his acting in a self-disclosing manner in particular.

²² Ibid pp. 203, 200, these statements are quoted in this order by Gordon Kaufman at the head of his article, "On the Meaning of 'Act of God,'" Harvard Theological Review, (April, 1968), p. 175.
²³ Cf Charles Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity, (New Haven, 1948) John B Cobb, Jr, A Christian Natural Theology, Schubert M Ogden, The Reality of God (New York, 1966).
²⁴ "God and Philosophy A Conversation with Antony Flew," Journal of Religion (April, 1968).

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No defense of this language can be made apart from an ontology of events such as proposed by Gilkey. The criteria an ontology adequate to the task would have to meet are clear. On the one hand, the theologian needs a way of stating quite directly how God could have been specially active in Jesus, if his construction is to be adequate to the intention of Christian faith. It is not enough merely to show that every event is an act of God in a sense, and then attribute the specialness of the special revelatory event entirely to the subjective response of the believers, as is definitely the case in Tillich and probably in Bultmann. Rather, to do justice to the intention of the Christian tradition in its related rejections of Adoptionism and Pelagianism, one must be able to attribute to the divine initiative, at least in part, the specialness of the event which especially reveals God.

But, on the other hand, the theologian must be able to do this without implying that the normal order of relations between events was suspended. Hence, he needs an ontology in which all events are related to God, i.e., in which God's causation is always an element in the "natural" web of causal connections. Then the discussion of God's activity in Jesus would not require presupposing that the natural course of events was interrupted. The source of the special significance of Jesus could be explained in terms of divine activity which was formally the same as divine activity everywhere, but differed from other such activity in content.

Whitehead has provided us with such an ontology of events. The basic events are called actual occasions. Everything that is real in the sense of actual (as opposed to merely possible) is either an actual occasion or is composed of these. The only actual occasions we know immediately are those occasions of our own experience. One moment of the psyche's experience is an actual occasion. All other actual occasions should be thought of as analogous to these human occasions of experience. Hence one can think of electrons, protons, atoms, molecules, cells, and God as being constituted by series of electronic, protonic, atomic, molecular, cellular, and divine occasions, respectively.

An actual occasion is a subject; it takes account of all the occasions in its past world, which were subjects but now have become objects for the present subjects; and it must take account of them with a certain degree of conformity. The fact that it must take account of

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them, and with some degree of conformity, is a necessity. There is no choice in this regard. This expresses the efficient causation of the past.

But precisely how an actual occasion receives the influence from the past is not strictly determined by the past. The way it synthesizes the ingredients given to it is based on its own subjective aim, which is its final cause. This subjective aim originates primarily from God's causation. God has an initial or ideal aim (that ideal or possibility which would be best for an occasion given its total situation) for every occasion. God, being everlasting and omnipresent, is in the actual world of every finite occasion. Hence, God is always one of the actualities which every finite occasion must take account of in its experience. Since God has a certain ideal aim or purpose for an occasion, this purpose is apprehended. This initial aim is the origin of the subject's own aim, its subjective aim. This means, of course, that the final cause originates through efficient causation. Hence, God acts in the world without violating the normal relationship of efficient causes which influence any effect, i.e., any actual occasion.

It is suggested here that, within the context of Whitehead's ontology, language about divine activity can be intelligible (and language about any subject finally presupposes some comprehensive conceptuality for its meaningfulness) on the basis of analogy with the psyche's activity in relation to that part of its environment with which it is intimately related, its body. As is the case with every actual occasion, the psyche's act in the primary sense is its own act of self-constitution, which involves not only its response to its environment, but also its decisions as to how its environment will be affected by it. Hence, since the actualities that are in its environment, and especially those that are contiguous with it (the brain cells), must respond to it, the psyche acts on them merely by being what it is, or, more precisely, by becoming what it becomes in each moment. For, included in each act of its becoming are aims for the various parts of the body. This is the person's activity in the primary sense.

In a secondary sense, the person's bodily acts are his acts too. At least they are his to the extent that the psyche has causal efficacy in relation to them. It is quite customary to think in terms of degrees here. For in many cases, we do not consider the person responsible for the acts of his body, for example, when its acts are done under the influence of fever or drugs.

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It is relevant to point out that this understanding of the mind-body relation has implications for our use of language. Both Nielsen and Paul Edwards, to whom Nielsen refers, seem to presuppose that the human being is simply one entity, ontologically. Edwards says that "psychological predicates are logically tied to the behavior of organisms."²⁵ This would mean that such a predicate as "love" could have no meaning apart from certain bodily movements. Now, whether or not this is meant to be based on an appeal to "ordinary language," it certainly does not do justice to the types of distinctions ordinary people make. For we know that it is possible to love someone and yet to conceal this by our bodily actions. And surely it is possible for a father to love his children, although he may be totally paralyzed and unable to express his love bodily.

The distinction made above between the primary and secondary meanings of a person's acts is able to make sense of these ordinary distinctions, and thereby proves itself, in this respect anyway, to be based on a more adequate ontology than one which implies that the human being is simply a unity. In terms of Whitehead's ontology, the human being is not simply one actuality, but a society of billions of actualities with one dominant member, the psyche. In terms of this explicit ontology (as opposed to the one evidently implicit in Edwards and Nielsen), it is not the case that "psychological predicates are logically tied to the behavior of organisms." Rather, they are tied to that which they logically and linguistically ought to be tied to, the acts of the psyche (which include its emotional responses to its environment). And it is not the case that "to do something" is necessarily "to make certain bodily movements."²⁶ It depends on whether one is speaking about the person's "doing" in the primary or the secondary sense.

Now the relation between the psyche and the body can be used as an analogue for speaking of God's action. God is thought of here not as some "utterly spiritual reality" in the sense criticized by Edwards,²⁷ that is, as totally separate from anything analogous to the human body which could serve as a means of expression. Rather, the world as a whole is thought of as a living organism; God is the soul of the world. This is not pantheism, but panentheism, in which the world is in God, and yet God transcends the world, being the

²⁵ Quoted by Nielsen, op. cit , p. 158.
²⁶ Ibid.
²⁷ Ibid.

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all-inclusive individual. God is related to the world as the psyche is related to the body.

Hence, the same distinction between God's acts in the primary and secondary senses can be made. A two-fold answer is thereby possible to the criticisms of Flew and Edwards reported (evidently with sympathy) by Nielsen. First, it is not the case that the application of psychological attributes to God necessarily involves speaking about worldly events as clear exemplifications of these attributes (and this is especially the case if the events of nature have some freedom vis-a-vis God, as will shortly be indicated). But second, it is not the case that God is without the possibility of self-expression; so it is possible that at least some events, and/or some aspect of all events, might be understood as expressive of God's character.

God's acts in the primary sense are his acts of self-constitution, in which he responds sympathetically to the past state of the world, and also lays the foundation for the next state of its creative advance by providing ideal aims for its members. And since every finite act of becoming is influenced by God's aims for it to some extent, every worldly event can be called an act of God in the secondary sense.²⁸

V

In the third section I tried to show that Whitehead's philosophy provides the "ontology of events specifying what God's relation to ordinary events is like," for which Gilkey called. Now it is time to show that this provides a basis for specifying "what his relation to special events might be," so that talk of God's special activity will not be vacuous.

First, it is necessary to clarify what is meant by the "special acts" of a human being. A special act is defined as a bodily act of a person which expresses peculiarly well his selfhood, his basic character, and life purpose, and hence is especially suited to revealing this selfhood to others.

There are three major elements entailed in such an act. First, the act must be of a type which is suited to expressing the person's

²⁸ This analysis of the meaning of "God's action," is similar to that earlier given by Schubert Ogden, op. cit , 176 ff. For my criticisms of Ogden's use of this conceptuality in explicating the meaning of a special act of God, see "Schubert Ogden's Christology and the Possibilities of Process Philosophy," The Christian Scholar (Fall, 1967), reprinted in Delwin Brown, Ralph James, and Gene Reeves (eds), Process Philosophy and Christian Thought (Indianapolis; 1971).

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selfhood. For example, although every bodily act probably expresses one's character and purpose to some extent, those acts in which a kindly individual has his fingers tie his shoelaces, or his hand shave his face, are not normally suited for serving as paradigmatic instances of self-expression. More important will probably be those types of acts in which he has his face offer a forgiving smile, or his hand give an encouraging pat on the back.

However, the type of bodily action is not the only factor involved in a "special act." For bodily acts can be deceptive; one can make his body give certain impressions that do not accurately express his true attitudes. Hence, a second essential element is one that concerns the person's action in the primary sense. The intention of the person in forming the aims for his body must genuinely express his true character and fundamental life purpose. Although the element of possible deception will not be relevant when this issue is applied analogously to God, it does serve to bring out the main point. There must be a high, positive relation between the person's general character and life purpose and the intention of the specific aims he has for his bodily events at the moment.

There is a third element involved in a special act as here conceived. The body must conform to a high degree to the aims given it by the psyche. This factor has been neglected in many circles because of the theoretical influence of Aristotelian and behavioristic views of man. It has also been obscured by the practical fact that our bodies (or at least the parts of our bodies we have become accustomed to thinking of as responsive to our aims) normally respond to our wishes to a very high degree. And yet, reflection upon a few facts will indicate the importance of this point. For one thing, we say that some people are more coordinated than others. We also know that at different times we have more control over our bodies than at others. This becomes especially evident when the body is drugged or otherwise impaired, so that there are competitors to the psyche's dominance in the organism. This type of reflection reveals that the psyche's control over its immediate environment is not total; its causal efficacy is a matter of persuasion, not of coercion or total determination. Hence, for a person's outer act to be "his" in the fullest sense his body must respond to a high degree to his intentions for it. Otherwise, at that moment he is not fully responsible for it, and it therefore could not be a good expression of

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his selfhood. For example, if the body is weary or drugged so that the intended smile comes out a sneer, or the intended pat on the back becomes a karate chop, these acts will not do much toward expressing the person's kindly nature.

These three elements are all included in the concept of a special act as defined here. It is important to notice that, in one regard, a person's activity in the primary sense is always the same. That is, a person always acts on the body by presenting it with certain aims. However, in another regard, there are various types of differences involved in various acts. That is, there are differences regarding the content of the aims (e.g., to tie one's shoelaces, or to offer a smile). This means that there are differences in the relation between the person's selfhood and his various aims, i.e., whether a particular aim expresses, conceals, or is not closely related to, the person's basic character and purpose. Hence, it can be seen that formally or structurally all of the outer acts of the person are the same; he acts by presenting aims for the various parts of his body.

But substantively there are important differences between a person's acts, especially between those which are and are not his special acts. The types of bodily acts performed and the degree to which the body conforms to the psyche's impulses are important; yet these alone do not constitute a special act. Included in the description must be something about the psyche itself, i.e., the content of the aims it offered and the relation between the content of these specific aims and the person's more general character and purpose. Hence, a purely empirical description of the person's behavior, even if this is supplemented with the way this behavior is apprehended by others, would not suffice to describe one of his special acts.

VI

A "special act of God" will be an event in the world which is an especially good expression of God's character and purpose, and hence would be appropriately received as a special revelation of God to man. The same three elements are essential to a worldly event's being truly a special act of God. First, the event must be of a type which is especially suited to the task. The most suited are those events in which human beings give symbolic expression to their vision of reality, which will include a view as to the nature of deity. As Tillich suggests, although every event can serve as a revelation

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of God, some events are better suited for this than others. But the main reason for this is one that Tillich cannot stress; i.e., if the sacred is a personal and therefore purposive being, as the judeo-Christian vision of reality implies, then events of personal existence are better suited for expressing the character and purpose of deity than are events of inorganic existence, or even of living but non-symbolizing existence.

Second, the ideal aims given by God to the finite events in question must be such that, if these aims are actualized to a high degree, the events will be especially good expressions of God's eternal selfhood. In other words, there must be a high positive correlation between God's particular aims for this event and his general purpose for his creation.

Third, the creaturely events must conform to a high degree to the aims given by God. This is particularly relevant since we are considering human events primarily. For the human psyche has considerable freedom to conform or not conform to God's aims for it; much more freedom, for example, than the cells in a person's voluntary muscular system normally have in relation to the aims of the psyche.

Accordingly, although it is the case that all creaturely events are "acts of God," they are this only in a secondary sense. And they vary greatly in the extent to which they are acts of God in this secondary sense. Those events which conform only minimally to God's aims for them are God's acts to a much lesser degree than those which respond quite positively to his aims for them. In addition, some events by their very nature are more suited to becoming special acts of God than are others. Closely related to this point is the fact that the content of God's aims for different events varies tremendously. For example, the content of his aims for a molecule in a rock will differ greatly from that of his aims for a chipmunk; the aims for either of these will differ greatly from those for a human being; and the aims in the sixth century B.C. for a saint in India will have been quite different from those for a prophet in Palestine. Since the content of the divine aims for certain creaturely occasions will more directly reflect God's eternal aim for creation, these events will potentially be qualitatively different in this respect from the rest of the events in the world; they will potentially be God's special acts. These events will in fact be special acts of God if (to refer to the earlier point) they actualize these divine aims to a high degree.

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God's supreme act would be a special act in which the two conditions-conformity between God's eternal aim and his particular aims for this event, and conformity of the human response to these ideal aims-were realized to an unsurpassable degree. The issue here is not, of course, whether these conditions could be verified, but only whether an intelligible conceptualization of an affirmation that might be believed is possible.

It is important to emphasize that this conceptuality provides a way of understanding a special act of God, and even a supreme act, without implying any interruption in the normal relations between the events of nature. For, even though events differ in the extent to which they are acts of God, and can even be said to differ qualitatively, in a sense, all events are ontologically related to other finite events and to God in the same way. That is, every act of becoming emerges out of a synthesis of its relations to its past world, and it is related to God in terms of the ideal aim proffered by him.

Accordingly, in one respect God acts in precisely the same way in regard to all finite events, ordinary or special. He acts on them by his action in the primary sense, by his act of self-constitution in which he includes ideal aims for them. Formally considered, all finite events are related to God in the same way; he does nothing extraordinary in relation to his "special" acts. It is only substantively that special events differ from ordinary ones, and this difference is partly rooted in the special content of the divine aims for them.

Thus far, little use has been made of the term "revelation" itself. This is because a legitimate use of this term requires an objective side (an act of God) as well as a subjective side (a human appropriation of the event as an act expressing God's nature). Modern theology has tended to emphasize the subjective side to the neglect of the objective. As Gilkey pointed out, since belief in the miraculous has declined, it has been difficult for theologians to speak of acts of God in any meaningful sense, and particularly of special acts. Hence they have tended to exploit the fact that revelation is always revelation to someone, and thereby finally to attribute the revelatory character of any event totally to the human response to it. But this move, as I am sure Nielsen agrees, involves an illegitimate use of terms such as "God's self-revelation," for such terms certainly carry connotations of activity on God's part.

294 - Is Revelation Coherent?

VII

In conclusion, the theologian has been asked to give an intelligible understanding of what it means to say that God reveals himself. The meaning of "act of God" in general, and of "special act of God" in particular, has been defined. General revelation would occur whenever someone correctly interprets any event in such a way as to learn something of God. But the central question involves special revelation. This occurs when an event that is indeed a special act (perhaps the supreme act) of God is appropriately received, so that God's basic character and essential purpose are communicated through the event to the believer, and the believer thereby appropriates a vision of reality which provides a basis for making all reality intelligible.

It is my intention and belief that this understanding of revelation, besides being cognitively meaningful, is also free from irrationalistic connotations, and in principle makes the truth of the cognitive element identified as the content of the revelation capable of verification.