What is revelation?

Most students of theology could tell you some of the differences between general revelation and special revelation. However, we rarely step back to make sure we have a solid understanding of what revelation itself is. All revelation. Any revelation. Thus wherever we look at a thing and say, “That is revelation,” it would have some common, indispensable characteristics. The idea of revelation may not seem very controversial among Christians at first glance. After all, God is a “speaking” God; and it was the Word who was made flesh. All creation was made by God to speak about Him.

Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote that “Most of the propositions and questions of philosophers arise from our failure to understand the logic of our language.” This may seem like a technical way of saying that we speak past each other; but it is more than that. Or, at least it ought to be. It is not simply that no two people ever have exactly identical lexicons. It is also that words mean things, and even among homonyms and other such opportunities for merely verbal disagreements, there are often real disagreements behind them. In short, there are right uses of words—words which, in a given context, ought to be used in one way to correspond to their proper object and not in another.

The Biblical Descriptions of Revelation

Although our English word comes more immediately from the Latin revelatio, several biblical words are more instructive. As we would expect, when the Bible speaks of divine revelation, it is not speaking of a lowest common denominator “show” or “inspiration” of some sort. These could be used figuratively to mean a thing “laid bare” by the one who makes the discovery or a thing particularly meaningful bursting suddenly into the psyche; and these are precisely the ways that modern naturalists and spiritualists alike have taken this word upon their lips. Not so of the biblical usage. 

The dominant word in the Hebrew canon is galah (גלה) which has the connotation of uncovering oneself, even making to be naked. As when Noah was “uncovered within his tent” (Gen. 9:21), so it is the word used throughout the law of Moses for all those occasions of indecency. However, it is also used when “the LORD opened the eyes of Balaam” (Num. 22:31), or in the form of speech: “the LORD had told Samuel in his ear” (1 Sam. 9:15). This reminds us that revelation may take on forms that are either visual or audible, even if the literal medium is the mind of the human recipient, as in the vision or dream of the prophet.

As to the Greek, we might think of the word phaneroō (φανερόω), meaning to “make manifest” or “show.” It is used 49 times in the New Testament. In an important text for our discussion, Paul says that “what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them” (Rom. 1:19). The word apokalypsis (ἀποκάλυψις) is the one often related to eschatology. Thus “the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels” (2 Tim. 1:7). Although there are more common uses of it, the idea here is of a kind of final reveal. The word mustērion (μυστήριον) is not a direct word for revelation; but it belongs to the same set of ideas. It refers to truth concealed for a time, yet subsequently brought to light. Paul makes much of this use in Ephesians 3:1-10 precisely to contrast his gospel-unpacking of truth to what some commentators take to be proto-Gnostics, but at the very least those “mystery teachers” who always make much of themselves by means of secret knowledge reserved only for the few.

What all of these words have in common is divine activity in the most supernatural sense. These may signal diverse manifestations of God, but they are of a God who is sovereign in His dealings with man and all truth being directed to the glory of God. Even where we see divine response in the narrative form, there is never the indication that God is passive or learning or answering to the demands of the seeker or the skeptic. 

A Few Helpful Definitions

W. G. T. Shedd’s definition gives us a helpful place to start our analysis. He said,

“Revelation in its general and wide signification is any species of knowledge of which God is the ultimate source and cause.”1

On the most basic level, we call a thing “revealed” if it has been discovered. Some reality that was at one moment not known to a mind has entered in. It is not self-originating as far as that mind is concerned. Except that, here, so says Shedd, God is the efficient cause of such a change in knowledge in the finite mind. We may even find there to be causes other than the efficient cause. Now if we put things in that way, then it raises the question as to how much of our knowledge as human beings can be traced back to this communicating act of God. Even if one concedes that God’s revelation is, in some way, “behind it all,” perhaps it is all something like the telephone game, or a series of echoes, more or less distant from the reasoning process of human beings alive at any given moment. 

Indeed, there is often a fear that to speak of media at all—to speak of secondary causes or instruments—used by God to reveal Himself, that this would become a slippery slope backwards into the outermost distances of time and space. It would be to push God further and further out of reach and relevance. It would be a move from supernaturalism to naturalism. Modernist schools of religion will speak in exactly this way. They will give room to “revelation” if this refers either to the artifacts of original nature, subject to comparative (i.e. pluralistic) analysis, or else to the mystical inspirations of any old claims to it. So one is left with either de-personalized empirical objectivism or else untestable religious feeling. These both have a place in talk of “revelation” for moderns.

Against such notions, Louis Berkhof’s definition stresses both the external and personal activity of God: 

“In its active sense it denotes the act of God by which He communicates to man the truth concerning Himself in relation to His creatures, and conveys to him the knowledge of His will: and in the passive sense it is a designation of the resulting product of this activity of God. It should be observed that in theology it never denotes a mere passive, perhaps unconscious, becoming manifest, but always a conscious, voluntary, and intentional deed of God, by which He reveals or communicates divine truth.”2

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1. W. G. T. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2003), 85.

2. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1932), 117.