Introduction

The postmodern era in which we live poses unprecedented challenges to the foundations

upon which traditional faith is based. Those of us who received a conservative religious

education were nurtured on the certainties of Jewish tradition: The Almighty created the

world in six days, revealed the Torah to Israel at Sinai and will redeem His people, and

with them the entire cosmos, at the end of days. In the New Testament, this idea of God

revealing Himself is evident in His son Jesus Christ our Lord and savior. Until the end of

days, we are bound to follow God’s will as expressed through the commandments of the

Torah and the new covenant through Jesus Christ.1

The contour of the postmodern discourse is quite different. We reside in a world of

relative truth, subjective reality and personal “narratives.” Claims to any metaphysical

truths are greeted with skepticism at best and most often with scorn. Postmodernity is

rooted in the Platonic distinction between ideal forms and particular instances. Immanuel

Kant drew a similar distinction between reality in itself, the noumenon, and the mere

perceptions of reality, the phenomenon. We do not perceive the world as it is. Only an

image of reality becomes known to us through our subjective sense perceptions. Today

we are left wondering whether there is anything beyond our subjective sense perceptions

at all. All that is left to believe in the postmodern world is the things that are perceptible

to the senses.2

Today we inhabit a world in which we are assaulted by mass media and connected by the

Internet. Belief systems are seen to be products of the particular civilization that spawned

1 http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Judaism/Is-belief-in-revelation-possible-in-the-postmodern-age 2 Ibid.

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them. It would be the cardinal sin of postmodernity to insist on the absolute superiority of

the belief system of one civilization over another. As a matter of fact, postmodernity is

hostile toward any totalizing system of belief or interpretive method.

In this paper, are tackled the questions; despite the development in the postmodern world,

Does postmodernism do away with revelation? Is revelation still necessary? Is there an

opposition between postmodernism and revelation?

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CHAPTER I: MODERNITY AND POSTMODERNITY

1.1. Understanding the Concepts

According to the encyclopedia of religion, modern is a correlative term; it implies what

is new as opposed to what is ancient, what is innovative as opposed to what is traditional

or handed down.”3

“Modernism and modernization represents, respectively, the cultural and social attitudes

or programs dedicated to support what is modern. Modernism entails a kind of explicit

and self –conscious commitment to the modern in the intellectual and cultural sphere.

Modernism is often pictured as pursuing truth, absolutism, linear thinking,

rationalism, certainty, the cerebral as opposed to the affective.  Postmodernism,

by contrast, recognizes how much of what we 'know' is shaped by the culture in

which we live, is controlled by emotions and aesthetics and heritage, and in fact

can only be intelligently held as part of a common tradition, without overbearing

claims to be true or right.4

First, given the postmodernist critique of language, some are claiming that an emphasis

on the bible as propositional revelation is problematic or even errant. They argue that our

view of scripture must be re-evaluated. Community should take precedence over

doctrinal propositions. Others claim that theology should be primarily narratival in nature

and not systematic or abstract. Telling a Christian story should replace stipulating

Christian doctrine. These contentions need a careful investigation if theology and so to

the truths of revelation are to rise to the challenge of postmodernism.3 The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade, Vol. 10 (New York: Macmillan Publishing company, 1987), p.18.4 Carson, D. A., Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), p. 27.

3

1.2. Historical development

Modernity is a product of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment during the sixteenth

and seventeenth centuries. With the rise of the Enlightenment, there came a new guardian

of truth to replace the church: science. No longer would human beings stand for the

irrational musings and archaic dogmatism of religion. Science, with reason as the

foundation, was the new god and all intellectual theories had to bow and pay homage in

order to be seriously considered. Science viewed Christians as being naively committed

to ancient myths, unable to see past their bias and to take an objective and neutral look at

the world. So, modernity proffers the idea that mankind, armed with rationalism and

science, is able to access absolute truth and make unlimited progress toward a better life

for itself. Therefore, at its core, modernity is a celebration of human autonomy. Charles

Darwin, in his 1859 “The Origin of Species”, exhibited clearly the effects of modernity

when he referred to the Christian view of creation as “a curious illustration of the

blindness of preconceived opinion.”5

According to the “Pascendi Dominici Gregis” of Pope Pius X,

“Modernists contrive to make the transition from Agnosticism, which is a state of pure

nescience, to scientific and historic Atheism, which is a doctrine of positive denial; and

consequently, by what legitimate process of reasoning, they proceed from the fact of

ignorance as to whether God has in fact intervened in the history of the human race or

5 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (New York: The Modern Library, 1859), 369.

4

not, to explain this history, leaving God out altogether, as if He really had not

intervened.”6

Postmodernity, in contrast to modernity, rejects any notion of objective truth and insists

that the only absolute in the universe is that there are no absolutes. Tolerance is the

supreme virtue and exclusivity the supreme vice. Truth is not grounded in reality or in

any sort of authoritative “text,” but is simply constructed by the mind of the individual.

Postmodernity can well be defined thus:

“It is a style of thought which is suspicious of the classical notion of truth, reason,

identity and objectivity, of the idea of universal progress or emancipation, of single

frameworks, grand narratives or ultimate grounds of explanation. Against these

enlightenment norms, is seen the world as contingent, ungrounded, diverse, unstable,

indeterminate, a set of disunified cultures or interpretations which breed a degree of

scepticism about the objectivity of truth, history and norms, the givenness of norms and

coherence of identities.”7

The transition from the period of modernism to postmodernism is marked by the

statement that, “all truth is relative.”8 The results of this transition have been predicable.

The new conclusions emerging from within postmodernism have shocked many people.

And rather than embracing the new morality and the new social mores, these people have

become the new counterculture. Like Old Testament prophets, they are foretelling an

6 Pope Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis (08/09/1907), No.6.7 T. Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), vii.8 Robert C. Greer, Mapping Postmodernism: A Survey of Christian Option (Madison: InterVarsity Press, 2003), p. 14.

5

impending doom upon Western culture unless it turns back, repent from its dalliance with

postmodernism and once again affirms the existence of absolute truth.9

1.3. Arguments on Revelation in Modernity and Postmodernity

1.3.1. The Rationalism and the Agnosticism of Modernists

Some of the most famous characters in this age include; Immanuel Kant, whose view of

the subject of revelation is most fully set forth in his religion within the limits of pure

reason. Here he maintains that everything sound in religion derives its values from the

three postulates of practical reason, that is, immorality, freedom and God.10 For him,

“revelation is, at most, a means of communicating the deliverances of practical reason in

popular symbolic fashion and with the sanction of external, social authority. The true

church is not the external one but the internal one- and it is confined to the rational union

of the morally upright wills. In effect, this implies the reduction of religion to morality.”11

Kant argued that human knowledge is necessarily restricted to the phenomenal order and

that the transcendent could not be known, even through revelation.12

Friedrich Schlleiermacher said that there was a tendency to stress faith rather than

revelation and to depict faith as a sentiment or practical decision having little or no

cognitive import.13

9 Robert C. Greer, Op.Cit., p.15.10 Avery Dulles, S.J, revelation Theology (London: Burns and Oates, 1970), p. 58.11 Ibid., p. 58.12 Avery Dulles, S.J., Models of Revelation (New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1983), p. 21.13 Ibid., p.21.

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1.3.2. The Deconstruction of the Postmodern Times

Deconstruction is a literary method of reading which effectively turns texts against

themselves.14 Some of the key contributors to deconstruction are; Roland Barthes (1915-

1980), Michel Foucault (1926-1984), and Jacques Derrida (1930). For Derrida, “a text

has no point of reference outside itself. Fixed meanings are generated by ‘a mobile army

of metaphors’.”15 Deconstructionism boldly argues that ‘there is no escape from the

hermeneutical circle, none whatsoever. As for words, not only is their meaning

constrained by other words (structuralism), but words are viciously self-limiting. In the

strongest form of deconstruction, not only is all meaning bound up irretrievably with the

knower, rather than with the text, but words themselves never have a referent other than

other words, and even then with an emphasis on irony and ambiguity - and “plain

meaning” of the text subverts itself. Language cannot in the nature of the case refer to

objective reality’.16 This leads to a difficulty to the knowledge of absolute truth.

In the postmodern times, evangelicalism and fundamentalism tend to show the dark side

of revelation. The problem experienced here is the understanding of the notion of the

absolute truth. Christian people always illustrate some disagreement: one Christian

believes, with the bible in the hand, claims to understand and embrace absolute truth, yet

has profound disagreements with other Christians similarly endowed with the bible.17 The

plethora of Christian denominations, most of which exist due to doctrinal disagreements

with other denominations that generated separations somewhere in their respective

14 Glen Ward’s, Teaching Yourself Postmodernism (Chicago, IL: McGraw-Hill, 2003), p. 211.15 Donald A Carson. The Gagging of God: Christianity confronts pluralism( Michigan: Zondervan, 1996), p 73.16 Ibid., p.72.17 Robert C. Greer, Mapping Postmodernism: A Survey of Christian Option (Madison: InterVarsity Press, 2003), p.15.

7

histories, gives ample evidence that the question is not much whether one possesses

absolute truth, but rather whose version of absolute truth one espouses.

1.3.3. The Romanticism of Postmodernism

The Romantics elaborated the doctrines of the innocent, infinite and divine self.

According to Rorty, one of the Romantics, the modern self has been freed by the legacy

of the Romanticism to assume a thoroughly pragmatic, instrumental view if language.

Our present vantage point allows us to see that contemporary pragmatism has its origin in

the battle between science and literature that began with the Romantics. Rorty

acknowledges that the Romantic movement started as an effort to salvage the spiritual

legacy of Christian faith by planting the sources of that faith within the self. To make this

move, the Romantics relied upon the innocence of the self and the power of the

imagination.18 William Bulter Yeats, who spoke of himself as the “last Romantic”,

succinctly expressed this Romantic Faith;

All hatred driven hence,

The soul recovers radical innocence,

And learns as last that it is self-delighting,

Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,

And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will.19

With this then one may conclude that the Romantics’ thesis is that the one thing needful

is to discover not which propositions are true but rather what vocabulary should we use.

With this thinking of the Romantics then there cannot be any divine revelation.

18 Timothy R. Phillips and Dennis L. Okholm, (Ed.), Apologetics in the Postmodern World (Madison: InterVersity Press,1995), p.29.19 Ibid., p. 29.

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CHAPTER II: REVELATION

2.1. Definition

9

“In older authors revelation (in Latin, revelatio, and in Greek, apocalypsis) is usually

understood as an extraordinary psychic occurrence in which hidden things are suddenly

made known through mental phenomena search as visions and auditions.”20

In the light of Vatican II: Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Liam

Walsh defines revelation as a gratuitous call to personal intimacy with the

blessed Trinity. He describes revelation as an ‘economy’ that is, a divine

providence directing men and their history towards salvation.21

Among the scholars of the modernity and postmodernity, revelation had a different

meaning all together. Among the modernists includes J. G. Fichte and G. F. W. Hegel,

who held that revelation, rather than being a free, supernatural intervention of God, was a

necessary phase in the immanent progress of the human spirit toward the fully rational

truth of absolute philosophy.22 In opposition to this definition is the definition of the

orthodox theologians, both Protestants and Catholics. They defend the idea of revelation

as authentic knowledge gratuitously bestowed on the human race through divine

interventions, accredited by prophecy and miracle.23

For Karl Barth, revelation is an eschatological event in which the eternal is paradoxically

present in the historical, the infinite in the finite, the word of God in human words.24

In the years immediately preceding and following World War II, revelation theology was

enlivened by a flowering of biblical theology. Scripture scholars particularly stressed the

20 Avery Dulles, S.J., Models of Revelation (New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1983), p.19.21Cf. Wilfrid Harrington, O.P., and Liam Walsh, O.P., Vatican II on Revelation (Chicago: scepter books Dublin, 1967), p.31.22 Avery Dulles, S.J., Models of Revelation, Op.cit., p.21.23 Ibid., p.21.24Cf. Avery Dulles, S.J., Models of Revelation, Op.cit., p.23.

10

idea of revelation through the certain historical events whereby God addressed his

people. All this contributed to the preparation for the very positive and forward- looking

statements of Vatican II, notably in its Constitution on Divine Revelation (1965).25

2.2. Revelation as the Experience of God

2.2.1. The General Meaning of Experience

We can begin our exploration of the meaning of experience by excluding at the outset

the more obviously deficient uses of the word.26 For some, experience is synonymous

with reference to a form of subjective emotionalism. Here experience is reduced to the

level of euphoric outbursts of transient emotions. Such phenomena may be the result of a

passing psychological mood or they may be induced by artificial external stimuli. In

either case we are dealing with a situation that is temporary, superficial and

unrepresentative of the normal human condition. To this extent such experiences cannot

be regarded as reliable channels of human understanding. Others restrict the word

‘experience’ to the passive reception of sense-data out there. Here experience is confined

exclusively to a direct contact with the empirically given world. This empiricist view of

experience must also be rejected because of the large areas of life that are automatically

excluded. A third and not untypical view of experience is one which says that language

determines the character of all human experience. Not only is language descriptive of

human experience, but it is also prescriptive of human experience. The language we use

in life determines the kind of experiences we have of the world around us.27 This

particular outlook, even though it does contain some truth, must also be put aside at this

25Cf. Ibid.26 Cf. E. Smith, Experience and God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p.3.27Cf. P. Winch, The Idea of Social Science (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1953), p. 15.

11

stage because it ignores the spontaneity of experience and the drive inherent in such

experiences for new expression. These restrictive accounts of experiences alert us to

some of the more obvious pitfalls that are around when trying to work out a critical

theology of experience.28

What then are the basic ingredients of a human experience? Experience involves first and

foremost a human subject and reality. By a human subject we mean an individual self that

is capable of seeing, feeling, thinking and discerning. The element of feeling, as distinct

from emotion, is important in the life of the human subject. On the other hand the word

‘reality’ embraces the external world as composed of spirit and matter in which the

subject lives. Following on this there must be some form of conscious encounter between

the subject and reality if there is to be any genuine experience. The word ‘encounter’

suggests a degree of contact between the subject and the world. It implies that within

experience we find something already there; we come up against reality as given, and

therefore prior to us. We confront persons and events in the world and we do so in such a

way that we receive whatever it is that we encounter without being responsible for

producing what we receive. Encounter, however, is only the beginning of experience

since within encounter we do not move beyond the surface of reality. Reality has more to

it than surfaces; it also has depth and breadth.

Moving from encounter we must go on to posit a process of interaction between the

subject and reality. It is through this process of interaction that experience begins to

actualise itself as event in the life of the subject. The interaction is composed of a chain

of events. These include a response or reaction from the subject, as conscious subject,

28 http://www.catholicireland.net/the-experience-of-god-an-invitation-to-do-theology/

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toward reality. Following on this, reality is refracted or broken back upon the subject.

This in turn evokes a process of critical reflection in the subject.

Experience, therefore, is the outcome of the interaction that takes place between the

subject and reality. Experience should not be located as something simply within the

subject who looks at life but rather as the outcome resulting from critical interaction

between the subject and reality. This qualification excludes the reduction of experience to

what Heidegger once called the mere ‘gawking’ at objects lying ‘out there’. Experience is

a more complex process; it is the critical assessment of reality by the subject through the

movements of response, refraction and critical reflection. Within experience there is

always a reciprocal flow between the subject and reality which creates a new relationship,

a new level of personal participation, a deepened form of awareness and understanding in

the life of the individual. Thus experience is never merely subjective or objective. Such is

a false antithesis. It is, instead, that which emerges out of a living relationship between

the subject and reality.29

2.2.2. Revelation and Experience

Karl Rahner puts it very clear that, “in all that I have written, is but to say this one simple

thing to my readers – whether they know it or not, whether they reflect on it or not,

human beings are always and everywhere, in all times and places, oriented and directed

29 http://www.catholicireland.net/the-experience-of-god-an-invitation-to-do-theology/

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to that ineffable mystery we call God.30 New experiences of God, shaped by already held

beliefs, in turn will ‘correct’ one’s previous interpretation of those beliefs and thereby

enrich future possible experiences.31

What is distinctive about Rahner’s theology of experience is his claim that everybody

experiences God, even though they may deny this or may not be consciously aware of it,

or may choose to interpret it non-theologically. Examples of the experience of God

include experiences of freedom and responsibility, the acceptance of death, the exercise

of duty without reward, and the expression of selfless love.32 Rahner seeks to rescue the

experience of God from being something peculiar to saints, the preserve of mystics, or

the privilege of the few: instead, he claims that every experience of God takes place in

the ordinary everyday experiences of life that everybody undergoes.33 Edward

Schillebeeckx asserts that ‘the world of human experience is the only access to the saving

reality of revelation and faith… How could we listen to a revelation from God, how could

it be a revelation to man if it falls outside our experience?’34

“The experience of God is something that can never be adequately expressed in language;

there is always more to human experience than we are able to articulate. And yet we are

compelled all the time to name, articulate, objectify, conceptualise and thematise this

unobjective, unauthentic and transcendental experience.”35

2.3. Revelation within the Scriptures30 Cf. Ermot A. Lane, Stepping Stones to other Religions: A Christian Theology of Inter-religious Dialogue (New York: Orbis Books, Maryknoll, 2011), p. 135.31 O. Rush, ‘Sensus Fidei: Faith “Making Sense” of Revelation’, Theological Studies, June 2001, p.236.32 Cf. Ermot A. Lane, Op.cit., p. 135.33 Cf. Ibid.34 Cf. E. Schillebeeckx, ‘Faith Functioning in Human Self-Understanding’, in the Word in History (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1966), p.45.35 Cf. Ermot A. Lane, Op.cit., p. 135.

14

In the Old Testament, the historical experience of Exodus sealed by the covenant on

Mount Sinai, and issuing in the recognition of Yahweh as Creator, marks a vivid example

of God revealing Himself to his people Israel. In their acceptance, the Israelites reply all

with one voice, “Everything the LORD has said, we will do.” Then Moses brought back

to the LORD the response of the people. The LORD said to him, “I am coming to you in

a dense cloud, so that when the people hear me speaking with you, they may also have

faith in you also.” (Exodus 19: 8-9).

In the New Testament, the historical experience of Jesus as Mediator, Saviour of the

world and the incarnation of the Word of God made flesh, marks God’s revelation event

to the Christians.

For Rahner, a Christian theologian, the Christ- event appears as that unique,

unsurpassable, unrepeatable and irreversible moment within the history of the

transcendental experience of God and categorical revelation. The person of Christ is the

absolute break-through of God’s gracious self-communication to humanity and

humanity’s free response to God’s invitation. This divine-human and human-divine

thresholds have been crossed in Jesus. Rahner’s theology of Grace and revelation reaches

fulfilment and finality in Jesus, the crucified and the risen one.36

36 Cf. Ibid., p.136.

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CHAPTER III: ARE MODERNIY AND POSTMODERNITY OPPOSED TO

REVELATION?

Given the rationalism and the agnosticism of the modern age, and also the postmodernist

critique of language, some are claiming that an emphasis on the Bible as proportional

revelation is problematic or even errant. They argue that our view of scripture must be re-

evaluated. Community should take precedence over the doctrinal propositions. Theology

should primarily be seen as narrative in nature and not systematic or abstract. Telling the

Christian story should replace stipulating Christian doctrine. These contentions need a

careful investigation if theology is to rise to the challenge of postmodernism.

3.1. Understanding the Scriptural Revelation in a Postmodern World

16

Revelation in the bible is essentially a mental conception: God’s disclosure is rational and

intelligible communication. Issuing from the mind and the will of God, revelation is

addressed to the mind and will of human beings. As such it involves primarily the activity

of the consciousness that entails the thoughts and bares on the beliefs and actions of the

recipient.37

Some who impugn a high view of propositional revelation as reflecting an outmoded

modernist approach to theology, have confused the effects of God’s revelation with its

nature when they claim that revelation comes through the community of faith and the

experience of Christians. God’s revelation creates a community, whether the community

of ancient Israel, the early church, or the manifestations of the body of Christ around the

world today. Revelation also produces relationships between believers and relationships

between believers and unbelievers. Revelation, when it is truly understood, likewise

induces certain emotions such as reverence for God, joy over salvation, sorrow over sin,

outrage over evil, and hope for the future restoration of the universe. But these

communities, relationships, and emotions ought to be rooted in God’s objective

revelation; they do not constitute or comprise that revelation itself.

When postmodernists seek to disparage meta-narratives, deconstruct truth into language

games, and render spirituality as a mixture of subjectivity compelling elements,

evangelicals must bring objective truth back to the table as the centerpiece of concern.

3.2. Karl Jaspers Christianity without Revelation

37 Carl F.H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, III (Waco, TX: Word Publishers, 1976), p.248.

17

Karl Jaspers in his Philosophical Faith and Revelation, rejects the idea of revelation, by

which he understands “a direct manifestation of God by word, command, action, or event

at a definite place and time.38 He believes that there can be a Christian, who though his

faith is based on the bible, does not accept revelation in the normal sense of the word.

This Christian accepts biblical symbols, including prophecy, apostleship, and inspiration,

as “ciphers” to be tested by their capacity to light up human existence and point to the

inaccessible depths of transcendence.39 For Jaspers then, God is not a personal being but a

mere cipher for transcendence. He goes on even to say that there can never be any special

presence of God in the church or the sacraments, views which he characterizes as

magical.40

If these views of Karl Jaspers were something to go up for, then we can say Jaspers as a

modernist existentialist, shows modernity as completely against revelation.

Such positions on Christian revelation are in error and miss the mark because they offend

against the fundamental understanding of transcendence.

Although the THAT of transcendence may be unquestionably experienced, its

WHAT remains hidden. There isn’t anything at all that can be said about it, and

every attempt to realize it, to make it bodily and concretely present, falsifies

transcendence or extinguishes it. Transcendence remains and is only in the

disappearing of the object; it is without specification and knowability, without

form or figure.41

38 Cf. Avery Dulles, S.J., Models of Revelation, Op.cit., p. 10.39 Ibid., p. 10.40 Ibid., p.11.41 Heinrich Fries, Fundamental Theology, trans. Robert J. Daly, S.J. (Michigan: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996), p. 259.

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3.3. The Primacy of Revelation in Modernity and Postmodernity

The thinkers of the postmodern times bring in a pursuit of the subjective within all human

knowledge and in the writings of some authors, a radical pursuit of the temporalized

individual. These writers do not allow the existential, finite, temporal individual to be

swallowed up by some essential, objectifiable understanding of the human, much less by

some sort of grand scheme of universal being.

In all these discussions, the “I” of the human person who experiences a revealing God is

placed at the fringes of discussion.42 All the human person needs to understand is that

God’s revelation is inherently, intrinsically, and incorrigibly cognitive: its content fuels

our existential transformation as we submit to and internalize these truths , graciously

made known to us by the Spirit of Truth (John16: 13). Carl Henry, one of the defenders

of revelation in the postmodern times highlights that,

Revelation is actual only as God gives himself to our knowing. All a priori

conceptions, all conjectural postulations, all subjective expectations are

answerable to the subject to what is given through divine self- revelation. The

objective given reality which theology must begin is God manifesting himself in

his word.43

Revelation is God’s activity to make himself known in ways that bear on every

dimension of the human being, the mind, the emotion, and the will.

In the mind of a postmodern man, he employs logical fallacies without knowing it and the

stock of facts from which he argues is sometimes limited in ways that hinder reaching 42 Cf. Kenan B. Osborne, Christian Sacraments in a Postmodern World: A Theology for the Third Millennium (New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1999), p. 154-155.43 Carl F.H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, III. Op. cit., p.275.

19

sound conclusions. The greatest defect in human reasoning is seen in its vain attempts to

become autonomous of God and divine revelation. This is the fault of human hubris, not

of reason itself. Paul indicts such people: “Although they claimed to be wise, they

became fools” (Romans 1:22).

We can now deduce that the error of modernism was the construction of a false totality

based on autonomous reasoning and humanistic utopianism that excluded divine

revelation. The new error of postmodernism is the abandonment of metanarrative, the

embracing of relativism, and the endorsement of cultural constructivism. If Christians

cannot appeal to universal standards of rationality and morality in their apologetic and

their theological articulations, the postmodernist criticism of metanarratives ends up

eroding the very Christianity we seek to present to the postmodern world. The very

concept of divine revelation presupposes that those that receive that revelation do have

some access to objective reality. God has made himself known in creation, Christ and the

Scriptures. The postmodern mind applied in this sense of thinking proves with no doubt

that postmodernism is not opposed to revelation.

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Conclusion

God’s revelation comes through historical events, (supernatural or otherwise), personal

experiences (Exodus 3; Isaiah 6), the witness of creation (psalm 19; Roman 1-2). Divine

revelation was given to people in various communities, but the source of the revelation

was not the community, but God working through communities to make the objective

truth known. Hence, God’s revelation is rational communication conveyed in intelligible

and meaningful words.

The error of the modernists is that of the exultation of human reason over revealed truths.

This renders divine revelation useless since the truths of revelation are not provable by

reason but rather through faith in propositional truths. The arguments of the modernists

proves to be insufficient because the human mind is limited and as such it is prone to

error. The question remains, “from where does man acquire the absolute truth?” To

21

answer this question, man has to transcend the limits of the insufficient reason and open

up to the transcendent truth given to us through divine revelation.

The relativity of the postmodernists is all in opposition to the Christian revelation. But

this need not act as a dead end of Christian revelation in our times. In the first place, it is

paradoxical how the postmodern man desires to experience spirituality, which can as well

be equated as the desire to experience God. Thus from the onset, postmodernism is in no

way a categorical rejection Christian revelation, but at the same time there is no any

categorical acceptance of the same Christian revelation by the postmodernist.

The postmodernist’s view of the one truth as truths further undermines the essence of the

Christian faith. To view truth as the product of contextual, linguistic, or community

construction is to eliminate the God of the Bible who states that He is the truth.  If in any

way or by any means Man constructs truth, then it follows that God is a creation of that

construct. It is on this point that Postmodernism stands or falls. In fact, it is on this point

that Christianity stands or falls. If truth is not as the Bible presents it to be, then there can

be no biblical Christianity. While Christians must engage Postmodernism and live within

its cultural context, it must not and cannot accept its view of truth. The Church must

maintain a strong and unashamed commitment to the Biblical view of truth.

If the church does not remain vigilant in the postmodern age, there would be some

dangers against its mission. The first is the danger of assimilation, in which the church

tends to become like world around it. To avoid this danger, the message of revelation

should be delivered using a biblical methodology.

22

Another danger would be that of the church isolating itself from the world. We are called

upon not to abandon but rather to reach out to the world, to make sure the message of

revelation reaches out to every creature.

If Christian theology is to hold its ground and advance in confronting the challenges of

postmodernism, it must clearly and powerfully affirm propositional truth of God-inspired

Scripture and its know-ability. It must recognize and heed the demands and privileges of

God’s great cosmic story of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation. Nothing less

will meet the need of the postmodern hour.

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The African Bible. Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa, 1999.

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Pope Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis (08 september 1907) AAS:40 (1907) 593-650.

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The Encyclopedia of religion, ed. Mircea Eliade, Vol. 10. New York: Macmillan

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Carson, D. A. Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church. Grand Rapids:

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Carson, Donald A. The Gagging of God: Christianity confronts pluralism. Michigan:

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Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. New York: The Modern Library, 1859.

Dulles, Avery S.J. Models of Revelation. New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc.,

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Dulles, Avery S.J. Revelation Theology. London: Burns and Oates, 1970.

Eagleton, T. The Illusions of Postmodernism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.

Fries, Heinrich. Fundamental Theology, trans. Robert J. Daly, S.J. Michigan: The

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Greer, Robert C. Mapping Postmodernism: A Survey of Christian Option. Madison:

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Harrington, Wilfrid O.P., and Liam Walsh, O.P., Vatican II on Revelation. Chicago:

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Henry, Carl F.H.. God, Revelation, and Authority, III. Waco, TX: Word Publishers, 1976.

Lane, Ermot A. Stepping Stones to other Religions: A Christian Theology of Inter-

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Osborne, Kenan B. Christian Sacraments in a Postmodern World: A Theology for the

Third Millennium. New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1999.

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Phillips, Timothy R. and Dennis L. Okholm, (Ed.), Apologetics in the Postmodern World.

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Rush, O. ‘Sensus Fidei: Faith “Making Sense” of Revelation’, Theological Studies. June

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History. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1966.

Smith, E. Experience and God. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968.

Wards, Glen. Teaching Yourself Postmodernism. Chicago, IL: McGraw-Hill, 2003.

Winch, P. The Idea of Social Science. London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1953.

Internet Sources

http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Judaism/Is-belief-in-revelation-possible-in-the-postmodern-

age

http://www.catholicireland.net/the-experience-of-god-an-invitation-to-do-theology/

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