ABSTRACT
So far the discussion has for the most part abstracted from the question what it is that is actually revealed in revealed religion and believed by believers. It is not for a philosophical text to spell out the details of Christian belief – that is a theological task. But it is necessary to say something about the sort of thing that is revealed and believed, beyond the facts that it can be expressed in propositions, communicated by language and believed on similar grounds to other knowledge. There are two traditional answers to this question (to which a third could be added). It could be that what is revealed is the nature of God, or the will of God. The early fathers and councils of the Church placed all the emphasis on the nature of God, and I think the Orthodox Church tends to follow this. Roman Catholicism, for all its emphasis on moral instruction, has at least enough of the same approach to have avoided including moral beliefs among the dogmas that all Catholics must believe. I don’t think that Reformation Protestantism departs from this tradition either, and indeed I have claimed that Luther’s conversion was essentially a change of belief about the nature of God. But modern Protestantism (at least since Kant) tends to dismiss teaching about the nature of God as metaphysical speculation, and focus on the will of God.
