ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the meaning of the phrase ‘propositional revelation’ and analyses whether it entails the view that any revealed truths would be necessarily timeless or ‘static’. The chapter begins by discussing four different approaches to the question of propositions: Lemmon’s conception of a proposition as the sameness of meaning that two different sentences may have in common, Quine’s replacement of talk of propositions with talk of eternal sentences, Geach’s view that a proposition is a form of words in which something is propounded for consideration, and Searle’s view that a proposition is what speakers express in uttering a sentence. Four different interpretations, including one from Rudolph Bultmann, of the charge that propositional revelation must be ‘timeless’ or ‘unhistorical’ are then considered; on each interpretation the charge is found not to stick. The chapter concludes by replying to the false dichotomy ‘God does not reveal propositions, he reveals himself’.
