ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at two contrasting ideas of special revelation, the continuous view of revelation, as held by John Locke and Immanuel Kant, according to which revelation is thought of mainly as a republication of moral knowledge already accessible to us all, and the more traditional discontinuous view of revelation, according to which revelation is a divine intrusion telling us things that would not otherwise have been known by anyone. The central question addressed by the chapter is how we might relate what we can know by reason and experience alone to what we can know only by courtesy of the divine revelation. The chapter goes on to discuss two different attempts to answer this question. The more famous of these two attempts, as seen in the work of Thomas Aquinas and Richard Swinburne, can be understood by the analogy of a house with a ground floor and a top floor: on this scheme, once the ground floor of God’s existence has been established by reason alone, the next move is to look to establish the top floor, signs that make it reasonable to believe that a particular document is God’s revelation. The less famous attempt treats beliefs not under the metaphor of a house, but as a web, a web of beliefs. While some of these beliefs are more central than others and lie at the heart of the web, and some lie towards the outside of the web, ultimately all parts of the web support and strengthen all other parts. The character of the web depends upon personal judgments made about the elements of what is believed, their coherence among themselves and with beliefs that lie outside the web of religious belief, such as geographical and historical beliefs. This personal character is a case of the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit, and its exact manifestation will be based upon the interpretation of the documents of the revelation. The chapter concludes by drawing the consequence of God’s omnipotence and omniscience, together with our own weakness and fallibility, that it is highly likely that God will do some things that initially surprise and baffle us.
