ABSTRACT
We concluded the second chapter by raising the matter of Christianity’s unique affirmation of faith: that in Jesus of Nazareth God himself becomes historically manifest, not as an expression of eternity imposed upon space-time, but as truth itself, divine reality, emerging from within history as history – not history made to represent the divine nature in analogical fashion but rather an aspect of history made to be at once both the primal event of the created world and the self-realization of God’s essentially creative will and eternal being.1 The Church is likewise formed in the Spirit: an aspect of history in which God continues to make his divine presence known in this-worldly actuality. It follows, then, that revelation and the experience of the divine comes not as an enlightening intuition or understanding that is itself disembodied, timeless and impersonal. Rather, the divine revelation in both Christ and Church lives synonymously with the revelatory event in interaction with and within the world. Where we identify revelation in the fully Christian sense, there we see eternity itself emerging amongst us dynamically, in no way fettered by having being in the finite realm.
