1. Introduction

Revelation has traditionally been a central idea in Christian faith. Christians believe that revelation is the means by which they know about God and it has provided the epistemological basis for theology. In the Oxford English Dictionary, the primary meaning of revelation is “the disclosure or communication of knowledge to man by a divine or supernatural agency.” This simple idea of revelation, however, has become difficult and theologians today still seek to clarify what revelation means or how it offers us the knowledge of God.

It should first be noted that the general interpretation of revelation has some formal features1. Firstly, revelation means an unveiling or a disclosure2. When revelation occurs, a veil is dropped and what was masked or hidden from sight is now disclosed. Secondly, this incident of disclosure cannot be initiated by any human witness, who is solely the receiver of a mystery, but is totally initiated by the mediator revealed in the incident. Thirdly, revelation always exceeds the grasp of human inquiry and therefore can be understood only by means of grace. The doctrine of revelation is actually concerned with the grace of God. Although most interpretations of revelation contain more or less some of these formal features, there are important differences between the classical understanding of revelation and various contemporary descriptions of the doctrine. One major problem is that there are disagreements about what revelation means and how it provides theology with an adequate foundation for the knowledge of God.

In fact, the theological controversies among different Christian traditions as well as other religions in both ancient and modern times are inevitably related to their ideas of revelation. As Avery Dulles comments, “the great theological disputes turn out, upon reflection, to rest on different understandings of revelation, often simply taken for granted.”3 The task of this paper is to investigate various concepts of revelation in different periods of Christian history4.