Context and the Principles of Revelation

Getting to know the importance of context for understanding revelation

You can listen to the audio version of this essay here.

Well, we’re four essays into this third year of Climbing the Rainbows, and we’re just now starting into the topic that the third year is actually supposed to be about. In other words, right on schedule.

By the way, last year I sent out a PDF of the first year’s essays to everyone who had a current subscription. I have another big PDF of everything from the second year. I won’t send it out unsolicited this year, but if you want a copy, message me and I’ll get it to you.

Now, without any further delay: the topic of the third year of Climbing the Rainbows is the contextual nature of revelation.

As we’ll discuss infinity to the max, to say that revelation is “contextual” means a few different things. We’ll talk about some of them below, and throughout this sequence I’ll be trying to include as many examples and connections to other areas of thought that I can. There are so many things to go through and so many connections to make, including things I’ve been wanting to write about for a long time. I’m really looking forward to getting to everything.

Today will serve as our introduction to a few different aspects of revelation and context—what it is, what it means, what sorts of things we’ll be talking about, and what we’ll get out of all of it. I’d also like to contextualize, LOL, where the principle of context for revelation fits into the large-scale development of gospel thinking that Climbing the Rainbows has been doing for the past couple years. That’s actually going to come first.

What’s that? You’d like me to quantify the level of excitement I feel right now? Why, I’d love to. My excitement level is somewhere between “Donna Kelce finding out that her son is dating Taylor Swift, and she’s actually a pretty nice girl” and “stranded astronauts thinking that Boeing would be trying to rescue them, but then finding out that SpaceX is actually going to do it.” Maybe my excitement is right at the level of “Clarence Thomas getting a brand-new motorcoach and all his lobbyists, uh, I mean his friends, remembering that it’s called a ‘motorcoach’ and not a ‘motorhome’.” And since, as you can imagine, those are some of the highest excitement levels ever recorded in a human body, it’s safe to say that I’m pretty excited.

I hope you’re excited too. Let’s get started!