Introduction to the Epistemology of Revelation Part 3: The Zeroth Principle

All truth has to fit together...somehow

A principle about principles

In the last essay we established that there can be an epistemology of revelation. That means that there are principles which govern the transmission and reception of divine communication. We also looked at a few such principles. Some we took from the scriptures, and others we took from certain common ways of thinking about God’s messages to us.

Throughout the next sequences of essays, we’ll be exploring some of those principles and many more as we try to develop an epistemology of revelation. Our goal will be to end up with a set of ideas that will help us grasp how revelation works, how we can get more of it, and how we can use our understanding of revelation to answer certain questions about the restored gospel of Christ.

For now, though, there’s still a bit to do by way of introducing the epistemology of revelation. In this essay we’re going to learn about what I call the “zeroth” principle of revelation. The “zeroth” principle is a principle about principles—it’s a way of seeing how we ought to be developing the epistemology of revelation, or more specifically, where we can look for the answers we need.

The idea of a “zeroth” principle