The Foundations of Revelation Part 3: The Fundamental Principles of Revelation

What is the right way to understand revelatory processes in general?

No more delays. In this essay I’m going to give what I think are four of the most fundamental principles governing how revelation and revelatory processes work. I’ll also have a brief discussion of each principle but I’m going to save the fuller treatments for later on when we can dedicate multiple essays to each principle. I think they’re deep enough that there’s a lot to say about them, and a lot of implications to explore.

Disclaimer

Before I give the principles, though, I want to head off complaints about them by making a few qualifications. I don’t know whether the qualifications will help avoid misunderstandings but at least they’ll clear my conscience.

First, everything I’m giving here is my own take on the epistemology of revelation. As with everything else in these essays, I’m just offering ideas and making suggestions. There’s room for disagreement, both about each principle and about the principles as a body.

Second, in giving the four principles below, I’m not saying that they are the most fundamental principles of revelation. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t, I don’t know. One of the reasons I took up writing in this venue and in this format is that I don’t have to figure out all the logical relationships between everything before I publish something. If it seems like I missed something, I probably did, and I encourage you to bring it up in the comments.

Similarly, while I’ll present the principles in a particular order and later on will write other essays about them on the basis of that order, I’m not saying that the order necessarily reflects how fundamental they are in relation to each other. I’ll sometimes talk about the relationships between them, but at least right now I think it’s more important to just get the principles out there than it is to try to work out all the dependency or entailment relations that might exist between them. Maybe we’ll do that later on.

I feel like this disclaimer is lacking something but hopefully you get the point. I’m saying these are the principles, but ultimately you have to figure out whether they fit with the evidence as you understand and experience it.

Here they are, then. I’ll state each of them and then discuss them one at a time in brief below.

Four fundamental principles of revelation